The ethnomusicologist as pedagogue: Disciplining ethnomusicology in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This article is about the history, disciplining, and transmission of ethnomusicology at universities in the United Kingdom. The opening sections will illustrate the contexts and broader organizational structure of higher education in the UK, and sketch the ideological and social practices that inform the disciplining of ethnomusicology and its transmission to students at universities. The subsequent discussions will position ethnomusicology as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, organized around three principal disciplinary alliances that characterize the disciplining of ethnomusicology at universities in the UK, namely musicology; anthropology; and interdisciplinary studies of popular music. The final discussions will provide a reflexive account of "knowing by doing and experiencing" while deriving a model for ethnomusicology pedagogy that represents the interdisciplinary, experiential, and holistic transmission of ethnomusicology in the UK today.