Ethno-musicological Awareness as a source for Organizational Knowledge

The following contribution explores the theoretical possibility to establish a resourceful interaction between the study of non-classically codified musical traditions, techniques, their compositional and cultural roots, and ways of thinking and structuring alternative forms of organization, both in the sense of management practices and self-awareness of the organization members and researchers. The article will try to bridge specific approaches in musicology (most notably ethnomusicology regarding african musical cultures and ethnomusicological awareness regarding experimental music) to hints for a larger study perspective on social organization and research positionality. This will be done by first approaching the issue of téchne in musical composition and performance from ethnomusicological points of view. This perspective will be then contextualized considering possible contributions to the issue provided by theories from critical musicology, referring to the concept of ethnomusicological awareness as considered in the reviewed literature, and how it could contribute to methodological advances in researching musical and organizational phenomena. This issue will be explored by addressing perspectives comparing nature and organization models in music as described in a range of authors coming from different disciplines, where considerations on music embodying multiple variables overlaps the question of interaction, cultural mediation, and ultimately intercultural organization. The article will argue about the possibility of introducing the problem of codifying radically diverse expressive systems, or simply gaining aware reading tools about music we often don’t have a codified theory for, as a way to try and lay ground to resourceful thinking models for management of complex phenomena.