Critical Review #3: Titon

Titon's article gives some useful background on the epistemology of ethnomusicology and goes into Titon's theories and beliefs regarding the best way to go about doing fieldwork. He talks about the different paradigms that ethnomusicology as a field has gone through in its progression from historical musicology to its current form, and he deals with such concepts as the difference between explanation and understanding and the relationship of phenomenology to ethnomusicology. Titon makes an interesting point that a great deal of ethnographic writing follows the model of the hero's quest myth, even if the ethnographer does so entirely unintentionally. In the end, Titon brings the article around to a discussion of fieldwork, and his belief that an ethnographer must develop friendship with his or her "subjects", based on "musical being-in-the-world."

QUESTION:
Standards of friendship, courtesy, and mutual gain vary greatly between cultures. If an ethnographer is setting out to follow Titon's fieldwork model of friendship and mutual gain and caring for one another, how can he or she determine if Titon's standards have truly been achieved with a given subject or if it only seems that way from the ethnographer's point of view?

Critical Review #2: Wong

Deborah Wong's article is an interesting analysis of how an ethnomusicologist can create performance ethnographies about his or her own participatory research, and how one can handle autoethnography. Because Wong's article was so self-referential, as she struggled with reconciling her deep personal involvement with taiko to her writing about it, at times I got a little lost as to what point she was trying to make. In the end, however, I felt that one of the main ideas of her article was that autoethnography of her own group allowed her to access a deeper current of social meaning in the performative practices of taiko. Additionally, it seems that she is trying to use the ethnographic writing as a method of self-discovery, to allow her "to learn how performative ethnography creates engaged encounters that offer strategies for social change" (Wong 88).

QUESTION:
Wong hopes that her ethnography will be "a study of what taiko might become in some of its possible futures". Do you think that, in reality, her ethnography will be what she hopes taiko will become in the future? She is very invested in the idea of taiko as an element of social, racial, and even gender identity and assertion (88), and she admits that she has "a stake in what taiko becomes" (88). Can she possible write about this in an unbiased fashion, does that even matter, and will her conclusions still be as relevant as (or possibly more relevant than) those of an unbiased ethnographer?

SEM History

Ethno-musicology

Several items of interest strike me in the first few issues of Ethnomusicology. The first is simply the title of the publication, which, on the first issue, is “Ethno-musicology”. The hyphen may not seem like a big deal, but that simple separation really drove home the meaning of the word for me, raising thoughts of the debates over the validity of that word as a name for the field that we have read about elsewhere.

The first issue of Ethnomusicology is notable for it’s tone, which is very positive, hopeful., and informal. This publication, and the associated society, are just trying to get off the ground, and the people organizing it are trying to get everyone involved. It has more of the feel of a social publication than an academic one in the early issues—it reports ethnomusicologists’ current status, projects, and goals more in the “where are they now?” style of an alumni magazine than in a detailed, detached academic matter. This is understandable, of course, as at this point they were just trying to establish some sort of scholarly community where there was none.

The first “notes and news” anecdote of the first issue shows the status of fieldwork technology of the time: a recently returned scholar who spent a year doing research in Africa has all of eight hours of music recorded. With today’s technology, a fieldworker could easily amass that much in a handful of days!

The friendly, social atmosphere present in the early issues of the magazine does not last into the present, as the journal achieved a more standard academic format, in which a handful of lengthy articles are published each issue along with some book reviews. This is not very surprising—the chummy attitude of the early issues was the logical approach at the time, when it was more like a newsletter than a journal, but that format was able to change as the society grew.

Another interesting facet of the journal is how its editors take an international focus from early on. They emphasize that the journal will exist “on an international basis”. This is interesting, as the society arose (to an extent) from the ashes of the American Society for Comparitive Musicology, the treasury of which funded the first few issues of this new journal. This journal, however, drops the word “American” from its title, seeking an international status from the start. Although many of the organizers seem to be American, it is clear that they want to form a legitimate international community so that scholars from different nations can share ideas and research. This is evident even from the first few issues, in which a German scholar writes to inform the readers of the state of ethnomusicological education in German universities, and the editors publish several letters in untranslated French. A certain international attitude and level of understanding is expected of the readers of this journal.

Fieldwork Topic

I will be doing my fieldwork on "Awkappella", one of Brown's a cappella groups. Awkapella was founded in the spring of 2008. They are self-described as " An a cappella group for people you LOVE to sing, but aren't really that good." It's a very interesting group, as the members perform the standard college a cappella fare of classic rock and other popular songs from the past few decades, however they show no regard for the standard measures of "good" singing; i.e. melodic accuracy, pitch, harmony, etc. Despite performing in a highly untraditional fashion, they have attracted audiences, as one can see in their YouTube clips, many of which can be found on this YouTube profile: http://www.youtube.com/user/luuuuucious.

Is this group's performance practice indicative of some cultural trend? They invest their performances with a great deal of enthusiasm and deadpan choreography—is this "camp" style entertaining to audiences? Is the audience more interested in the unselfconscious performance of this group of people who "LOVE to sing, but aren't really that good" than the performance of a more traditional a cappella group? Do the members of the audience, many of whom are probably not accomplished singers, take pleasure in the success of people with whom they may identify (in terms of singing ability) in the seemingly-exclusive field of a cappella?

There are many interesting questions that the existence and popularity of this group raise, and I hope to delve into some of them over the course of this semester.

Critical Review #1: Clifford

Clifford's extremely dense article covers a good deal of the history of anthropology and ethnography as fields, dealing especially with the evolving practices of anthropologists and ethnographers (and the conflation of the two) and how they went about chronicling their experiences and observations. One aspect that I found particularly interested was the account of the emergence of ethnography, "a powerful new scientific and literary genre" (Clifford 30). It was quite interesting how the new "scientific" approach simultaneously improved some practices while making others drastically worse. The new practice involved a more detached, culturally relativistic outlook that was probably more accurate than the previous observations of missionaries and colonial administrators. However, along with this detachment came the belief that an ethnographer need not stay with a group for an extended period of time to fully understand the implications of their practices, as well as the belief that the ethnographer could sufficiently converse with the people and make conclusions based on those conversations after a mere handful of years' experience with the language. This contrasted sharply with the anthropologists of the past who, biased as some may have been, spent years or decades gradually learning about a group's culture and language.

QUESTION:
Which is more valuable (in terms of leading to more accurate information about a culture): a strong sense of detachment and cultural relativism (at the cost of familiarity and long-term observation) or a deep familiarity with a culture, perhaps including fluency in its language and comprehensive knowledge of its cultural practices, at the cost of impartiality and scientific neutrality?

24-hour musicpalooza

24-hour music log
starting at 12:00 pm Friday, September 5, 2008

The following were heard between 12:00 and 1:00 pm from my computer, in my room:
“Handlebars” – the Flobots
“Us” – Regina Spektor
“Après Moi” – Regina Spektor
“The Call” – Regina Spektor
“Little Boxes” – Regina Spektor
“Samson” – Regina Spektor

The following was heard in my head at approximately 1:30 pm
“Don’t Stop Me Now” – Queen

The following was heard at approximately 2:45 pm
Various unidentifiable snippits of music wafting from the restaurants on Thayer

The following were heard between 3:00 and 5:00 pm, at a rehearsal for the a capirate group “ARRR!!!”
“The Bullgine” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)
“Bully in the Alley” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)
“The Grey Funnel Line” – Cyril Tawney (performed by ARRR!!!)
“The Fields of Athenry” – Pete St. John (performed by ARRR!!!)
“Bell Bottom Trousers” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)
“Roll Your Leg Over” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)
“Let it Be” – The Beatles (performed by Ryan Mott)
“Cape Cod Girls” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)
“South Australia” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)
“Low” – Flo-Rida (performed by Danny Musher)
“Whiskey” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)
“The Mermaid” – Traditional (performed by ARRR!!!)

The following were heard between 5:00 and 5:30 pm, played on the piano and sung
“Tiny Dancer” – Elton John (performed by Eric Bair)
“Don’t Stop Believing” – Journey (performed by Eric Bair)

The following were heard between 5:30 and 6:00 pm
Generic Ringtone – “Nuance” – my friend Lynsey’s phone
“Don’t Stop Believing” – Journey (performed by Lynsey Ford)
“I Will Survive” – Gloria Gaynor (performed by Lynsey Ford)
“Mary Had a Little Lamb” – Traditional (performed by Lynsey Ford)
“The ABC Song” – Traditional (performed by Lynsey Ford)
“I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” – Fred Heatherton (performed by Lynsey Ford)
(I should note that the preceding half dozen songs were only sung in excerpt. My friend Lynsey discovered that I was keeping a record of all of the music that I heard, and so she began singing random snippets of songs. I debated whether to include them, as they weren’t representative of what I would have heard had I not been keeping this log. I decided that they should be included, as they were pieces of music that I heard.)

At 8:00 pm I heard Ravel’s “Bolero” playing from my friend’s speakers.

Between 10:00 pm and 1:00 am, I heard an assortment of modern dance music (which I could not identify) coming from a set of speakers in the kitchen of Zeta Delta Xi.

I did not hear any more music until the log ended at 12:00 pm on Saturday, September 6

Welcome to the Jungle

This shall be the blog chronicling my adventures through the land of Ethnomusicology, or at least through the course MUSC1900. It shall be a quest for truth, beauty, freedom, but above all love.

Music is pretty sweet. I highly recommend it.

Love,
Joe