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Introduction
Ethnomusicology currently engages with the study of Western music in two principal ways. On the one hand, there are specific ethnomusicological studies that focus on aspects of Western musical traditions. Examples include Paul Berliner's analysis of improvisation in jazz (1994), Philip Bohlman's study of chamber music as ethnic music in contemporary Israel (1991), and the examinations of music schools and conservatories by Bruno Nettl (1995) and Henry Kingsbury (1988). These works, in and of themselves, offer explicit and direct indication of what an ethnomusicological approach to Western music involves and what manner of insights can be produced thereby. Second, and more diffusely, ethnomusicological research plays into the study of Western music through musicologists' adoption, adaptation, and application of ethnomusicological techniques and concepts: some musicologists have drawn from specific ethnographies of non-Western musical traditions, and others have made recourse to the standard texts of ethnomusicological theory and practice (such as Merriam 1964 and Nettl 1983). Conference presentations, seminars, conversations, and, especially in the case of younger scholars, courses taken as part of their academic training also provide channels of contact between the repertory of scholarly ideas and procedures developed primarily for the explanation of non-Western musics and the field of Western musical studies. The titles of such publications as Nicholas Cook's Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990) and Peter Jeffery's Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant (1992) are clear in their referencing to this particular field of academic endeavor.
Nonetheless, despite musicology's recent expansion into cultural models of musical interpretation, it remains rare for musicologists to draw on existing ethnomusicological approaches or theories. It is almost as if the new musicologists and critical musicologists would prefer to invent their own theories of social and cultural contextualization than consider those already developed in ethnomusicological research.l Kay Kaufman Shelemay writes: While I applaud its efforts, the "new musicology" . . . seems not so startlingly new, at least not to someone familiar with the last half century of ethnomusicological research, not to mention considerable earlier work in historical musicology itself that engaged fully with issues relating to culture, society, and politics. I am delighted that "new musicology" has moved full force to considerations of music and culture, but I marvel at the oversight...