Classical Reframed: Merriam’s Tripartite Model and the Future of Classical Music

What happens when we stop treating classical music as a museum piece and start seeing it as a living, evolving conversation?

In 1964, anthropologist Alan P. Merriam proposed a model for studying music that has since become a cornerstone of ethnomusicology. His tripartite framework, presented in The Anthropology of Music, outlines three interdependent facets: the conceptualization of music (what people think about music), the behavior surrounding music (what people do in relat…