Bi-musicality
Mantle Hood explained ethnomusicology as being the "study of music wherever and whenever." While his teacher Jaap Kunst wrote the two volumes of Music in Java without actually playing any of the music, Hood required that his students learn to play the music they were studying. While Hood was not the first ethnomusicologist to attempt learning to perform the music being studied, he gave the approach a name in his 1960 article on bi-musicality. It has been an important ethnomusicological research tool ever since. The approach enables the researcher to, in some manner, learn about music "from the inside", and thereby experience its technical, conceptual and aesthetic challenges. The student is also able to better connect socially with the community being studied and have better access to the community's rituals and performances.
The inspiration of "bi-musical" was "bi-lingual". Hood applied the term to music the same way a linguist would when describing someone who spoke two languages. He also strongly proposed that ethnomusicology students should know the spoken language of the musical culture being studied. This led to the breakdown of the steadfast rule of having to have competence in French and German at many ethnomusicology programs. Now Javanese, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Navajo, Finnish, Quechua, Korean or any other topic-relevant language can fulfill foreign language requirements.
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