This article seeks to characterize the different outlooks which comparative musicology, in the first half of the 20th century, and ethnomusicology, its heir in the second half of the century, have evolved concerning the thinking about music in the cultures they have studied. If the perception of the (non-)existence of this thinking was initially marked by the opposition to Western music theory, an acknowledgement of the diversity of its content and, thereafter, of its form, was gradually to dominate this field of study. So much so, in fact, that one might today dialectically inquire whether, over and above the diversity in the thinking about music, there would be some sort of unity in musical thinking as a cognitive modality typical of the human species.
comparative musicology; ethnomusicology; music theory; thinking about music; musical thought