The history of ethnomusicology is the history of ideas and concepts of why and how to deal with expressive practices in social formations which are usually located outside the researcher's primary cultural experience. Ideas in ethnomusicology (comparative musicology, anthropology of music, folk music research, folkloristics) are interlinked with other scholarly disciplines and academic fields. The history of the field is sometimes described as a shift from either a more philologically oriented study of "national" folk music or "armchair anthropology" to a modern anthropological concept expressed in context-oriented, sociological, and performer-centered research, as well as in urban ethnomusicology. However, a great deal of issues frequently associated with English-speaking mainstream ethnomusicology of the last five decades (the "ethnographic turn") appeared in the intellectual folk music discourses as early as the late 18 th and the 19 th century. In a similar way, the history of comparative musicology as a scholarly concept can be traced back at least to the Age of Enlightenment. This article traces the emergence and early history of motivations, theoretical paradigms and research methods by discussing the following key issues and conceptual oppositions: Comparative study of musical cultures; Fieldwork experience; Aesthetic appreciation vs. value-free textual analysis; Relativism of expressive cultures: "our" and "their" concepts (emic/etic issues); The paradigm of orality vs. Kunstlieder im Volksmunde; "Living antiquities" vs. the sociology of folklore; Cultural homogeneity vs. performercentered research; Studying songs vs. studying singing; Music in its cultural context-"uses and functions"; Standards of notation and documentation; Rural vs. urban research; 'Cultural purity' vs. intercultural exchange.

Regardless of Eric Hobsbawm's negativistic understanding, 'tradition' is a powerful and dynamic (and in no way traditionalist) concept in academic folkloristics. The widespread scepticism against 'traditional music', both as a recognizable field of research and a matter of theoretical thought, is based on an insufficient and sometimes stereotypic understanding of a term and concept with a fascinating history. I argue that there is good reason to maintain a term which is intrinsically linked to core issues of ethnomusicology, among them community-based music, cultural innovation, oral/aural transmission, sonic orders, and stylistic pluralism.

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