I read Mieczyslaw Kolinksi's article "Ethnomusicology, Its Problems and Methods" in the May, 1957 issue of Ethnomusicology and found his concerns to be quite different from current ones. Kolinski spends a good deal of the article refuting claims made by Eric von Hornbostel. Some of them seem ridiculous to me: Hornbostel made assertions about whether musical cultures (i.e., folk songs) have "basically ascending" or "basically descending" trends in their melodies. European music supposedly had the former, non-European music the latter.
Already there are some problems. How can all non-European music be grouped together? How can all European music be grouped together (and what counts as European)? If you solve those problems, how can you possibly provide a representative sample of all of the music in the world in order to compare? What does it even mean to have a "basically" ascending/descending trend?
This last question is addressed by Kolinski. He describes a system in which the first and last tones of a melody are given values in relation to the total tonic range of that melody. By calculating the shift for individual songs, and averaging this shift for all of the music of a particular country (again, how do you decide where everything belongs?), one can allegedly calculate the degree of ascent/descent in a particular culture's melodies.
Even if you accept the premise (that is, even if you ignore all the questions posed above), I would argue that this method is still ineffective for measuring the shift.
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I also read this article and agree that most of these notions are way too generalized. I thought that Kolinski's article spoke to Titon's words in chapter 2 of Barz and Cooley: "ethnomusicologists tend to distrust broad comparative generalizations." After reading this, I definitely understand why Kolinski was criticizing von Hornbostel but I still don't understand why von Hornbostel tried to make these generalizations in the first place.
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