Etnomuzicologia și obiectul ei de studiu. O încercare de evaluare și sistematizare

Ethnomusicology and Its Object of Inquiry. An Evaluation and Systematization Attempt (Abstract) Although a relatively young discipline, ethnomusicology has a consistent and diverse scientific tradition. Over time, it proved to be a fertile ground for testing and debating various theories and methodologies as it was able to accommodate different ideas from other areas of research. However, if we look closely at its research tradition, we can see that, no matter how different the scientific approaches are, they can all be incorporated in three major categories, based on what answers the researcher aims to extract from the tunes she collects and/or analyzes. Thus, the final goal of a research is to construe and explain music from the perspective of a cultural artifact, of a social product, or from that of a psychological process. In Romania, ethnomusicology had its own distinctive path of evolution, one that sometimes intersected the prevalent practices in the Western world. This article aims to review the theoretical trends that permeated the local ethnomusicology in order to understand what its dominant ideas were. Applying the above tripartite distinction, we conclude that most of the research was conducted within the premise that folk music is a kind of a cultural object, whose value resides mostly in its own configuration. We claim that this perspective is not suited anymore for ethnomusicological field research, and that a better way to understanding the musical life of contemporary rural Romania is the one which sees music as a process shaped by the interaction of various social forces.