Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology studies music within its cultural and social context, usually through fieldwork alongside the performers themselves rather than by transcribing a melody as an abstract score detached from the setting that gives it meaning. The Dutch scholar Jaap Kunst, who had spent decades studying the music of Indonesia, coined the term ethnomusicology in his 1950 book of that title, replacing the older and narrower label comparative musicology with a name that treated music as inseparable from the community and ritual life that produced it.

A chant, a drumming pattern or a liturgical melody carries meaning that a written score alone cannot capture, when it is performed, who may perform it, what state it accompanies or induces, and ethnomusicology's fieldwork based method is built specifically to record that context rather than lose it. The atlas draws on the discipline wherever a religious tradition's music, a Sufi qawwali, a Vedic chant, a shamanic drumming pattern, is described, relying on documented fieldwork for what the music's function and history actually are rather than on an outsider's impression of the sound alone. Kunst's own decades of fieldwork in Java and Bali set the model other ethnomusicologists have followed since, living alongside a tradition's musicians rather than transcribing their performance from a distance.