Global Sonic Culture
The Nature of Music
‘The nature of music’ looks at the contribution of the study of ethnomusicology to current theoretical thinking on what music fundamentally is. Ethnomusicologists have been able to combine the specificity of fieldwork with anthropological and social science theories to learn a great deal about music as a human behavior and cultural practice. By doing this they have managed to create a rich picture of the nature of music and its significance to human life. They have come up with a number of truth claims in the form of metaphors that link human thought to music which are based on theories taken from social sciences, humanities, and philosophy.
Rice quoted that Ethnomusicologists have made important contributions to. understanding the nature of music from the vantage point of their fieldwork-based idiographic musical ethnographies. Arguably’ ethnomusicology’s most important theoretical move has been a sustained attack over more than a half-century on the notion, purweyed until recently by its sister musicological disciplines, that music is primarily an art form made for its own sake, mystically transcendent in its effects, and with little or no social or practical signiflcance. Combining the specificity of fleldwork with theories from anthropology and other social sciences, from feminism and other social movements, and from various philosophical traditions, ethnomusicologists have learned much about the nature of music as a human behavior and cultural practice in thousands of particular studies. In the process, they have created a rich picture of the nature of music and its significance for human life.
- music is a resource r’vith psychological and social functions;
- music is a cultural fbrm;
- music is a social behavior;
- music is a text to be read and interpreted;
- music a system of signs;
- music is art.