Forty years of International Folk Music Council/International Council for Traditional Music means that we already have a history, a comparatively short one, but a real history with high points and low points. I have witnessed over thirty of these years. Don't worry—I am not going to tell you all of my experiences with the ICTM, but I would like to recall a few stories today. Why? Let me say it in the words of the German poet Heinrich Heine: “Der heutige Tag ist ein Resultat des gestrigen. Was dieser gewollt hat, müssen wir erforschen, wenn wir zu wissen wünschen, was jener will”.

The history of scholarship cannot be constructed just in terms of ideas, remote and aloof from the people who conceived or accepted them and acted on them—or did not. To understand the course that a particular branch of knowledge—in our case, the study of music in the context of Western academia—has taken, it is necessary to consider the individuals and institutions that have affected the course of events. Corporate decisions as they are taken by the governing bodies of scholarly societies, and the processes that lead to them, can provide insights into the workings of institutional scholarship; those of an international organization add the dimension of national or even continental distinctions in the quest for knowledge, such as they are implied in the notions of “European” versus “American” ethnomusicology.

As far back as the incorporation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1662, it has been understood that association, discussion, exchange of information, and debate among scholars and scientists are essential to the development of scholarship and research. The very existence of the Royal Society contributed to the strong development of science, particularly in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and much was accomplished as a result of the associations therein formed. Similarly, the establishment of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft in 1899 provided for musicology an international forum and fostered the development of general European rather than simply national approaches. In the United States, the establishment of the American Folklore Society, just a hundred years ago, brought together literary artists and scholars, musicians, and anthropologists in a way that made possible the peculiarly interdisciplinary configuration of American folkloristics.

As many of the articles in this volume of the Yearbook for Traditional Music celebrate the first forty years of the ICTM and the concerted, if indeed polyphonic, voice that that organization has provided the study of traditional music throughout the world, they evoke a mood of reflection and reexamination of the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Reflection was abundantly evident as the ICTM paused in 1987 to call attention to its achievements with a grand commemoration in Berlin, itself taking stock of a 750-year history. But the reflective mood of the ICTM's fortieth year was not simply a matter of panegyrizing the past; rather, it seemed equally concerned with reexamining the present and future in light of that past, with contrasting the old and the new, with juxtaposing them and encouraging ethnomusicologists to welcome that which has more recently come to shape our understanding of music throughout the world.

Publications are the core of scholarship. For disciplines dealing with human history, they assume significance beyond that associated with other fields. These disciplines have taken as their subject matter that which individuals have made public, or have shared with others, i.e. what French sociologists describe as représentations individuelles in the conscience collective (Bohannon 1960).

Whereas ethnomusicologists rarely agree amongst themselves on a definition of their field of study, there seems to be an unusual consensus of opinion about the period in which ethnomusicology, then called “comparative musicology”, developed as a distinct discipline. Prominent 20th century scholars such as Erich M. von Hornbostel (1922:3)2 and Robert Lachmann concur in their view that the roots of this “science” (Wissenschaft) are to be found in the 1880's:

Die exakt-wissenschaftliche Erforschung der außereuropäischen Musik is erst wenige Jahrzehnte alt. Sie beginnt mit Messungen von Instrumentalstimmungen nach physikalischen Methoden (1885 durch A.J. Ellis) und mit der naturgetreuen Festlegung gesungener und gespielter Musik durch den Phonographen (Lachmann 1929:5).

Numerous dimensions of this paper were stimulated by and formulated in response to two of my favorite groove-sters, Robert Plant Armstrong and Charles Keil, to whom it is dedicated. Bob was my main uptown source of inspiration; elegant, visual, heady, abstract, he could contemplate every phenomenological ounce of melody from a sculpted object. I think of Bob as the His Master's Voice of the groove, loving the intensity of form, and the sensuality of witnessing it. Charlie has been my strongest downtown critic, hearing Kaluli ideas and sounds as street-solid critiques of Western modes of musical production and consumption, always ready to help celebrate what liberation or resistance they can inspire. I think of Charlie as the James Brown (“Give it up or turnit a-loose!”) proto-rap-scratcher of the groove, putting pennies on the tone arm, push-press-pulling the record back and forth before digging the spin.

Research support for fieldwork with the Kaluli 1976-7, 1982, 1984 was generously provided by the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Philosophical Society. For discussion of early variants or versions of these ideas much thanks and no blame to audience participants at lectures/colloquia at the University of Texas Semiotics Colloquium, Rice University Circle, Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology, American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, New York University Anthropology Department, Carleton University Conference on Alternative Musicology. As always, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the help of my collaborators and kinsmen, nado Babi (Bambi B. Schieffelin) and nabas Bage (Edward L. Schieffelin), both of whom lifted-up-over several versions of this essay, and Jubi, Kulu, Gigio, Honowo, Ayasilo, and many other Kaluli who have shared song, talk, food, and trail. Thanks too for helpful lift-up-over comments to Dieter Christensen, John Miller Chernoff, Charlie Keil, Gail Kligman, Greg Urban, and anonymous readers. Bikpela thanks to Shari Robertson for her photographs, and to Don Niles of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies Music Department for tracking down the original Krymus Band recording of Wanpela Meri.

In the last decade some of the most significant research in ethnomusicology has resulted from anthropologically orientated inquiries into the nature of musical cognition. We have witnessed the development of a “cognitive ethnomusicology”; based on the exploration of emic notions about music. Some studies have been directed specifically to explore these cognitive representations, for example: Zemp (1979) on the panpipe ensembles of the ‘Are’ are; Feld (1981) on descriptions of melodic contour amongst the Kaluli of New Guinea, and Sakata (1983) on musical ethnosemantics amongst Persian speakers in Afghanistan. Others have tackled these issues as part of wider ranging studies, such as Blacking (1967:20-1) on the naming of pipes in the end-blown reed-pipe ensembles of the Venda, and Berliner (1978:2-7, 54-9) on the system of note names for the keys on the Shona mbira.

Conventional definitions of music usually deal with notions related to sound. Ethnomusicological definitions generally add notions related to context. But even when both sound and context are considered, a restricted view of music may result.

Music and dance serve to transmit visual, auditory, and symbolic indications of cultural identity. Within a society, the cultural performances of its particular named, identified groups create special kinds of temporal-spatial continua. Analysis of the positioning of, and support for, these groups through time within a given society reveals the type and degree of cultural engagement.

Since the turn of the century, Peruvian traditional and popular music has been intensively investigated by local and foreign scholars, even though there was no institutional base which could effectively support musical research. These efforts, isolated as they were, nevertheless, followed definite theoretical and methodological trends which this article will undertake to synthesize.

Ethnomusicology as an academic discipline was introduced to the Portuguese university system for the first time in 1981 with the founding of the musicology department at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. However, local interest in the documentation and study of Traditional Portuguese Music (TPM) goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Since the 1870s, several aspects of TPM from rural areas have been documented and investigated by Portuguese musicologists, composers, music teachers, anthropologists, folklorists, folk music enthusiasts and “local erudites”.3 In addition, a handfull of foreign researchers have published on TPM, both in Portugal and abroad.