Society for Ethnomusicology

Anthony Seeger
Past President, SEM

The Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) has been an international society since its founding in the 1950s. It has been consistently international in its research object, its annual meetings, its publications, and its membership. Ethnomusicology may briefly be described as the interdisciplinary study of musical performances in any place and at any time, generally with the objective of making generalizations that transcend particular periods and particular places.¹ A fundamental tenet of the field of ethnomusicology is that in order to understand music at all we must consider all types of music, and that we must also learn about the musicology that has been developed about the traditions we study. The progress of the field may be seen as an ongoing dialogue over time and space with professional musicians and musicologists around the world. The membership of the SEM has always been broadly international (now about 30 percent of our membership), but in terms of bylaws and organizational stance the SEM is a U.S. society with overseas members. At least one non-U.S. citizen has been elected President of the Society (Professor John Blacking, Belfast), and others have been elected to the SEM Council.

The SEM is a small society (2,000 members), with volunteer officers who are elected for two-year terms. For many years lacking even a full-time clerical staff person, its budget is relatively small ($100,000/year), and a great deal of that goes to its publications. The SEM itself does not, therefore, engage in many international activities, other than in supplying its international members with timely services and information as required. The membership of the SEM, however, is extremely active in international activities.

I do not believe the activities, scholarship, and involvement of the Society for Ethnomusicology have become more international over time. Rather, succeeding generations of its members have struggled to overcome enduring barriers of language, import tariffs, postal systems, and very limited funding in order to produce collaborative work of high quality and to train active professionals in many countries. If there is a trend, it is for a greater recognition of the role of local scholars and performers, and a greater tendency to involve them in the final writing and publications.

Between 1900 and the 1970s, ethnomusicologists were considered to be specialists in non-European musical traditions. While some did study American vernacular music, the vast majority of the members of the field did research on non-European musical traditions either in the United States (especially among American Indians) or abroad. In the early twentieth century much of the research consisted of the collection of interview material and audio recordings for analysis, publications, and eventual deposit in an audio archives. Beginning in the 1950s, with work by Mantle Hood, it became appropriate to learn about other musical traditions by becoming “bimusical” or acceptable performers in the non-Western musical tradition. While many undergraduates received some gamelan experience thanks to this tendency, many ethnomusicologists became reasonable, and sometimes acclaimed, performers of other musical traditions.

In the 1980s more and more students began to study immigrant traditions in the United States, and European and American popular music. This may have been partly the result of shifting priorities of granting agencies (ethnomusicological research often involves 12–24 months of residence in the community whose performances are being studied, which requires considerable grant support). It also stems in part from the realization that ethnomusicology, by focusing too exclusively on non-Western musical traditions, was ignoring some of the most important musical processes of our century — the transformation or preservation of immigrant traditions and the globalization of popular music (already prefigured by the global spread of hymns and brass bands). Ethnomusicologists have typically approached popular music from an international, global perspective.

Relations between U.S. members of the Society and overseas colleagues have almost always been collegial and collaborative, but hampered by difficulties of communication. Because of their research, most ethnomusicologists speak the language of the country they work in quite well, and collaborate with scholars and professionals there. I believe the last 20 years or so has seen an increased collaboration with local scholars, and increased care in the ethical treatment of the local performers, which may be traced to postcolonial power shifts, increased communications, and the popular music industry’s commercial exploitation of traditional music.

Although the size and budget of the SEM are small, the membership itself has requested of the Executive Board that we do as much as we can to involve the international members not only as readers of our journals, but as active participants in our meetings and our publications.

The Society for Ethnomusicology has undertaken the following steps over the years to facilitate the intellectual presence of its international membership:

• Invited foreign scholars to present the annual Charles Seeger Lecture at the annual meetings of the Society in order to bring their ideas before a plenary session of the annual meeting. This was successful, but extremely expensive due to airfare and hotel fees, and has only been done a few times. Overseas members are considered in all publications awards.
• Arranged plenary sessions for international scholars at the annual meetings. This year, for example, the Russian scholar Izaly Zemzofsky spoke at the SEM meeting. In this case the scholar was already in the United States, and money was not required. We would do this more often if we could.
• Put information about the Society on-line so that it may be acquired in a more timely ,fashion by overseas members who do not wish to pay the $20.00 surcharge for air-mail shipping of publications. This has been quite popular with our overseas members, who were often frustrated with the delays of the print mail.
• Announced that the journal, Ethnomusicology, will review manuscripts in virtually any language, instead of requiring full translation before submission. We have not had as many submissions of this sort as we expected, but our journal does publish articles by overseas members — although not as many as that of the Yearbook of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM Level C) or the Latin American Music Review, or the World of Music.
• Exchange of Publications. We exchange some publications with professional societies. The disadvantage is that we have no repository for what we receive, and it is quite costly. We also have a publications award, or three-year gift, to countries in the Middle East.
• Inexpensive gift rates for members. SEM members may give membership (and thus publications) as gifts to people in other countries for half the price of full membership. This was widely acclaimed, but has not often been used. The objective was to find a more suitable way to get the journal into the hands of the people who would benefit from it, and to give the membership an appropriate way to reciprocate for favors received in other countries. We hope this will grow.
• On at least one occasion a group of SEM members visited the (then) U.S.S.R. as part of an international exchange of scholars. This was considered a success by the participants.
• The SEM set up a standing committee to serve as the National Committee of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), the UNESCO Level C organization that is the official international organization in the area of ethnomusicology. Like many UNESCO organizations, the ICTM is a body of National Committees as well as of individual members. The vast majority of the membership of the ICTM resides in the United States, and many SEM members have served, or currently serve, on its Executive Board.

Attempts we have made in other areas, such as to coordinate tours of speakers from overseas, or to coordinate tours of musicians, have not been successful. The Society does not now have either the funds or the infrastructure to do this, while many universities do and are doing so.

During the seven years I have spent on its Executive Board, the SEM has made consistent efforts to increase communication among professionals in the field. I do not believe we have done much more than previous generations have done. We have perhaps, but not certainly, done more at the Society level, rather than the individual level, than has been attempted previously.

I look forward to hearing about the successes and failures of programs in other societies.

Notes

1. Ethnomusicologists are famous for inventing and then agonizing over definitions of the field. This is provided simply for those unfamiliar with the field. [Return to text]