The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions by Bruno Nettl (review)

Bruno Nettl’s The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions(2015) is a revised edition of The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts(2005), which was an updated version of his 1983 The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts. Popularly known as “The Red Book,” the text has thirty-three essays that Nettl no longer refers to as concepts and issues, but rather as discussions. This edition is substantively revised, presenting closely- and well-edited versions of previously presented chapters with updates to reflect recent developments and concerns in the field. Most chapters are refashioned from the previous edition; a few have entirely new information. The Study, regardless of the edition, is a standard introductory text in many ethnomusicology courses on the history and development of the discipline. It is an amazing repository of information recounted from texts and other sources, as well as from Nettl’s own work and personal interpretations of events, relationships, ideas, directions, and experiences over the course of the history of the discipline.

Nettl’s third excursion in The Study of Ethnomusicologydivides the manuscript into six parts. The first five parts are revised, reworked, updated, and reorganized from the previous edition’s four parts. The sixth part has new materials. While the number of chapters in each section is unevenly distributed, they hold together well in their units: Part I has three chapters, Parts II, III, and V have six chapters each, Part IV has seven, and Part VI has five chapters. As in previous editions and in line with the book’s title, each chapter has a subtitle that more explicitly conveys the topic under consideration. In each chapter, Nettl includes a historical trajectory of the subject matter with expanded literature that reflects continuing discussions from newer literature or previously-unknown older texts. This, of course, has resulted in a more extensive bibliography. Further, in each chapter Nettl introduces concepts and terms that have defined the field, whether they were borrowed from other disciplines or invented by ethnomusicologists. In this way, one can imbibe the discipline’s linguistic protocol almost seamlessly.

Part I, titled “Contemplating the Musics of the World,” revisits and collates perennial discussions about how to delineate the field and the definition of music itself, as well as debates and understanding of universals and specificities of music and its study. His provocative opening line states that ethnomusicology may have arrived into polite society in 2013 due to its inclusion in a New York Timescrossword puzzle (p. 3). This sets up an account of scholars who have offered definitions of the term ethnomusicology and the discipline, and credits the first use of the word “ etnomusikologia” to a Ukrainian folklorist and scholar Kliment Kvitka in 1928, according to Bohdan Lukaniak (p. 7). Nettl rehashes some of his previous opinions on these definitions and how they determine who ethnomusicologists are and what they do, and also revisits and revises his take on the discipline’s “Credo” and how it has shaped or been shaped by the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM). Chapter 2 is an update of the previous editions’ discussions of what “music is,” leading into Nettl’s exploration, in chapter 3, of concepts about the universality of, or commonalities within, music, with expanded ideas on origins (which seems to have been an obsession for scholars through much of the twentieth century).

“As Sounds and Structures,” Part II, examines how music is created (chapter 4), what makes music distinctive and/or distinguishes one music culture from another (chapter 5), and rehashes debates on notation and transcription (chapter 6) in order to discuss how data is collated so as to distill its particular characteristics: issues that generate dialogues about universals versus culturally-specific features of repertory (chapter 7). Chapter 8 deals with what solidifies a piece of music to give it a particular identity, featuring a...