Tiersot was first keenly interested in popular French music, on which he published in 1889 his Histoire de la chanson populaire en France "History of the Popular Song in France." He attempted to trace the history of the genre, linking it to the educated, classical foundations, an approach which was greeted dimly by his contemporaries. The same year, during the 1889 Paris Exposition, he discovered the Javanese gamelan through the dances he observed, and shortly thereafter published Promenades musicales à l'exposition, Les danses javanaises. He thus became aware of the value of non-European music and musicians, which were also, as he expressed it, "manifestations of human nature." He discovered that these traditions could also extend to "classical" genres, just as developed as that in the West, and distinguished from a popular musical tradition. He thus grew interested in the music of Japan, China, Java, India, Central Asia, the Arab region, and Armenia as well as Amerindian and African-American musical culture. As such, he was an early pioneer of what would later become ethnomusicology, and which he termed "Musical Ethnography" in his notes of 1905–1910. His research gave rise to a number of controversies, since his findings often contradicted inherited notions about ethnographic hierarchies. "Does not the music of people separated by space, have the same value as that of people separated by time?" he asked in the preface to his 1905 work Notes d'ethnographie musicale. His works extended beyond a musical aesthetic framework to include sociological considerations. From 1895 to 1900, he collected roughly 450popular songs from the French Alps, as well as regional variations, eventually amassing more than scores. The resulting publication, Chansons populaires recueillies dans les Alpes françaises appeared in 1903, which included 227 of these melodies. His curiosity and activities extended to many different classical composers, such as Couperin, Bach, Berlioz and Smetana. Tiersot sang the tenor part in the premiere of Chabrier's Duo de l'ouvreuse de l'Opéra-Comique et de l'employé du Bon Marché in April 1888. In 1917, Arthur Honegger wrote the Chant de Nigamon, a symphonic poem based on three iroquois themes that he found in the Notes concerning Musical Ethnography of Julien Tiersot.
Selected publications
Histoire de la chanson populaire en France, 1889
Promenades musicales à l'exposition, Les danses javanaises, 1889
Chants populaires pour les écoles, poèmes de Maurice Bouchor, 1897
Chansons populaires recueillies dans les Alpes françaises, 1903
