What is Ethnomusicology?

If you love reading about composers, compositions, and music traditions, you’ve likely enjoyed something written by a music scholar. These folks go by many names and use many tools to study all these things. Not all musicological topics are historical, and not all music scholars are musicologists. So today, I want to break down for you the three major disciplines of academic music study people pursue when they want to write about music history and culture: musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.