Since John Blacking did so in a 1987 book, Australian-American composer and pianist Percy Grainger (1882-1961) has often been labelled an underappreciated pioneer in ethnomusicology. This claim mainly rests on two of Grainger’s activities: First, his innovative approach to folk song collecting, and second, his 1932 NYU class “A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music,” one of the first university World Music surveys. But while Grainger’s methodology for folk song collection bears detailed examination (e.g., he was an early advocate of wax cylinder recording, and his transcriptions sought to capture microtonal variation and rhythmic nuance), his NYU class is more likely to be praised only for its inclusive approach to world music. His categorization in the class of the world’s musics into two racial-ethnic categories, “Mongolian-Javanese-Celtic-Nordic-Anglosaxon” and “East Indian-Arab-Moorish,” is generally dismissed as arbitrary and unscientific. In this paper, I argue that while Grainger’s framework was indeed arbitrary, he nevertheless constructed it out of what he believed to be a methodologically rigorous combination of scholarship in comparative musicology with his substantial firsthand experience with traditional Asian and Pacific music and European folk music. I identify the comparative-musicological sources of Grainger’s ideas, primarily the writings of Karl Bücher and Joseph Yasser, and analyze how Grainger adapted their arguments to present students with a racialized model of the world’s musics across two semesters. In doing so, I broaden our understanding of the history of ethnomusicology and complicate the history of World Music teaching in the US academy.

By analyzing A Paper on Chinese Music (1907) by Mary Martin Richard (1843-1903), a Scottish Baptist missionary in late Qing China who uncharacteristically adapted “un-Westernized” local Chinese musics for devotional purposes, this paper presents a case study that, I argue, shows clear evidence of a sympathetic attitude and open-minded approach towards Chinese musics and their practitioners from the perspective of a Christian-European expatriate in the age of high Western imperialism and “scientific” racism. Unsurprisingly, Eurocentrically culturalist and/or racist ideas and attitudes are commonly found in late 19^th and early 20^th century European texts on Chinese music, such as J.A. Van Aalst's Chinese Music (1884). I show how A Paper on Chinese Music differs from similar texts in one crucial aspect: while the author does not completely dispense with the commonly held idea of “civilized vs. barbarous,” she at times reflexively relativizes and, thus, de-Eurocentricizes it. This is clearly shown in her discussion of the lack of harmony in Chinese music: after pointing out that European harmony, typically regarded as an emblem of European musical superiority then, “is said to have come from Northern barbarous hordes,” she claims, in an as-a-matter-of-fact manner, that “doubtless [the Chinese] think [our harmony] barbarous” (17). I further suggest that her problematization of Euro-supremacism and Euro-exceptionalism was ideationally grounded in a Christian-universalist worldview. Theoretically, I hope to shed some light on the complex and not always harmonious relations between Eurocentrism(s) and Universalism(s), which tend to be lumped together in discussions within contemporary Anglophone music studies.

This paper examines teaching ethnomusicology in a post-socialist East-Central European country as a situated practice marked by a constant effort of translation between languages, cultural and geopolitical histories, and academic traditions. This involves translation between English and a local language, but also between ethnomusicology as a ‘global’ Western academic discipline—whose theoretical discussions are largely shaped by postcolonial and decolonial discourses—and its ‘local’ practice in the transforming post-socialist (Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021), “white but not quite” (Kalmar 2022), semi-peripheral and disenchanted (Krastev and Holmes 2019) East-Central Europe, which occupies a precarious geopolitical position between others’ imperial and colonial aspirations (Feinberg 2024). Historically without colonies but sharing aspects of the colonial imagination towards the Global South (and sometimes their inner Others), and through their membership in (or candidate status for) the EU and NATO, these countries today experience their own “point zero of decolonization” (Barša 2020). Against this backdrop, I have had to negotiate my position as both a teacher and a translator of ethnomusicology at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, for more than a decade. To support Czech-speaking students, I translated Rice’s Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction (published in Czech in 2020), and I initiated and serve as the main academic editor of the Czech translation of Rommen’s and Nettl’s Excursions in World Music, 8th edition (forthcoming). The paper offers grounded reflections on teaching and translating ethnomusicology as situated cultural practices and critiques epistemic schemes organizing ethnomusicological knowledge that sometimes lack nuance regarding the East-Central European situation and replicates Cold-War stereotypes.