Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Western Art Music: Questions of Context, Realism, Evidence, Description and Analysis

Abstract

Ethnomusicologists have employed ethnographic techniques for much of the history of their discipline, drawing upon experiences and methodological considerations found in the fields of anthropology and sociology. Since the late 1980s, there have been a range of studies—from scholars working in a variety of disciplinary fields—applying such techniques to the study of forms of Western music-making, whether folk, popular, art or otherwise. Key early texts in this respect were those of Catherine M. Cameron, Christopher Small, Henry Kingsbury, Ruth Finnegan and Bruno Nettl. Many ethnomusicologists make pointed claims for the superiority of such approaches over those of more ‘traditional’ musicologists, whose work and object of study (Western art music) are invariably portrayed in a highly pejorative manner. In this chapter, I survey wider critical perspectives upon ethnography from within the social sciences, in particular those provided by Martyn Hammersley, Harry F. Wolcott, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Tim Ingold and Steven Lubet, which I employ in order to undertake a parallel critique of this body of ethnographic work. Key critical questions relate to dogmatic approaches to methodology and means of data collection, petty territorial disputes between sub-disciplines, the distinction between ‘description’ and ‘analysis’, the value or otherwise of ‘ethnographic realism’ and some more iconoclastic alternatives, the eliding of the distinction between perception and reality, antipathy on the part of some ethnographers towards historical approaches, a fetishisation of any sort of data collected through fieldwork, and the difficulties of verifying or judging the veracity of ethnographic research, drawing here upon Mitchell Duneier’s conception of an ‘ethnographic trial’ and Stephen Steinberg’s idea of ‘the ethnographic fallacy’. Through application of such perspectives, I observe in a body of ethnographic writing on Western art music frequent resorts to ‘descriptive’ writing such as other types of musicologists generally attempt to avoid, meaning that some ethnographic studies are only marginally differentiated from journalistic writings, and a lack of the type of wider contextual knowledge generally only available through study of other types of existing musicological literature. As a result, such ethnographic studies often feature sweeping generalisations and simplistic conclusions. I also note a common eschewal in such work of engagement with sounding music and any of the techniques which musicologists have developed for so doing, drawing upon my earlier concept of ‘musicology without ears’. I identify two ‘phases’ of such ethnographic work, the first including the work of Cameron, Small, Kingsbury, Nettl and Georgina Born, and generally entailing a detached, sometimes hostile attitude towards the field surveyed; the second pre-figured by the work of Finnegan, generally avoiding critical dialogue with subjects, beginning with a key text by Kay Kaufman Shelemay on the Boston early music movement, into which category fall the writings to which I will apply more detailed scrutiny in the next chapter. I also note that this field, which is notoriously hostile to the process of ‘canonisation’ in Western art music, has created its own canon of texts, which are invariably given a hallowed mention. This is one manifestation of hagiography, which will be my focus in the next chapter.