Society for Ethnomusicology
| Formation | 18 November 1955 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Bloomington, Indiana, U.S. |
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Membership
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2,500 |
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President
|
Anne K. Rasmussen |
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President-elect
|
Gregory Barz |
The Society for Ethnomusicology is, with the International Council for Traditional Music and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, one of three major international associations for ethnomusicology. Its mission is "to promote the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts."
Officially founded in 1955, its origins extend back to November, 1953 at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia with an informal agreement between Willard Rhodes, David McAllester, and Alan P. Merriam. These three traveled together to the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in New Haven to enlist the support of musicologist Charles Seeger in their endeavor to create a new academic society. This meeting resulted in the launch of the Ethno-musicology Newsletter, ethnomusicology's first dedicated serial publication, containing notes about current field research projects, a bibliography, and list of recordings of interest to the nascent discipline. The first annual meeting of the society was in Philadelphia, in September 1955.
Over the decades, The Society for Ethnomusicology has created a setting that allows scholars to publish and present their work from the field, better communicate and connect with fellow researchers, and provides leadership opportunities for those striving to improve the field of ethnomusicology.
The society currently publishes a quarterly newsletter, a quarterly journal entitled Ethnomusicology, and an extensive set of "ographies" (bibliography, discography, filmography, videography). It organizes an annual international conference and over a dozen regional conferences, maintains an active website, and presents more than a dozen awards for scholarship and service, such as the Jaap Kunst prize for the best published article in the field.
The founding of the Society for Ethnomusicology was not the first attempt at an organization focusing on the music of the world. Before the work of SEM’s founders in the 1950s, several efforts in Europe had taken place through the work of dozens of musicologists and those who would eventually be considered ethnomusicologists, including Frances Densmore, Helen Heffron Roberts, and George Herzog. These and other scholars found inspiration in Viennese Guido Adler and Englishman Alexander Ellis, who both produced articles in 1885 discussing “ethnological studies” of music and the equal treatment of every society’s music. Later, scholars turned to Austrian Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, credited with inventing the musical instrument categorization system still used today, and his 1905 article outlining "The Problems of Comparative Musicology." The word ethnomusicology, though casually used towards the mid-1900s, was not widely used officially. The word first appeared in publication in Jaap Kunst's book, Ethno-musicology; a study of its nature, its problems, methods representative personalities, which wasn’t published in 1955.
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