Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds

Abstract

space among the disciplines. Triangulating between the arts, humanities, and the social sciences, ethnomusicology has long held the ambiguous, middle ground between historical musicology and anthropology. If anthropology provided the methodological tools for musical ethnography, a heterogeneous world of musical performance contributed the sounds, settings, and significances that ethnomusicologists have sought to document and understand. Yet while ethnomusicology absorbed theories from across the disciplines, ethnomusicologists in North America have continued to find their most secure institutional homes not within departments of anthropology, linguistics, cultural studies, or as area specialists, but within schools of music and music departments. Finally, while questioning power inequities within the societies they study and interrogating their discipline's colonial roots, ethnomusicologists have continued to pursue studies of other musics-musical traditions that in some way stand outside the world of the Euro-American classical tradition, whether these boundaries are defined by geographical origins, transmission patterns and technologies, or socio-economic positions. In the following essay, I would like to offer a preliminary ethnography of the early music movement, drawing from it what I hope are useful insights into the collapsing musical boundaries in our changing world and the new agendas that might unite musical scholarship through a shared pedagogy and practice of musical ethnography. To this end, I will preface my case study with a brief disciplinary overview and return to this broader perspective in the conclusion.'