Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2010
Abstract
Timothy Rice is concerned that ethnomusicology—field, discipline, area of study, constellation of diverse musico-intellectual pursuits—has some “serious problems.” It seems that we have either not been reading each other’s work, or not engaging with it sufficiently. Opportunities to develop some “theoretical muscle” have been missed. Specifically, some seventeen articles broaching the favorite theme of music and identity published in this journal between 1982 and 2005 failed to proceed in cumulative fashion. Rice wants to see ethnomusicology “grow in intellectual and explanatory power,” but this will not happen if subsequent writers refuse to engage their predecessors at a theoretical level. A thriving ethnomusicology, he implies, is one in which actors proceed linearly by affirming or invalidating findings that preceded their own in print.
Comments
This article was originally published in Ethnomusicology, available at https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.54.2.0326