The history of scholarship cannot be constructed just in terms of ideas, remote and aloof from the people who conceived or accepted them and acted on them—or did not. To understand the course that a particular branch of knowledge—in our case, the study of music in the context of Western academia—has taken, it is necessary to consider the individuals and institutions that have affected the course of events. Corporate decisions as they are taken by the governing bodies of scholarly societies, and the processes that lead to them, can provide insights into the workings of institutional scholarship; those of an international organization add the dimension of national or even continental distinctions in the quest for knowledge, such as they are implied in the notions of “European” versus “American” ethnomusicology.