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Ethnomusicology and the Exiles Jef Todd Titon (Brown University) It was in the spring of 1966, near the end of my irst year in graduate school, when my musicology professor, Johannes Riedel, approached me. “You’ll be happy to know,” he said, “that we’ve hired an ethnomusicologist. Next year you’ll be able to take courses in ethnomusicology.” “In what?” I asked. I’d never heard of it. “Ethnomusicology,” Riedel explained. “It’s the comparative study of the music of the world’s peoples. We used to call it comparative musicology, when I was teaching at the university in Ecuador and collecting Ecuadorian folk music. You’ll learn about it soon enough.” As Riedel had predicted, next fall ethnomusicologist Alan Kagan arrived and in the ensuing years I took to heart every course and all the advice he ofered. Riedel hovered in the background like a benevolent uncle. In the years after graduate school he and I corresponded some, but in 1980 he retired, our correspondence petered out, and I more or less forgot about him—until one day David Josephson said some things that opened my memories. David was in the lush of his early enthusiasm on his “exiles” project, turning up the name of one musicologist after another who had led from Nazism and the increasing European anti-Semitism during the 1930s and 1940s, to land in North America and try to establish, or re-establish, a university career. I knew of a few of them, and to David I mentioned Curt Sachs, the polymath musicologist whose proliic writings extended to comparative work in the mu- 32 Jef Todd Titon sic of ancient Greece, indigenous musics, and the world history of dance. And then, suddenly, it occurred to me that I had known one personally: Johannes Riedel had also been an exile. Born in Poland in 1913 and educated in Berlin, he was not Jewish, but his wife was. Together they led Germany around 1937, landing in Ecuador, where he became a professor of musicology at the Colegio Normal Rita Lecumberry in Guayaquil. In 1948 the Riedels moved to California. In 1953 he received the PhD in musicology from USC, and in that same year he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, becoming a full professor in 1960. I mentioned Riedel to David, and he took it in—one more to add to a list that was lengthening daily. It should have, but didn’t, occur to me until years later to wonder what inluence, if any, these exiles might have had on my ield, ethnomusicology. And the answer, I should have known, was considerable. I won’t write at length about this here, because I’ve already done so elsewhere, in a diferent context (Titon 2015). Comparative musicology, the most direct ancestor of ethnomusicology, was established in the United States in the 1930s, by the exile George Herzog (19011983). Born to acculturated, liberal Jewish parents in Hungary, educated in Budapest and later in Berlin, Herzog led to the United States in the late 1920s, the decade in which Hitler published Mein Kampf—his Nazi Party was gaining in inluence and power, and anti-Semitism was on the rise in Germany and Hungary. Herzog’s academic pedigree was impressive. He had worked with the leading comparative musicologist in Germany, Erich M. Von Hornbostel; and upon emigrating from Germany to the United States, he took the PhD under the supervision of Franz Boas, the leading cultural anthropologist of the period. Herzog began his career at the University of Chicago, working with Edward Sapir. In 1930 he accompanied Sapir to Yale, where Sapir had been invited to establish a department of anthropology. After Yale, Herzog took up a professorship at Columbia, and in 1948 he became a professor at Indiana University. From the late 1920s until the mid-1950s, when he became too ill to continue his academic career, Herzog was the most inluential person in the ield of “primitive music,” as his specialty within comparative musicology then was called. His student David McAllester, in 1955 Ethnomusicology and the Exiles 33 one of four founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), recalled that if during those earlier decades one wanted an academic career in comparative musicology, that if one wanted (as he did) to study Native American music, or music in Africa, or South America, or elsewhere in the world, then one attempted to study under Herzog. Herzog combined the methods of comparative musicology—transcription, structural analysis, description of style and genre, comparison of diferent peoples’ music—with the methods of Boasian cultural anthropology, including ethnographic ieldwork. He accomplished original ieldwork with Native Americans, transcribed and analyzed bodies of music that he and others collected, and published proliically. He was an authority—the authority, in the United States—on folk and primitive music; his standards were high and he did not hesitate to make or break careers. For nearly three decades, comparative musicology in the US lowed through the exile George Herzog. Herzog’s two most prominent students, each to have important careers as ethnomusicologists in the second half of the twentieth century, were David McAllester (1916-2006) and Bruno Nettl (1930-). McAllester recalled Herzog’s teaching methods during his 1989 visit to my history of ethnomusicological thought seminar at Brown. Herzog would have you in his oice and go over one of your musical transcriptions very slowly and carefully, McAllester said, and point out how awful it was. “Now see if you can’t do better next time,” Herzog would say, and the student would leave with a bit of encouragement. But the next time the transcription was judged just as bad, and the examination was just as painful. Eventually the student would ind it harder and harder to get an appointment to see Herzog. “With Herzog it was do or die,” McAllester said, “and many died” (McAllester 1989). Bruno Nettl’s father, Paul Nettl (1889-1972), a Jewish exile from Czechoslovakia, had a distinguished career between the World Wars as a professor of musicology in Prague; but as war-clouds gathered he understood that he and his family had no future there. hey immigrated to the United States in 1939, when Bruno was nine years old. In 1946 Paul Nettl secured a position as a professor of musicology at Indiana University, where Herzog wound up two years later. Bruno 34 Jef Todd Titon Nettl became Herzog’s student there in the early 1950s, but encountered the same diiculties that McAllester had. McAllester somehow succeeded in getting the PhD under Herzog’s supervision—as far as he knew, he was the only one ever to do so—but a half dozen years later when Nettl was studying under Herzog, the illness that would end his career had progressed to the point where Nettl had to change supervisors. Herzog, although still brilliant, had become undependable due to what would today be diagnosed as a bi-polar disorder. Although Bruno Nettl was still a graduate student when the Society for Ethnomusicology was founded in 1955, he vied for academic inluence in the ield with the slightly older members of his generation—most notably McAllester, Alan Merriam (another founder of the Society), and Mantle Hood (at UCLA). Harvard University Press published Nettl’s irst book, Music in Primitive Culture, one year after SEM was founded (Nettl 1956). A thoroughly Herzogian work of comparative musicology, it was a itting tribute to his former professor. Measured by the number and variety of his publications, his keynote addresses, his roles as editor, as an oicer of musical organizations, and the graduate students he taught who themselves went on to careers in the ield, Nettl had the most inluence of any scholar-teacher on ethnomusicology as it grew to maturity as an academic institution in the last half of the twentieth century. His graduate textbook, he Study of Ethnomusicology, a description of the ield as he views it, has gone through three editions since 1983 (Nettl 2015). It would be hard to ind a graduate student or professor in ethnomusicology of the past 36 years who hasn’t read it. However, neither Herzog nor Nettl were positioned politically to inluence North American ethnomusicology in its earliest decade. SEM’s founders had deliberately excluded Herzog from their plans to begin a new academic society, fearing that he would exert undue pressure; but once their plans were well underway, they asked Herzog and dozens of others to sign a letter of support, which they did. Nettl, as I mentioned, was still a graduate student at the time, and although a rising star he was not in a position to participate directly in the founding. McAllester recalled those early years of SEM as a time when people from many disciplines, including anthropology, folklore, comparative musicology, dance ethnology, acoustics, and psychology, came together to create a new interdisciplinary ield, Ethnomusicology and the Exiles 35 ethnomusicology (McAllester 1989). Merriam and McAllester, both SEM founders and both anthropologists, sought to move this new ield toward the study of music as culture, rather than continue the Herzogian notion of music centered within a cultural context. he Herzogian formulation, and with it comparative musicology, would soon make a comeback as Nettl rose to prominence, along with other comparativists such as Mieczslaw Kolinski (who had studied with Von Hornbostel, spent the War years in Belgium, and emigrated to Canada in 1951) and George List, who succeeded Herzog as head of the ethnomusicology program at Indiana, while Merriam remained in the anthropology department there until his death in 1980, at the age of 56, in an airplane crash. Indeed, Nettl’s memories of the founding of SEM were quite diferent from McAllester’s. Whereas McAllester and Merriam considered ethnomusicology a revolutionary new fusion aimed at the cultural study of music, Nettl’s memoirs portray it as the restoration of a great tradition (comparative musicology) that had been interrupted by the rise of Nazism (Nettl 2010:160-162). One point remains to be made regarding the exiles and ethnomusicology: their distrust of social and political activism. Beyond research itself, the irst priority of the founding generation of ethnomusicologists—something McAllester, Merriam, Nettl, Hood, and the others could agree on—was to establish ethnomusicology as an academic discipline with doctoral programs turning out PhDs who would go on to teach ethnomusicology at colleges and universities throughout the world. In this drive to professionalize the discipline, some (including Nettl and Merriam, but not McAllester or Hood) were skeptical of world music performance ensembles within the universities, thinking that the surest path to respect and the security of academic freedom was to establish ethnomusicology’s scientiic credentials as a research discipline. Nor did the founding generation (with the exception of McAllester) pay much attention to ethnomusicology in music education as a means of helping to diversify the K-12 music curriculum. “Sandbox ethnomusicology” was Merriam’s derisive term for it. Nor, despite the rise of applied anthropology within the ield of cultural anthropology after World War II, did the founding generation engage in what is now known as applied or public ethnomusicology, or ethnomusicology engaged with commu- 36 Jef Todd Titon nities, guided by a sense of social responsibility, in the public interest. Although a few ethnomusicologists (this writer, for one) combined their research with social activism as early as the 1960s, activism did not come to characterize a signiicant part of our ield until the late 1990s. In retrospect, it is understandable that the generation of exiles and their immediate descendants would have had their doubts about applied ethnomusicology. hey had, after all, experienced music used for propaganda and social engineering under the Nazi and Soviet regimes, continuing in the Communist nations throughout the Cold War period (Titon 2015). In addition, they were wary of the centuries-old missionary practice of employing music to help convert indigenous peoples to Christianity. In fact, the irst mention of applied ethnomusicology in the SEM Journal occurred in the early 1960s when Merriam, reviewing a book about missionary music in Africa, pondered the wisdom of using music to “manipulate the destinies of people,” as he awkwardly phrased it (Merriam 1963:135). Viewing the early decades of ethnomusicology as the restoration of a great tradition (comparative musicology), a tradition that had been associated with the exiles and their descendants, ofers a rather narrow perspective, emphasizing the German connection and Guido Adler’s inclusive deinition of comparative musicology as a branch of musicology. But when viewed through the commonalities of an exile experience, this version of history makes sense to me in a way that it would not have done, had David Josephson not brought his own research into the exiles and their inluence on musicology to our attention in the irst place. References Cited McAllester, David. 1989. Unpublished videotape of seminar at Brown University, transcribed by Lisa Lawson. Accessible from the author, and from the American Folklife Center, Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Merriam, Alan. 1963. Review of Henry Weman, “African Music and the Church in Africa.” Ethnomusicology 7 (2):135. Ethnomusicology and the Exiles 37 Nettl, Bruno. (1956). Music in Primitive Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. _________. 2010. Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. _________. 2015. he Study of Ethnomusicology: hirty-hree Discussions. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Titon, Jef Todd. 2015. “Applied Ethnomusicology: A Descriptive and Historical Account.” In he Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, ed. Svanibor Pettan and Jef Todd Titon, pp. 4-29. New York: Oxford University Press.