Coda

Abstract

In his classic The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (1983; revised edition 2005), Bruno Nettl defined ethnomusicology as the study of “music in culture.”² In variation, then, this book is concerned with the interrelated historical study of “music in imperial culture” in Britain and India. In different ways, it made clear that both Britons and Indians with an interest in Indian music tapped from a wide configuration of imperial ideas, which included for example nationalist, evolutionary, and racial concepts, as well as Orientalist constructions of India and the notion that the West was the home of the modern and the scientifically advanced. In particular, it underlined the importance of the cultural interactions between a handful of British and Indian individuals against the backgrounds of national “classical” music making, internationalism in music, folk music research, and the emergence of comparative musicology. By and large, it argued that the imperial encounter led to the emergence of aesthetics in music that often were more or less similar at once in Britain and India as part of larger processes of (national) identity formation and rationalization. The resulting dominant musical formations and related forms of social consciousness largely followed high cultural norms and to a great extent overlapped with the modernizing goals of the British civilizing mission. Simultaneously, however, and despite the discovery of a shared Aryan heritage, mutual influences and cross-cultural quests for inspiration were generally frowned upon by the British and Indian nationalist orthodoxy.

If two of the themes of 1880s Europe that informed musicology were the discovery and conquest of the world and the understanding of one’s national culture, it follows almost logically and inevitably that a third theme, combining the first two, would lead to a concern with understanding the world that has been politically or intellectually conquered, contemplating the interrelationship of its cultures and their components. Juxtaposition of nation and world led inevitably to a need to confront and relate to the cultural “other,” and this need was the most direct inspiration for the development of ethnomusicology.

(Bruno Nettl, Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology, 2010)¹