Experiential Ethnomusicology (Phenomenology and Ethnomusicology, 2)

     In 1976 I began to undertake ethnographic field research in religious folklife, beginning with projects with Rev. John Sherfey and his congregation in Stanley, Virginia, and also with Rev. C. L. Franklin of Detroit, the best-known and most popular of the whooping African American preachers. The Virginia project resulted in a book, Powerhouse for God (University of Texas Press, 1988; 2nd edition, University of Tennessee Press, 2018). The Detroit project resulted in another book, Give Me This Mountain (University of Illinois Press, 1989). When I started I was not concerned so much with sustainability as with making a contribution to knowledge by documenting religious traditions that were little known to scholars. Although I had studied philosophy in college, it was chiefly pragmatism and analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition that I learned, in addition to a general course in the history of philosophy that did not get very far into the 20th century, nor did it include phenomenology. Starting this ethnographic project, I felt familiar with the field research methodologies of ethnomusicology, folklore, and anthropology, but beyond that I wanted to explore how scholars in religious studies approached their subject. Analytic philosophy of religion was congruent with a field calling itself the scientific study of religion, presumably to highlight sociological explanations and distinguish them from theology. I did not find this field helpful; in attempting to explain religion, this analytic scientific approach explained it away.    

Ninian Smart (1927-2001)

     As I recall, it was in the fall of 1977 that I discovered the writings of Ninian Smart on phenomenology of religion. In them I found a more agreeable methodology, one that was compatible with ethnomusicology’s insistence on avoiding ethnocentrism and instead learning to understand the expressions of a culture different from one’s own on its own terms. Smart advocated adopting Husserl’s phenomenological method of epoché in the study of comparative religion. The observer should “bracket” or set aside the truth-claims of the religion under study, suspending both belief and disbelief. Meanwhile, the student of a religious group should try to understand its worldview, doctrine, system of beliefs, practice, and expressions as a system that functioned in its own way and on its own terms. It’s possible that Smart had read Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Phanomenologie der Religion (1933). Van der Leeuw suggested that the student adopt Husserl’s epoché so as to suspend one’s own beliefs about the sacred so as to describe a religion in way consistent and empathetic with the way their adherents understood it. 

       The implication for ethnographic fieldwork, as I saw it, was that regardless whether the researcher was a member of the religious group under study or not, bracketing was called for in order to achieve the subject position best suited toward documenting the group’s expressive culture while relying on members of that group to explain it. This, I felt, was best done by thinking of my subject position as that of a long-term visitor or guest. Smart was suggesting relativism for he felt that the sacred manifested itself in different ways wherever human life could be found. One of those ways was in the dimension of lived experience, something that I knew resonated deeply in the musical preaching and its affective presence in the churches I was studying. As I learned more about Husserl’s phenomenology, I understood that experience was at the center of its inquiry—how experience was presented to consciousness. I made this one of my chief areas of research inquiry during my fieldwork; that is, I asked the preachers and members of the congregations to tell me about their experiences of the sacred, both in general and in response to musical preaching. 

     The sacred was manifest in a spiritual presence (the Holy Spirit) not only in inspired preaching but also singing, praying, and testifying (witnessing). Smart had written that each religious tradition had an overarching narrative that explained its worldview and justified its practices. Among the people I was visiting, the Bible provided the overarching narrative; but narrative itself as a speech mode was not confined there. Rather, it was a habitual mode of thinking about, organizing, and expressing experience and its meaning. The church members' narratives of conversion to Christianity were their most important; but they also, habitually, thought of their daily experience as an ongoing story of how God was present in their lives—and their task was to understand its meaning by interpreting the pattern in the narrative as it went along. In addition to their conversion narratives, each preacher also had at the ready the story of how they became preachers—not by deciding on their own as one might decide to become a professor or an entrepreneur, but always because they were called, or inspired, by God. Usually after resisting for some time, they bent to God’s will and gave up whatever else they might have intended to do, in order to go and preach the gospel. These narratives were, foremost, stories of personal experiences of the sacred; and they were the generative centerpieces of religious experience for these preachers and the members of their congregation. And as I puzzled over the meanings and significances of these narratives, I found hermeneutic phenomenology to be the approach that yielded the most satisfying interpretations.

     In his article on the history of phenomenology in ethnomusicology, Harris Berger singles me out as a pioneer in this area and points to my book, Powerhouse for God (1988), along with Timothy Rice’s book, May It Fill Your Soul (1994), as the earliest ethnomusicological instance of hermeneutic phenomenology—that is, our “approaches to issues of [meaning and] interpretation in music . . . are grounded in the writings of hermeneutic phenomenologists.” Indeed, I wrote Powerhouse from the standpoint of hermeneutic phenomenology; but it never occurred to me that this was pioneering work. I chose this approach to interpretation because it seemed the most suitable to the experiences described and re-lived in the expression of sacred language. I made my debt to that philosophical tradition and especially to Paul Ricoeur explicit in the Introduction to the book and elsewhere. But it is worth mentioning that before I came to hermeneutic phenomenology while writing the book in the 1980s, I depended on a Husserlian strain of phenomenology while undertaking most of my field research in the 1970s—specifically, as I indicated earlier, the methodology advocated by Ninian Smart, which derived from Husserl’s epoché, or “bracketing.” In other words, whereas hermeneutic phenomenology enabled me to do the work of interpretation, Husserlian phenomenology enabled me to do the prior work of documentation.

Experiential Ethnomusicology (Phenomenology and Ethnomusicology, 1)

     In the last month I spent the better part of two weeks at academic conferences, one in California on cultural sustainabilities, the other in Newfoundland on phenomenology and ethnomusicology. Typical of academic conferences, those who gathered presented their research and exchanged ideas; but atypically, these were small conferences, with about twenty presenters at each one. Small conferences where academics gather over a single topic are more frequent in the humanities nowadays and, because they are focused on topics of special interest to those who participate, they can be more rewarding than the large, annual, professional disciplinary ones. On this blog I’ve had a lot to say in the last ten years about musical, sonic and cultural sustainabilities. I haven’t written much about phenomenology here, though, so perhaps it’s time to say something about it in connection with the history of ethnomusicology.

     Phenomenology is a word that sends most people to the dictionary. Seldom heard outside of academia, for decades it inhabited the discipline of philosophy, and then in the second half of the 20th century it escaped to other branches of the humanities. The key word in phenomenology is experience. Phenomenologists study experience, experience as presented to consciousness. More generally, phenomenology is the study of phenomena as presented to awareness. Physics, of course, studies phenomena—but as external objects, independent of personal observation. Experiences presented to my consciousness will differ from your experiences presented to your consciousness; but that table over there exists whether or not you and I are aware of it. When we are aware of it, it is present to our consciousnesses individually. You may be experiencing its shape while I may experience its shiny surface. Experience is personal and individual; and phenomenologists study it as it is present to consciousness. A phenomenological ethnomusicology emphasizes musical experience. Musical experience would appear an obvious direction for ethnomusicological inquiry; but according to Harris Berger, the convener of our conference in Newfoundland, and the editor of and a contributor to a book-in-progress, the Oxford Handbook of Phenomenology and Ethnomusicology, phenomenology didn’t enter ethnomusicology until fairly late in its history, the 1970s and 1980s. Why not?

     It wasn’t because ethnomusicologists were unconcerned with musical experience altogether. The early ones (the comparative musicologists, beginning in the 1880s) were most interested in comparing how music was structured—scales, rhythms, melodies—among different social groups throughout the world. A notable exception was Carl Stumpf, interested in music psychology; but let that be. In the 1920s comparative musicology began to take social and cultural context more seriously, as evidenced in the work of Constantin Brailloiu in Romania and George Herzog in the US. In the 1950s, two American anthropologists, David McAllester and Alan Merriam, were asking their Native American informants (Navajo and Flathead, respectively) about their ideas about music—what it was, what it was for, and how they felt about it. Asking how they felt was to ask about experience. McAllester told me his Navajo friends found those to be very odd questions; they just didn’t habitually think about those things.  And so the answers he got were brief and not very informative. In the 1960s, when as a blues musician I asked my blues-playing friends the same kinds of questions, I got pretty much the same kinds of answers—it wasn’t something they thought about. Happy to talk about their careers in blues, some going back to the 1930s, and willing to critique other (usually more famous) musicians, they had not developed what might be called a theory of blues experience. When I told them that the blues historians and jazz critics wrote that blues is a cathartic experience, they laughed. They were professional musicians, after all. Blues was a way to make a living, not personal drama. They wouldn’t last long as performers if they had to purge themselves of melancholy night after night. 

     What Merriam, McAllester, and I had in common, in addition, was ignorance of the phenomenological tradition—or at least, I was ignorant, and I’m not aware that Merriam or McAllester ever indicated their debt to it. But in the 1970s I stumbled onto it in connection with a new research project, where experience was at the center of authentic performance, and where a rich tradition of talk about that experience had developed. In fact, talk was expected, as a way of validating the experience’s authenticity. My research project began in the mid-1970s, around the same time or possibly somewhat earlier than two other research projects where musical experience also was at the center, one undertaken by Ruth Stone and the other by Tim Rice. Even though each of us did something a little different, what we all had in common was that in that decade we encountered phenomenology. When we wrote about this research, we acknowledged how phenomenological methods had guided it, and our interpretative conclusions. Stone employed classic phenomenology to study the experience of time among Kpelle musicians in Liberia. Rice, drawing on the phenomenology of bodily experience, wrote about how his fingers learned to play the Bulgarian bagpipe when his mind was unable to grasp the technique by means of musical analysis. And I employed what my friend and colleague Dan Dennett later termed heterophenomenology, after I had read Ninian Smart’s brief on behalf of phenomenology in the study of comparative religion. I should add that Berger writes that it was with this research and writing by Stone, Rice, and myself, that phenomenology entered ethnomusicology. I’m not sure where Stone encountered phenomenology but I would guess through Husserl. Rice may have found it through Merleau-Ponty, and possibly he also had read the work of David Sudnow; but like me, he soon moved into the field of interpretive, or hermeneutic, phenomenology. I only know for certain the details of how I stumbled onto it, and how helpful it was to me as I was doing my research and writing about sacred speech, chant, and song in the 1970s and 1980s. That will be the subject of my next blog entry.