Alan Parkhurst Merriam (1 November 1923 – 14 March 1980) was an American ethnomusicologist known for his studies of music in Native America and Africa.

[4][5] Born to a highly musical household in Missoula, Montana, Merriam began studying piano and clarinet at a young age.

His father was the Chairman of the English department at Montana State University, and his mother was a highly skilled cellist.

Merriam went on to complete a doctorate in anthropology, his dissertation titled "Songs of the Afro-Bahian Cults: An Ethnomusicological Analysis."

"[6] Due to its nature as a field at the intersection of several disciplines, ethnomusicology takes on many forms and is viewed through many lenses, highly dependent on the goals and background of the ethnomusicologist.

[9] Issues that Merriam has weighed on in heavily in his opinion pieces are the way the field had been and should be defined and the directions it was taking during his lifetime.

Merriam emphasizes that "In other words I believe that music can be studied not only from the standpoint of musicians and humanists, but from that of social scientists as well, and that, further, it is at the moment from the field of cultural anthropology that our primary stimulation is coming for the study of music as a universal aspect of man's activities.

The distinction between these two approaches to define ethnomusicology lie in how culture is treated relative to the study of music.

Merriam had, like all ethnomusicologists, completed fieldwork in his area of interest, but he was characterized by his peers in ethnomusicology as being more scientific and focusing on drawing conclusion from data.

I do not deny the contribution of such a specialist in the past, nor in the future, but his role is becoming progressively smaller, and rightly so, for method and theory are inseparable in the gathering of data, and the descriptive phase of our study in which we treat simply structural facts is giving way before the broader interpretations.

Hood was more interested in creating a graduate student body that could accomplish the egalitarian purpose of ethnomusicology in spreading world musics and preserving them.

This definition embodies the purpose of the entirety of The Anthropology of Music, being that ethnomusicology is not weighed further in favor of the ethnological or musicological, but instead an inseparable amalgamation of the two.

This harkens back to the difficulties in ethnomusicology's past priorities, which were simply the understanding of sound as an object in and of itself, and almost no emphasis was placed on the relationship music had with the cultures it existed in.