IMAGINE a college music department and all the familiar images come to mind: practice rooms containing Steinway pianos, orchestras playing Mozart and Beethoven, harmonic analyses of Bach chorales scrawled across chalkboards. What will not come to mind, unless you spend time in such places, is students discussing topics like “Music and Globalization,” “Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, and the ‘New Musicology,’” “Performance and Popular Culture in South Africa,” or “The Music of Bebop.”
Yet discuss these things they do. Welcome to the world of ethnomusicology, sire of the courses named above. Ellen Koskoff, president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and a professor at the Eastman School of Music, defines her field as “a discipline that looks at all musics from all over the world and tries to understand them in their own contexts.” And she means “all” literally: Ethnomusicologists study both non-Western music and the West’s popular and folk tunes—Chinese opera and Willie Nelson and everything in between.
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