SEM

There were several surprising things about the early issues of Ethnomusicology. One of the most surprising was how small it started out. The first issue appeared in December 1953, and although its Introduction says that there were three hundred copies sent out, it looks as though all three hundred ten-page pamphlets were done on someone's typewriter. The first several issues of the journal seem to have been very focused on finding and uniting all those who self-identified as ethnomusicologists. It seems to have been a very tightly knit community: the Notes and News reads almost like a family newsletter sent out during the holidays (look what productive and wonderful things we've been up to!). I absolutely love the Exchange section; it is introduced in the first issue as something that "will appear only as needs and problems are suggested." James Van Horn's earnest plea that someone record the singing of the elderly Snoqualmie Indian chief, Jim Kamin, is the first thing to appear in that section. I'm not quite sure what the attitude in the field of ethnomusicology is today, but that request really encapsulates the sense of mission that ethnomusicologists of the past seem to have had--if we do not preserve it, it will be lost.

In the August 1954 issue, one of the notes in "News and Notes" is about a paper that Willard Rhodes (future president of the Society for Ethnomusicology) presented at the 1953 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. In the paper, which was about Chippewa songs, Rhodes suggests that music can be used to track the movements of peoples. In a lot of the other early articles one can see the very close association between ethnomusicology and anthropology. Also in the August 1954 "News and Notes" is a lengthy response in agreement with an article in the London Times which claimed that musicologists and anthropologists ought to work together. I find it interesting that the journalist used the word musicologist--I guess the term ethnomusicologist still hadn't come in to common use.

Another one of my favorite things is the list of ethnomusicology classes at different institutions. I can think of several reasons why they did this. These lists certainly give an excellent idea of where one would want to go to study if one were a prospective student of ethnomusicology in the fifties. But I really don't see the early years of the journal something that would find a wide audience among pre-college kids. Perhaps they were more directed towards anthropology students with a strong interest in music seeking graduate programs. Or it could have been a way to let ethnomusicologists at different universities know what their colleagues were doing, so they could create similar courses for their own students. The list of classes seems to be one of the many ways in which ethnomusicologists used the journal to share resources. It's impressively exhaustive.

The class names themselves are very entertaining. I wonder what Willard Rhodes talked about in his class at Columbia, "Folk and Primitive Music" a graduate music class to which undergraduates were admitted. And why was a class with the exact same title give by Indiana University's anthropology department? Some of these classes make me want to take a time machine back to the fifties and shop them--I think "the Rise of Music in the Ancient World" sounds fascinating. (It was also taught by Curt Sachs, who wrote an amazing one-volume History of Musical Instruments.) For all the fact that the new discipline of ethnomusicology had been founded, Richard Waterman (an author we're going to read soon) still taught a graduate seminar in Comparative Musicology at Northwestern. Why was that? Brown is not on any of the lists--I'm not sure we even had a music department in the fifties.

One final thing that I enjoyed was the little article January 1957 issue noting that the Society for Ethnomusicology had spent $437.17 and was left with only $567.21 in its budget! It seems like such a tiny sum of money for an international academic society to have.