Chapter 1: Questions To Consider

1. Music is universal in the sense that music is heard everywhere, all around the world there is music. Music is not a universal language because it does not follow the strict rules that languages follow when carrying certain meanings. Music is not as black and white as language, different people from different cultures might interpret different feelings and emotions from a piece of music then someone from some where across the globe.

2. When you classify music as “classical”, “folk”, or “popular”, you are inevitably categorizing music and valuing one genre higher than another. It is hard to have a neutral categorizing system to identify such a broad subject.

3. An ethnomusicologist might approach the study of Western classical music music more in depth than a musicologist would. An ethnomusicologist has phases and they must go through extensively when studying one type of music. A musicologist might just study the artifacts used to make that music.

4. Fieldwork is the first-hand study of music at its origin. Fieldwork is very important to ethnomusicologists because they throw themselves in to the culture, recording, photographing, living, eating the life where a certain music originated. This way that can have the best understanding of the deep complex culture of music they are studying.

5. You must have an interdisciplinary approach when studying World Music because there is so much music from so many different cultures that you can not have ethnocentrism. You can not view a different cultures music as “strange” because if is different. It is hard for one to not think one type of music is “different” because most of us have been only listening to one cultures form of music.

6. Ethnocentrism is the thought that one’s own cultural background is normal and others backgrounds are “strange”. I am defiantly guilty of