Comparative musicology.

A translation of the German vergleichende Musikwissenschaft,

this takes as its task the comparing of tonal products, in
particular the folksongs of various peoples, countries and
territories, with an ethnographic purpose in mind, grouping and
ordering these according to the variety of [differences] in their
characteristics (Adler, 1885; trans. 1981, p.13). One of four
subdivisions of systematic musicology in Guido Adler's
formative 1885 definition of the scope, method, and aim
ofmusicology, comparative musicology was renamed
ethnomusicology in the 1950s in the United States.

Adler and his followers applied the then recent advances in the
sciences of geology and biology to the
new Musikwissenschaft (music science). In geology, this
involved the ability to infer chronological sequence from
stratigraphic layering of fossils in rock beds; in biology, the
classification of plants and animals; while comparative
methods from anatomical studies and Darwin's evolutionary
theories (and their applications to history and ethnology)
provided the intellectual framework within which comparative
musicologists worked for more than 50 years (Mugglestone,
1981). The invention of phonograph recording (by both the
American Thomas A. Edison and the Frenchman Charles
Cros, working independently) in 1877 gave comparative
musicologists the tool they needed to collect performances of
unwritten, orally-transmitted music in a fixed form for scientific
analysis, comparison and classification in a laboratory.

Two of the earliest works in this discipline, published in

England, cast doubt on the prevailing scientific assumptions
of the time. In 1885 Alexander J. Ellis invented a linear scale,
the so-called cents system, that facilitated the measurement
and comparison of interval sizes. Dividing the octave into 1200
equal units, he measured the musical scales of various
nations and discovered that they were not governed by
natural laws that proved the superiority of Western harmonic
practices. Instead, they were extremely diverse, even
capricious, and apparently unregulated by mathematical laws.
Richard Wallaschek's 1893 study of primitive music was
steeped in the prevailing late 19th-century assumptions about
the progress of man from savage and simple to civilized and
complex. Yet his sometimes favourable impressions of the
musicality that must have been necessary to play certain kinds
of primitive music could be seen to indicate the beginnings of
a suspicion (never fully articulated) that a
comparative musicology could challenge rather than ratify the
commonly-accepted evolutionary framework of the time.

Comparative musicology flourished in the hands of

psychologist Carl Stumpf (18481936) and his student Erich
Moritz von Hornbostel (18771935), who founded the Berlin
Phonogramm-archiv at the University of Berlin. Using cylinders
recorded by anthropologists in the field, they and their
associates (some trained in other sciences such as
physiology) focussed mainly on pitch, intervals and tone
systems, and used their findings to study psychoacoustics
comparatively (Hornbostel, 1910); speculate on the origins of
music (Stumpf, 1911); invent methods for analysing scale and
melody (Hornbostel, 1913); create a classification system for
musical instruments (Hornbostel and Sachs (1914); and
transcribe and analyze the musical structures of many
individual musical styles (e.g. Hornbostel, 1923). Hornbostel
produced only two doctoral students in
comparativemusicology, Mieczyslaw Kolinski and Fritz Bose,
but other influential scholars who worked with them included
Otto Abraham, Robert Lachmann, Marius Schneider, Curt
Sachs and George Herzog, some of whom brought their ideas
to North America in the 1930s and 40s.

In addition to classification systems for tonal material and

musical instruments, some German research in
comparative musicology was influenced by the evolutionary
theories of German anthropologists. According to their culture-
circle doctrine (Kulturkreislehre), cultural traits could be
grouped into geographical circles of distribution. The circles
could then be placed in chronological order, representing the
evolutionary stages of development of those traits: the widest
circles were presumed to contain the oldest traits and the
smallest, the newest. Marius Schneider (19345) applied this
doctrine to the study of polyphony and found that monophony
(or sometimes heterophony) appeared most widely distributed
and was therefore the oldest type, with various forms of
polyphony evolving (in stages) out of monophony. Curt Sachs
(1940) applied the doctrine to musical instruments, finding that
rattles have the widest distribution and are therefore the oldest
instruments; that the musical bow and xylophone evolve at a
later stage; and that the African sanza (lamellophone), with its
somewhat restricted distribution, is younger still. Though the
evolutionary underpinnings of this doctrine, and therefore the
conclusions based on it, were rejected by American
researchers of the period and later, these scholars' ability to
control huge amounts of data was nonetheless impressive.
The cents system and the Hornbostel-Sachs system of
instrument classification remain the main legacy of
comparative musicology.

If comparative musicology is taken as an umbrella term for all

research on folk, primitive and Asiatic music from the late
19th century to the 1950s, then not all researchers in the
period worked in the German tradition. Another important
stream included American collectors of Amerindian music such
as J.W. Fewkes, Francis Densmore and Helen Roberts. Yet a
third stream consisted of the many European collectors of
national folksongs. Some worked strictly within national
boundaries, but some, such as Bla Bartk in Hungary, Oskar
Kolberg in Poland and Constantin Briloiu in Romania, had a
more or less comparative outlook. Fundamental to all
scholarship in this period, however, was the collection,
classification, comparison and historical stratification of styles.

When ethnomusicology replaced comparative musicology as

the disciplinary label in the 1950s, research turned primarily to
localized studies of music conceived as a part of culture.
However, the comparative impulse, stripped of its evolutionary
underpinnings, has surfaced occasionally, in Miecyslaw
Kolinski's classification of melodic movement (1965), Alan
Lomax's cantometrics (1968), Anna Czekanowska-Kuklinska's
(and others') study of pan-Slavic features (1972); Steven
Feld's proposal for a comparative sociomusicology of
egalitarian cultures (1984); and Bruno Nettl's descriptions of
musical styles and cultures (1989).
Bibliography

G. Adler: Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft, VMw, i (1885), 520; Eng. trans. in YTM, xiii (1981), 121

A.J. Ellis: On the Musical Scales of Various Nations, Journal of the Society of Arts, xxxiii (1885), 485527, 110211

R. Wallaschek: Primitive Music: an Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances and Pantomimes of Savage

Races (London, 1893/R)

E.M. von Hornbostel: ber vergleichende akustische und musikpsychologische Untersuchungen, Zeitschrift fr angewandte Psychologie und

psychologische Sammelforschung, iii (1910), 46587

C. Stumpf: Die Anfnge der Musik (Leipzig, 1911)

E.M. von Hornbostel: Melodie und Skala, Jb der Musikbibliothek Peters, xix (1913), 1123

E.M. von Hornbostel and C. Sachs: Systematik der Musikinstrumente: ein Versuch, Zeitshrift fr Ethnologie,xlvi (1914), 55390; Eng. trans. in GSJ,

xiv (1961), 329

E.M. von Hornbostel: Musik der Makusch, Taulipng und Yekuan, in T. Koch-Grnberg: Von Roroima zum Orinoco, iii (Stuttgart, 1923), 397442;

Eng. trans. in Inter-American Music Bulletin (1969), no.71, pp.142

M. Schneider: Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit (Berlin, 19345)

C. Sachs: The History of Musical Instruments (New York, 1940)

M. Kolinski: The General Direction of Melodic Movement, EthM, ix (1965), 24064

A. Lomax: Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington DC, 1968)

A. Czekanowska-Kuklinska: Ludowe melodie wskiego zakresu w krajach sowiaskich [Folk melodies of narrow range in Slavic countries]

(Warsaw, 1972)

A. Schneider: Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre: zur Methodik und Geschichte der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft (Bonn, 1976)

E. Mugglestone: Guido Adler's The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology (1885): an English Translation with an Historico-Analytical

Commentary, YTM, xiii (1981), 121

S. Feld: Sound Structure as Social Structure, EthM, xxviii (1984), 383409

B. Nettl: Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives (Kent, OH, 1989)

D. Christensen: Erich M. von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology , Comparative Musicology and

Anthropology of Music, ed. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago,1991), 2019

Timothy Rice