Ethnomusicology, sounding philosophical: some musical reflection on the debate between analytic and continental thought

Abstract

In this text I intend to show how the prevalent idea of music in ethnomusicology as a discipline depends on the previous position is adopted under the contrast between the analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. The debate on whether the perspective of music as object dislocated and multifocal characteristic of ethnomusicology be justified by the tension lying between this philosophical polarity. To illustrate this theoretical route I discussed several examples in which this problem is embodied: the cantometrics method, developed by Alan Lomax, as an example of an analytic statistical approximation, and the celebrated musical ethnography Steven Feld Sound and Sentiment, on which the author goes to the principles of continental philosophy to braid your project. Ultimately, the display of this problems that face from the analytic and continental philosophy will allow us open some conclusions about disciplinary conditions in which ethnomusicology addresses the question of what is music.

Keywords

• etnomusicología, filosofía de la música, cantometrics, etnografía, filosofía analítica, filosofía continental