Alexander J. Ellis and His Place in the History of Ethnomusicology

Stock profiles Alexander J. Ellis, an Englishman who was believed to be an accidental pioneer of comparative musicology, whose social concerns motivated his scholarly work. Ellis is the one who offered a detailed statistical data by means of his recently devised cents system, a system which allowed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethnomusicology 2007-04, Vol.51 (2), p.306-325
Main Author: Stock, Jonathan P. J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropology
Cognitive problems, arts and sciences, folk traditions, folklore
Ellis, Alexander J
Ethnic Studies
Ethnology
Ethnomusicology
Fieldwork
Fillies
Folklore
History of music
Libraries
Music
Music education
Music research
Musical intervals
Musical pitch
Musical scales
Musical traditions
Musicians
Musicology
Personal profiles
Philology
Phonetics
Scholars
Social change
Sound pitch
Sources and methods
Theoretical and systematic contributions
Tone
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Summary:Stock profiles Alexander J. Ellis, an Englishman who was believed to be an accidental pioneer of comparative musicology, whose social concerns motivated his scholarly work. Ellis is the one who offered a detailed statistical data by means of his recently devised cents system, a system which allowed the precise delineation of pitch measurements expressed as hundredths of an equal-tempered semitone. His presentation was far distant in content and tone from the experiential ethnographies fashionable in today's ethnomusicology, and as little as twenty years after his death, music researchers inspired by folklore and anthropology were beginning to turn to field study as a primary means of gathering data, not pitch analysis. However, his paper achieved a genuinely lasting impact and his conclusion is still cited, prized, and even memorized, by modern-day ethnomusicologists.
ISSN:0014-1836
2156-7417
DOI:10.2307/20174527