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PROFESSOR DR LASANTHI MANARANJANIE CHAIR OF THE ICTMD-SRI LANKA,NATIONAL COMMITTEE CORDINATOR OF THE M.A IN MUSIC UNIVERSITY OF KELANIYA – By Sunil Thenabadu Ethnomusicology could be broadly described as a holistic investigation of music in its diverse cultural contexts. The term ethnomusicology itself can be broken down as such: ‘ethno’ = people, and ‘musicology’ = the study of music. Thus, in the process of defining its study field, ethnomusicology combines perspectives from a wide variety of disciplines such as ethnology, cultural anthropology, musicology, folklore, linguistics, history, psychology, music theory, and even medicine. This disciplinary variety has resulted in several distinct definitions of ethnomusicology in different parts of the world. Attitudes and foci of ethnomusicologists have evolved since initial studies in comparative musicology and folk music research from the early 1900s. According to some American scholars from the second half of the 20th century, ethnomusicology is a theoretical and empirical study amalgamating both musicology and anthropology (Willard Rhodes, 1956), study ...