Artistic Research in Music versus Musicological Musicianship

Artistic Research in Music versus

Musicological Musicianship
Marko Aho

Introduction
Since the Bologna process initiation in 1999, the new millennium has witnessed an ex-
pansion of formal types of academic degree in higher arts education in Europe. In fact,
these degrees have been granted a rather special place in European science policy, to-
gether with a revised definition of the role of the humanities in society in general. Fol-
lowing developments that, as a matter of fact, unfolded in the creative arts long before
Bologna, artistic research has fully established itself in the curricula of higher music
education within the EU. Strong centres of artistic research on musical performance
have evolved e.g. at the Sibelius Academy, Finland, and at the Orpheus Research Center
in Music, Belgium. Despite these institutional advances, discussion on the meaning and
goals of artistic research of music, as well as on its relation to existing music research,
remains complex, politically charged and far from complete. An ultimate definition of
artistic research seems now as remote as ever.
The implied initial motivation for artistic research was to enhance art itself using
scientific methods and concepts that would make artistic endeavour more explicit and
goal-oriented. The scope of artistic research benefiting autonomous artistic practice has
nevertheless broadened to include other than purely artistic goals, and the acceptance of
not only creative artistic outcome, but also of traditional research prose as an appropri-
ate end product of artistic research is now a matter of fact. So far, artistic research lit-
erature has been overwhelmingly concerned with abstract philosophical, epistemological
and methodological questions (see Solleveld 2012 p. 78-79), and the debate concerning
the value of artistic research to existing music research paradigms has been hindered
by scarcity of concrete research outcomes which would exemplify exactly how artistic
research furthers the accumulation of academic knowledge of music. Nevertheless, the
artistic research community has sought to embrace a multitude of potentially usable
conceptualizations which embody connotations towards practice as a research method.
In the ongoing conversation within art academies, art-based research, also known as
practice-based research, practice-led research and practice as research, refers to the
idea of artistic practice, as it is traditionally understood, as a legitimate form of research
in which some of the resulting knowledge is embodied in an artefact. The artistic re-

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search community’s embracing of these methodological strategies has sometimes over-

shadowed the fact that practice-based or practice-led research has also been conducted
outside the arts fields: the idea of practice as a part of research already applies to many
disciplines involving professional accreditation, among them engineering, architecture,
health care, education, law and social work. In a similar vein, the fact that there is now a
form of music research dedicated exclusively to practice may have made traditional mu-
sicologists feel shy about their own music-making. �����������������������������������
For example, in recent years ethno-
musicologists seem to have overlooked the potential of incorporating concrete musicking
in their research. Symptomatic of this is the lack of a proper concept for research that
incorporates music-making with the sole goal of acquiring scientific knowledge. Never-
theless, in ethnomusicology research involving music-making is not unknown and has its
roots in the concept of bi-musicality (coined by Mantle Hood in the 1950s), a concept
which was a part of the mainstream vocabulary in the discipline’s formative years.
In this article, I will introduce motivations for incorporating performance into research
in all musicology, but especially in ethnomusicology, where such practice has an explicit
history. Secondly, I will raise questions concerning the tendencies within the artistic
research camp to define the objectives of artistic research very broadly. The placing of
artistic work at the centre of the research activity carries with it a set of concerns which
relate to, for example, the definition of human creativity. The lack of a clear-cut defini-
tion of artistic research may be beneficial from the point of view of discipline formation,
but it has also led to all-encompassing tendencies which may become problematic for
musicologists interested in the creative processes of music-making: artistic research
tends to be both highly inclusive in its definition of the scope of artistic research as
creativity in music, and, at the same time, highly exclusive in its definition of the artistic
researcher as a researcher with a formal art education. In being so loaded with the in-
stitutional and hierarchical connotations of art and artistry, artistic research may pose
an unfair challenge to contemporary musicological and ethnomusicological forms of
research with which it shares significant elements.

Musical performance as a research tool for ethnomusicology

Which elements could artistic research and musicology share? Besides practice, an
epistemological appeal to tacit rather than explicit knowledge; a methodological prefe­
rence for hermeneutics rather than external observation; an interest in corporeal, non-
conceptual experience rather than cognitive conceptualization (these are brought forth
by Borgdorff in his influential 2012 thesis The Conflict of the Faculties p. 44-53, 122-4).
Of course, artistic or any other research can possess no exclusive rights to the theories
of Polanyi, Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty, which can rather be considered widespread

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paradigms for anthropological inquiry in general, and which are certainly not unknown
to musicologists. However, the story begins much earlier: what is usually shared, perhaps
not surprisingly, are the backgrounds of the practitioners of both music performance and
music research. Behind every acquired musical skill there must be research: non-formal
but determined information-seeking and meaning-making aimed at gathering enough
data to begin acquiring the skills of expert musical performance. For the benefit of per-
formance skills, this informal research would probably take place intermittently before
and during formal training. Behind every musicological research endeavour, an encoun-
ter with the essence of music will have taken place, at some stage. Very often this has
involved musical performance. I do not know of any musicologist or ethnomusicologist
who cannot play and sing at all. Some of my fellow ethnomusicologists, though lacking
formal training as musicians, have become very good performers: touring professionals,
pop stars, teachers in the conservatoire system (oddly enough). The point is: institutional
demarcations between music research and music performance should not be taken too
seriously.
Inside every ethnomusicologist there is a musician, small or great. Therefore, it should
not come as a surprise that, in classic ethnomusicology, musicianship-dependent prac­
tices have been a key means of acquiring knowledge. As mentioned, bi-musicality became
a mainstream practice in the years when the discipline was established in the USA. Even
before Mantle Hood, ethnomusicologists made some effort to learn to perform their (usu-
ally exotic) objects of study. However, such a seminal figure of early ethnomusicology as
Jaap Kunst, an expert of Indonesian gamelan music and an able amateur violinist, never
actually learned to play gamelan during his time as a colonial officer in the Dutch East
Indies in the 1920s and 1930s (Kunst et al. 1994). Hood’s students, on the other hand,
actually learned to play the music they were studying at the Institute for Ethno­musicology
at UCLA. Hood’s article ‘The Challenge of “Bi-Musicality”’ (1960) contained the seeds of
his program. For him, learning to perform was not merely a useful technique in ethnomu-
sicological research, but a foundation for any kind of musical scholarship:
The training of ears, eyes, hands and voice fluency gained in these skills assure a real com­
prehension of theoretical studies, which in turn prepares the way for the professional activities
of the performer, the composer, the musicologist and the music educator. (Hood 1960 p. 55.)

Hood was of the opinion that the student should aim at acquiring basic musicianship
skills, ‘so that his observations and analysis as a musicologist do not prove to be embar-
rassing’; but if the student ‘chooses to become a professional instrumentalist or singer
competing with others in the country of his chosen study (and this possibility seems to
me remote) he will have to persist in practical studies considerably beyond the require-
ments of basic musicianship until he attains professional status’ (Hood 1960 p. 58).

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Hood adapted his term ‘bi-musicality’ from the term ‘bilingual’. Later, this has been
considered slightly problematic: ‘bilingual’ denotes a fluency in two languages acquired
in childhood – a process quite possible also in music – but what Hood referred to was
rather an additional musical ability systematically acquired later in life. Another question
is how much distance there must be between two or more ‘musics’ for them to count as
different musical languages. While accepting Hood’s basic idea, some ethnomusicologists
have found his term so problematic that they have opted for an alternative vocabulary,
talking simply of ‘learning to perform’ (Baily 2001 p. 86).
Apparently independent from Hood’s ideas, John Blacking, the pioneering music
anthro­pologist who did major fieldwork among the South-African Venda tribe as early
as in the mid 1950s, found it natural to learn children’s songs. Blacking drummed in
possession trance sessions and took part in community dances during the early stages
of his fieldwork, ‘by the same process as the Venda themselves’ (Blacking 1967 p. 28)
and in order to ‘discover the principles which generate (music) and their relationship to
other social activities and cultural forms’ (Blacking 1973 p. 214). Echoing Hood, Blacking
explicitly stated that performance should not be seen as an end to itself, but as a means
to a better understanding of the music. Furthermore, Blacking continues, ‘only a limited
amount of time can be spent on performance, enough to get the feel of the music and
the problems involved in playing it, to elicit constructive responses from one’s teachers
and critics, and to have discussions with those who are experts’ (ibid. p. 215). Blacking
and Hood were backed by Charles Seeger, who argued that a high level of musicianship
is not necessary but that ‘a certain minimum of competence of performance is necessary
for the knowledge about the idiom that is the essential stuff of the study’ (Seeger 1977
p. 325).
Blacking’s protégé John Baily learned dutâr and rubâb in Afghanistan during the 1970s
and -80s. In an initial response letter to Baily, who had plans to study under masters of
the instrument tar, Blacking stressed that, as an ethnomusicologist, one should not go
overboard in acquiring playing skills. Rather, one should concentrate on discovering how
the average tar player learns and transmits his skills. Thus, for Baily, at the beginning,
‘[l]earning to perform seemed like a bonus, an extra benefit acquired in the course of
the research’ (Baily 2008 p. 121). Only later did Baily, who gives a detailed account of his
learning to perform Afghan music in Baily 2001, realise the importance of using himself
as a ‘subject’, both as something that enabled him to make and know music as a lived
experience (ibid.) and, more directly, as something that enabled him to argue how the
spatial layout of the stringed instrument affects the structure of the music performed. In
Baily 2008 (p. 122) he assesses that, after three decades of research, half of his insights
into music in Afghanistan has been gained from his own active performance.

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If ‘learning the music’ was the original motivation of ‘bi-musicking’, from the 1980s
on, those ethnomusicologists who reported performance as a major part of their re-
search method saw that there was more to it than just ‘getting the feel of the music’.
Performance as research, they found, encompassed a wide stratum of cultural and
aesthetic values, associations, and embodiment within a musical system. Burt Feintuch
(Feintuch 1995) took on the tedious task of learning to play the Northumbrian smallpipes
(an instrument he did not even much like) in order to understand how a local music­
al instrument that had become nearly extinct had made a comeback. After two years
of extensive study, he won first prize in the overseas class of the Northumbrian Piper’s
Society’s annual competition. He learned not only what it takes to learn the pipes, but
also what it means ‘to experience the challenge of the instrument’, and in doing so he
was able ‘to come to feel (finally!) the rhythm and timing of the music, to move in social
synchrony with other musicians, to be recognised by local masters first as a musician
(not an anomalous questioner)’. Furthermore, ‘all of this and more constitutes a universe
not available as discourse’ (Feintuch 1995 p. 303). Jeff Todd Titon (1995 p. 288) stresses
that ‘bi-musicality […] can induce moments of […] subject shifts, when one acqui­res
knowledge by figuratively stepping outside oneself to view the world with oneself in it,
thereby becoming both subject and object simultaneously’.
For Timothy Rice (Rice 1994; 1995), it was a major revelation to find that music was
being learned rather than taught: ‘People act in culture without informing others about
what they are doing or intend to do, and those growing up in a culture, whether folklor-
ists and ethnomusicologists or children, learn to act – and to play music, sing, or dance
– in culturally appropriate ways through observation and trial and error’ (Rice 1995 p.
274). Despite all the tutoring he received, Rice ultimately learned to play the Bulgarian
bagpipe in solitude from his field recordings. Such an experience was shared by Neil V.
Rosenberg, who learned music from the famous country mandolin player Bill Monroe
‘through intense observation, trial and error, and solitary practice’ (Rosenberg 1995 p.
282). Rosenberg, then a graduate student and a semi-professional member of Monroe’s
band, had to carefully choose a role for himself in the music culture. Similarly, Jos. Ko­
ning, who studied Irish fiddle in County Clare, Ireland (Koning 1980), stressed the impor-
tance of carefully selecting an acceptable social role for the musically active ethnomusi-
cologist, because a particular role may limit the researcher’s access to specific informa-
tion, and because role expectations affect the behaviour of the their informants.1

1 In this context I should also mention Gerhardt Kubik, who has performed as a clarinettist with a neo-
traditional kwela band and who has conducted research on blues and African music (Kubik 1994). In Finland
Hannu Saha (1996) learned to play kantele from the old masters of the Perho river valley, while Risto-Pekka
Pennanen (1999) took up the Greek bouzouki lute.

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Combining insights from some of the aforementioned research with his own experi-
ences learning to perform Afghan music, John Baily (2001 p. 122-127; 2008 p. 93-96)
lists the benefits of incorporating performance into ethnomusicological inquiry. I would
like to recount them here:
1. The most obvious benefit of learning to perform – the benefit put forward by Hood
and Blacking – is the discovery of the principles of a music system. Learning to perform
is the most direct means of investigation into music itself, and the most direct under-
standing of music from the ‘inside’. The structure of music is apprehended operationally,
in terms of what you do, and, by implication, what you therefore have to know. Related
to this is the uncovering of not only the implicit but also the representational, verbalised
music theory and terminology.
2. Learning to perform may provide crucial insights into modes of musical encultura-
tion and methods and institutions for training, such as apprenticeship in the society in
question. This holds true even though an ethnomusicologist is unlikely to replicate the
learning process experienced by native performers.
3. Learning to perform has a number of social advantages for the researcher. It gives
him/her an understandable role in the society. Particularly in the early stages of the
fieldwork it explains why you are there and what you are doing. It also makes one worthy
of being informed.
4. When making music there is a need for musical instruments. And with them, the
human body has to be taken into account:
‘Acoustic music’ is the product of human movement processes and embodies aspects of the
human sensori-motor system, which to some extent and in various ways shape the structure of
the sonic product. Musical instruments are like machines with which human sensori-motor sys­
tems interact. The instrument itself has an ‘active surface’ in relation to which the body moves.
A musical instrument is a type of transducer, converting patterns of the body movement into
patterns of sound. The technical problems that arise in learning to perform are likely to be very
revealing about music and the human body, with what goes on at the human/musical instru­
ment interface, with ‘ergonomics’ of the music, showing how it fits the human sensori-motor
system and the instrument’s morphology. (Baily 2008 p. 123-124.)
5. Similarly, learning to perform invites the practitioner to explore the cognitive side
of playing an instrument, to understand the way the performer mentally represents the
task performed, and to experience how that representation is utilised in the process of
performance. Of particular relevance here are spatial thinking and active movements in
the spatially structured environment provided by the morphology of the instrument.
6. Being able to perform leads to improved opportunities for participant observation,
as compared to the opportunities available to non-performing anthropologists using the
method of participant observation. Being able to perform to a reasonable standard pro-

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vides privileged access to current affairs in the field, and a direct entry into the perform-
ance event, which is of course a central issue in an ethnomusicological inquiry.
7. Playing an instrument often develops into something more serious after the re-
search is done. Having put a lot of effort into learning to perform, a researcher is not
likely to stop after the fieldwork is finished. Depending on what happens in the musical
culture in question, the researcher might become ‘a resource, the archive of field record-
ings invaluable remnants of a cultural heritage, the fieldwork part of the informants’ own
music history’ so that ‘[a]t the end of the day, the researcher becomes the researched’
(Baily 2001 p. 96).
In my years as a student of ethnomusicology in Finland in the mid 1990s, music-
making was encouraged and, indeed, it was a central extra-curricular activity among
students and teachers alike. Studying ethnomusicology certainly affected my personal
music-making aspirations, but it was not until my time as a post-doc that I considered
giving performing any role in my research ventures. I started playing kantele seriously
in 2008 after some experimenting and an initial hands-on introduction some year be-
fore. Having been trained as an ethnomusicologist in Finland, I had of course acquired
plenty of exposure to Finnish folk music and a good knowledge of its history. Yet, having
specialised from the outset on early Finnish popular music, I had rather a nonchalant
attitude towards the finer details of folk music. I was an amateur jazz musician, playing
the guitar on the local jazz scene, and until 2007 had never heard a kantele performance
in the style prominent in the Perho River Valley in Finnish Central Ostrobothnia, a style
in which I would later learn to perform myself. Having (despite the fact that my creden-
tials were primarily in popular music studies) taken on the position as director of the
Folk Music Institute in Kaustinen, Finland, I had several reasons for taking up this Finnish
national instrument. But I also wanted to execute an experiment which I felt would be
of interest within the research communities of ethnomusicology, music pedagogy, pos-
sibly cognitive musicology, and even artistic research. At the core of this experiment was
the idea that I would take up an instrument and learn it starting from scratch, get some
tuition, and document and analyse the learning process from beginner to intermediate
levels, and all the way to advanced level. Since this was to be a project with a beginning
and an end, a fairly steep learning curve was required – the advanced level should be
achieved in four years. Introspection in the form of phenomenological analysis has not
been my only method, but it has been the most beneficial one. In the end, my research
was not limited to the issue of learning, but dealt also with another topic of which the
kantele provided a good example: the relationship between motor control and music
technology, style and expression.

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In what ways, then, has my research benefited from, or even been dependent on, my
own playing? Coming back to Baily’s list, I would say that the benefit of covering the
basics of the music system does not apply to my research. The simplicity of the harmonic
and rhythmic building blocks in the kantele style of the Perho River Valley were not
cognitively hard to comprehend, and sufficient amounts of written instructions were
available. When it comes to insights about musical enculturation, my experience was very
similar to Rice’s and Rosenberg’s. When I really learned, I learned in solitude, going over
what I had observed watching more advanced players, and taking the aid of old field
recordings and written material. I found myself startled by the low number of kantele
players in the region. Eventually I came to make some music with two untrained elderly
folk musicians, and received a couple of lessons from a trained professional pedagogue
who could also play in the style of the Perho River Valley. A few kantele players study-
ing at the local conservatoire had been taken under the wing of the other local master
with whom I also played on a few occasions, but no player seemed to be able to help me
tackle the virtuosic style of the deceased kantele master Eino Tulikari (see Aho 2011),
which was what really interested me. Luckily, I had some very accurate transcriptions at
hand, and an ample amount of old field recordings and recordings of radio broadcasts.
Social advantages and opportunities for participant observation were certainly there, and
the future will show if some day I will myself become a resource of cultural heritage. As I
observed earlier, not many play in this style anymore. Although it is taught in conserva-
toires, the repertoire will probably remain somewhat restricted. I could well become an
object of study in my later years if I continue to play.
But what I had really targeted was the corporeal and cognitive processes involved in
learning the musical instrument and performing in the style in question (see Aho 2009).
The process of learning can be measured and observed with great precision. Instrumental
pedagogy has developed through such observation, as well as through trial and error,
and also by introspection of the teachers, who are or have once been musicians. This
notwithstanding, learning can ultimately be understood only from the inside, in the con-
sciousness of the learning subject. The body’s response to new demands, such as play-
ing an instrument, is a major concern for the phenomenologists of the body, especially
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty, sometimes called ‘the dancing philosopher’,
stressed the need to return to practice whatever a phenomenological analysis has re-
vealed (Merlau-Ponty 2003/1962). There is a tendency, when we learn, to forget how
we learned, and therefore it is important to make notes once the learning is fresh. So: I
have played in order to analyse what happens in my body and in my consciousness as I
learn. If the aim is to say something new, meaningful and valid on musical performance,
the tacit, unverbalised ‘doing yourself’ acts as a link between what is already cognitively

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known (from existing literature or from observation), and new knowledge, which can not
be born as something explicit, not yet. I doubt that I could ever say anything very new
on the tactility of musical instruments solely by means of contemplation.
Finally, there is a further motivation for a researcher to perform, a motivation which
Hood already hinted at: the fact that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Personal
involvement in musicking becomes a form of source critique (a question of reliability and
validity) or a kind of a vaccination against gross misunderstanding of what is important
in the object of study. It prohibits one from bringing out a totally irrelevant feature of a
given phenomenon and from using borrowed rhetoric which one does not really under-
stand. This works even when no one will ever know of the researcher performing. Think
of the armchair musicologist, the lesser-known cousin of the armchair anthropologist –
the more I think of it, the more I realise that conducting research through music making
is an ethical choice. I would like to cite Charles Keil, who, in the introductory dialogue
in his and Steven Feld’s book Music Grooves, brings out the importance of the fact that
Feld is not only a music anthropologist but also a trombonist:
It’s a book to tell people about an apprehensible reality that is in your hands, fingers, feet, butt,
hips, gut, and unified mind-body in social context, in your sound-context relationship to the
world! [A distinguished Cuban scholar] told me that it’s not just better to give than to receive,
but that in music it is absolutely essential. You have to give music to other people, and you
must do it physically. In order to understand what any musician is doing, you have to have done
some of it yourself. I used to think you could do it just through listening, but that alone won’t
let you connect to the music or to other people. All the listening in the world does not condition
your mind-body to be musical and therefore to take the next step in listening. […] Unless you
physically do it, it’s not really apprehensible, and you’re not hearing all there is to hear inside the
music. You’re not entering it. Participation is crucial. (Keil & Feld 1994 p. 29-30.)

Conclusion
Recent years have seen rather few studies that are explicitly bi-musical in nature, al-
though such practice has not disappeared totally from the face of ethnomusicology.
While it may be hard to prove, some confusion may have resulted from the great expan-
sion of ill-defined artistic study that has also embraced folk music and popular music.
As an ethnomusicologist, I am interested not primarily in music as art, but in music as
human behaviour. I do research on the tacit skill involved in all musical performance, not
just on the tacit elements or aspects of performance considered ‘artistic’, ‘creative’ or
‘professional’. Nevertheless, I am inclined not only to regard my work as an example of
ethnomusicology, but also to range it under the banners of practice-based research, or
practice-led research, terms that have been used to denote a form of research that aims
to advance knowledge partly by means of practice, and in which some of the resulting

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knowledge is embodied in an artefact. However, the term performative ethnomusicology,

proposed by Baily (2008, p. 131), will also do just fine.
Despite the occasional self-absorbed tendencies of the artistic research community,
members of this community have indeed expressed wishes for a novel interaction be-
tween artistic and scientific research. However, I have sometimes wondered whether
these wishes are really quite earnest. On a couple of occasions I have found myself in a
circumstance where I was held up as an example of what artistic research is not. I use
the expression I, here, not my research, since it has seemed that these judgements of my
work have had more to do with my background as an ethnomusicologist than with my
research as such. But stating that my research is not artistic research – indeed it is not –
would not bother me if the judgements were not so obviously charged with valuation.
These encounters with artistic researchers have convinced me that, since artistic re-
search was not born into a tabula rasa, the need for a better definition of the concept
should be satisfied not by the artistic research community alone. Instead, the debate on
artistic research should be opened to a wider community. But if, in the end, institutional
demarcations are here to stay, then, in addition to asking what artistic research is, one
should ask what it is not. It is easy to come up with several issues that artistic research
has not dealt with, in spite of the fact that the performative method seems to be the
best means for tackling them. Such issues are mediocrity in musical performance (most
performed music falls into this category), amateurism, musical performance with only
utilitarian value, untrained geniuses, and the tactile basis of all musical performance (not
just of specialised professional performance). Most likely, these topics are too embar-
rassing for a serious artist doing serious artistic research.
As I said earlier in this article, demarcations between music research and music per-
formance should not be taken too seriously. Here I would like to refer to Heikki Laitinen,
a professor emeritus of the Folk Music Department of the Sibelius Academy. 2 The aes-
thetics of the archaic folk music of the Finns had to be built from very little evidence in
the form of few written sources, manuscripts and even fewer recordings (see Laitinen
2003 p. 143-163; 1991 p. 59-85). What Laitinen and his colleagues did in the mid 1970s,
at the newly established Folk Music Institute in Kaustinen, was to enter into practice and
to perform in order to verify that it was indeed possible to play, with subtle variations,
a five-string kantele for hours and thereby to achieve a special kind of meditative state.
Laitinen admits that a researcher with enough imagination could probably have traced
the aesthetics without touching the kantele. Still, I wonder whether Laitinen and his col-

2 Laitinen raised the following topic in a presentation at the Sibelius Academy on 6 May 2011. The context was
a seminar dedicated to the societal effectiveness of artistic research conducted at the Sibelius Academy.

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leagues would not have faced problems at the latest when it was time to demonstrate
the aesthetics to others, so that they could follow suit. Being able to play is a perfect
way of illustrating the findings of the research. Where rhetoric ends, music begins. This
is even more relevant today because of the new web-journals and the easily available
audio-visual enhancements in research report illustrations. 3
In a commentary on essays by six distinguished performative ethnomusicologists,
Carol Silverman (1995 p. 307) notes that her construction of the scholars’ identities ‘as
scholars primarily and musicians secondarily is a manifestation of the hierarchy that my
academic training imbued upon me, namely, that musicianship is an addition to their
identities as scholars, not primary’. Her academic construction actually contradicted the
real chronology in this case, since all six scholars were first musicians, their participa-
tory interest in music then leading them to academia. Indeed, in many cases the division
between musician and music researcher is not very clear, and it is hard to come up with
tenable arguments why institutional division should be favoured at the cost of the incor-
poration of concrete music making into standard research practices. In figure 1 (on the
following page), I present a conceptual taxonomy of different roles that a music special­
ist may take on. (Since I do not discuss the music pedagogue in the present article, I
choose to omit this type of music specialist also from the taxonomy.) The variables of the
taxonomy are the activities and objectives of the different roles. These roles, in turn, are
situated in social fields of role expectations and communities. Let us bear in mind that
individuals shuttling between roles are not uncommon.
Ethnomusicology is culturally sensitive, or, better, a human-sensitive, scientific and
musical endeavour. It draws certain kinds of spirits. Twenty years ago it could be stated
in an ethnomusicology handbook that
[c]ultural barriers evaporate when musicologist meets musician. There is no substitute in
ethnomusicological fieldwork for intimacy born of shared musical experience. Learning to sing,
dance, play in the field is good fun and good method. (Myers 1992 p. 31.)

What is the state of things now? For me, the method that Myers refers to has always
worked. Learning to perform has also benefited me in ways other than those directly

3 The Finnish Graduate School of Folk Music and Popular Music (2003–2006), of whose management group
I had the pleasure of being a member for the most of the school’s existence, was Heikki Laitinen’s idealistic
attempt to merge the practices of artistic research in music and musicological and ethnomusicological
research. The attempt was partly successful. The doctoral thesis of Tuuli Talvitie-Kella (2010) was the one
ethnomusicological thesis applying the theory of bi-musicality in praxis and using the method of performa­
tive ethnomusicology. Her work met with some reservations. A source of misunderstanding seemed to be the
uncertainty whether a playing researcher should be measured on the same scale as performing artists and
professional musicians. Furthermore, the inclusion of concerts in the thesis created confusion with regard
to its scientific status (Talvitie-Kella 2010 p. 49). A performative ethnomusicologist clearly has to beware of
being stamped twice as a dilettante.

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Artistic Research in Music versus Musicological Musicianship

Unambiguous role expectations

Music researcher Musician

•does research •makes music
•produces research prose •produces music
Research Music
community community

Researcher-musician Musician-researcher
•does research and makes music •makes music and does research
•produces research prose •produces music

Ambiguous role expectations

Figure 1: The activities and objectives of different roles of the music specialist

serving research ends. Working on an executive position in a folk music institution

(which in retrospect was very much a special kind of fieldwork for me) required, in my
own opinion at least, that I learn to perform local folk music: without it I felt I would
never have anything but an uncomfortably distant relationship with the very essence of
my profession. With new areas such as applied ethnomusicology (Harrison, MacKinlay &
Pettan 2010) and medical ethnomusicology (Koen 2008), ethnomusicology is evolving
into directions of social involvement and extra-academic activity. This emergent intel-
lectual profile of the discipline is well in line with the practice of learning to perform,
but, as Baily acknowledges, ethnomusicologists ‘need to re-assess the value of analysts
performing in ethnomusicology’ and to ‘show how the acquisition of accomplished per-
formance skills is central to the overall project’ (Baily 2008 p. 131-132). I believe this
centrality to the overall project has to be made obvious to artistic researchers too, if
ethnomusicologists wish to retain their right to make music.

References
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oppimisprosessista' in Musiikki 39:3 (2009), p. 58-78.
Aho, Marko (ed.) 2011: Tulikarin nuottikirja. Kaustinen: Kansanmusiikki-instituutti.
Baily, John 2008: 'Ethnomusicology, Intermusability, and Performance Practice' in The New (Ethno)-
musicologies. Ed: H. Stobart. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.
Baily, John 2001: 'Learning to Perform as a Research Technique in Ethnomusicology' in British Journal
of Ethnomusicology 10:2 (2001), p. 85-98.
Blacking, John 1973: How Musical is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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Borgdorff, Henk 2012: The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia.
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Journal of American Folklore 108:429 (1995), p. 298-306.

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Harrison, Klisala, Elizabeth MacKinlay & Svanibor Pettan (eds.) 2010: Applied Ethnomusicology.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Hood, Mantle 1960: 'The Challenge of "Bi-Musicality"' in Ethnomusicology 4:2 (1960), p. 55-59.
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Grooves. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
Koen, Benjamin (ed.) 2008: The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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Clare, Ireland' in Ethnomusicology 24:3 (1980), p. 417-429.
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Abstract
Artistic Research in Music versus Musicological Musicianship
Artistic research has fully established itself in the curricula of higher musical education
in Europe. The strong associations between artistic research in music and music-making
in service of research pose a challenge for those traditional musicologists and ethnomu-
sicologists who wish to incorporate music-making in their research practices. Especially
with the emergence of an ever stronger artistic research scene in the genre of folk music,
it may be argued that the role of music-making as a method for ethnomusicological en-

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Artistic Research in Music versus Musicological Musicianship

quiry has been unduly abandoned. In this article, the ethnomusicological concept of bi-
musicality and the benefits of performative ethnomusicology are brought forth.

Keywords
Ethnomusicology, bi-musicality, musicking, artistic research, musical performance.

The author
Marko Aho is a researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. He is also adjunct professor in
performance research at the University of Tampere. Previously he has worked as research
director at the Department of Music Anthropology in Tampere, and as director of the
Folk Music Institute in Kaustinen. He has also been a member of the board of the Finnish
Ethnomusicological Society for several years. He has published papers in journals such
as Popular Music, Popular Musicology Online, Music Performance Research, and Finnish
Yearbook of Ethnomusicology. His research on this article was financed by Emil Aaltosen
Säätiö.

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