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179Of course, to say that the pre-WW2 German school of comparativeethnomusicology was always based on a “horizontal study” and that the post-WW2American school of ethnomusicology was alternatively always based on “vertical study”would be a gross oversimplification, although if we use the word “mostly”, instead of“always”, the generalization will be closer to the reality. We should not forget, however,that there were some very important regional studies (particularly by nativeethnomusicologists from East European countries studying their own musical traditions),published before WW2, and there were at least a few wide comparative studies afterWW2 as well (for example, Alan Lomax’s widely publicized “Folk Song Style andCulture” was possibly the widest ever comparative endeavor in ethnomusicology).There is not much sense in discussing which of the abovementioned methods is“better”. I hope that most of my colleagues would agree that the method of any particularstudy should be naturally connected to the research goals of the study. If we want to geta systemic understanding of the social and musical life of a Bolivian mountain village, ora gamelan-centred community musical life on Bali, or an urban society in NortheastBrazil, we need to spend months and years in getting into the details of their social,economic and cultural life, understand their language and feel the flow of their everydaylife. We simply cannot fulfill such a task only by going to the library and readingpublished accounts about this culture, region or country, or even visiting this region onshort fieldtrips. On the other hand, if we want to understand the history of developmentand distribution of, say, woodwind instruments, or any particular scale, or dronepolyphony, or personal songs, or lullabies, or many other shared elements of humanmusica l cultures (and it is not easy to name the element that is not shared by at least fewcultures), we cannot accomplish this goal by having long fieldworks in one village or onecountry, learning the language and studying one tradition in amazing depths of details.We will need to conduct a wide comparative study, using all the available resources thatsophisticated contemporary libraries provide, and besides try to get as much as possibleadditional information from a variety of different sources.Of course, if we still try to compare the regional (“vertical”) and comparative(“horizontal”) methods, we need to acknowledge that deep regional study is the“backbone” of ethnomusicology, because regional studies can certainly exist withoutcomparative studies, whereas comparative studies totally depend on the number andquality of regional studies. In the case of active comparative studies of the first decadesof the development of our discipline (before WW2), there was a quite insufficient basisof regional studies of the world regions for comparative studies. So the global theoriesabout the general rules of development of human musical cultures, or about the cultural“borrowings” from one culture by another were often based on a mixture of inferior factsand second- and third-hand incomplete information.Wider regional studies, or studies of a single phenomenon of traditional musicmake two most promising directions for new comparative research. As usual, these typesof pure “wider regional” or “single phenomenon” studies rarely exist in real life. Inpractice most existing comparative studies combine the elements of both regional andsingle phenomenon studies. For example, the study of gender relationships in the musicalcultures of Mediterranean peoples is aimed at the particular regional entity(Mediterranean region), although it concentrates only on one aspect of musical culture(gender) (see, for example, Magrini, 2003). In the same way, say, a study of traditional