Etnografie del suono tra natura e cultura

Abstract

Relationship between nature and culture has deeply changed within the years, from an almost expected opposition of the two terms to a total overthrow which implies their mutual entanglement. The aim of this contribution is to show how such a change has affected oral musical tradition studies, focusing on some topics belong-ing to different theoretical-methodological frames and different historical periods: from comparative musicology to ethnomusicology, from anthropology of music to biomusicology (in reference also to evolutive musicology and to zoomusicology), from anthropology of sound to acustemology. Among the themes dealt with: the “na-ture” of musical scales, the phylogeny of musical behaviour (even according to an interspecies perspective), the musical instruments as a reflex of specific environmen-tal contexts, the connection nature-culture in the development of musical and cho-reutic knowledge and skills, the cultural relativism of the notion of “music” and its overcoming in an anthropology of the sound and, lastly, in acustemology.