Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology studies music in its cultural and social contexts, examining how people create, perform, transmit, and understand musical practices.

Music: Music is organized sound and silence shaped by human practices, conventions, and interpretation. Ethnomusicology treats musical activity as its subject while asking how culture shapes it.
Field recording: Field recording is the capture of sound in its original or natural setting for documentation or study. Recordings preserve performances and sound environments for later analysis.
Comparative musicology: Comparative musicology was an early academic study of musical systems across cultures, especially prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ethnomusicology developed partly by revising this field's comparative methods and assumptions.
Music and identity: Music and identity concerns how musical practices express, negotiate, and shape individual and collective identities. Musical participation can mark belonging and contest imposed identities.
Music and politics: Music and politics examines how musical practices engage power, governance, protest, and political identity. Research asks how musical meaning and institutions participate in struggles over power.
Ethnography: Ethnography is the systematic description of a community based on sustained observation and participation. Fieldwork often relies on ethnographic presence within musical communities.
Transcription (music): Musical transcription is the representation of sound in notation or another visual system. Transcription makes selected musical features available for close comparison and discussion.
Jaap Kunst: Jaap Kunst was a Dutch musicologist who helped establish the term ethnomusicology in the mid-twentieth century. His terminology gave the discipline its widely adopted name.
Music and ritual: Music and ritual examines how sound and performance participate in religious and ceremonial practices. Ethnomusicology studies how music organizes ritual action and meaning.
Decolonization: Decolonization is the dismantling of colonial rule and the continuing transformation of colonial structures and knowledge. The field examines how colonial histories shaped the collection and interpretation of music.

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