This paper is a methodological reflection on the historical research within the ethnomusicological realm. Currently, the “The Special Interest Group for Historical Ethnomusicology” has produced valuable contributions, and the term “historical ethnomusicology” is widely embraced. Nonetheless, the exact connotation and denotation of this sub-discipline remain ambiguous. By examining all literature involving “historical ethnomusicology” with the aid of “the archaeology of knowledge,” this article argues that the development of this sub-field has not followed a straight, linear trajectory. Instead, due to “misreadings” (in Harold Bloom’s words) among scholars, it has gradually deviated from its theoretical starting point set by K. Shelemay. Such deviations, spawned by various conditions, have led “historical ethnomusicology” to ramify into multiple intellectual paradigms. Throughout this evolution, there is also a potential for “historical ethnomusicology” to dissolve into parent disciplines. Furthermore, the paper notes that the perspectives used to probe the topic “subjectivity of historical construction” differ significantly between “historical ethnomusicology” and historical investigations in ethnomusicology without this sub-disciplinary label. This phenomenon illuminates their overarching methodological disparities when studying the musical past: the latter sometimes draws on the methods provided by Hobsbawm’s “invention of tradition,” whereas the former, “historical ethnomusicology,” rarely exhibits this tendency and leans more towards conventional historical thinking on factuality. Then this paper uses “historical anthropology,” a discipline in which “invention of tradition” is also a watershed delineating the sub-disciplines, as a reference, and suggests that focusing more on the original theoretical point helps preserve the independence of “historical ethnomusicology” and clarify its boundaries.

Throughout the 1930s, the Russian folklorist E. V. Gippius made dozens of recordings of Georgian vocal music using a special technique: three wax-cylinder phonographs operating simultaneously, each capturing the voice of an individual singer. Gippius himself never wrote about these experiments, and a manuscript by his assistants remains unpublished to this day. Despite this archival silence, Gippius’s multiple-phonograph recordings represent a signal moment in the development of Soviet ethnomusicology and its engagement with recording technology. The deep significance of these recordings truly emerges when situated within the rich intellectual milieu in which Gippius worked. In these decades, Russian artists and thinkers developed influential theories of structural linguistics, literary polyphony, and filmic montage, all of which can be seen at work in Gippius’s analytical, multi-perspectival recordings. In this paper I focus on connections with a thinker less well known in the West, the Georgian-born linguist and archaeologist Niko Marr (1865–1934). Once the leading figure in Soviet social sciences, the now-maligned or forgotten Marr pioneered the archaeology of the Caucasus and developed an iconoclastic theory of linguistic evolution. Unlike the structuralists, Marr did not focus exclusively on speech but incorporated writing and non-verbal communication into a larger system of human meaning-making. A media manifestation of Marr’s “linguistic paleontology,” the multiple-phonograph recordings isolated different strata of sound, revealing the interactions and improvisations that constitute a musical event. Gippius’s work thus exemplifies the practice of ethnomusicology as embedded within larger intellectual currents, while illuminating paths not taken in the development of sound-recording technology.

Lullabies are commonly described as a “universal” musical genre among humans and a likely source of insights into the origins of music. This paper explores the validity of these claims through a critical analysis of the ethnographic literature. It starts with a review of the eHRAF World Cultures database confirming the wide distribution of lullabies on a global level, while also identifying counterexamples to the "universality" thesis, in particular in American, Circumpolar, and Polynesian regions. Cases include societies without any known lullabies and societies in which lullabies only exist in entanglement with other genres, such as court music. In conclusion, this study confirms the widespread presence of lullabies on a global scale but calls for caution regarding speculations about their universal or primordial status, and highlights alternative key issues for future research.

Though little can be ascertained from Indic sources regarding Indian Buddhist musical practices during the classical age of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka empires (320CE-550CE), the earlier period of Buddhist musical development is documented in the artistic record of ancient Gandhāra from the 1^st and 2^nd centuries CE and in the extant recensions of the roughly contemporaneous code of conduct for monastics, or vinaya. The evidence from these sources attest to the existence of a rich tradition of theatrics, song, and chant in the ancient Buddhist world, a tradition with theoretical underpinnings drawn from both Hellenistic and Vedic models. When combined with Chinese textual descriptions from the first half of the 1^st millennium and shortly thereafter, Japanese and Tibetan theoretical treatises from the 13^th century on, and extant traditions of Sanskrit Buddhist chant and song from both Japan and Nepal, this evidence allows us to give an historical account for the development of Buddhist musical practices on the Indian subcontinent from the beginning of the 1^st millennium until the disappearance of those practices, along with Indian Buddhist monasticism itself, in the 13^th century. In this presentation, I will give such an historical account, demonstrating the persistence of descendant traditions Sanskrit esoteric Buddhist chant and song in Japan and Nepal.