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.

The Curry Lecture: Applied Ethnomusicology

(Note as of June 29, 2015: The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, edited by Svanibor Pettan and Jeff Todd Titon, has just been published by Oxford University Press. My section of the Introduction to that book is an updated and far more extensive review of applied ethnomusicology and its history than what I wrote below. The Handbook itself contains essays by more than 20  international contributors.)

Having just now returned (in late April 2011) from a stimulating trip to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and now finished with the last of my guest lectures this semester on music and sustainability, I’d like to catch the blog up on them here, beginning with the Curry Lecture which I delivered at the University of Michigan last March 18. Soon I will post about my talk at Indiana University a week later, and then about the ones at Chapel Hill. The Ethel V. Curry Distinguished Lecture in Musicology is an endowed lecture series created for the University of Michigan by H. Robert Reynolds in honor of his mother. Now retired and living in California, he was for many years a professor in the School of Music at the University of Michigan; he returned to Ann Arbor for this lecture. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Reynolds at the lecture and thanking him as we spoke for some minutes before the lecture.

My lecture had been advertised at http://www.music.umich.edu/departments/musicology/lectures.htm as follows, in the generic descriptive paragraph that I gave them last fall when I wasn’t yet sure which aspect of the project I would emphasize: “While sustainability is in vogue today, musical and cultural sustainability have yet to be fully theorized. If ethnomusicology is the study of people making music, and applied ethnomusicology is the application of that study in the public interest, Professor Jeff Todd Titon asks how cultural policy regarding music may be informed by the most powerful contemporary discourses in sustainability, those coming from ecology and economics.” The advertisement concludes with a link to this blog.

As usual with descriptions like this given well in advance, they represent the project as it then exists; predictably, it turned out that during my fall presentations at the conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the American Folklore Society I continued exploring the sustainability discourses in ecology and economics, seeking complementarity between them in the concept of “Nature’s economy.” I’ve already written about those presentations on this blog, and also offered the papers themselves. In my lecture at the University of Texas I concentrated on the cultural policy aspects of the project, working with (and against) David Throsby's ideas concerning the economics of cultural policy. And so in the Curry Lecture I turned to a different aspect of the project, in response to requests from professors and students there who wanted to know more about applied ethnomusicology. That is, in addition to offering an overview of the project, I spent the first third of the talk on a definition and explanation of applied ethnomusicology, along with some illustrations. For when an ethnomusicologist gets involved with a project like this, which involves theorizing towards a public policy implementation, it falls under the heading of applied ethnomusicology. And so that will be the subject of this blog entry, expanded somewhat from what I said in Ann Arbor.

In 1992, when I was editor of Ethnomusicology, the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, I solicited articles for a special issue on applied ethnomusicology. At that time there was no single word for this field: it was either called public sector ethnomusicology (after public sector folklore), or applied ethnomusicology (after applied anthropology). Other terms in use were practice ethnomusicology, action ethnomusicology, and active ethnomusicology. In recognition that the name had not yet been settled, I called the special issue “ethnomusicology in the public interest,” a working definition of applied ethnomusicology that appealed to me because it suggested a recognition of civic responsibility in all that we are about, a view that our work ought to engage with public discourse beyond university walls. “This work,” I wrote, “involves and empowers music-makers and music-cultures in collaborative projects that present, represent, and affect the cultural flow of music throughout the world” (“Music, the Public Interest, and the Practice of Ethnomusicology,” Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, no. 3 [1992], p. 315).

In my introductory essay for that special issue, I emphasized the differences between practice and theory, and between the ivory tower of the university and the world of practice outside of it, far more than I do today, and more than I did in 2003 in an article that appeared in a special issue of Folklore Forum devoted to applied ethnomusicology. This article, "A Conversation with Jeff Todd Titon," was an interview that John Fenn conducted with me, in which he asked me to define applied ethnomusicology, offer some instances of it, discuss my involvement with it going back to the nineteen-sixties, and say where I thought applied ethnomusicology was headed and why so many graduate students were interested in it at that time. This article may be downloaded for free at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/2361

But in the period from 1950-1990 there was a good deal of opposition, chiefly among senior ethnomusicologists (I was not quite so senior at the time), to applied ethnomusicology. Some agreed with Alan Merriam that ethnomusicology ought to be a pure science, not an applied one; for in the early 1950s the founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology had, after all, rejected overtures from the International Folk Music Council to ally their work with theirs, on account of a perceived bias at the IFMC towards “salvage” work—a romantic preoccupation with dead and dying musics and musical cultures. According to the founders, ethnomusicologists were meant to study all music as objectively and scientifically as possible; romantic bias had no place in the discipline. Merriam had, also, publicly ridiculed applied ethnomusicology in K-12 education as “sandbox ethnomusicology,” taking a swipe at the direction Society for Ethnomusicology co-founder David McAllester had gone since about 1970. Other prominent ethnomusicologists put it more mildly: applied ethnomusicology surely was a good thing for society, but was the practice of music in the public interest really ethnomusicology?

In the 1980s another model (besides applied anthropology) for applied ethnomusicology became available in the US: public sector folklore. Three federal institutions--the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Office, the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center, and the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts became involved in various applied folklore projects whose aim was what was called cultural conservation. The Smithsonian's major project was their annual folklife festival; the American Folklife Center, which housed the Archive of Folk Song, began to do folk cultural surveys in various parts of the US, resulting in exhibits and other interventions in the public sector; and the Folk Arts Division distributed some $3 million annually to organizations who were identifying, documenting, and presenting folk artists to the general public. Further, Folk Arts established the position of "state folklorist" on state arts councils and other state and local organizations, to the point that by the end of the decade a network of public sector folklorists was operating in nearly every state of the union. As traditional music was considered a folk art, a few ethnomusicologists were hired by the Smithsonian and the American Folklife Center both for particular projects and as permanent staff; meanwhile, two or three ethnomusicologists could usually be found on the Folk Arts panels. (I served from 1980 to 1984 and again in 1989 and 1993). Folklorists attended the Society for Ethnomusicology conferences and led workshops that helped ethnomusicologists see how they might get involved in public folklore. Many were attracted by the possibility that they could obtain grants for their organizations.

Applied ethnomusicology topics and projects appeared increasingly on the SEM conference programs in the 1990s, and eventually a special interest group (committee) on applied ethnomusicology was founded, by myself and twenty-six others, in 1997. In 2002 two of the leaders of that group, Doris Dyen and Martha Ellen Davis, turned it into a “section,” a more permanent designation. Today the section, of which I am currently a co-chair, has more than 100 members and is the largest section in the Society. The first conference devoted to applied ethnomusicology, held at Brown in 2003 and organized by two of our doctoral candidates, Erica Haskell and Maureen Loughran, was called "Invested in Community." In addition to the kinds of scholarly exchange that take place at conferences, it was an attempt to show that applied ethnomusicology is both an international effort (a number of invited presenters were from Europe) and also that applied ethnomusicologists worked both inside and outside the university world. All the conference presentations are on line at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/invested_in_community/index.html

Most ethnomusicologists, today, have adopted a live and let live attitude; applied ethnomusicology is fine for those who want to do it, and not required for those ethnomusicologists who do not. Some applied ethnomusicologists, though, carry forward out of habit the incorrect assumption that applied ethnomusicology is something that exists apart from universities, while others express animosities toward academics. And, to be sure, some academics remain suspicious of applied work. These divisions are not helpful. To think of applied ethnomusicology as an "alternative career" immediately marginalizes it as "alternative" and erects barriers between academic and applied ethnomusicology. One can just as easily imagine the academic career as an alternative to a career in the public sphere; indeed, some non-academics think of universities as ivory towers that are out of touch with the mainstream. Most important, it is a false dichotomy because many ethnomusicologists employed by colleges and universities do applied work, while many applied workers employed outside of universities do academic research.

In the Curry Lecture, I defined applied ethnomusicology as the process of putting ethnomusicological research to practical use. It is not the same as putting music to use; many people put music to use without the benefit of ethnomusicological research. Nonetheless, this definition that I favor now is, like my earlier notion of ethnomusicology in the public interest, more inclusive than some other current definitions, emanating particularly from my European colleagues, which ally applied ethnomusicology to a desire to intervene with music on behalf of peace and social justice. While it’s true that many applied ethnomusicologists do this work for that reason, one with which my own history with activism aligns, this is too narrow a definition to accommodate much that goes on in this field, such as medical ethnomusicology, which includes music therapy as well as education for HIV/AIDS. Other examples of applied ethnomusicology include public programming involving documentation and presentation of under-represented music at museums and festivals; participatory action research, involving partnerships with community scholars to work toward mutual community music goals such as encouraging conditions under which music will flourish; music, peace studies, and conflict resolution, particularly with regard to ethnic rivalries in the Balkans and Middle East; education, enabling multicultural initiatives such as a diversity of music in the curriculum; and cultural policy regarding music, including sustainability initiatives.

None of these examples is out of harmony with pluralism and social justice goals and most are, in fact, very much in the same spirit; and yet one can imagine ethnomusicological research put to use in the service of other ideologies. For example, some Christian missionaries do engage in what they call applied ethnomusicology, the application of ethnomusicological knowledge to fieldwork and musical partnerships with various groups, with conversion and education a principal goal. One group, led by Brian Schrag, who received his PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA, has worked out a methodology and has presented examples of their work in Africa at the annual conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Brian and his group do seek social justice for the Africans they work with, but within an explicit Christian framework. And unlike some other missionaries, they are respectful of the Africans' traditional ways. The argument could continue: one might say that in introducing the Christian framework they are elevating a particular world view. Against that, it could be pointed out that the ideology of cultural equity that underpins applied ethnomusicology (and public folklore) also elevates a particular world view that values diversity and pluralism. And so on. Still, that missionary work is different from the work of ethnomusicologist Rabbi Jeffrey Summit with a group of Ugandan Jews. Rabbi Summit’s goal is not conversion; it is musical and cultural conservation. These Africans are already Jewish. My own work with various religious musical cultures (all Christian) is the same: the goals have been documentation and conservation, as well as interpretation.

One could say that the musical relativism on which ethnomusicology was founded (in response to the perceived absolutism of older musicologists whose subject was the tradition of Western art music aka classical music, and who considered it to be the best, the most rewarding, most stimulating, most complex, most civilizing musical achievement of humankind) should not, to be consistent in principle, exclude applied ethnomusicologies with varying ideological agendas. On the other hand, one might argue that there is a difference between musical relativism and ideological relativism.

It is an old argument. Should the definition include, for example, ethnomusicological research put to use in torturing political prisoners? The United States bombards Muslim “detainees” with loud music, in their efforts to break their resistance and obtain information. Evidently hip-hop is especially loathed, especially Eminem. The Society for Ethnomusicology’s Executive Board, on the recommendation from the Society’s Ethics Committee, put out a statement on the SEM website publicly condemning the use of music for torture. (Go to: http://webdb.iu.edu/sem/scripts/aboutus/aboutsem/positionstatements/position_statement_torture.cfm)

It so happens that I was the one who brought the matter before the Ethics Committee in the first place, and I found nothing but strong support for my position all the way through to the publication of the statement—the first time that SEM has taken such a public political stand, be it said. But can I find an ethical principle that will exclude this appalling use of ethnomusicological research (I don’t know that any ethnomusicologists were directly involved in the government’s decision to use hip-hop to torture political prisoners, of course; my guess is that they consulted the literature of music psychology primarily) and not exclude ideologies that embrace social justice? This is more than a technical question. For the moment applied ethnomusicology can afford, in my view, to be inclusive and expansive. I can imagine a time when it may not be so easy for me to take this view.

Having worked through a definition of applied ethnomusicology, though not with all of this background, I went on to give examples of it, such as the ones above, and to speak at length about my longitudinal study and partnership with the Old Regular Baptists, in southeastern Kentucky, who were and are keen to conserve their traditional sound, embodied in their lined-out hymnody. Neither proselytizing nor conversion was at stake here; it was a matter of improving the musical and cultural conditions under which this group could conserve their musical tradition, the oldest continuous English-language sacred song tradition in the United States. This is, for example, the way that the Massachusetts Bay Puritans sang; the first book published in Colonial America was theirs, the Bay Psalm Book. I have written extensively about this work elsewhere, but the effects of the project were summarized by Elwood Cornett, the moderator (elected head) of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, in the program "Radio-Gram: Religion" thus: http://www.appalshop.org/wmmt/node?page=23&prevnext=7

In the Curry Lecture I also discussed the dichotomy between “pure” and “applied” with ethnomusicology in mind. My view is that they are two sides of the same coin, and that the distinction is not helpful. The pure versus applied distinction is borrowed from the natural sciences, where “pure” science means research aimed primarily at offering analysis, explanation, and understanding and at increasing knowledge about the natural world. So-called “applied” science means research aimed primarily at finding practical uses for pure research in order to meet human goals. In other words, applied science involves applying theoretical knowledge gained in pure research to make interventions in the natural world that meet human needs and desires.

The classic distinction is often made between the pure science of mathematics and the applied science of engineering. How might this distinction work in the discipline of ethnomusicology? Not very well, I believe. For not only are the pure and applied interdependent, as are the theoretical and practical; but academic and public ethnomusicology are interconnected as well. Most pure ethnomusicologists do applied work. We think, perhaps, of the pure ethnomusicologist in the university doing research. But even the most six-ply, steel-belted, fully tenured ethnomusicologists do applied work when they teach, and when they do fieldwork. They may also theorize applied ethnomusicology from within the academic world, as I am doing now. And they may engage in applied projects from their secure base in the university.

At the same time, applied ethnomusicologists, even when working outside the universities, not only employ ethnomusicology theory but advance our knowledge of people making music through the practice of ethnomusicology. In doing fieldwork aimed at presenting music in various settings such as artists in the schools, museums, concerts, and ethnic festivals, they identify, document, and interpret the music they are becoming acquainted with and add to the storehouse of pure ethnomusicological knowledge. The same could be said about ethnomusicologists involved in medical ethnomusicology, for example, insofar as they contribute to our knowledge about the physiology and psychology of music; and about ethnomusicologists doing participatory action research, insofar as they learn ethnographic information which contributes to our knowledge of particular music cultures. And so forth, but you get the drift: applied contributes to pure, pure to applied, and the categories spin and merge in what is called practice theory, or theory grounded in practice: the finest kind of each.

For the rest of the Curry Lecture, I gave the assembled group—perhaps 200 of them—an overview of the music and sustainability project. I’ve worked out some Keynote (the Apple version of Microsoft’s Powerpoint) slides that help me present it, and I found them useful at the University of Texas and again just recently at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After the lecture, there was a question-answer session for about an hour, and then we broke up. I went to supper with a group of professors, ethnomusicologists and musicologists, and we talked well into the night, past 11 p.m. One of the wonderful things about giving these invited lectures this semester has been the chance to listen to questions and critique, some of which carry on in email, as I try to work these ideas into a book manuscript. At the same time, I hope that something I say at these talks will affect each of the listeners, for I want to leave them with an idea or two that may prove useful and helpful in their own work, for ultimately it is not my work or theirs but it is our work after all.