A Half-Century of Monographs in Ethnomusicology

It is surely one of the clearest signs of the intellectual vigor of the Society for Ethnomusicology at half-century that our books and monographs stretch across disciplinary and cultural borders as never before. In 2005, there were 43 books nominated for the Alan Merriam Prize of the SEM, presented annually to honor the outstanding monographs in ethnomusicology. That the monographs of our field recognize the breadth of our field so fully could not be more evident. Indeed, the nominations this year truly chart new territory and realize the goals of the potential that fifty years of ethnomusicological scholarship have set in motion.

It is emblematic of our achievements that ethnomusicological scholarship did not parse into typical monographs or genres in this year’s Merriam competition. The authors came from all subdisciplinary domains of our field. Collaboration was common, and coauthorship was by no means rare. New areas of scholarship were opened by many authors, while others were inspired by the history that we collectively celebrate at this conference. Past and present enrich each other, ensuring the conviction with which the ethnomusicological monograph leads us into our future.

Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004)
The second co-winner of the 2005 Merriam Prize has charted new ethnomusicological landscapes in the course of a very distinguished career. Many of the musical landscapes that Judith Becker opens in Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing are internal, and to many they have seemed elusive, difficult to retrieve and perceive, for some even pathological. With deep reflection and respect, Judith Becker honors the methods of our ancestors and invites us to pursue new partnerships with collaborators today, in the hard sciences, religious studies, and even beyond. Deep Listeners speaks expansively to music writ – or rather, musicked – large through human experience, but no less important it speaks metaphorically and phenomenologically to ethnomusicologists, to wit:

Fragmentation of intellectual effort is one of the curses of the modern academy. Ethnomusicology with its multiple parentage has never had a monolithic dogma but, rather, multiple practitioners of many different kinds of ethnomusicology. I hope that there can also be many different kinds of music cognition including one that is biologically based, psychologically sophisticated, and attuned to cultural nuances, cultural knowledge. (7)

It is indeed fitting to honor Judith Becker and Deep Listeners at this 50th Anniversary of the Society for Ethnomusicology.