Sustainability in the local context, and the misplaced critique of resilience

    Sustainability remains ubiquitous. Here on the down east Maine coast, no one speaks of musical or cultural sustainability, although to do so would have relevance, insofar as this area has conserved its culture better than most other parts of Maine. Work, education, even the look of the houses hasn’t changed much in the forty-five years I’ve been fortunate to live here, for at least part of every year. The people exhibit a cultural conservatism, a preference for the old ways.

Stonington Harbor, photo © by Jeff Todd Titon.

     If you’re speaking with folks who’ve moved here from away, sustainability means land put into conservation, through the various non-profit heritage trusts, either as “farmland forever,” or more commonly as a public space for light recreation, nature walks and the like, usually on coastal land abutting the ocean. But if you’re speaking with area natives, sustainability refers to the fishery, traditionally lobsters, clams, and cod, hake, pollock, scallops, and the like. The cod have almost disappeared, and shrimp stock is very low, to the point where government regulations severely limit the catch, making that part of the fishery an example of what happens when resources that had been abundant become unsustainable. Lobsters, on the other hand, have never been more plentiful; yet there is worry that even this fishery is unsustainable, particularly in the face of climate change which, warming the ocean water, will cause the lobsters to move to cooler, more northern waters, just as the birds are gradually moving their ranges north to Canada.
    Some conservationists have formed alliances with the island fishermen (and women), seeking common ground in sustainability. The regional news media includes a very interesting monthly, called Working Waterfront, featuring stories about the populated islands, fishing, crafts, yachting (a pastime that is very old in this area, which supplied the 19th century crews and boats for the successful US America’s Cup racers). Cultural conservation does interest these journalists, as they understand that it is not simply the fishery that is at stake but the sustainability of the culture that supports it, and that it supports. In that regard, the “field notes” editorial by the president of the Island Institute, Rob Snyder, publisher of Working Waterfront, caught my eye last month. “The world is watching our coast: Swedes say Maine lobster fishery among least resilient systems,” read his editorial headline. Snyder reported that Stockholm, Sweden, is home to the Resilence Center, which is taking a resilience approach to sustainability on our planet. He noted that Stockholm is in the center of fourteen islands, so they understand something of what it is to be island-centered, as we are on the Maine coast also. The Swedish Resilience Center, Snyder continues, defines resilience as “the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about the capacity to use shocks and disturbances like . . . climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking . . . [grounded in the] belief that humans and nature are strongly coupled to the point that they should be conceived of as one socio-ecological system.” This is the same understanding of resilience that I’ve been writing about recently, in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, and elsewhere; and of course, it is neither original with me nor with the Resilience Center. Resilience is a strategy for achieving sustainability.
    Interestingly, Snyder takes issue with the Resilience Institute’s proclamation that the Gulf of Maine’s lobster fishery is one of the least resilient systems in the world. Ironically, Snyder's resistance echoes the usual local reaction to criticism from away. Instead of admitting the obvious, that the lobster fishery is indeed precarious, Snyder opposes resilience theory, on the same grounds that I did a few years ago, even in this blog--namely, that “it takes a defensive posture to living. Resilience seems to assume that we must become resilient because we are always under threat.” But as I studied resilience theory, I realized that this common critique is based in misunderstanding. I changed my mind. Resilience isn’t the same thing as resistance. Resistance indeed does take a defensive posture, but resilience refers to something else: the capacity of a system to recover, to bounce back, from disturbance. Considering yourself, for the moment, as a system, you take defensive measures to resist a cold; but your resilience, on the other hand, will enable you to recover afterwards. Resilience theory doesn’t deal with resistance; rather, it identifies those things that make a system resilient after disturbance and attempts to maximize those so that a system maintains its integrity as it recovers.
    Snyder goes on with his critique of the Resilience Institute, writing that in response to dissatisfaction with resilience theory, “a movement is growing to think about reframing resilience through a language of thriving. The actions that need to be taken would be the same: embrace diversity, operate at multiple scales . . .” and so forth. But resilience doesn't need reframing, except for those who mistakenly identify it with resistance. Resilience is already about thriving. And in this instance, Snyder recognizes that what is under discussion is cultural sustainability; that is, it is the culture of fishing that must embrace diversity, and operate at multiple scales.
    The same can be said about farming and gardening. Maine’s farming has undergone a quiet renaissance in the past fifteen years, diversifying from mainly dairy farming—once the only profitable kind of farming in Maine, now a break-even proposition at best—and operating at different scales. The number of small farms has increased markedly, as more organic farms, local agriculture, CSAs, and cooperative grocers come to supply a public that wants locally grown organic food and is willing to pay a little extra for it, understanding that the real costs of agribusiness-produced food are not reflected in its low market price. Even in the less populated areas, like this one, locally-sourced farmers markets may be visited most days of the week, with some staying open through winter; and two grocery co-ops are located within easy driving distance. Meanwhile, many residents grow kitchen gardens that supply fresh food in summer, and some put food by in containers, root cellars, and the freezer. Frosts have been arriving later as a result of climate change, with fresh food in the garden now available late into the fall. This fall was unusually warm, on account of the El Niño effect on the East Coast. As of two weeks ago I still had brussels sprouts in the garden ready for harvest.

Labor Dispute at the AFS Conference 2015

    I’m just back from the annual conference of the American Folklore Society (AFS), that took place this year in Long Beach, California. Every year the Society books the conference in a mid-sized city with more or less affordable accommodations in a hotel with conference rooms or a nearby conference center large enough to hold nearly a thousand people. An unusual aspect of this year’s conference was that our hotel workers were involved in a labor dispute with management. As a result, some of our members stayed away from the hotel, and others from the conference altogether. I might have done so too, but last year I was elected a member of our Executive Board, and so in addition to my rank-and-file membership I am now responsible as a trustee of the Society as a whole.
    When our AFS Board met last spring, our Executive Director presented us with the news of the labor dispute and asked us to consider whether we wanted the Society to pull out of the conference. There was no strike because the dispute was not between a union and management; rather, the dispute was over the method by which workers would vote to decide whether to be represented by a union. Most, if not all of us, were sympathetic with labor in this dispute; however, we were told that if AFS withdrew from this hotel, our Society would face several problems. First, we would be unable to book another suitable hotel at this time within the Los Angeles area; second, breaking our legal contract with the hotel would cost the Society a penalty of $100,000, which would amount to more than the Society’s annual income from member dues and deal a significant blow to our sustainability. The Executive Director recommended that we continue with plans to hold the conference at that hotel, but try to intervene to help settle the dispute, and also hold activities in connection with the conference that might educate the participants, as well as our members, in labor history and expressive culture. This recommendation carried, with only one vote against. I decided that my responsibilities as a Board member to the Society in this case outweighed my qualms and joined in the affirmative vote.
    As I anticipated, the union and management ignored our efforts to mediate, while the union attempted to enlist support from our membership. Some events were held outside the hotel, and a delegation from our Society went to meet with the chief officer of the hotel to present their views on behalf of the workers. In gratitude, the union called off its daily, hour-long and quite vocal protests outside the hotel, which could have interfered with our conference presentations. Yet, predictably, no progress was made in the labor dispute.
    In a later post I will say some things about the conference itself. One of its themes was “ecologies,” and some of the presentations on that theme interested me. I presented on a panel concerned with “sensory ecologies” — the ecological systems involving expressive culture and the senses—and offered a much-abbreviated version of the keynote on a sound ecology that I presented at both the Canadian Society for Traditional Music last June, and the joint SEM-ICTM forum in Ireland last month.

Toward a Sound Ecology: Activism, Community Engagement, and Ethnomusicology

    Several months ago I was invited to Limerick, Ireland, to give a plenary address in a conference for ethnomusicologists, on activism and community engagement. Community-engaged activism is characteristic of applied ethnomusicology, of course, but some who are activists in our field don’t self-identify as applied ethnomusicologists. No matter; the conference organizers wished to cast a broader net, and they therefore brought together many people whose work was unknown to each other—not just ethnomusicologists, either, but also arts promoters who’d done much to program concerts featuring indigenous performing groups. The gathering took place two weeks ago and resulted from a historic alliance between the US-based Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Europe-based International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). It was a great pleasure to meet and speak with some European colleagues whose work I’d read but whom I’d never seen before. Several old friends and colleagues were in attendance as well. While some ethnomusicologists are active members of both societies, SEM has been my only professional organization for ethnomusicology since I joined in back in 1971.
    I was impressed with many of the presentations. It so happened that Oxford University Press had a small book exhibit at the gathering where the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology was prominently featured. Although that book was published only two months earlier, it’s already had some impact. Many of the conference attendees had seen it; and parts of it, especially my introductory essay, were referenced in several presentations. A few of the conference highlights: Angela Impey from the University of London offered a description of her work with songs that “tell the truth” in war-torn South Sudan, where music makes meaning and expresses justice. Deborah Wong, a professor at the University of California, made an appeal for “witnessing” as activism, and related her work in Riverside, with the soundtracks of police violence against African Americans. José Jorge de Carvalho, from the University of Brasilia, described a program in which indigenous “masters” (bearers of traditional knowledge) are brought to teach in his university, on a level playing field with Western professors. Such a program, limited to the arts, does not threaten the established political order; but bring in masters to teach indigenous ideas about nature, for example, and give them authority equal to Western science, and you have the beginnings of a revolution. Denise Bolduc, a member of the First Nations (Canadian) Anishnabe group, spoke about her work in promoting concerts and other performances for a broad audience. One of the phrases that stuck with me from her presentation was “blood memory,” a kind of memory that is genetic rather than cultural, and which some indigenous people invoke to provide authority for a cultural process in which they feel they have re-created ideas and practices of previous generations that had been lost to cultural genocide or for other reasons. Andrew McGraw, from the University of Richmond, spoke about his work helping prison inmates make hip-hop tracks, describing the new Richmond (VA) city jail as a highly sophisticated surveillance state. Anthony Seeger spoke about lessons that could be learned from applied anthropology, and Rebecca Dirksen spoke of her efforts in applied ethnomusicology to make a documentary film involving music and waste in Haiti, where the streets of Port-au-Prince are piled high with trash. Mark DeWitt described (and played recordings of) songs made in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, meant to raise environmental consciousness. He added that the songs, while powerful statements in themselves, seemed like everything else done in opposition to the oil drilling culture to have little effect on the oil industry itself, and wondered what he, as someone supported as a university professor by the economic establishment in the region, and as someone answerable to many different and sometimes conflicting constituencies, could or should do about it. Luke Lassiter, whose work in collaborative ethnography was well known to me, and whose book on it I taught in the fieldwork seminar at Brown, talked about new developments in this area, including increased reflexivity and a broadening of the concept of collaboration. Some of the presenters referred to my published work when making a similar or related point, and one critiqued my ideas about music’s economic and cultural value. We disagreed politely and explored those disagreements in a question-and-answer session after his presentation, all of which was helpful to me and, I hope, to him.
    The one who was critical objected to my point (made in this blog and elsewhere) that music should not be considered intellectual property or bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, I’m not the only one to feel this way, nor was I anywhere near the first to say so. But I’ve argued that music has personal and cultural values that ought not be confused with exchange value in the marketplace, yet value and values are brought into tension and compromised when music is bought and sold. My critic raised the common objection that musicians needed to make a living and ought to be paid for their music, artists for their art, and so forth. Oddly, most of the musicians he discussed were amateurs whose main income wasn’t from music; but still, there are those whose is, and why shouldn’t they have the right to be paid for it? In the economic systems prevailing in developed nation-states, of course this makes sense; musicians are laborers and should be paid for their work. But I envision a different economy, one in which making music is as natural as breathing or walking, and where it is not labor at all.
    The presentation closest in concept and spirit to my plenary talk was by someone who was entirely unfamiliar to me, Professor Chad Hamill, of Northern Arizona University. It came at 8:30 in the morning, and the conference room was only half full, which was a pity. Chad is of both Native American (Spokan Indian) and non-Native ancestry, and has his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Colorado. His spoke about indigenous adaptation in the era of climate change, but began with a portrait of Spokan life in the natural world pre-European contact. Translated into my terminology it was a world of relational being, knowing, and doing, anchored in sound. Chad explained how in this Spokan world song bound humans to (and in) nature, linked to a sacred geography centered in the Spokane River. Today that river is polluted and dammed, and the salmon no longer run, all in the “photochemical haze” of the colonial legacy. Yet they are fighting all of this in the courts and gradually obtaining justice. He and I were able to speak about our common interests at times during the conference, and afterwards. I was reminded of the efforts of the Penobscots in Maine to restore the Penobscot River, efforts that are being rewarded as pollutants are outlawed, dams are being undone and the river is renewing itself. In that effort these Native Americans are joined by non-indigenous people who are conservation-minded, many of them sportsmen and women who would otherwise be on the right wing of the political spectrum.
    My plenary lecture came in the evening, after supper, and closed out the events that same day. It was fitting for Chad and me to bookend the day by speaking about nature, culture, and music within an environmental activist framework. I explained my current work in ecomusicology as it moves toward what I’ve been calling a sound ecology, or a new ecological rationality based in sound and presence, one that encompasses a sound community and displays a sound economy. These ideas have been gradually coming to me out of my concerns with music and sustainability, economy and ecology, nature’s economy, music, heritage and tradition, the sound commons, applied ethnomusicology, and so on as readers of this blog will understand. They had their first expression as music and sustainability in 2005 in my Nettl Lecture, at the University of Illinois, and then again at the SEM conference in 2006 in Honolulu, on a panel I organized on sustainable music—those papers were published in a 2009 issue of the world of music. Since then, they’ve been influenced profoundly by Thoreau’s writings, or at least by my interpretations of them, as they bear on ideas of presence, co-presence, and a critique of economic man, the business mentality that underlies the global corporate capitalism that turns music and art into intellectual property (and where traditional arts are given the value-added status of heritage) and fuel for the creative economy, cultural tourism, and so forth. I must emphasize that my critique is not directed at capitalism per se, as so many others’ is today (e.g., Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein). Rather, it is directed at what underlies contemporary neoclassical economics and capitalism, namely “economic man,” the assumption that humans are capitalists and traders by nature.
    Gradually I am bringing my ideas of a sound ecology to publication; two essays on Thoreau will be published very soon, one in Current Directions in Ecomusicology and the other in the inaugural issue of Sound Studies. The keynote address that I gave at the CSTM conference last June should appear in an issue of Ethnologies within a year or so. I also have a publication that will appear on sound and climate change, more of a personal essay, in Antioch College’s environmental journal, Whole Terrain, later this year. All of this thought on music and sustainability inches toward a larger, comprehensive publication that will bring the ideas on sound, presence, co-presence, community, economy, and ecology together.

Music in a Changing Climate

     I've been remiss in failing to post a description of the "music in a changing climate" event at the University of Minnesota last April. What I contributed on "The Sounds of Climate Change" is an ongoing project, and it will be good to get some of those ideas out here now, as this research blog is meant to do.
      Sixty years ago, in Northrup Auditorium, at the University of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra regularly performed the standard concert repertoire under the baton of composer Antal Dorati. Last April, the audience there was treated to more contemporary sounds, including a composition by Daniel Crawford and recordings of the songs of hermit thrushes. “Music in a Changing Climate” was the name of the event, and it featured talks by three ecomusicologists, as well as Crawford himself performing “A Song of Our Warming Planet.” For this 2013 composition, Crawford worked with data from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies on warming global temperatures from 1880 to the present. It has been featured in Slate and the New York Times, and has even been tweeted by Al Gore.
      In the same year Crawford composed “A Song of Our Warming Planet,” I recorded the songs of hermit thrushes in the spruce forest outside my home on an island off the Maine coast. I began my talk for the Northrup audience on “The Sounds of Climate Change” with these recordings, later informing the audience that, on account of global warming, within a generation no one on that island would any longer hear those birdsongs in our forest.
      According to Aaron Allen, one of the founders of the movement, and one of the speakers at the event in Minnesota’s Northrup Auditorium last April, ecomusicology is the formal name for a new field that is attracting musicians, composers, scholars and scientists interested in music, sound, nature, culture, and the environment. His definition of ecomusicology in the new Grove Dictionary of American Music is the standard reference at present, while presses are competing to publish books on the subject. Current Directions in Ecomusicology, edited by Aaron Allen and Kevin Dawe, will be out from Routledge later this year, and the Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology, edited by Sabine Feisst, is in preparation. Already the subject of three major conferences, ecomusicology includes a great many topics, music and climate change among them. Musicologists who are interested in doing ecomusicology research write about composers and compositions that represent and involve the environment, and they pay attention to contemporary musicians and composers who raise consciousness about environmental degradation, global warming, and the like. At Northrup Auditorium, musicologist Denise von Glahn spoke about a composition that evoked the atmosphere of Mount Everest, composer Libby Larsen’s “Up Where the Air Gets Thin.” With climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps, the summit of Mount Everest is also experiencing great changes, and as a result the mini-industry of tourism surrounding the mountain today, along with its symbolism as a once-unconquerable force of nature, is also undergoing change. A performance of Larsen’s piece was also part of the “Music in a Changing Climate” program.
     Today, with an increasing number of ethnomusicologists, ecologists, and scholars in sound studies gathering under the banner of ecomusicology, the subject is broadening to include soundscape ecology, indigenous people’s ideas about music, sound and nature, and the sounds of the built environment. Included in the presentations at the most recent ecomusicology conference was a plant scientist’s presentation on her research about how plants use sound to communicate with insects and with other plants, and a documentary film on Greenpeace’s attempts to get guitar manufacturers to use more sustainable forest wood in the manufacture of their instruments. As many people know, Brazilian rosewood, used to make the sides and backs of the most expensive guitars, is now an endangered species, protected against export by the government of Brazil, while pernambuco, from which the best violin bows are constructed, is also an endangered wood. For that reason, and others, ecomusicologists are increasingly concerned about music and sustainability.
     After I began my talk on the sounds of climate change with the recordings of bird songs that will vanish from their accustomed places as a result of global warming, I told the audience how last year I heard the sound of climate change. An unusual early November storm was shaking the Maine coast: fast-falling, heavy wet snow with winds of 40 knots and the ground wet and loose from the October rains. I was out on my porch in the middle of the snowstorm, taking it all in. The big branches of the tall, slender spruce trees were waving back and forth in the gale, needles piling up with wet snow, looking like so many Shivas moving their arms about. Suddenly I heard a loud crack, and knew at once it was a spruce trunk snapping in two. I saw it go, a big one, at the edge of a field a hundred yards away, crashing down across the path into the woods. That day thousands of trees would break and topple in the storm, on the island where I live, and it would take five days before the power would be restored and five months before the damage was cleared out and cleaned up. In the presence of nature then I experienced a solemn beauty, awe and terror: the sound of climate change.

     

     Or at least I thought I’d experienced it. Was this really the sound of climate change, or instead a poetic indulgence in the pathetic fallacy, the idea that somehow the natural and human world express the same feelings, albeit in different ways? Scientists tell us that most animals communicate in sound with members of their own species. But behavioral ecologists also point out that one species gains knowledge from listening to sounds made by other species, sounds that may not be meant for the eavesdroppers—as they call them—at all, but which they nevertheless put to use. Alarm calls that warn of predators alert all species within hearing range. Perhaps, then, when I heard the horrific storm, and listened to the spruce trees cracking and toppling, I was eavesdropping on nature’s alarm call, portending climate change for any and all who heard it.
     The signs of climate change are all around us; the role of humankind in accelerating it is obvious to all but those who deny it on account of ignorance or a narrow and short-sighted self-interest. As the Paris climate change conference approaches at the end of November, we may hope that the delegates too are hearing nature’s alarm calls loud enough so that at last they will commit the inhabitants of the earth to doing something about it.

Update on Music, Torture, and the APA

     On August 7, the American Psychological Association's Council of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to prohibit its members from "participating in national security interrogations." Their vote would ban member psychologists from advising the Department of Defense on enhanced interrogation techniques (aka torture)--please see my previous blog entry for details of their involvement. Their press release gives the text of the resolution and also notes that it does not prevent APA members from advising on "domestic law enforcement interrogations or domestic detention settings where detainees are under the protection of the US Constitution."

Music, Torture, and the APA

Torture Chamber, Belgium. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

           Is any music not worth sustaining? Except in jest, I’ve never encountered an argument in favor of a language or a music going extinct; but what about harmful musical practices? Music used for torture, for instance? It’s true: the US military has tortured prisoners by playing recorded music, continuously and at ear-splitting volume. In conversation with a US Air Force Academy graduate this morning, I learned that Academy cadets were tortured by, among other things, music, to toughen them up psychologically as well as physically.
            I raise the issue because of the release, a couple of weeks ago, of an independent investigative report commissioned by the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest professional association of psychologists in the United States. APA members are college and university professors, licensed psychologists in freelance practice, those working for various corporations and organizations (including the US military), and those engaged primarily in private, but funded, research. The APA officers commissioned the report to learn the extent, if any, of their organization’s complicity in Defense Department (DoD) activities during the war on terror under the Bush-Cheney Administration. As the report itself explains, “The specific question APA has asked us to consider and answer is whether APA officials colluded with DoD, CIA, or other government officials ‘to support torture.’ […] As a result of our investigation, we can report what happened and why. And as part of that description, we answer whether there was collusion between APA and government officials, and if so, what its purpose was.” This is an important story. First, of course, it shows that music is not always benign nor should it be sustained unquestioningly. Second, it reveals how a scholarly society and some of its members can become corrupted. For in an atmosphere of increasing professionalization, scholarly societies work to increase their power and influence, both in academia and in the public arena; and they work to advance the careers of their members. In this case, the APA advanced its profession’s importance by supporting US military torture, rewriting its own ethics rules to permit its members to advise the torturers, and in this way provided ethical cover for acts that are illegal as well as immoral when judged by international standards such as the Geneva Conventions. 
            Of course, it’s not news that psychologists advise military organizations on torture—how to do it, how to withstand it—and it shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows about the psychological operations of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Less well known, perhaps, is the US and its Allies’ psyops activities in programming US rock music on radio stations during the recovery period after the Balkan wars 20 years ago. Torture surfaced again with Abu Garaib in 2004, though music didn’t appear part of it. But not long after, I learned from progressive media sources that continuous, loud music was a part of the torture arsenal used by the US military on detainees held in secret places outside the US. I thought that my professional organization, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), ought to take a stand against this. And so, as a member of the SEM Ethics Committee, in 2005 I proposed that we petition our SEM Executive Board to issue a position statement condemning the uses of music for torture and demanding that the US government stop doing it. The proposal was approved unanimously in the Ethics Committee and sent up to the Board for action. Meanwhile, other ethnomusicologists were at work on the topic. For example, in 2006 Susan Cusick published an important essay, "Music as Torture / Music as Weapon," which she described as an "attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based." In 2007 the Board approved our position statement and posted it on the SEM website, where it received attention from the media and from other scholarly societies.             
          The just-released investigative report on the APA confirms that the US military tortured detainees in the war on terror with music. New to me in the report was that the APA itself was implicated, as an organization. In other words, it wasn’t just that politically conservative psychologists advised the military on music and other kinds of torture, but that an academic society did so. The report concludes that officers of the American Psychological Association, and especially the head of their Ethics Committee (!), acting on its behalf and in its name, condoned torture and supported those psychologists who helped the US military engage in it. This may seem like a fine line to draw, between individuals and an organization, when torture is torture; but let’s recall that to this group, torture wasn’t torture. As someone who’s spent many decades as a card-carrying member of two other academic organizations, and now as an officer of one of them, I am troubled over how and why the officers of such an organization might have chosen to do what they did.
            I started talking to some non-academic friends who’d been following the story for several years. They hadn’t yet read the investigative report, but on the basis of previous revelations offered me some reasons why the APA might have done as it did. One said the psychologists were paid off, in grants and other favors; another, the former Air Force cadet, thought that they would have rationalized it on the grounds of “just war” doctrine. Certainly the Bush-Cheney Administration took pains to present US policy as a war (on terror) rather than as an initiative to prevent and contain terrorism. The investigative report confirms these explanations.  Besides, it adds what I also suspected: that the APA itself as an organization was implicated, and that they did it in order to enhance the power and importance of their profession. How could a scholarly society do something like that? And why? I was all the more disturbed because, as a scholar myself, I felt it as a blow to the high ideals of my chosen profession.
            Here, now, is the story of the APA and torture, according to the independent investigative report. In the years immediately following 911, the US Justice Department defined torture (for the CIA) in a much narrower way than it is usually understood, and in 2003, Defense Department lawyers concluded in a report that “a U.S. law barring torture by military personnel was inapplicable to interrogations of detainees, and that causing harm to an individual in U.S. custody abroad could be justified ‘in order to prevent further attacks’ on the United States by terrorists” (p. 3). They added, astonishingly, that the Geneva Conventions were not applicable either. By early 2005, most of the DoD report’s conclusions had been made public, along with stories in the media documenting instances of detainees having been tortured. There was pushback from the progressive media, along with charges that US psychologists were working for, and with, the military. Under the pressure of this ferment, the APA President created the so-called “PENS” task force (Presidential Task Force on Ethics and National Security), appointing a group of APA members, including the then APA Ethics Director, and charged it with formulating ethical guidelines for its members working with the Department of Defense (DoD). The task force published those guidelines in June of 2005. How were those guidelines determined? The independent investigation’s report found that “key APA officials, principally the APA Ethics Director, joined and supported at times by other APA officials, colluded with important DoD officials to have APA issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain DoD in any greater fashion than existing DoD interrogation guidelines. We concluded that APA’s principal motive in doing so was to align APA and curry favor with DoD. There were two other important motives: to create a good public-relations response, and to keep the growth of psychology unrestrained in this area” (p.9).
            That is a devastating conclusion: APA is guilty as charged. It confirms suspicions that it was done to protect and enhance the research opportunities of individual psychologists already working with the Defense Department. It points to the APA Ethics Director as the chief instigator, reporting that from 2005-2008, after manipulating the guidelines, he further “engaged in a pattern of secret collaboration with DoD officials” to defeat opposition within the APA, and that he also “formed an undisclosed joint venture with a small number of DoD officials to ensure that APA’s statements and actions fell squarely in line with DoD’s goals and preferences” (p. 9). That the Ethics Director—who of all people should have followed the Geneva Conventions—was the villain is worse than ironic.
            Insofar as blame can be laid on individuals working for personal gain, or on behalf of a misguided patriotism in which ends justify means, members of the APA (and those outside of it) can continue to oppose these practices directly. Procedures such as censure, new guidelines, and so forth can be formulated, debated and acted on; and they should. In fact, some already have. In the court of public opinion, the APA is shamed once again. More sinister, more diffuse, and well worth pondering is the report’s conclusion that the APA had two other motives: to align the psychology profession with forces of political and economic power, and to enhance its prestige. How could that happen, in an association of scholars, professors, and researchers whose chief motivation for their work is, presumably, the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of objective truth independent of parochial considerations, subjective feelings, and political influence? We understand that doctors and health organizations engaged in eugenics research have perpetrated horrors on human beings, whether in Nazi Germany, or among African Americans in the US. But the APA, an association of scholars, researchers and practitioners whose stated “mission is to advance the creation, communication, and application of psychological knowledge,” would seem to have loftier goals. Indeed, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association developed ethical guidelines that prevented their members from participating in US military torture. Why did the the psychologists do the opposite?
            Academic societies such as SEM were founded primarily to share research and understanding, and to add to the storehouse of knowledge about their subject. Certain other professional organizations, for at least as long as I can recall, developed an additional purpose: to help advance the careers of their members, and the reputation and stature of their profession in the public eye. The AMA is one. Fifty years ago, the AMA was a very vocal opponent of Medicare. They lost that battle, and Medicare became law. I don’t know the history of the APA, but one imagines they have a similar dual orientation. Career and reputation building has lately come, also, to scholarly organizations in the humanities, such as SEM. In the 1970s it was absent, but gradually it increased in the 1980s, until now the SEM Board believes that an important part of its mission is to promote ethnomusicology and to help its members in their careers. Graduate students are offered training, by SEM and at their graduate schools, in what is called professional development. Professional development now characterizes graduate training generally, no matter the field. And professional development is implicated among the causes of this corruption.
            I witnessed the change at my own university, beginning in the early 1990s. Until then, most professors advised graduate students individually, chiefly one-on-one in discussions that, until they were looking for jobs, were about their graduate school work and had little if anything to do with careers. I myself got no career advice and didn’t wish for it; I assumed that good work would be properly rewarded and any career would take care of itself. Naive, of course, but to me careers were things people had in the business world; teaching was a calling, not a career. Teaching assistants—those graduate students who worked with professors to help lead discussion, give an occasional lecture, and grade papers and exams under professorial supervision—were treated as interns in the best cases, and as merely paid labor in the worst. But in the last fifteen years of the past century, a change occurred. First, Brown developed a center for the advancement of college teaching, where graduate students and young professors could ask for advice on how to teach more effectively, and on how to think about a career in teaching. Next, the Graduate School began discussions with professors teaching in doctoral programs, suggesting that it would be wise to emphasize professional development along with the usual course work, qualifying exams, and dissertation research and writing. It was important for our graduates to compete well on the job market, for their own sakes and for the sake of the reputation of our program and the university. Our programs would be rewarded, in part, on how successful our graduates were in getting jobs at peer institutions—a high bar indeed. This was an early example of professional development to benefit programs, institutions, and professions as well as individuals. At the outset the impetus came from university administrators and also from young, newly-tenured professors who felt that career advice was important and who were eager to offer it to our students on a more formal basis. Soon the students themselves were asking for it, and expecting it, although some were critical of it. They wanted to know how to write grant proposals, but they did not want to engage in grantsmanship. If teaching was an art, teaching how to teach was difficult; there was no one way to do it, and while courses armed with procedures, explanations, and exercises in teaching techniques could be helpful, they might also reduce an art to a mere craft, like a model constructed from a standard blueprint.
            Besides noting the growing professionalization in graduate programs, I witnessed it in the scholarly associations I belong to. Until the late 1980s, these groups of humanists operated mostly as annual conferences and scholarly journals. They had had officers, collected dues, disbursed payments; the officers met once or twice a year to discuss the conference, the publications, and other business; but as entities they came together only at the annual conferences. The conferences and publications were for presenting research, and for sharing and debating ideas. They also were a convenient, if compromised, place to conduct job interviews—the meat market, as the larger societies called it. Toward the end of the 1980s, these groups began to establish themselves as more permanent, daily operating, non-profit organizations. They raised endowments to secure their futures. They established offices, and hired and paid executive directors to work in them. Boards composed of members now assumed responsibilities for good governance of the Societies, not just oversight of the conferences and publications. They initiated conference panels on professional development and careers, targeted at graduate students. They published, on their websites, statements meant to guide colleges and universities in understanding and rewarding the kinds of work their members did. They engaged in publicity and advertised themselves to the world on the Internet, while their sites became bulletin boards for their members. Finally, as non-profits they sought grants of their own, engaged in various projects, and attempted to raise the profile and prestige of their professions. These activities intensified in the first decades of the new century. As a current member of the AFS Executive Board, I witness this directly and am a part of it.
            Much can be said in favor of professional development. Of course it’s important for a professor to learn how to be a good teacher. Beginning professors, those who’ve just gotten their PhD degrees, often believe that their primary allegiance is to their profession, their discipline, their subject; devoted to that ideal, they present material with integrity in the classroom and are disappointed when students don’t share (or even understand) the same ideal and aren’t especially interested in the subject. Beginning professors don’t realize that they are the ones who must bridge the gulf between their subtle appreciation for their subject and the students’ puzzlement over it. Professors learn, sooner or later, that to teach is not merely to explain a subject, however well presented; to teach also means to learn to connect with the human beings who have agreed to study with their teacher. And, of course, a researcher must learn how to do research, how to write it up, how to bring it to the attention of others; how to apply for jobs, and what to expect in them; how to balance research with teaching and other activities, how to work with granting agencies in order to fund research; how to work with publishers; how to manage their careers and advance in them; how to obtain tenure if they are on a tenure track; and so on. Many promising careers have foundered, not because the research was insignificant or badly done, but because the researcher didn’t know how to treat it afterwards. It is easy to say to oneself that any research that has merit will automatically demonstrate that merit, as if it would emit such a bright light that everyone would recognize and reward it. But it seldom happens that way. Professional development, particularly in a highly competitive academic world, is helpful and today almost a necessity for a career that involves research, teaching, or a combination of the two.
            Yet professional development can sometimes devolve into careerism. In advancing their careers, professors might act selfishly, even ruthlessly. They may choose certain research topics not out of interest, nor the social benefit that might come out of it, nor as a place to make an original contribution to knowledge, but because grants to fund it are easier to get. And success in grants and funding gives an edge on the job market and career. Professors and researchers may seek out particular research topics, colleagues, and publication outlets because these are more prestigious. They may spend more time “networking” with colleagues in a position to do them favors, than with colleagues with whom they might share ideas. They might not share their ideas at all; they may be highly protective of field sites as well. They may try to make their teaching load easier (fewer students, fewer assignments, more repeat courses) in order to spend more time on research and publication, where most institutional rewards are. They may inflate student grades because they worry over negative student evaluations.
            Much can also be said in favor of professional development for scholarly societies. Putting them on a strong organizational footing benefits members as well as their disciplines. Raising their public profile helps bring their insights into the public sphere where they have something to contribute to the commonwealth of knowledge and practice. Better public relations; growth in numbers, prestige and power—whether these are worthy goals depends on the uses to which they are put. My point here about professional development is that in an atmosphere where scholarly societies are concerned about their sustainability, standing and influence, it becomes tempting to relax ethical standards while cooperating with the US military or other government or corporate entities, supposedly to advance the self-interest of the societies and some of their members. This is, to say the least, disquieting.
            For ethnomusicologists, much is at stake. While it might seem far-fetched for folklorists or ethnomusicologists to collaborate with the military on torture, recall that cultural anthropologists regularly consult on foreign policy, where their knowledge serves national goals, whether war, colonial rule, agricultural revolutions, modernization or foreign aid. Like the cultural anthropologists, folklorists and ethnomusicologists who are consulted may be held responsible for the bad as well as the good. In fact, this was the principal objection, among the founding generation of ethnomusicologists in the US (roughly from the 1950s through the 1970s) to applied ethnomusicology. In The Study of Ethnomusicology (1983), Bruno Nettl had little good to say about applied anthropologists, whose efforts were not always or even often appreciated by indigenous peoples; he classified applied ethnomusicologists in the same category. I raise these issues in the context of an ongoing (though today, not very public) critique of applied ethnomusicology; namely, that applied ethnomusicologists also “meddle” in political affairs (through music and cultural policy) where they have no business, because academics ought to be objective, neutral observers and interpreters. Of course, applied ethnomusicologists do meddle, and intervene, for what we hope will be social benefits; but then the academic psychologists who advised the US military in its war on terror also did so on the grounds of contributing to the social benefit of opposing terrorism, saving lives, and so on. It seems to me there are two ways of proceeding, and that we can learn from the example of the APA. One way is to withdraw completely from applied work; the other is to adhere to strict international standards of ethics and justice, and never assume that the end justifies the means. I will have more to say about this in future entries.

Applied Ethnomusicology Handbook published

    A few days ago Oxford University Press published the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, co-edited by Svanibor Pettan and myself. This book offers essays from nearly 25 different contributors, including those of the editors. Nearly 900 pages long, it contains articles from ethnomusicologists who work in North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I contributed two essays: one is an article on sustainability, resilience, adaptive management, and applied ethnomusicology; the other is a historical and descriptive introduction to applied ethnomusicology. The latter was the basis for my Botkin Lecture at the Library of Congress, in January 2015. A video webcast of that lecture will be posted on the Library's website later this year.
   In the Handbook I define applied ethnomusicology as ethnomusicology put to practical use in a community for a social improvement, a cultural good, an economic advantage, a musical benefit, or a combination of these. Guided by ethical principles of social responsibility, human rights, and musical and cultural equity, applied work greatly appeals to contemporary ethnomusicologists.
   As this book was eight years in the making, it may be of interest to know how, and why, it took so long, and what the process was from start to finish. Why, one might wonder, would it take eight years to put an edited book together from start to finish? Anyone wishing to embark on or be part of a similar project might want to know. 
    The Oxford Handbook’s eight years comprised the time it took to determine the shape of the book, produce a proposal, obtain the contributions from the various authors (including the editors), and for the various parts of the book to go through multiple review processes. Once the book was in production—that is, in copyediting, and then putting it into page proofs and eventually books—it went quickly. The project got under way sometime in 2008 when Oxford editor Suzanne Ryan first approached Svanibor with an idea for such a Handbook, and he suggested me as co-editor. Svanibor, who is a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia, would work to invite his colleagues, particularly from the International Council on Traditional Music (ICTM), an international organization with many active European members. I would invite my colleagues, particularly from the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), also an international organization but with most of its members in North America. In the fall of 2008 I met with Suzanne at the annual SEM conference, and confirmed agreement to co-edit the volume with Svanibor. In 2009 we moved toward a preliminary proposal, with a list of potential contributors; we submitted this to Oxford, they approved, and they asked for a full proposal with a list of committed authors and article abstracts from all of them. In 2010 we began the process of inviting authors and learning whether they would contribute, and what; while we tried to shape the full proposal. We discussed the content of the proposal, the intended themes, audience, and which authors to invite. We asked a few potential authors and found many needed time to make up their minds and decide what they might write on; meanwhile, we tried to shape the volume thematically and work towards the full proposal.
    By early 2011 we had many of the authors’ verbal commitments, and we issued formal invitations. A few authors said they felt unable to commit the necessary time to the project, but most accepted, and we awaited the abstracts of their proposed articles. They arrived by the end of the year, whereupon we sent them with a second draft of the proposal to Oxford, whose editor made comments meant for the individual authors, in an attempt to improve their abstracts and eventual articles. Svanibor and I had responses of our own, of course, and we discussed it all with Oxford, eventually returning to the authors with some suggestions for them to revise their abstracts. This process played itself out by the end of 2011, when we sent off our full book proposal along with the revised abstracts.
    Oxford then sent the full proposal and revised abstracts off to external reviewers, for they needed outside referees to advise them on whether they thought it was a worthwhile project and that it should go forward. This review took some nine months, and by early fall of 2012 we had Oxford’s approval to go forward, as well as a contract for us and the contributors. We asked the authors to write their articles and let us have them by May of 2013, but no one submitted on time; we pushed the deadline back to the end of August of 2013, and a few months after that the last articles straggled in. Off they went to Oxford for a second external review—this time, a review of the articles, not the proposal and abstracts—and, predictably, this also took several months but, again, the reports came back in May of 2014 and were positive, albeit with many suggestions for the authors for revision. And so in May of 2014 the authors began revising once more. After all the essays were in, Svanibor and I planned to put the finishing touches on our Introduction and return the whole project to Oxford by August 15 so they could put the book into production. It took a little more time to get everyone’s essay and to put the whole volume together, but in early fall we were able to do that, Oxford put the book into copyediting, returned the essays for correction, put the copyedited essays into pages, which we proofread, and then after more corrections, turned them all into bound books, with the official publication date of June 29, 2015, eight years after we began.

Scott Walker's Assault on Sustainability

     In my last entry I suggested that anyone who wanted to become an ethnomusicologist should realize that the usual path to this profession, through graduate school and the Ph.D. degree leading to a career as a professor in a college or university, was harder now that it was a few decades ago. The doctoral programs are graduating more ethnomusicologists than there are professorships available for them. Some graduates seek careers elsewhere, in museums, arts organizations, as journalists, and so on, while others remain on board the academic vessel, in 2nd class cabins as adjunct (i.e., part-time) professors for low pay and few, if any, benefits such as subsidies toward health care, retirement, etc. I’ve written earlier about the trend among presidents and boards of trustees to run colleges and universities as corporate businesses, generating profits in certain areas such as fund-raising, so as to support other areas and compete for students, faculty, attractive facilities and, of course, administrators capable of generating income. The difficulties arising from running colleges as corporations stem ultimately from the divergence between business values and educational values. Whereas business values competition and efficiency, education values collaboration and the free play of ideas, which is inherently inefficient. Education is far more process-oriented, whereas business values emphasize results.
     If the current assault on the tenure system in higher education succeeds, then the prospect for aspiring college and university teachers takes a further turn for the worse, while US higher education's sustainability is further threatened. Now, security of the position and tenure’s guarantee that a professor’s teaching and research must be free from political interference is in jeopardy. Ten days ago, the news media carried stories on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s attempts to do away with tenure at the state colleges and universities. Walker proposes to eliminate tenure and also some faculty decision-making authority regarding curriculum, research, and staffing. The idea behind it, say Walker and his Republican supporters, is to enable university administrators to “be more like a business and nimble in how they govern,” according to the US News & World Report.
    This change would enable administrators to hire faculty to teach this year’s fashionable subjects, and fire those whose offerings were no longer popular, as if math and history and physics and literature and engineering and music were marketplace products subject to the law of supply and demand. Competition in the educational marketplace, as in the business world generally, must be a good thing, they reason, as the best products will out-compete the others. The Wisconsin Board of Regents, most appointed by Gov. Walker, just recently approved many of his proposals, despite overwhelming opposition from faculty and students at Wisconsin colleges and universities.
     And if this change occurs in one state, Wisconsin, pressure will mount for others to take similar action in order to compete. The end of the tenure system and faculty authority concerning curricula, research, and staffing means the end of academic freedom—the rights of free speech granted to faculty—that enabled the growth of knowledge and its expression at the university without threat of faculty being fired for exercising that right. Professors without tenure could under this new regime be fired, and students expelled, for expressing minority views on such topics as climate change, labor unions, foreign policy, racial profiling, or the roundness of the earth. Although the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, it doesn’t guarantee the right not to be fired from a job as a professor unless that right is accompanied by the academic freedom that has been guaranteed in the US by tenure for at least a century.
    These efforts can be viewed within the larger trend toward turning the colleges and universities from collegially organized and governed institutions, where tenured professors were responsible to their colleagues and to the profession, into corporations organized and governed hierarchically, where the privileges of freedom of inquiry no longer operate. Of course, it isn’t only professors who suffer under these conditions. Teaching, research, knowledge and its application suffers as well under a regime of fear, as does public discourse. Professors fled Nazi Germany and Soviet countries in the last century—if they could get away—on account of political interference; academic freedom guaranteed in the US was, for them especially, an expression of the principles of freedom on which the US was founded. It is vital that not only professors and students but also the public at large vigorously oppose Gov. Walker’s efforts to politicize higher education.

Going to Graduate School in Ethnomusicology?

[Updated Sept. 2017]    
   Daniel Drezner, a Tufts professor of political science, has been writing opinion pieces in the Washington Post and elsewhere offering advice to students who seek college and university teaching careers. Professors traditionally have sustained higher education (and themselves) by reproducing their kind through professional training in graduate school, leading to the PhD degree. More broadly, music education (formal and informal) sustains music cultures from one generation to the next. Today, as I’ve remarked here before, higher education (and the professoriate), as it has existed in the US for more than a hundred years, is in jeopardy. What else should undergraduate students who’d like to become ethnomusicology professors know about the future of that profession and their chances of being a part of it? I’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s see what Drezner has to say. Like ethnomusicology, political science (despite having the word science in its name) falls outside of the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math)  getting the most support in educational institutions these days. The non-STEM subjects aren’t as popular as they once were, not because students don't like them, but because the public believes they’re not cost-effective career preparation. In other words, students graduating with high loan debt (as so many do today) are thought best served by specializing in STEM subjects because they're more likely to get a well-paying job. It's easy to make fun of the non-STEM major who winds up repeating "Would you like that for here, or to go?"--but back in the day the argument ran that a liberal arts major was best prepared as a citizen and human being for leadership or for professional school afterward. Today that argument is no longer as effective as it once was, though it's no less true.
    In 2012 Drezner wrote a column advising would-be graduate students in political science how to tailor their preparation, applications, and behavior toward getting into the school of their choice. Evidently at that time, he must have thought a PhD was a wise choice. But his most recent columns suggest that no one should enter graduate school in political science unless (a) they’re accepted to the top graduate programs (he does not name them), because otherwise they’ll never get hired as a professor after they graduate; and (b) their primary motivation is to learn, and they won’t be too disappointed if they can never find a full-time job as a political science professor anyway. The job market for political science PhDs hasn’t suddenly soured in the last three years. It was just as sour three, ten, twenty years ago. But Drezner now seems to be discouraging those he once encouraged. At least he’s not giving them false hope. He should know: in 2006 he was fired after having been denied tenure at the University of Chicago. But he landed on his feet and accepted a tenured position at Tufts, where he is now a full professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy as well as a non-resident fellow of the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor for the Washington Post.
    Thirty years earlier I was certain that I would be denied tenure. Although my PhD was in American studies and my specialization was in ethnomusicology, I had the MA in English and elected to join an English department. My first fulltime teaching job began in 1971 in a tenure-track position at Tufts, Drezner’s current university. I was teaching American literature and folklore and, after a couple of years, on released time from English I also was teaching an ethnomusicology course in the music department. Although my dissertation was published by a respectable university press, I thought my interests were peripheral to the mission of both departments. Then to my great good fortune I won a year's fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a second book project. This was a rare honor, and it came during the year of my tenure review. I realized that even if Tufts denied me, that honor would help me obtain a good academic position elsewhere. But in 1977 Tufts decided to award me tenure in a joint appointment as associate professor of English and associate professor of music. Now half my teaching load would be in each department, while I could pursue my research interests in both fields.
    In 1979 after my NEH fellowship leave I returned to Tufts and was made Director of Graduate Studies in English. Up for debate soon afterwards, not at my initiative, was whether as a faculty we should continue our Ph.D. program in English literature. The job market for English professors had become difficult, tenure even more so. Our PhD graduates were not getting the multiple offers or good jobs they had been getting five years earlier; in fact, some were getting none at all, and the future looked bad as the economy took a turn for the worse. Colleges and universities, expanding in the 1960s and hiring more and more faculty, had reversed course. Was it ethically responsible for us to continue the degree? Some said no; but others argued it would be unethical to stop it because that would cheapen the degree for those who already held it. No one doubted that we had a good program; but it was not at the same level as Harvard’s and Yale’s—we didn’t have the resources, and Tufts didn’t have the reputation. We met several times to discuss the question and after a few months we voted. If I recall right, there was one more vote in favor of keeping the program than for eliminating it. Predictably, those in favor took it as a vote to continue, while those opposed took it as a vote of no-confidence and argued that we should therefore drop the program. But majority ruled, the program continued, and over the years fewer and fewer graduates received academic jobs in English. At about that time, I started telling prospective applicants not to apply unless they understood that their job prospects would be uncertain. It was a disclaimer similar to Drezner’s advice today. And now Drezner repeats it, from the same university platform, but the difference is that it’s 35 years later; and also, of course, that he’s directing it into the public sphere. And on this platform I do the same.
    I guess that the job market in political science in 1980 wasn't significantly better than it was in English. I suppose it’s the same today, if not worse on account of the proliferation of adjuncts. When I moved to Brown in 1986 to direct their PhD program in ethnomusicology, though, my responsibilities were both greater and different. For the next 27 years I supervised dozens of doctoral dissertations, advised dozens of Ph.D. students, and in addition to teaching large undergraduate lecture courses and some smaller ones, I regularly taught one graduate seminar each semester, rotating topics that included the history of ethnomusicological thought, music and cultural policy, ethnographic film, fieldwork theory and methods, and others. Now I was wholly in a music department and I was concerned about the future of music studies and the prospects for PhD graduates in ethnomusicology. Like English and political science, music was experiencing contraction rather than growth in one college and university after another, but I was in a subfield (ethnomusicology) that was expanding, however gradually, in a zero-sum game. In short, the fortunes of certain subfields can improve even while the field as a whole is in decline. In the 1980s and 1990s humanistic anthropology was in the ascendance, but today the pendulum is moving back toward scientific anthropology. Ethnomusicology has been able to profit from cultural trends that some other fields have not: pluralism and diversity, for one, and the rising popularity of world music for another. Today, with many years of hindsight, I understand that although there were better and worse periods for jobs in ethnomusicology during the past 40 years, overall the number of ethnomusicology professorships greatly increased during that period, while other positions in music decreased. Last year saw more ethnomusicology job openings than usual; this year may be worse. Still, the supply today well exceeds the demand for college and university professors of ethnomusicology. Additionally, the proportion of tenure-track job openings has declined, while universities now hire a higher percentage of part-time and adjunct professors.
    How would I advise today’s student looking to obtain a doctoral degree in ethnomusicology? I still believe that anyone wishing to enter graduate school must first consider the pleasures of mastering a body of knowledge, technique, and application, as an end in itself. How much of a reward would that mastery be, apart from a good academic job (or any academic job at all)? Would it be a joy to spend most of your time learning and satisfying your intellectual curiosities, or a lot of work doing enormous amounts of reading, writing long papers, and toiling on projects large and small, some for the benefit of the musical communities where you've been doing your fieldwork? Does making a contribution to the storehouse of knowledge and theories about people making music all over the world excite you? Does applied ethnomusicology appeal to your sense of social responsibility? Tenure-track faculty positions open up each year even now, but I estimate there are five times as many qualified ethnomusicologists looking as there are positions for them. And many more apply who are not qualified. Outside of colleges and universities, positions for ethnomusicologists do exist: in museums, in other non-profit organizations, NGOs, arts councils, and the like; but most of these should require only the MA, not the PhD. It’s possible, also, to take that mastery and work in the music industry, or as an author and journalist. Graduate work in ethnomusicology may be combined with a degree in library science in order to prepare for a career as a music archivist. One may become an entrepreneur in the world music field, making films and producing recordings, though of course an ethnomusicology degree is not a prerequisite. I’m not aware of any MA programs in ethnomusicology tailored for these public and private sector jobs outside of academia, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in five or ten years a few enterprising universities established them.
    Drezner writes that to have any chance at an academic career in political science today, it’s necessary to go to a top-tier university for graduate work. About twenty US universities meet this criterion, he says. These would for the most part correspond to the top twenty in the US News and World Report's annual overall rankings of research universities. Brown is ranked 14th there; Tufts is 29th. But while most of those top twenty US universities have PhD programs in political science, only nine of them have a doctoral program with a specialization in ethnomusicology. Some excellent ethnomusicology PhD programs exist at lower-tier research universities: for example, at UCLA (ranked 21st), Michigan (ranked 28th), NYU (ranked 30th), California--Santa Barbara (ranked 37th), Illinois (ranked 52nd), Washington (ranked 56th), Texas (also 56th), Pittsburgh (ranked 68th), Florida State (ranked 81st), and Indiana (ranked 90th).
     Instead of choosing a graduate program in ethnomusicology on the basis of the university’s reputation, then, it’s best for applicants to read widely in ethnomusicology to find the professors they want to work with. Then apply not necessarily to the universities with the best overall reputations, but where those professors teach, planning to study with them. In my view, an ethnomusicologist with a Ph.D. from Florida State does not have a significant disadvantage on the academic job market compared with a student from, say, Columbia (one of the top-tier universities). Still, those I named plus those in the top 20 US universities overall make nearly 20 doctoral programs in ethnomusicology, and taken together they're graduating more PhDs each year than there are academic jobs, while the previous years' graduates who remain un- or under-employed also are still looking. It's harder for them to find a tenure-track academic job than to find a publisher for their dissertation. The reverse was true in the 20th century.
     To conclude, one bit of miscellaneous advice: sometimes, musicians having a hard time making ends meet think a graduate degree in ethnomusicology will provide a day job for their musical career. I believe they should think again, because graduate work is so time-consuming it doesn’t leave enough time to sustain a musical career, let alone to keep performance skills at a high enough level even to have one.
       

Music Sustains People

     I’m writing from Minneapolis, where I traveled to take part in an event on music, sound, and climate change. A year and a half ago, Aaron Allen, Denise Von Glahn and I met to give a plenary “trialogue” on sound and sustainability at a conference in Nashville, and afterwards we were invited to do a reprise at the University of Minnesota. This is the event that came of it, in celebration of Earth Day, a week later than the actual day but nonetheless the time when it could be arranged for all. The event takes place later today, but I flew in from Maine two days ago, and had a chance to walk around the university yesterday.

Vincent Hall, Univ. of Minnesota, April, 2015

Much of its appearance has changed. The grand old buildings remain, including Northrup Auditorium, with its imposing Greek columns, and Vincent Hall, with its, where many of my classes were held. Much new modern architecture, quite out of keeping with the old, has been erected throughout the campus, forming blocks of high-rise steel and glass and concrete and granite, with massive faces and few windows, in some ways looking like vast parking garages, but reminding me most of the Soviet-era buildings I saw in Beijing five years ago. One of the professors planning the event, Mark Pedelty, confirmed that impression when we had supper in Dinkytown last night, calling it Stalinist. At that point I began to couple the architecture with the ubiquitous strategic planning that has been going on at colleges and universities over the past fifteen years or so, doubtless also reflecting their transformation from educational non-profit institutions run more or less at a loss, funded by philanthropists and state legislatures, into corporations run to break even, still dependent on donations but less and less so on government funding, while the expenses of maintaining them, pro-rated on a per-student basis, have increased enormously. I’ve blogged about this before; there’s no need to repeat it, except to say that even though I wasn’t surprised to see it at my graduate alma mater, my spirits did not rise as I’d hoped they would.
    In some ways it’s surprising that I’ve been back only once before, and that was around the early 1980s, when one of the professional societies I belong to met in a downtown Minneapolis hotel, and I managed to skip out for an afternoon visit. At that time the campus had not transformed so. Today, it seems much more a model of efficiency. Buses and light rail transport students who crowd the streets, making the sidewalks look like Manhattan during rush hour. The streets and roads of the campus itself are curved, well landscaped, and do not have the look of a city; yet on the outskirts the city is clearly there. Dinkytown has upgraded and yet it was still recognizable in shape. I could see the ghosts of old shops and restaurants like Valli Pizza, where our blues band performed weekends in the “Grotto Room” in the cellar. Of course, the Valli no longer was there.

But on Washington Ave. still stood Stub and Herbs [always missing the apostrophe], now a sports bar and tavern. Stub and Herbs, or Sturbs as we used to call it, was our favorite bar on the east bank of the river, and my old friend Cameron Nickels forever burned it into my memories by deciding he would have a fiddle recital there.
    Cameron, like me a graduate student in American studies but a year ahead of me, shared my love of music and rekindled my interest in old-time and bluegrass. He was a fine singer and guitarist, and joined me as an instructor in the Scholar Music Workshop (attached to the Scholar Coffeehouse), and later in the Mill City School of Folk Music. He decided, about 1968, that he was going to learn to play the fiddle. Aged 27 or so, starting from scratch on the violin is difficult even for an experienced musician with a good ear, which he was and he had. He set himself the goal of a public fiddle recital after six months, and he asked me and another friend, Charlie Angermeyer, to accompany him. We ran thru a set of old-time songs and tunes that Cameron had learned from old hillbilly 78s, some of them recycled by the New Lost City Ramblers. He felt that bluegrass fiddling was too difficult to learn in six months, but that old-time might be possible. It turned out to be possible, barely.
    Listening back to the recording he made of it, I realized that there’s a difference between what a musician hears while performing with others, and what the audience hears. I’m not talking about a need for monitor speakers so the band can hear itself coming through the PA system, if any, but rather a difference between listening while making music and listening back to it afterwards. Listening while making music, I was intent on playing what I had in mind to play, and constantly listening to what I was playing as feedback. Of course, I also heard what Cameron and Charlie were doing, and tried to keep time with them (and succeeded); but mostly I was listening to myself, partly because I had just learned the tunes and songs. If I had known them a long time, they’d have been second nature and I could have, and would have, listened more carefully to the others rather than mostly to myself blending with them.
    Listening back, of course, I heard myself as an accompanist, while the fiddle stood out—as it should have. Now I heard the marks of a beginning fiddler, the same kinds of issues that arose when a dozen years afterward I, too, started playing the fiddle. The fiddle’s timing wasn’t always where it should have been, sometimes a bit late and sometimes a bit early. Whereas in guitar and banjo repetitive motion can set up a regular pulse beat, on the fiddle the bowing motion usually doesn’t do so except for brief periods of shuffle rhythm lasting perhaps only a second or two. Besides rhythmic issues, playing in tune is another. Precise intonation is notoriously difficult on the violin or any of the stringed instruments that do not have frets; and when a musician used to playing a fretted instrument such as a guitar takes up an unfretted one, the results can be even more problematic because intonation has not been troublesome on the earlier instrument. Worse yet, a musician usually has a “head tune” in mind—that is, an ideal melody is heard silently in the brain while its approximation is executed on the instrument. A beginning fiddler tends to confuse the two, and hear the head tune as if it’s sounding aloud; or, the musician hears them both and they blend, the melody in the mind masking the problem of playing out of tune, so that it seems more in tune than it is. But listening back to a recording, a beginning fiddler is without that head tune in mind, and hears how far out of tune the playing was.
    Of course, I don’t mean to be critical of my friend here; my own struggles on the fiddle were just as difficult, if not more so. When I began fiddling, our cat would not stay in the same room. Soon he learned to leave as I started to open the violin case. I supposed that some high-frequency squeaks beyond my hearing range were painful for him. But after a couple of years of playing, the cat no longer left the room. I don’t think it was because he was becoming hard of hearing, but because I was no longer making painful sounds. I know that even after two years I was having trouble with accurate intonation, and that for anyone who starts late in life, it’s a continuing problem—one that diminishes but never leaves entirely. After warming up, intonation seems to get better—and no doubt it does, but I think that, also, the ear adjusts. Again, listening back to recordings—this time, my own—showed that to be true.
    All those memories came back with a rush as I recalled Cameron, Charlie, and me standing up in the front of a narrow, rectangular space, on a small stage, performing for family and friends at his fiddle recital about 45 years ago. I can visualize the others—Charlie with his uncombed, long hippie hair; Cameron’s neat as always, his body stretched to its full height as he tucked the fiddle under his chin and played short, sawing bow strokes and as we all sang, and played, not especially well, but competently enough for the occasion, considering. And it was a success in the sense that we got through it, and Cameron could say that he had his fiddle recital, and then—. Well, for whatever reasons, he continued to play the fiddle but only from time to time, never progressing far enough to his satisfaction, while his singing and guitar playing continued strong. After he moved to take up a teaching job at Madison College, later James Madison University, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he fell in with several music groups singing and playing old-time and bluegrass music over the years, spending many of them in bands with “Two-Gun” Terry (whose last name escapes me), a fine fiddler who was kind of a local legend. Possibly because his music was more involved with rehearsals and performances than jam sessions, Cameron didn’t play the fiddle as much—there were others who could do that better, and so he stayed with what he could do well. I am speculating some here, because I know he enjoyed a good jam session too; but perhaps he felt that even there, he didn’t want to play the fiddle very much, as it would impose some on the others.
    Cameron left the University of Minnesota and found a teaching job the year before I left to do the same. We’ve kept in touch over the years, seeing each other from time to time. He had a fine time as an English professor, somewhat of a curmudgeon in his community as I understand it, an early champion of women’s rights (unusual for a man at that time and place), and a specialist in the literature of humor. He wrote several essays for academic journals and published two books on the subject, one on New England humor and the other on Civil War humor. Now retired, he is still reading and writing—and enjoying music. I’ll tell him about this visit, and send him a picture of Stub and Herb’s. Music and sustainability isn’t only about how culture workers can partner with people in musical communities to achieve goals of sustaining the integrity of music cultures in the face of inevitable change. It is not only about how people may sustain music, but also about how music may sustain people.

Old Regular Baptist Field Recordings Chosen for National Recording Registry

    Two days ago, the Library of Congress announced its list of 25 recordings named this year as "American Treasures" to the National Recording Registry, recognized for their “cultural, historical, and/or aesthetic merit” in contributing to American society and its aural history. The announcement was broadcast by the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio as well as other national networks such as CBS. I was surprised but gratified to see that among those selected they chose a CD made from my field recordings of Old Regular Baptist singing. This is a major honor for the Old Regular Baptists, and it will help them in their efforts to maintain their musical tradition, which dates back to the 16th-century English parish church. Their lined-out hymnody represents the oldest living English-language oral tradition of religious music in the United States.  
     These sound recordings are part of a larger collection of my field recordings documenting Old Regular Baptist traditions: singing, praying, and preaching, along with interviews conducted with elders in the church. They span a period of from 1979 until now. I couldn’t have made them without the help of Berea College and three of its faculty members: Loyal Jones, John Wallhausser, and Bill Tallmadge. Other individuals and institutions that helped along the way were my employer, Brown University; Daniel Sheehy and Anthony Seeger of Smithsonian Folkways Records, which in 1997 released the CD that was selected for the Registry; and the National Endowment for the Arts, Folk and Traditional Arts Division, which supported the portion of this ongoing project that led to these recordings in 1992 and 1993. The recordings were the culmination of a self-documentation project grant from the NEA that I got for the Old Regular Baptists. It enabled them to record endangered songs from their elders, some too ill to attend church any more. I taught them how to use the recording equipment purchased on the grant, and accompanied them on their first recording trips to elders’ homes. Later, I returned to make the high quality sound recordings that would become that CD. Folkways released a second CD in 2003 from recordings I made in 2002. Elwood and Kathy Cornett, Jim and Dosh Fields, Don and Shirley Pratt, Ivan Amburgey, Mackenzie Ison, Ruth Frazier, Bob Banks, and Squire and Claudette Watts are among the Old Regular Baptists I must thank for their participation, along with many others too numerous to mention but whose names are on the albums as song leaders and speakers who related what the sound of the singing means to them.
    I looked at the list of recordings selected for the National Registry since these honors began in 2002. Only about a half dozen folklorists and ethnomusicologists’ field recordings have been chosen in the dozen years of the program’s existence. I was surprised at how few there are. My recordings now join those of Frances Densmore, Franz Boas and George Herzog, David McAllester, and Alan Lomax. Boas, the most important American anthropologist of his day, began ethnographic documentation of music in the 1880s, accompanied by the polymath Carl Stumpf, who was instrumental in establishing comparative musicology in Germany.      

Frances Densmore, 1916

Frances Densmore’s recordings were made early in the 20th century for the Bureau of American Ethnology. I remember seeing volume after BAE volume of her transcriptions in the University of Minnesota library, when I was a graduate student in Alan Kagan’s ethnomusicology seminars. Alan gave us an assignment to transcribe in musical notation one of Densmore’s field recordings of Native American music. He did not identify it by name until after we completed our transcriptions. I can still remember the title that Densmore wrote down for it: “Song to a Little Yellow Wasp.” I may even have my transcription in a file cabinet somewhere. Herzog, of course, was recognized as the leading US comparative musicologist from about 1930 until the early 1950s; he had assisted von Hornbostel at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and after emigrating he received his doctorate from Boas in 1928. Dave McAllester was one of the four founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He taught at Wesleyan University, collaborated with me on a book, and became a friend. After he retired, we kept in touch and I visited him in his new house in the Berkshires, where he had also built a wigwam and meditated inside it at times. I thought he would live forever, but he died in 2006.

David P. McAllester, 1963

Alan Lomax is, of course, well known as both a folklorist and ethnomusicologist. I got acquainted with him in the mid-1970s when, as a young assistant professor, I asked if I could hear his Cantometrics training tapes. He invited me to New York and after I spent some time with him, I brought back on the train to Boston a carton of a dozen reel-to-reel tapes. Not only did I listen to them, but so did my students; and that began a collegial relationship that lasted until he died in 2002.
    It feels good to have my field recordings join theirs, but I know that there are many deserving documentary collections besides these, made by thousands of folklorists and anthropologists and ethnomusicologists ever since J. Walter Fewkes recorded Passamaquoddy singing in Maine 130 years ago. Fewkes' earliest ethnographic sound recordings also are honored on the National Recording Registry, and copies are still being circulated among Passamaquoddy today. But even more important, they are still being sung.