Etnografie del suono tra natura e cultura

The relationship between nature and culture has changed deeply over the years, from an almost expected opposition of the two terms to a total overthrow, which implies their mutual entanglement. The aim of this article is to show how such a change has affected oral musical tradition studies, focusing on some topics belonging 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 will be: the “nature” of musical scales, the phylogeny of musical behaviour (even according to an interspecies perspective), musical instruments as a reflex of specific environmental contexts, the connection of nature and culture in the development of musical and choreutic knowledge and skills, the cultural relativism of the notion of “music” and its overcoming in an anthropology of sound and acustemology.