Fourth Critical Review

Shadows in the Field Ch 6 "Virtual Fieldwork" by Katherine Meizel, Timothy Cooley, and Nasir Syed

In this chapter, the three authors examine how changing communications and informational technologies impact their fieldwork. They cite arguments that cyberspace is a part of everyday life, not a work in itself, and they make the point that the virtual field shows how people are affected by these technologies. They also note that in a world of multi-site and multi-disciplinary academic work, their approach is at home. Katherine Meizel worked on "American Idol" and found new opportunities and challenges in the virtual field. Tim Cooley worked with surf musicians in Hawai'i and California and found that a combination of both old-fashioned techniques and new technology worked best (he concludes that he is happy to live in the information age). Nasir Syed, the student of a famous sitar teacher, explains the great resource that the Internet can be to him and to other sitar players, and argues that the Internet augments but does not replace the traditional student-teacher relationship. The authors as a group conclude that "fieldwork should happen where music does."

Discussion Question: Would the fieldworkers who wrote the initial issues of Ethnomusicology agree with the conclusion these authors come to? Why would someone argue that the "virtual field" cannot be a place for "real" fieldwork?

Critical Review #3

Shadows in the Field Ch 5 "Moving" by Deborah Wong

In this chapter, Wong addresses several of what she feels are problems in modern ethnomusicology through her experience of and involvement with taiko. She writes about the problems of the relationship between ethnomusicology and ethnography, and also insists that a place in the discipline be kept for auto-ethnography. She supports the Denzin's idea that performance and political engagement come together to become performance ethnography. She concludes her chapter by with a few thoughts about how ethnomusicology can intersect with identity and social change.

I found this reading very difficult to understand. Because of this, my discussion question is simply: What are the main points of this article? How does ethnomusicology intersect with identity politics? And how can ethnomusicology be a force for social change?

SEM

There were several surprising things about the early issues of Ethnomusicology. One of the most surprising was how small it started out. The first issue appeared in December 1953, and although its Introduction says that there were three hundred copies sent out, it looks as though all three hundred ten-page pamphlets were done on someone's typewriter. The first several issues of the journal seem to have been very focused on finding and uniting all those who self-identified as ethnomusicologists. It seems to have been a very tightly knit community: the Notes and News reads almost like a family newsletter sent out during the holidays (look what productive and wonderful things we've been up to!). I absolutely love the Exchange section; it is introduced in the first issue as something that "will appear only as needs and problems are suggested." James Van Horn's earnest plea that someone record the singing of the elderly Snoqualmie Indian chief, Jim Kamin, is the first thing to appear in that section. I'm not quite sure what the attitude in the field of ethnomusicology is today, but that request really encapsulates the sense of mission that ethnomusicologists of the past seem to have had--if we do not preserve it, it will be lost.

In the August 1954 issue, one of the notes in "News and Notes" is about a paper that Willard Rhodes (future president of the Society for Ethnomusicology) presented at the 1953 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. In the paper, which was about Chippewa songs, Rhodes suggests that music can be used to track the movements of peoples. In a lot of the other early articles one can see the very close association between ethnomusicology and anthropology. Also in the August 1954 "News and Notes" is a lengthy response in agreement with an article in the London Times which claimed that musicologists and anthropologists ought to work together. I find it interesting that the journalist used the word musicologist--I guess the term ethnomusicologist still hadn't come in to common use.

Another one of my favorite things is the list of ethnomusicology classes at different institutions. I can think of several reasons why they did this. These lists certainly give an excellent idea of where one would want to go to study if one were a prospective student of ethnomusicology in the fifties. But I really don't see the early years of the journal something that would find a wide audience among pre-college kids. Perhaps they were more directed towards anthropology students with a strong interest in music seeking graduate programs. Or it could have been a way to let ethnomusicologists at different universities know what their colleagues were doing, so they could create similar courses for their own students. The list of classes seems to be one of the many ways in which ethnomusicologists used the journal to share resources. It's impressively exhaustive.

The class names themselves are very entertaining. I wonder what Willard Rhodes talked about in his class at Columbia, "Folk and Primitive Music" a graduate music class to which undergraduates were admitted. And why was a class with the exact same title give by Indiana University's anthropology department? Some of these classes make me want to take a time machine back to the fifties and shop them--I think "the Rise of Music in the Ancient World" sounds fascinating. (It was also taught by Curt Sachs, who wrote an amazing one-volume History of Musical Instruments.) For all the fact that the new discipline of ethnomusicology had been founded, Richard Waterman (an author we're going to read soon) still taught a graduate seminar in Comparative Musicology at Northwestern. Why was that? Brown is not on any of the lists--I'm not sure we even had a music department in the fifties.

One final thing that I enjoyed was the little article January 1957 issue noting that the Society for Ethnomusicology had spent $437.17 and was left with only $567.21 in its budget! It seems like such a tiny sum of money for an international academic society to have.

2nd Critical Review

James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority"

In this chapter, Clifford writes about the changes that have occurred in beliefs about who is the authority in ethnography. He writes about how university-trained anthropologists came to supplant other ethnographers (missionaries or travelers) who did not share their scientific viewpoint and methodology. The next major wave of anthropologists he writes about shared many of the following beliefs: they did not feel it necessary to be fluent in the language of the people they studied; they emphasized observation and theoretical abstractions; their research was relatively short-term; they focused on particular social institutions; and their personalities tended to be a part of their work. At this time, the method of participant-observation and an emphasis on the fieldworker's experience also came into the fore. In interpretive anthropology, the next school of thought Clifford presents, a culture is looked a bunch of texts to be interpreted. Discursive anthropology, which follows interpretive, recasts the fieldworker's experience in the form of a dialog, but Clifford concludes that this too can be unsatisfactory. He concludes by writing about models of "polyphonic authority," including an example of an anthropologist who included her informants on the title page of the book she wrote about their culture.

Discussion Question: In this chapter, Clifford claims that there is no "neutral standpoint" for an ethnographer to take when writing about a culture. How does his suggestion of "polyphonic authority" (among other things, use of informants who are ethnographers within their culture) address this problem?

Fieldwork Topic

I am hoping to do research on contra dance bands. Specifically, I hope to work with a friend of mine and the group he's a part of, the Sunday Night Jammers. I met Paul at a Brown Contra dance last year, but I don't remember hearing about the Jammers until the middle of last year. They are a group of all sorts of instrumentalists who get together and play dance tunes of all descriptions, Sunday nights at Goff Hall in Rehoboth, MA. They have three FREE community dances this fall: Sept 21, Oct 26, and Nov 23. By some stroke of divine luck, all of these work with my current schedule, so I will go to all of them. (Hope knocks on wood, and then makes a sacrifice to the Gods of Free Time.) Alternately, if that doesn't work out, I will try to work with another band.


I'm not sure exactly what I should be posting here, but I feel like I should say a little bit about what contra dance is and my background in it. (Warning: my definition of "what contra dance is" is based on personal experience, with no scholarly knowledge or research yet thrown in.)


Contra is a form of traditional American community dance. It's based on British community dance and was brought to this country by British settlers. Couples start standing two-by-two in long lines running down the hall, and a caller tells them a pattern of steps for traveling up and down the line. All of these patterns have names ("Petronella," "Chorus Jig," etc) and most were made up by a particular person. The band plays the music. One dance--one repeated pattern of steps--can last about 10-15 minutes, and then you find a partner for the next one. There is a first half, with 3-4 easy dances, followed by a waltz, and then a break to get water, talk to friends, announce when the next dance is going to be, etc. Then the second half contains slightly harder dances and again ends with a waltz. Then everyone goes home. (If you have any familiarity with square dancing, contra is a bit like that, except in a long line, not a square.)

I was introduced contra dancing in summer 2004. Apple Hill, which is the awesome place where I go to play chamber music, takes all the campers to the Monday-night contra dance in Nelson, NH. So from 2004 until college, I danced there once or twice a year. Then I came here and discovered that there are dances here at Brown and in Rehoboth. I go to the one here pretty regularly (which is to say, once or twice a month) and slightly less often to Rehoboth.

A Few Possible Research Questions:

• What association is there between a dance (the set of steps) and the music the band plays for it?
• How does a caller work with a band?
• What makes a good dance (referring to event as whole)?

I also think I could possibly do something about how one becomes and learns to be a caller, since my friend started that process last year.

And finally, just because I want to, and also in case you're curious, here are links to things I wrote about in this post:

Brown Contra dance

Sunday Night Jammers

Rehoboth Contra Dance

Chorus Jig at Nelson!

Critical Review #1

Handler, Richard and Jocelyn Linnekin
TRADITION, GENUINE OR SPURIOUS Journal Of American Folklore, 97, 1984, p.273-290

In this article, Handler and Linnekin argue for a new definition of tradition. They point out that previous definitions of the term viewed tradition as something fixed in time and consciousness and they argue that modern definitions, although they acknowledge the reality of constant change in traditions, do not move far enough away from this stereotype. In the authors' view, tradition is a "symbolic process," something created and assigned meaning by people, which involves continual change and reinvention.

Discussion Question: Are there ways in which musical traditions defy this definition? Or do they reinforce it?

24 Hour Music Log for Saturday, 9/13

• 12:00am

chiming of grandfather clock in stairwell

• 12:30am

until I fall asleep, I hear pop music from a Thete party across the quad. I don't know any of it.

• about 8:30am

I am eating breakfast in the Ratty when music from a commercial catches my attention.

• 9:30am-1pm

I practice violin: scales, Kreutzer Etude #12, and Mozart 4th Violin Concerto. Also the few fiddle tunes I know.

• 12:05pm

My cell phone goes off.

• 2:50pm

While doing homework, I listen to Mozart String Quartets K 168, 168, 160, and 589. The last is a piece my string quartet plans to read when we pick a piece for the semester. The recording is by the Eder Quartet. (Thank you, Naxos!)

• 3:39pm

Briefly from across the way: "WHO LET THE DOGS OUT" followed by static, possibly from another source (a saw?). Mozart still playing.

• 3:41pm

At least one of my neighbors is playing electric guitar.

• 3:46pm

From across the way: hip-hop and an arrhythmic bounced basketball.

• 3:48pm

No more Mozart.

• 4:13pm

A cell phone goes off outside.

• 4:29pm

Acoustic guitar from a neighbor.

• 6:19pm

More distant pop music. It was probably going on continuously but it only came to my attention periodically.

• 7:51pm

Phone call from my sister.

• 9:46pm

Solitary whistler outside.

• Sometime close to, or possibly after, Midnight

I retrieve butter from my refrigerator and hear people singing sea shanties in the bar.