What blessed times they were when all people still understood each other, “and the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” (Genesis 11:1). The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is one about the hubris of …
The task of musicology (Musikwissenschaft in German, musicologie in French, and ongakugaku in Japanese) in its proper sense is to study music of the past, present, and future regardless of region. For this purpose, various methods have been proposed and …
I remember the time (1981) when the IFMC—the International Folk Music Council—renamed itself ICTM (International Council of Traditional Music). I was relieved to hear this, because, as a German brought up in the 1950s, I had learned to suspect the …
Forty years ago to this day, September 5, 1977, NASA rocketed the space probe Voyager I into space. While music theory at that time was busy circling within its own orbit exploring “the music itself,” the astronomer Carl Sagan placed on …
Is musicology limited to human culture? The NASA team that put together the Voyager mission forty years ago didn’t think so. They included on board of their two spacecraft a “Golden Record” that included greetings in more than fifty languages, …
