i first came across this term in a novel by Timothy Rice about the study of "ethnomusicology." you may ask, what is ethnomusicology? well it's the study of how different ethnic groups of people throughout the world practice, perform, and understand music. In United States musical academia, there is a distinction between ethnomusicology and musicology. The distinction is, though few may be forthright about it, that the latter are primarily concerned with the study of European "classical" music. When we break this down even further we must unpack the musihistorical terminology used to describe the time periods of this performance practice i.e. medieval/renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, and modern. you may notice classical is only one portion of the listed set and that means the true definition of "musicology" is even more vague then it first suggests.
I first encountered this conundrum when I took seminars in both ethnomusicology and musicology for my doctoral degree in cello performance from the University of Kansas. I was even fortunate enough to be the graduate teaching assistant for two esteemed scholars in their respective fields namely Dr. Ketty Wong and Dr. Paul Laird. I learned an immense amount from their respective erudition.
my own research was concerned with the influence of Vietnamese "traditional" music on the cello works of three Vietnamese composers living in the United States linked below. Again the vague terminology: what is "traditional" music exactly? well it depends on who you ask. musical axioms and traditions, just like regular axioms and traditions, are constructed by "performance practice"--that was a whole seminar with Laird. Performance practice. Almost everything goes into performance practice: the clothes people are wearing, demographics of audience members, instruments, lyrics, theatrics, event production, you name it, if music, or sounds at this point, are being played by it then it has something to do with performance practice.
Ethnomusicology and musicology then share many intersections but yet don't completely align somehow. Musicology is related to mainly European classical music which pretty much encompasses 1400s from the earliest liturgical music, masses by Palestria, Perotin, and Ockeghem to the troubadours and madrigals of the Renaissance, through J.S. Bach and Buxtehude, First Viennese School, Romantics i.e. all the Germans (which will be the subject of a whole different blog post), to the second Viennese school, all the way to pretty much what we perceive as "modern music." Ethnomusicology on the other hand is essentially everything else that I didn't mention i.e. all of the traditional music of the world from every indigenous culture imaginable in all breadths of theory, instruments, knowledge, and performance practice.
during my doctorate i was pretty much told to let this issue lie to rest but i still think about it quite a bit. it may be a fool's errand and futile to reconcile the distinction between ethnomusicology and musicology in anyway. well why should we change it? what are the reasons for changing it? I believe the primary reason to go with "ethnosonicology" over either of the other two alone would be because musicology implies a universality to the content matter at end when as mentioned before it is not possible to have true universal knowledge over all musical types; Musicology also implies some type of superiority over ethnomusicology at least etymologically; calling them both "ethnosonicology" would allow for the free transfer of information between the two fields as a unified field and without any worries about distinguishing between the two; the etymology makes more sense i.e. how different groups of people study sound.
alright so where am i going with this rant? it brings me to this page, a dedicated space for sound studies under the moniker of ethnosonicology. Right now all I can forsee myself having time for is researching and blogging about different sound practices that I come across on my journey and maybe even one day do the 21st century thing and start a podcast dedicated to ethnosonicology i.e. interviewing musicians, sound practioners, composers, performers, improvisers, anyone really that uses sound in their practice and assembling a legacy vault of information. let's see where that takes us.