Professor Bill Edwards

I would like to point out that I read some of the article on Ethnomusicology, and I do not entirely concur with the notion that it is primarily a study of non-western music, partly due to the following two factors:
Merriam Webster defines Ethnomusicology as:
1 : the study of music that is outside the European art tradition
2 : the study of music in a sociocultural context

That falls into the second reason - my degrees are in American
Ethnomusicology from 1860 to 1930. My focus, of course, was on black and to some extent French music in America from that time, given the ethnicity of their origins and the fact that they came from a minority. Western music is a pretty large category that can include Bach, Liszt, Stravinsky, Billy  Joel, etc., but there are many subcategories that are legitmately ethnic, even if they are based on known western music forms.'
The black folk music was comprised of a combination of African rhythms handed down over generations of American slaves (the synthesis of the syncopation) with French folk forms often heard along the rivers in the American south, given that it was a French territory for around a century and many of them stayed behind to work and live once the U.S. purchased it from France. There are also elements of Mexican music forms that influenced Dixieland style jazz from New Orleans, and vestiges of Russian music forms that influenced March music. Ragtime, my general area of focus, in its purest form was an ethnic music. In the diluted Tin Pan Alley form it is hardly so pure, and was largely an effort of hack composers or even good composers to capitalize on a growing fad by attaching rag to a song in
which a couple of bars of syncopation were added to a hook. This did not constitute the ethnic form of Cakewalks and Ragtime music put forward by Scott Joplin, Artie Matthews, James Scott, Blind Boone and other more ethnically centered composers. Therefore the study of and writing about these forms, sanctioned at the university level in my case, is legitmately considered ethnomusicology. It doesn't have to be Pakistani, Chinese or Inuit to be ethnic, nor does it have to have a Partch tonal scale or polyrhythms (like Brubeck incorporated into Blue Rondo a la Turk) to qualify. It just has to have a source and definition with continuity and content.
Just some thoughts to fill in the gray areas and not give an incorrect notion of the word, which would otherwise totally invalidate what I have been doing for more than two decades.