Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts of musical behavior, in addition to the sound component.
While the traditional subject of musicology has been the history and literature of Western art music, ethnomusicology was developed as the study of all music as a human social and cultural phenomenon. Oskar Kolberg is regarded as one of the earliest European ethnomusicologists as he first began collecting Polish folk songs in 1839 (Nettl 2010, 33). Comparative musicology, the primary precursor to ethnomusicology, emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The International Musical Society in Berlin in 1899 acted as one of the first centers for ethnomusicology. Comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology tended to focus on non-Western music, but in more recent years, the field has expanded to embrace the study of Western music from an ethnographic standpoint. 
Folklore.
Folklore and folklorists were the precursors to the field of ethnomusicology prior to WWII. They laid a foundation of interest in the preservation and continuation of the traditional folk musics of nations and an interest in the differences between the musics of various nations. Folklorists approached folklore through comparative methods, seeking to prove that folk music was simple but reflected the lives of the lower classes.
Folklore is defined as "traditional customs, tales, sayings, dances, or art forms preserved among a people." Bruno Nettl, an ethnomusicologist, defines folk music as "...the music in oral tradition found in those areas dominated by high cultures." This definition can be simplified to the traditional music of a certain people within a country or region.
Folkloric studies were partly motivated by nationalism and the search for national identities. Southern and Eastern European composers incorporated folk music into their compositions to instil sentiments of nationalism in their audiences. Examples of such composers are Leoš Janáček, Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius, Béla Bartók, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. As Helen Meyers puts it, "Nationalist composers throughout Europe turned to peasant song to enrich the classical musical idiom of their country." In the United States, the preservation of folk music was part of a search for a sense of national tradition in the face of striking regional diversity.
"The collecting projects of southern and eastern Europeans of the second half of the 19th century were largely contributions to folkloric studies. These collectors feared that entire repertories were on the point of extinction, repertories that were thought a proper base for nationalist styles of art music. Early collectors were motivated by musical nationalism, theories of self-determination, and by hope for a musical rationale for a pan-Slavic identity...eastern Europeans explored their own linguistic setting, amassing large collections, thousands of song texts and, later, tunes, which they sought to classify and compare." The most well-known eastern European collectors were Béla Bartók (Hungary), Constantin Brăiloiu (Romania), Klement Kvitka (Ukraine), Adolf Chybinski (Poland), and Vasil Stoin (Bulgaria).
In 1931, Béla Bartók published an essay detailing his study of what he refers to as "Peasant music" which "...connotes...all the tunes which endure among the peasant class of any nation, in a more or less wide area and for a more or less long period, and constitute a spontaneous expression of the musical feeling of that class." Bartok takes a comparative approach in his investigation of Hungarian folk music and believes that peasant music is primitive when compared to the music of the educated class.
In North America, state folklore societies were founded in the early 20th century and were dedicated to the collection and preservation of Old World "folksong", i.e. music that came from Europe, Africa, or places outside of the U.S. during the settlement of the U.S. by colonizers; Native American music was also included in these societies. "In 1914 the US Department of Education instigated a rescue mission for ballads and folksongs, stimulating an era of collecting by local enthusiasts and academics that lasted through the Great Depression until World War II."
Cecil Sharp, a lawyer turned musician, greatly contributed to the collection and preservation of British folk songs found in Appalachia. His interest in folk music began in 1903, when he discovered that a large amount of native folk song survived in England and published "Folk Songs from Somerset" (1904–1909). After he studied traditional English folk song in England, he traveled to the Appalachia region with his collaborator Maud Karpeles of the United States of America three times between the years 1916 and 1918 and discovered around 1,600 English tunes and variants.
In 1909 Olive Dame Campbell traveled to the Appalachia region of the U.S. from Massachusetts and discovered that the ballads sung by the residents had strong ties to English and Scots-Irish folk songs. This region of the United States preserved these old folk songs because it was isolated from the city centers of the original thirteen colonies. She collected ballads by having people sing them to her while she recorded them on a phonograph and transcribed them. She worked with Cecil Sharp and published the ballads that she had collected in "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians".
A controversy in the field of musicology arose surrounding "Negro Spirituals". A musical spiritual is defined as "a religious song usually of a deeply emotional character that was developed especially among blacks in the southern U.S." The controversy revolved around whether the spirituals originated solely from Africa or if they were influenced by European music. Richard Wallaschek claimed that Negro Spirituals were merely imitations of European song, starting the debate on the subject. Erich von Hornbostel concluded that African and European musics were constructed on different principles and therefore could not be combined. The white origin theory argued that black music had been influenced by Anglo-American song and constituted an integral part of the British tradition. Melville J. Herskovits and his student Richard A. Waterman discovered that "European and African forms had blended to produce new genres bearing features of both parent musics. European and African music...have many features in common, among them diatonic scales and polyphony. When these two musics met, during the slave era, it was natural for them to blend..." "Negro Spirituals" were the first black musical genre comprehensively studied by scholars.
The interest in folklore did not end with the folklorists before World War II. After World War II, the International Folk Music Council was founded and was later renamed the International Council for Traditional Music. In 1978, Alan Lomax sought to classify and compare the music of world cultures through a system he named Cantometrics. This goal began with his idea that singing is a universal characteristic and therefore all musics of the world should have some comparable characteristics. Lomax believed that human migration could be tracked through songs; when a certain culture's song or style is heard in another geographical region, it signifies that the two cultures interacted at some point. Lomax thought that all folk song styles vary with, and can be compared using, several categories, which include: productive range, political level, level of stratification of class, severity of sexual mores, balance of dominance between male and female, and the level of social cohesiveness. He compared vocal performances through a set of characteristics, some of which are 'raspiness', the use of meaningful words, and the use of meaningful syllables.
Comparative Musicology.
Comparative musicology is known as the cross-cultural study of music. Once referred to as "Musikologie", comparative musicology emerged in the late 19th century in response to the works of Komitas Keworkian (also known as Komitas Vardapet or Soghomon Soghomonian.) A precedent to modern ethnomusicological studies, comparative musicology seeks to look at music throughout world cultures and their respective histories. Similarly to comparative linguistics, comparative musicology seeks to classify music of global cultures, illustrate their geographic distribution, explain universal musical trends, and understand the causation concerning the creation and evolution of music. Developed throughout the early 20th century, the term "comparative musicology" emerged in an 1885 publication by Guido Adler, who added the term "comparative" to musicology to describe works by scholars such as Alexander J. Ellis, whose academic process was founded in cross-cultural comparative studies. As one of four subdivisions of systematic musicology, "comparative musicology" was once described by Adler himself as the task of "comparing tonal products, in particular the folk songs of various peoples, countries, and territories, with an ethnographic purpose in mind, grouping and ordering these according to...their characteristics".
Comparative musicology is typically thought to have been inspired by the work of Komitas Vardapet, an Armenian priest, musicology and choirmaster, who began his work studying in Berlin. His work primarily focused on the transcription of nearly 4000 pieces of Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish folk music. His efforts to categorize and classify various music inspired others to do the same. This included Guido Adler, a Bohemian-Austrian musicologist and professor at the German University of Prague, Bohemia, who officially coined the term "vergleichende Musikwissenschaft" (translated: comparative music science) in 1885 in response to the emergence of new academic methods of studying music. Around the same time of Adler's development of the terminology associated with the study, the work of Alexander J. Ellis, who focused primarily on developing the cents system, was emerging as the foundation of the comparative elements of musicology. This cents system allowed from precise delineation of particular measurements denoted from pitch denoted as "hundredths of an equal-tempered semitone". Ellis also established a general definition for the pitch of a musical note, which he noted as "the number of...complete vibrations...made in each second by a particle of air while the note is heard".
Other contemporaries of Komitas, Ellis, and Adler included Erich von Hornbostel, and Carl Stumpf, who are typically credited with establishing comparative musicology as an official field separate from musicology itself. Von Hornbostel, who once stated that Ellis was the "true founder of comparative scientific musicology.", was an Austrian scholar of music, while Stumpf was a German philosopher and psychologist. Together with Otto Abraham, they founded the "Berlin School of Comparative Musicology". Despite working together, Stumpf and Hornbostel had very different ideas regarding the foundation of the school. As Stumpf focused primarily from a psychological perspective, his position was founded in the belief of "unity of the human mind"; his interests were on sensual experiences of tones and intervals and their respective ordering. In addition, his studies focused on testing his hypothesis of perceived fusion of tones. On the other hand, Hornbostel adopted Stumpf's assignment, but rather approached the topic from his systematic and theoretical perspective, and did not concern himself with others. Through the institution, additional scholars such as Curt Sachs, Mieczyslaw Kolinski, George Herzog and Jaap Kunst (who first coined the term "ethno-musicology" in a 1950 article) further expanded the field of comparative musicology. Additionally Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was conducting his own comparative studies at the time, focusing primarily on Hungarian (and other) folk music, in addition to the influence of European popular music on musical folk-lore of that particular geographic region.
Eventually, comparative musicology began experiencing changes. Following the Second World War, issues regarding the ethical contexts of comparative musicology began to emerge. As comparative musicology was founded primarily in Europe, most scholars based their comparisons in Western music. In an effort to adjust the Western bias present in their studies, academics such as Jaap Kunst began adjusting their approaches in analysis and fieldwork to become more globally focused. In the 1950s, comparative musicology continued to evolve to become ethnomusicology, but still remains today a field focused primarily on comparative studies in music.
Beginnings and early history.
Ethnomusicology has evolved both in terminology and ideology since its formal inception in the late 19th century. Although practices paralleling ethnomusicological work have been noted throughout colonial history, an Armenian priest known as Komitas Vardapet is considered one of the pioneers to ethnomusicology's rise to prominence in 1896. While studying in Berlin at Frederick William University and attending the International Music Society, Vardapet transcribed over 3000 pieces of music. In his notes, he emphasized cultural and religious elements as well as social aspects of music and poetry. Inspired by these thoughts, many Western European nations began to transcribe and categorize music based on ethnicity and culture. Inspired by these thoughts, many Western European nations began to put many ethnic and cultural pieces of music onto paper and