Professor Bennett Zon bennett.zon@durham.ac.uk
Professor
The music of non-Western nations and the evolution of British ethnomusicology
Zon, Bennett
Authors
Contributors
Philip V. Bohlman
Editor
Abstract
According to Philip Bohlman, “national music reflects the image of the nation so that those living in the nation recognize themselves in basic but crucial ways. It is music conceived in the image of the nation that is created through efforts to represent something quintessential about the nation” (Bohlman 2004, 82–3). Like all nations, Britain conceived of music in its own image, whether indigenous or foreign, and while the British Empire expanded from the seventeenth century onward, so too did its characterization of its own, and the world’s, national music. Until the middle of the nineteenth century this characterization was premised on an early anthropological model called developmentalism, but, from that time forward, evolutionary models increasingly challenged its hegemonic position. This chapter explores the relationship between anthropological theory and the representation of non-Western music from the heyday of the British Empire to its decline after World War I. It sets the scene by tracing the often-fraught history of anthropology from developmentalism to evolutionism, highlighting important developmental paradigms, such as monogenism, polygenism, the comparative method, and slightly later the evolutionary models of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. It then situates these developmental and evolutionary templates with contemporary representations of world musics, providing in fine a suggested explanation for their adoption and abandonment.
Citation
Zon, B. (2013). The music of non-Western nations and the evolution of British ethnomusicology. In P. V. Bohlman (Ed.), Cambridge history of world music (298-318). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cho9781139029476.017
Publication Date | Dec 1, 2013 |
---|---|
Deposit Date | Jun 12, 2014 |
Publicly Available Date | Jun 13, 2014 |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 298-318 |
Book Title | Cambridge history of world music. |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1017/cho9781139029476.017 |
Files
Accepted Book Chapter
(439 Kb)
PDF
Copyright Statement
© Cambridge University Press 2013.
You might also like
Science and Religion
(2020)
Book Chapter
Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines
(2019)
Book
Liberalism and Victorian Musical Sympathy
(2019)
Book Chapter
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search