comparing source of ethnomusicology

Project description
You will need to read carefully to discover, by inference and deduction, the approach and methodology of each author. In your paper quote from the

articles in an effort to build a picture of what each author thinks is important, and how they go about ethnomusicology. Your job is to compare and

contrast the approaches that the authors represent with one another, and with your own definition and preferred purpose of Ethnomusicology. The paper

needs to make clear and complete references to the written works, which will appear in your Bibliography.
***It needs to fulfill the requirements of critical comparison listed above

Sound, Silence, Music: Power.

Author(s):
Deborah Wong
Source:
Ethnomusicology,
Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2014), pp. 347-353
Published by:
University of Illinois Press
on behalf of
Society for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0347
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Vol. 58, No. 2
Ethnomusicology
Spring/Summer 2014
© 2014 by the Society for Ethnomusicology
Sound, Silence, Music: Power
Deborah Wong
/
University of California, Riverside
The Music Problem
O
ne afternoon in the mid-1990s, I walked past a bookstore in Berkeley,
California and stopped to look at the window display.
1
It featured a group
of at least twenty books with wildly divergent subjects that were clearly meant
to be viewed together, and I stared, puzzled, until I suddenly saw that each book
title had the word “power” in it. They bore titles like
Power and Accountability
,
Power and Beauty
,
Power and Civil Society
,
Power and Community
,
Power and
Difference
,
Power and Empowerment
,
Power and Everyday Life
,
Power and Gen
–
der,
and so on. Power was everywhere: Foucault had gone off like a bomb in the
humanities and the social sciences.
Much ink was spilled that decade laying out exactly how no position is
neutral. Tracing the pervasiveness of power took up everyone’s energy for quite
a long time. In significant ways, ethnomusicologists haven’t gotten much further
than this, but we are stuck for real reasons.
I will be unapologetically polemical in this essay. I hold that ethnomusicol
–
ogy is always already neutralized in music departments, and our acceptance of
music as an aesthetic framework ensures we cannot and will not have much
critical clout. Many ethnomusicologists spend our professional lives arguing
against powerful assumptions that are wholly normalized in music departments,
where juries and western art music theory courses still dominate. We do hard,
long-term work under these conditions (i.e., getting ethnomusicology courses
to count toward the music major, for example) (Wong 2006), but working with
or against the assumptions driving music departments means, necessarily, that
we have been co-opted before we even begin our work. We count our successes
in telling ways, e.g., when our courses are accepted and thus assigned cultural
capital by the very ideological system with which many of us have real issues. We
give ourselves over to value systems that dictate we work in permanent states of
contradiction and asymmetry. We are familiar with Audre Lorde’s warning that
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348
Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2014
the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house but we don’t know
what to do about it (Lorde 1984:112).
If ethnomusicologists want our work to matter, we must de-link (not rescue)
our work from music as a historical and ideological construct. Ethnomusicol
–
ogy is marginalized in most music departments because its radical relativism
challenges logocentric thinking about music. Gary Tomlinson has argued this
repeatedly (1999:344):
[M]usic signifies not an ideologically neutral, cross-cultural array of sounding
phenomena but rather a constructed cultural category—one indeed that is, as we
delimit it, and viewed against the long historical
durée,
recent and local. The prob
–
lem with ‘music’ is one familiar to us from other naturalized constructs. It tends to
stand outside our thought, directing it but inaccessible. Music’s transparency gives
it power to determine our discourse while remaining invisible to it. In this it oper
–
ates together with another construct, the aesthetic, that emerged in the eighteenth
century just as music (again, the cultural category) was attaining its modern form.
The bedrock structures of music departments rely on this interconstitutive
relationship between music and the aesthetic, and Tomlinson argues that this
epistemology is powerful precisely because it is invisible and inaccessible. Many
ethnomusicologists work in an environment where we can only intermittently
identify the terms of that epistemology and render its structures marked and
visible; when we do, we risk removal from the playing field. Susan McClary goes
further, asserting that the ontological reliance on music as a cultural category
has compromised music scholarship (2000:7–8):
But music studies .
.
. has long denied signification in favor of appeals to the ‘purely
musical,’ that places music beyond the reach of ‘mere’ social arrangements. And this
history of denial, I would argue, has put us in what is no longer a tenable position
for our understanding of musical cultures, either past or present.
McClary notes this denial first hardened into the commonsensical and then
into “the status of social contract” (5), and this is the crux of the matter: the
aesthetic and the music object cannot be disentangled because their relationship
is already rendered as natural. Similarly, Adorno argued that the conflation of
beauty and autonomous music is an ideology of advanced capitalist society; he
wrote that “Music is ideology insofar as it asserts itself as an ontological being-
in-itself, beyond society’s tensions” (Adorno 1949:100).
Yet ethnomusicologists are wed to music as a cultural category because of
our reliance on relativism. In the United States, the ethnomusicological problem
with music begins with our origin myth, i.e., with the powerful imprimatur of
Merriam, who was at pains to delimit a framework for defining music “from
the standpoint of scientific analysis” (Merriam 1964: 26–32). Merriam’s purpose
was to delineate the ethnomusicological object of study, and he thus asserted
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