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At its core, ethnomusicology has always been animated by a single, restless question: what is the proper object of study when we examine music across human societies? Is it the sound itself—the scales, rhythms, and formal structures that can be measured and compared? Is it the behavior that produces that sound—the rituals, learning processes, and social interactions that surround music-making? Or is it the meaning that sound carries for the people who make and hear it—their concepts, values, and identities? Each major framework in the field's history has offered a different answer, and the disagreements among them have shaped not only what ethnomusicologists study but how they study it, whom they collaborate with, and what they take their ultimate responsibility to be.
The first systematic framework for studying the world's musics emerged in the late nineteenth century under the label Comparative Musicology. Centered in Berlin and closely tied to the development of the phonograph, this approach treated music as an object that could be collected, measured, and classified. Researchers such as Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs amassed recordings from colonial expeditions, analyzed them for intervallic structures and scale types, and arranged them into evolutionary sequences that placed European art music at the apex. The unit of analysis was the recorded sound sample, stripped of its social context; the method was acoustic measurement and statistical comparison; the theory of musical meaning was implicitly universalist—music's significance was thought to reside in its formal properties, which could be understood without reference to the culture that produced it. Comparative Musicology established the institutional infrastructure of the field—archives, journals, classification systems—but its evolutionary assumptions and colonial entanglements would eventually become untenable.
The first decisive break came in 1964 with Alan P. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music. Merriam directly rejected the Comparative Musicology program by arguing that sound alone could never be the proper object of ethnomusicological inquiry. Instead, he proposed a tripartite model in which musical sound, behavior (the physical and social actions that produce sound), and concept (the ideas a culture holds about music) formed an indivisible whole. The unit of analysis shifted from the recorded excerpt to the culturally situated event; the method became ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation; the theory of meaning was now culturally relativist—music meant what it meant because of the concepts and behaviors that surrounded it. This framework reoriented the entire discipline. Where Comparative Musicology had treated music as a natural object to be classified, the Anthropology of Music treated it as a human activity to be interpreted. Fieldwork, not archival comparison, became the discipline's signature practice.
At roughly the same time that Merriam was arguing for a holistic cultural approach, a different current drew on structural linguistics and Claude Lévi-Strauss's anthropology to produce Structural Ethnomusicology. Scholars such as Simha Arom and Hugo Zemp applied paradigmatic analysis to musical performances, seeking the underlying rules that generated surface variation. The unit of analysis was the abstract system of relations—the grammar—that governed a repertory; the method was formal transcription and rule extraction; the theory of meaning was structuralist—meaning arose from the internal relations among elements within a closed system. Structural Ethnomusicology coexisted uneasily with the Anthropology of Music. Both insisted on fieldwork, but they disagreed sharply about what the fieldworker should be looking for: cultural concepts and behaviors, or formal generative rules. The structuralist commitment to systematic rigor produced powerful analyses of Central African polyrhythm and Central Javanese gong structures, but its abstraction from lived experience left it vulnerable to the critique that would soon arrive.
By the 1970s, a growing dissatisfaction with structuralism's static, rule-based models gave rise to Performance Theory in Ethnomusicology. Drawing on the work of anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Dell Hymes, and on the philosophy of speech-act theory, scholars like John Blacking and Mantle Hood argued that musical meaning was not encoded in abstract structures but produced in the act of performance itself. Hood's concept of "bi-musicality"—the idea that ethnomusicologists should learn to perform the music they study—became the framework's signature methodological innovation. The unit of analysis was the situated event, the performance as it unfolded in real time; the method combined participant observation with hands-on musical training; the theory of meaning was practice-based—meaning emerged from the embodied, interactive, and often improvisational dynamics of performance. Performance Theory directly reacted against Structural Ethnomusicology's formalism: where structuralists looked for rules, performance theorists looked for agency, creativity, and the unpredictable contingencies of live music-making.
Also emerging in the 1970s, but from a different intellectual lineage, Marxist and Political-Economy Ethnomusicology introduced class, capital, commodification, and state power as central analytical categories. Scholars such as Steven Feld and Chris Waterman examined how musical practices were shaped by economic structures—the recording industry, patronage systems, labor migration, and the global circulation of recorded sound. The unit of analysis was the political-economic formation within which music was produced and consumed; the method combined ethnographic fieldwork with historical and economic analysis; the theory of meaning was materialist—music's significance was inseparable from the social relations of its production and distribution. This framework coexisted with Performance Theory and the Anthropology of Music, but it introduced a tension that persists today: between frameworks that emphasize cultural meaning and those that emphasize material conditions. For Marxist ethnomusicologists, a focus on concepts and behaviors without attention to class and capital risked romanticizing or depoliticizing musical life.
By the 1980s, the interpretive turn that had reshaped anthropology reached ethnomusicology with particular force. Interpretive and Reflexive Ethnomusicology, influenced by Clifford Geertz's "thick description" and by post-structuralist critiques of ethnographic authority, insisted that ethnomusicologists could no longer pretend to be neutral observers. The unit of analysis became the encounter between ethnographer and interlocutor, and the process of representation itself; the method was reflexive fieldwork in which the researcher's own positionality was examined and acknowledged; the theory of meaning was hermeneutic—meaning was co-constructed in dialogue, never simply discovered. This framework absorbed and radicalized the Anthropology of Music's commitment to cultural interpretation, but it added a critical self-awareness that earlier frameworks had lacked. Where Merriam had treated the ethnographer as a transparent conduit for cultural knowledge, Interpretive and Reflexive Ethnomusicology argued that the ethnographer's presence, power, and perspective shaped everything that could be known.
Feminist Ethnomusicology, which coalesced in the mid-1980s, shared the interpretive turn's concern with positionality but focused it on a specific axis of power: gender. Scholars such as Ellen Koskoff and Jane Bowers challenged the androcentrism of earlier frameworks, which had often ignored women's musical practices or treated them as marginal. The unit of analysis was gendered musical practice—how musical roles, repertories, and meanings were organized by gender; the method combined ethnographic fieldwork with feminist theory and, increasingly, queer theory; the theory of meaning was that gender was not a background variable but a constitutive dimension of musical experience. Feminist Ethnomusicology coexisted with and extended the concerns of Interpretive and Reflexive Ethnomusicology, but it also pushed the field toward more explicit political engagement. By the 1990s, gender analysis had become a standard component of ethnomusicological training, absorbed into the mainstream even as it continued to generate new questions about sexuality, embodiment, and intersectionality.
The 1990s also saw the emergence of Postcolonial and Decolonial Ethnomusicology, a framework that directly confronted the field's colonial origins. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Latin American decolonial theorists, scholars such as Deborah Wong and Philip Bohlman argued that ethnomusicology's foundational archives—the recordings, classifications, and theories inherited from Comparative Musicology—were products of colonial power relations. The unit of analysis became the colonial encounter and its aftermath; the method was critical historiography combined with collaborative, community-centered fieldwork; the theory of meaning was that musical knowledge was always entangled with power. This framework extended the Marxist concern with material conditions by adding a specifically colonial and racial dimension, and it deepened the reflexive turn by insisting that the very categories of "music" and "culture" used by ethnomusicologists were historically produced through colonial violence. Postcolonial and Decolonial Ethnomusicology remains one of the field's most active and contentious frameworks, pushing researchers to ask not only what they study but whose interests their research serves.
Applied Ethnomusicology, which began to crystallize as a distinct subarea in the early 1990s, took the political implications of earlier frameworks to their logical conclusion: if ethnomusicological knowledge is always situated and always political, then researchers should explicitly use their work to serve communities. Scholars such as Jeff Todd Titon and Anthony Seeger developed projects in cultural preservation, heritage management, music therapy, and social justice advocacy. The unit of analysis was the community's own goals and needs; the method was collaborative, often action-research oriented; the theory of meaning was pragmatic—music's significance was demonstrated through its effects on people's lives. Applied Ethnomusicology coexists in productive tension with more academically detached frameworks. Its advocates argue that it fulfills the ethical promise of the discipline; its critics worry that advocacy can compromise analytical rigor or that it risks instrumentalizing music for external political agendas.
Cognitive Ethnomusicology, which emerged in the mid-1990s, brought the methods and theories of cognitive science to bear on questions that earlier frameworks had addressed through cultural analysis alone. Scholars such as Steven Friedson and Judith Becker asked how universal cognitive processes—memory, attention, emotion, expectation—interacted with culturally specific musical practices. The unit of analysis was the cognitive process as it operated in musical contexts; the method combined experimental tasks, computational modeling, and ethnographic observation; the theory of meaning was that musical meaning arose from the interaction between evolved cognitive capacities and culturally learned schemas. This framework narrowed the focus of the Anthropology of Music by isolating cognitive mechanisms, but it also broadened the field's methodological toolkit by importing techniques from psychology and neuroscience. Cognitive Ethnomusicology remains a minority approach within the discipline, partly because its experimental methods sit uneasily with ethnomusicology's dominant ethnographic tradition, and partly because its universalist assumptions are viewed with suspicion by scholars committed to cultural particularity.
The most recent framework to gain recognition, Historical Ethnomusicology (c. 2005–present), addresses a long-standing blind spot in the field. From the Anthropology of Music onward, ethnomusicology had privileged the ethnographic present—the here-and-now of fieldwork—and had often treated historical change as the province of historical musicology rather than its own concern. Historical Ethnomusicology argues that musical cultures are always in motion and that understanding them requires reconstructing their pasts. Scholars such as Jonathan McCollum and David Hebert draw on archival sources, oral histories, iconography, and organology to trace how musical practices have transformed over time. The unit of analysis is the historical trajectory of a musical practice; the method combines archival research with ethnographic fieldwork; the theory of meaning is that musical significance is historically contingent—what a piece or practice means depends on the historical moment in which it is encountered. This framework revives the Comparative Musicology interest in the past and in archives, but it does so without the evolutionary assumptions that discredited the earlier approach. It also extends the Anthropology of Music by insisting that cultural concepts and behaviors have histories that cannot be captured in a single fieldwork visit.
Today, ethnomusicology is a field of living frameworks in active coexistence. The Anthropology of Music remains the default orientation for most training programs, providing the basic vocabulary of fieldwork, participant observation, and cultural relativism. Performance Theory continues to shape how researchers approach embodied practice and musical learning. Marxist and Political-Economy Ethnomusicology, Interpretive and Reflexive Ethnomusicology, Feminist Ethnomusicology, and Postcolonial and Decolonial Ethnomusicology together form a critical constellation that keeps the field attentive to power, positionality, and representation. Applied Ethnomusicology has grown rapidly, especially in heritage and community-engagement contexts. Cognitive Ethnomusicology and Historical Ethnomusicology remain smaller but growing currents, each challenging the field's dominant assumptions in different ways.
What the leading frameworks agree on is that music cannot be understood apart from the social and cultural contexts in which it is produced and experienced—a legacy of the Anthropology of Music's foundational break with Comparative Musicology. They also broadly agree that fieldwork is the discipline's core method, though they disagree about what fieldwork should consist of and whose knowledge it should prioritize. The major disagreements today revolve around three axes: first, whether ethnomusicology's primary responsibility is to scholarly knowledge or to community service (Applied vs. academic frameworks); second, whether universal cognitive processes or culturally specific meanings should be the focus of explanation (Cognitive vs. interpretive frameworks); and third, whether the discipline's colonial past can be reformed from within or requires a more radical decolonial break (Postcolonial and Decolonial vs. reformist positions). These disagreements are not signs of weakness. They are the field's engine, ensuring that the central question—what should we study when we study music across human societies?—remains open, contested, and alive.