Early Comparative Musicology and the Study of non-Western Music: A Critical Appraisal

Abstract

This article focuses on the emergence of the academic discipline of comparative musicology at the end of the nineteenth century. As predecessor of ethnomusicology, comparative musicology paved the way for the study of non-Western music and many of its premises had a lasting impact on musical studies around the world until the present day. Based on the premise of the situatedness of knowledge production within the socio-cultural as well as political and technological contexts from which it emerges, this article critically examines the conditions of possibility for the study of non-Western and more generally human musical expression outside the Western art music paradigm around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It scrutinises the paradigm shift in aesthetical discourse that made the institutionalisation of comparative musicology possible and addresses questions about the relevance of early studies of non-Western music by comparative musicologists for scholars working in postcolonial contexts today.