Sustainability and the Hidden Life of Trees

Beech tree forest, central Europe. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

   By now many readers of this blog will have sat down with Peter Wollheben’s remarkable best-seller, The Hidden Life of Trees. Wollheben, a German forester, writes about forest sustainability, but there are takeaways for musical and cultural sustainability as well. Indeed, one of his major points is that trees have a kind of social and cultural life together. The author anthropomorphizes trees to an extent that bothers me; he attributes emotions and feelings to them, for example, as well as intentions and agency in ways that are striking. Nevertheless, he makes a convincing case that trees in a forest comprise an interactive community.
    In his first career, Wollheben was a professional forester, and managed a forest for commercial interests. In central Europe, as in many parts of the US, planned forests are planted (or replanted) with trees evenly spaced (or thinned to give them space) so they will grow fast for a quick harvest by large, efficient machines. Although he doesn’t specify, we infer that the forests he worked in were coniferous, with spruce trees the favored commercial species. At some point, he stopped managing commercial enterprises and instead began to manage an old-growth forest chiefly of beech trees, not for harvest but for preservation for the community nearby.
    When he began doing so, he observed that the beech forest (which had been growing for many decades without much human interference) was much different than the commercial forests he managed. The trees were much closer together—too close, in terms of the forestry management practices he’d learned—and yet they grew better, straighter trunks, and they grew more slowly and to a ripe old age: hundreds of years. It took them far longer to come into maturity, and they lasted many times longer than the trees in the commercial forest of conifers. They were well adapted to the soil, unlike many of the conifer forests that had been planted in unlikely places. He began to wonder if, for the health of the trees and the forest, it wasn’t better to manage as nature did, rather than to adopt the practices of forestry management—even so-called selective cutting and thinning and harvesting. Although he does not reference Thoreau, 150 years ago Thoreau came to the same conclusion, on reading an English book about planting walnut trees.
    Searching for an explanation about why this beech forest that seemed to violate all the principles of forestry management was able to maintain itself better than the managed one, he read reports by scientists. What most intrigued him was a paper published in 1997 by Susan Simard as lead author. Simard and her group observed that in the forest soil, fungi attach to tree roots and that, when trees grow close to each other, the roots and fungi of different trees intertwine, even among different species, and transmit carbon and other chemicals (glucose, for example) from one tree to another. In effect, the trees were feeding one another. Afterwards, Wollheben began to read of other experiments in which trees seemed to “help” each other, for example by sending out scents signaling the presence of a pest, that would cause other trees in the forest to erect chemical defenses against the pest. It was not a big step for him to conclude that the trees in a forest constituted a kind of symbiotic community, even though they were also in competition with one another for sunlight and water.
    One of the corollaries of this research, he concluded, was that trees closer to each other can help each other more—they are better off that way. Not only are their entwined roots better able to reach each other and exchange food, but the stronger trees often “feed” the weaker ones because it is beneficial to keep them all alive so they can “help” each other. When I walk out in the un-managed spruce forest behind my own house, I hear tree branches and sometimes the trunks, high up, rubbing against each other when there is a strong wind. I used to think that was unfortunate, that the trees were too close together. Now, after reading Wollheben, I realize that they are propping each other up against the possibility of breaking off or toppling over completely.
    In early October, 2014, a snowstorm with high winds occurred where I live on East Penobscot Bay. It toppled many trees, also snapping off branches. The earth was wet from recent rains, making it easier for the top-heavy trees to become uprooted if they had no nearby tree to prop them up. I noticed there were more snapped and toppled trees at the edges of clearings. Also, four apple trees in an old, planted orchard had been uprooted completely. I was able to save two of them with the help of a neighbor, and get them back upright after pruning them back heavily; they are growing again, but the other two were beyond help.
    Consider, then, the advice given by professional foresters for planning an apple orchard: plant the trees at some distance from one another so they avoid their branches touching. For a full-sized tree, that should be forty feet apart in all directions; but such a tree will not be able to extend its roots to entwine with its neighbor, for the roots spread about as far under the ground as the branches do above. Those trees will also be more susceptible to damage from wind and insect pests. Of course, for easier harvest they are planted at that distance; but it would not be that much more difficult to harvest apple trees planted closer together. The apples might be more numerous, but they would be smaller, and many would not fully ripen unless the branches were pruned so that in a heavy wind they would not prop each other up.
    In nineteenth-century New England, when a house was built, a small home orchard usually was planted out behind the house, the tree trunks about fifteen feet from each other. You can find these commonly with the older houses still standing, and even when the houses are gone and only the cellar holes remain, and the surrounding area has grown up into forest, a home apple orchard is likely to found within seventy-five feet of the cellar hole. The full-sized trees that grew up were able to live long as their roots and branches entwined, and the apples they produced--for cider, baking, and fresh eating--were easily enough harvested, by climbing the trees or using pole harvesters for the best specimens, while the cider apples were gotten off the trees by shaking the branches. Such an orchard stands in back of my own house, and these trees were not damaged in the 2014 snowstorm the way those planted in a field nearby, according to proper orchard practice, were damaged.
    In short, the trees in a natural forest, according to Wollheben, comprise a community, a kind of mutual aid society while at the same time they are competing with each other. By means of mutual aid they are able to sustain the forest far better, and for far longer, than a forest planted or managed according to the principles of contemporary good forestry practice. The same principle might be applied to the management of music cultures. Indeed, I have embraced it in earlier blog posts here: feed the cultural soil, do not target the individual plant. In other words, encourage the music culture, not individual musical genres. If the cultural soil is nurtured, the musical genres will develop and thrive. An endangered music will not thrive if the cultural soil is not working in its favor, no matter how much it is aided.
   

Public Lectures and Collaborative Project on National Park Soundscapes

I’m spending some time at East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City, Tennessee, where among other things I’m looking forward to a collaboration with the biologist at the Great Smoky National Park, Scott McFarland, who’s in charge of their natural sounds and night skies project. Most every US National Park is participating in this project, with the twin goals of improving the visitor experience with soundscapes more in keeping with their expectations for a largely wilderness environment, and improving the sonic habitat for wildlife—after all, sound is a principal means of animal communication, and a sound commons is its ideal expression. Minimizing sound (and light) pollution is the aim, and part of the process involves monitoring (i.e., recording) the soundscape to obtain baseline readings over a period of time. Some of the students (and faculty) will be be part of this collaborative effort, and the students will learn about soundscapes in a hands-on way. They’ll also be taking soundwalks and doing projects involving personal and public soundscapes, perhaps in Johnson City, or possibly in favorite places away from there. Reports of these projects will be forthcoming.
    In addition, at ETSU I’ll be offering a series of four public lectures on what I’ve been calling a Sound Ecology. It will be an attempt to answer a question I first put in writing some 20 years ago, in an essay for the book Shadows in the Field, edited by Timothy Cooley and Gregory Barz, about doing fieldwork in ethnomusicology. There, I wrote about sound as a way of being in the world, a way that differed from our usual orientation toward the world as a text subject to interpretation. The question has developed into this: what sorts of communities, economies, and ecologies might result from taking sound experience, rather than the interpretation of texts or experimentation with objects, as the primary means toward understanding ourselves and our worlds? I am interested in proposing what I am calling (with apologies for the puns) sound communities, sound economies, and sound ecologies. I offered preliminary versions of my answers in keynote addresses at various conferences during 2015, but this will offer an opportunity to consider the subject in more detail.

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.

Representing ethnographic ambiguity in fiction

Photo by Jeff Todd Titon, Maine, 2011.

    It’s become a commonplace to speak about the truth of fiction, which is to say that fiction does better in representing experience than verifiable fact. As a blogger wrote recently for the Paris Review, “The truth of fiction allows the reader not only to believe that the story has happened to the narrator, but to believe that it is happening to himself as well.” I was reminded of this when asked about why, in response to an invitation to write a piece on an assigned subject for a journal that publishes scholarly essays, I submitted a short work of fiction.
    The original invitation came to write an essay for a special issue of a journal devoted to scholarship on music and culture. The issue's theme was to be “Connecting with Communities.” My initial response was to say no. In my reply I mentioned five published essays and one keynote address, from 1985 until now, in which I’d pontificated on how and why we scholars should be connecting and collaborating with musical communities, not just studying them. “So,” I concluded, “I feel as if I've already had many opportunities to present on this subject, and that the world doesn't need to hear anything more from me on it, at least not in another essay. I thank you for thinking of me, and wish you well with the special issue.”
    The editor wasn’t done with me yet. “I wonder,” she kindly wrote back, “if you would consider another form of contribution to this special issue. . . Might there be some creative way you might be interested in sharing your ideas with us in relation to the context of the issue? Especially as we seek to integrate innovative ways of conducting research / creating and sharing knowledge.”
    "Creative way?" I’m not sure if she was aware that years ago I'd tried my hand at fiction before a scholarly audience and, given this leeway, might try again. At any rate, when I submitted a short story, she wrote to ask me to share my thoughts about why fiction? and to say that these thoughts could accompany the story.
    Again, my first reaction was to say no, that the story I submitted should stand or fall on its own. But when I’d presented a piece of fiction to a scholarly audience before, I realized that even if I didn’t want to offer an explanation, the audience deserved one. I hadn’t done it then, but decided to try to do it now. The editor interviewed me and we considered it within the context of multidisciplinarity or, with apologies to Wallace Stevens, the advantages of more than one way of looking at a blackbird.
    We’ve been living, for the past few decades, in a time when in certain circles it is difficult to maintain a stance of scholarly objectivity, a time when the world seems to have dissolved into competing narratives, ways of representing people and things, ways of making sense of experience, ways of telling a truth. We even hear this from media talking heads, usually in the pejorative sense, as “so-and-so’s narrative” of reality. In the US, the Republicans have their narratives, and the Democrats theirs; Fox News has its narrative, MSNBC a different one.
    The difference between these narratives and fiction is, of course, that fiction does not pretend to describe something real. It may be true, but it can't be real in the sense that it corresponds directly to something that happened in the factual world, even if it is derived from real events. Citizen Kane is a fiction based on truths in the life of William Randolph Hearst, but it is not real. You could not find a real Charles Foster Kane, living or dead, even though Hearst, upon release of the film, prohibited its mention in any of his newspapers. And needless to say, most fiction is more made-up than that.
    A scholarly essay persuades by being true to facts, ideas, and logic; but fiction seeks assent in the reader’s experience, real or imagined. It may persuade, but it does not seek to do so. It offers the reader (and the writer) a different advantage: an opportunity to imagine, feel and, perhaps, resolve some of the ambiguities inherent in experience.
    Or not resolve them. I think that fiction writing offers the scholar a chance to explore feelings and understandings, sometimes contradictory ones, and hold them in a state of suspension, a liminal state on both sides of a threshold. Let me offer an example from the first piece of fiction I read before a scholarly audience. It was in 1979, at the New England chapter meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. I derived this fiction from events and experiences at a large folk festival some years earlier. A blues singer, Big Joe Williams, refused to perform blues on the porch of a building constructed especially for this festival. The building looked like a country church and served mainly to present religious music. Of course, it wasn’t a church; but it looked like one, and religious music had been and would be presented there. For blues singers of Big Joe’s generation, it was a sacrilege to sing blues in church, so he refused.
    It happened that I was employed by this festival as a presenter, someone who interprets the performers for the audience, and also, at times, serves as a companion for them. I’d had some experience with blues musicians—had even performed for a couple of years in a blues band, and had written my PhD dissertation on blues—so I was assigned to hang out with and present Big Joe. But he wouldn’t be presented on that church stage. I explained the situation to a high official at the festival, suggesting that we simply move Big Joe to a different stage. But it turned out that logistics wouldn’t permit it, and I was instead directed to persuade him to perform. “It’s not a real church, after all,” I was told. “It’s only a building made to look like one. Just make sure he understands the difference.”
    Impossible. For Big Joe, it was a real church. Real enough, anyway: the performance of gospel music inside had consecrated it as such. I was stuck in the middle and could comprehend both viewpoints, even though I was sympathetic to Big Joe and upset with the festival official who should, I thought, have moved heaven and earth—and said so to Big Joe, who that night changed his mind and performed on that church porch the next day anyway. And now I’ve just explained the liminality of this experience, for Big Joe and for me as well. But 35 years ago I decided to represent it, indirectly, and for that scholarly audience, in a piece of fiction, a murder mystery narrated not by me or even a stand-in, but by a hard-boiled detective--so that the scholars might experience it vicariously themselves and, if I were successful, assent to that liminal position and connect it with their own liminal experiences.
    I’m not sure if the story that I submitted to this journal will be as effective. It’s much more a made-up product of my imagination than the story I wrote about the festival. It’s about a bird watcher—but then I don’t want to explain it or try to interpret it here, now. We’ll see if it can be contextualized in that special issue. As faithful readers of this blog will have guessed, it has to do with bird song, with presence, and with co-presence; and in more ways than one it’s about connecting with communities. I think I'll leave it there, for now.

Sound, Language, Community and Place

    Nancy Menning and Mary Hufford both spoke to the cultural sustainability symposium in Craftsbury Common, Vermont last August about the relation between language, place, and community. Conversational narratives enact a collective commitment to the land and its inhabitants. Putting this into my frame of reference, I’d want to add that the medium of story is sound (even in so-called silent reading, a story is sounded in the mind’s ear). And sound draws beings into co-presence.
    Both Menning and Hufford are working on civic engagement projects exploring place-knowledge and land commitments. Menning is a professor of religious studies at Ithaca College in New York. Her project is located in the state’s Finger Lakes Region. She explained that she planned to engage the public with a project involving blogging, mapping, and storytelling that would explore the history of the landscape and weave personal narratives into the spirit of the place, especially as informed by the religious imagination. For Menning, the religious imagination here does not represent religious doctrine, but rather a spiritual inclination that becomes a humanities resource and includes multiple ways of conceiving of relationships among beings and the land: those of the Native Americans that inhabited the region, the revivalists in the burned-over district, Mormons, and contemporary spiritual practices of many kinds, some no doubt to be discovered in that place. At the conference, Menning referenced a book by Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, in which Tall found her bearings and made a home in the Finger Lakes Region through the interactions of her personal story with the larger, spiritual narratives of that place that were inscribed there over time. In that sense, for Menning, cultural sustainability is about imagining and building a home and feeling at home in a particular place and community. She showed intriguing pages from a website that she is building to house this project. To date I haven’t been able to find it on the Internet, and I am uncertain if it has gone live yet; but when I do find it, I will post a link here.
    Menning’s insight itself forms a part of a larger narrative about topophilia, or love of place, which becomes a cultural imaginary. The first time I encountered this concept was in 1974, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s book, Topophila. Tuan, a cultural geographer, drew on his experiences of Chinese and Euro-American love of place, and in that book he mapped the territory, so to speak, for spiritual attachments to place, spirit being broadly conceived in all its possible meanings. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is plain that topophilia figures prominently: for the “promised land,” for the land of Canaan, and indeed for God’s creation itself (not merely the land but all its creatures). Tuan shows how topophilia animates other spiritual traditions as well as secular ones. I have written about topophilia myself from time to time, particularly in terms of the way sound binds people to places and to one another. For me, the exemplary moment of topophilia occurs in an old-time string band jam session when a fiddle tune is played and either before or afterward a story is told about the tune (which often evokes a particular geographic location by name, and a reference to a story surrounding it) and the generations of fiddlers who have played it.
    Hufford’s presentation is part of her ongoing project in understanding, valuing, and utilizing local knowledge of the land and natural environment in partnering with local groups to formulate a land stewardship strategy for particular places. She did much of her research in eastern forest areas, where she has examined such local uses of the land as ginseng and mushroom hunting, fox hunting and hound training, and the health of forests in the southern Appalachian mountains. This local knowledge is manifestly not the same as the “expert” knowledge of the forest conservationists, often working for the corporations or the government, who guide land and resource policy, usually taking into account the interests of those persons and corporations engaged in extracting coal, timber, and other resources from the land and region. Often the local and expert knowledge is at odds; but inevitably the government exercises its power to regulate land use through law, sometimes at the expense of traditional, local interactions with the land and environment. It is a fraught issue, and it has a history going back, in the United States, to the days in the 19th century when the government began enacting laws restricting hunting in the name of conservation. One result was that locals who hunted game chiefly to feed their families became poachers and outlaws when hunting out of season. James Fenimore Cooper was one of the first Americans to write about this (in his Leatherstocking Tales).
    Hufford’s presentation began with Aldo Leopold’s statement (introducing his A Sand County Almanac) that we habitually view land as a commodity, whereas we should view it instead as a community. She went on to ask how do people come to know land as a community? This is a question similar to the one I have been asking in my work with Thoreau's writings, namely, how does one come to respect the natural world and enter into a relationship with it of stewardship instead of ownership? Hufford’s talk tacked between the high theory of Bakhtin, Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty, and the vernacular conversations among rural inhabitants about the land they’re intimately acquainted with, as a way of explicating a dialogical relationship between humans and the land. Hufford finds in common conversational metaphors, such as “robbing the land,” the idea that the land itself has rights of possession in the sense that its inhabitants belong to the land.
    She went on to link this idea to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic communication (something that has been important for me in my ethnographic work ever since Dennis Tedlock introduced it to me in the late 1970s), and to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “common ground” (no pun intended) in dialogue, a relationship of reciprocity. This is similar to the concept of co-presence, Erving Goffman’s formulation from the 1950s, which I’ve been updating and working with in my recent public lectures and publications—particularly in the context of sound and its ability to enact co-presence. I also see a link to my earlier work in the way sound sacralizes space, especially uncommon sound (song, chant, and shifts from speech to one or the other). Hufford points out that this “communication” also exists in the land itself, in the soil, as organisms cooperate with one another; and she suggests (along with Merleau-Ponty) that this cooperation, both in the soil and in human conversation, creates a “third party” and brings “self and other into an identity-completing relationship.”
    Hufford describes the discourse of conservation experts in policy planning as top-down and monologic, whereas the discourse of local knowledge expressed in conversation among inhabitants of the land is dialogical, invoking community through place-names and ancestors. One person told her, “I don’t know where Williams come from, but I know where their grandma come from, cause she was my grandpa’s sister. Her name was Pliney. I’ve got a hollow up there that’s named for her: Pline’s Hollow.”
    As I wrote above, this kind of thing happens when a fiddler begins or ends a performance of a fiddle tune at a jam by saying something like, “That came from Shade Slone, who brought it back from Pike County," then names the tune: "The Brushy Fork of John’s Creek.” Then  another musician adds that this place marked the last battle of the Civil War in Kentucky, and references the oral tradition that the tune commemorated the battle and the war dead. Even though the musicians already know this, it must be enacted through conversation to animate for that moment of performance the links between the tune, its name, persons, places, events, and names on the land. Without those dialogical associations, the tune is just a series of sounds; with them, the tune invokes family (some in the region are named Slone and descend from Shade [nickname for Shadrack] Slone), place, and binds all in a community of musicians to land and family in that space. Hufford links these dialogues phenomenologically to organs of perception, sensation and embodiment, the living bodies of humans and the natural world. The monological pronouncements of the corporate state deny human being to those who know the land and the natural world in that region through hands-on experience. As one remarked, “A. T. Massey [the coal mining corporation] came in here and said, ‘You don’t exist.’” But Hufford insists that not only do those who inhabit the land exist, the land solicits the inhabitants’ attention and arouses their conversations about it, the kind of participatory dialogue that characterizes grass-roots democracy.
    It’s not entirely surprising how much Hufford’s work has in common with my own, although my emphasis is in music and sound as a bridge to community and the natural world, while her bridges involve dialogue and material culture with community and place. I’ve valued and learned from her work for more than two decades. Back in the late 1980s when she was working at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, and before I knew about her research, she took me aside to ask me about mine into the Appalachian forest ecology and economy that I’d been doing in connection with the Powerhouse for God project, which I had been presenting at conferences since the late 1970s and which in 1988 I finally published as chapter 2 of the Powerhouse book. I had titled that chapter “Land and Life,” with apologies to the cultural geographer Carl Sauer, who with Yi-Fu Tuan had strongly influenced my approach to the connections between the two; another debt, my idea that “husbandry” unified the realms of farming, family, and worldview, was the partly the result of my reading Wendell Berry’s fiction and essays about his home place in Henry County, Kentucky. Probably Hufford also was aware of the research of Chuck and Nan Perdue into the same forest area in Appalachia’s northern Blue Ridge, in connection with the population removals that took place in the 1920s to form the Shenandoah National Park.
    In the early 1990s, Hufford asked me to write an entry on this work in cultural geography and human ecology in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, for a section that she was editing; and she also asked me whether the people I’d gotten to know in Appalachia had observed a decline in forest health. In truth, by the mid-1970s when I began that research, most of the Powerhouse people were no longer living off the land, and the minority who were, were farmers of a more modern sort, no longer living in the mountains. A few still hunted but, as I recall, their discourse about the good old days when they were growing up on mountain farms expressed general nostalgia, not stories of specific incidents showing forest decline. That decline had occurred fairly abruptly from about 1890-1910, when the combination of commercial timber cutting and the chestnut blight had made it no longer possible for the mountain farm economy to continue utilizing forest resources, particularly summer pasture and chestnuts for their pigs. The final blow was the Shenandoah Park removals, in which much of that population of mountain farmers were thrown off their land, by the federal government, against their will, to make room for the Park. They were resettled in modern tract homes, where they languished. My research into land and life in that chapter was chiefly historical. Hufford was interested in what she, along with forest activist John Flynn, was calling “the falling forest”: an increase in the number of trees falling to the forest floor as a result of ecosystem changes and declining forest health. I did not have much information for her.
    But if the Powerhouse people were no longer living close to the land, many in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky were. For the Old Regular Baptists of that region, whom I began getting to know in 1990 when I started teaching at Berea College, a couple of hours by car to the west, the mountains remained a resource for hunting and gathering, as well as a kind of spiritual resource. They expressed a strong topophilia for the area, saying that the land (and their singing) had a “drawing power” that caused many of them to stay, despite worsening economic conditions; and to return later in life, if they had migrated out in order to earn more money for their families. They spoke often about the ways the sounds of their singing echoed in the coal mines, and up and down the hills and hollows of the mountains. I tape recorded many of these statements about sound and the land (and the built environment), and some were published on the two CDs that I produced of Old Regular Baptist singing, for Smithsonian Folkways, in 1997 and 2003. It is unusual to include such spoken statements in the grooves of music albums; but these were a kind of testimony to sound and its meaning, and were so important to them (and so strikingly articulate) that I was compelled to add them to the music. Here, for instance, is a statement about affecting sound and the natural world, from Charles Shepherd: “One time when I was about six years old we had a meeting at a cemetery and, hearing these songs ever since I’ve been born, we was setting up in a cemetery, and I heard my daddy singing “Amazing Grace.” I never heard a more beautiful sound in my life. Seemed like the trees was just carrying that sound up and down the valleys, and it did something to my heart.”    

Cemetery, s.e. KY. Photo by Jeff Titon.
This work is licensed under a
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3.0 Unported License.

     I did speak to Hufford in the early 1990s about the Lilley Cornett Woods, which I'd learned about while visiting with the Old Regulars. This is the only old-growth, original growth forest in the state of Kentucky; and currently it is managed for sustainability by the University of Kentucky. It was set aside in the 1920s by Lilley Cornett, an eccentric and cantankerous mountain man who lived in the same part of southeastern Kentucky as the Old Regulars that I visited. Cornett stubbornly refused to sell the timber or mining rights to his land, as everyone else was doing, to the corporations who were coming in and paying good money for the privilege of damaging the mountain ecosystem. I’ve mentioned Mr. Cornett and his Woods in this blog before, saying that they deserve a separate entry; and they do. I will get to it in due course. It is not a stretch to link the Lilley Cornett Woods to our cultural sustainability symposium’s field trip, to the farm and woods of a former dairyman who had decided only the year before that dairy farming as he was practicing it was unsustainable. As the last scheduled event of the symposium, we heard him talk about this and explain his circumstances and his reasoning as we walked over what once had been his farm's cow pasture. Soon we were in the farm's woods. Now the conversation was led by a local forester who was helping the farmer manage his land and whose passion turned out to be for Thoreau. More about this soon.

Fieldwork and Applied Ethnomusicology

    One of the topics I presented for discussion in the ABET workshop was fieldwork and musical sustainability. The turn to applied ethnomusicology and advocacy for music communities grew out of the “new fieldwork” that began in the 1960s. The new fieldworkers did not think of themselves as scientific investigators only. Gradually, through repeated visits and residencies in those communities they became partners and formed friendships with those whom the old fieldworkers had regarded chiefly as informants.[1]
     In the first half of the 20th century, most ethnomusicologists (then called comparative musicologists), anthropologists and folklorists thought that modernization would inevitably doom the variety of musical expression on the planet, and the best a scholar could do was survey, collect, and preserve it in archives where it could be examined, classified, analyzed, and compared in order to shed light on origins, transmission, and the functions of music in human society. The new fieldworkers began to realize that musical expression was dynamic and more resilient than that, and that in some communities it could instead be successfully encouraged within its cultural setting—that is, it might be conserved and renewed. Later, as the conservation discourse turned to sustainability, the new fieldworkers engaged in partnerships and participatory action research within those musical communities. The goal was musical and cultural resilience in the face of—indeed, while undergoing—outward modernization.[2]
    In the workshop, Tony Seeger suggested we also discuss a third model, the ethnomusicologist doing fieldwork in his or her native musical community; and so we did. One questioner asked what were the advantages and disadvantages of doing fieldwork in one’s own musical community. This is a perennial question, with a perennial answer: the outsider brings a fresh perspective and is apt to notice things that the insider takes for granted, while the insider has better access and cultural knowledge (some of which an outsider will never quite get right). I said that the moment insiders take on the role of researchers, people in their musical community perceive them differently. They may become more guarded; they may also become more open. Besides, there are degrees of “inside” within a musical community, based on age, knowledge, ability, social and musical capital, and so forth. Although insider/outsider may be useful as a starting point, the dichotomy does not hold, and as a result fieldworkers researching music in their own communities must nonetheless negotiate their subject positions depending on the situation, the people they’re working with, the music and the knowledge associated with it, and other things.
     Academically-trained ethnomusicologists doing field research in their own musical communities inevitably take on the role, stance, and identity of researchers who have been educated in the culutral ways of the universities. They may be contrasted with the indigenous scholar, one who—even though he or she may have undergone academic training elsewhere—is perceived primarily as a member of that musical community, belonging to this family, that lineage, etc. Inevitably, the community scholar was born, raised, and will continue to live in that community, whereas the ethnomusicologist (native to the community or not) often is resident elsewhere, teaching at a university or working in a cultural organization outside the native community. Again, this dichotomy isn’t always useful, but when ethnomusicologists form partnerships with community scholars to encourage cultural and musical sustainability, the combination is more effective than either working alone.
    Many (but not all) of the Brazilian academics at the ABET conference had formed partnerships with community members and scholars in indigenous communities in the rural areas, and among the urban working-class communities. In the latter, internationally-known Brazilian ethnomusicologist Samuel Araujo has applied the liberation insights of the Brazilian radical educator Paolo Freire, who wrote that education was inevitably a political act and that State educational institutions served to perpetuate inequality and oppression. Among the former, the work of ethnomusicologist Angela Luehning caught my attention. The paper she presented at the meeting was entitled “Sustainability, Musical Heritage and Public Policy,” and was based experientially in a variety of Brazilian neighborhood soundscapes. As it was being presented, and as Ralph Waddey was translating the gist of it to me, I realized that I wanted a copy of the paper to read and study. Prof. Luehning was kind enough to send one to me (in Portuguese, of course) and I put it through Google’s translation program, for a first approximation. Busy since my return, I look forward to reading it next week. Clearly these academics, and their students, were committed to the new fieldwork.
    Although we did not discuss this in the workshop, a few of the other Brazilian ethnomusicologists had come to the conference with indigenous community members, some of whom were community scholars. I saw a very interesting presentation of ethnographic video documentaries resulting from partnerships among Brazilian ethnomusicologists and community scholars. One was a joint presentation by ethnomusicologist Marilia Stein and her field partner, Vherá Poty. In the film, Mr. Poty spoke at length about conserving his indigenous culture’s musical and ritual traditions. He is a charismatic young man, a traditionalist in his community much in the same way that Wayne Newell has been among the Passamaquoddy. Indeed, I’ve presented at conferences with Wayne. At the ABET presentation, Mr. Poty chose to sit among the audience rather than on the platform with the other presenters. When he was asked to come to the front with the others, he joked that he was an old man and needed to sit in the back! He came away from the conference refreshed, Professor Stein told me, and with a new interest--in ethnomusicology.
    The video documentary that most arrested my attention was shot and edited by a young indigenous film maker whose name I am still trying to find out. It was a vérite video of a group from his village performing an all-night musical ritual in which two lines (men and women) formed half circles and danced in a circle, the women encircling the men. The video began with a few shots of people walking in the village to establish the location, but then for what must have been fifteen minutes the video concentrated relentlessly on this ritual, in which the half circles continued to dance and sing around each other, first in an enclosed structure, and then later (near dawn) outside. The force of the repeated music and dance drew me into the experience and, like some (but not all) of the others who were watching, I was receptive and grateful for it.
    After the films were shown, a professor who taught ethnographic documentary filmmaking critiqued the films. He found fault with some of the very things I thought were innovative, particularly in the video showing the all-night music and dance ritual. He questioned whether it was necessary to show the singing and dancing continuously for so long. The indigenous filmmaker began his response by apologizing for his “small voice.” But, he said, “it is the only voice I have.” He went on to say that in fact the singing and dancing went on like that for nearly ten hours and he had showed only a small portion of it. It was what it was. A few of the ethnomusicologists in the audience commented that by concentrating continuously on it, he had conveyed the intensity of the experience. Others felt that it could have been shorter, and contextualized as documentaries often are—by narration and explanation. I was moved to ask who the audience was for this video, and to suggest that it would be unwise to impose a Western filmmaking grammar on indigenous viewpoints. In this case, the indigenous vision produced something innovative and valuable that foregrounded experiential aspects of the ritual. I mentioned Sol Tax’s experiment in giving super-8mm cameras to Navajo back in the early 1970s, with the resulting films showing long shots of sacred spaces where not much appeared to move in the visual frame. I concluded that films like these are the results of fieldwork that is committed to advocacy and applied ethnomusicology beyond mere scientific investigation, and was good to see it at the ABET conference.
    Although we did not discuss it in the workshop, it’s worth mentioning that the new fieldwork, applied ethnomusicology and advocacy has not been embraced by the entire ethnomusicological profession. Some are uneasy with the advocacy role, fearing that interference does more harm than good, and that one should not, as an ethnomusicologist, meddle in the “natural” processes of musical change.
     On the contrary, these processes are no more “natural” in music than, say, forests. Modernization is no more a natural process than clear-cutting forests. There are other reasons not to do applied ethnomusicology, of course; one can contribute as an ethnomusicologist in other ways. But to write histories of ethnomusicology and neglect or belittle applied work and to maintain that ethnomusicologists ought not to take political stands, that they ought not to advocate on behalf of the musical cultures to which they have made commitments of all sorts—time, intellect, emotion, career, and so forth—seems, to me at least, to require some thought and examination. Just as applied workers should be—and are—reflexive concerning motivation, so should the historian be. Perhaps I will pursue this in a later entry, but at this point I will continue with the other ABET workshop topics that I mentioned in my previous entry: the four principles (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship); heritage tourism and the creative economy contra sustainability; and the difficulties of sustaining unofficial music through official cultural policy.
     Additional note as of June 22, 2013: A reader has kindly supplied the name of the indigenous film maker--Marilton Maxikali--and the name of his film, Putoxop's Songs: The Parrot-Men. Further information on the indigenous group and location is in the comment attached to this post. Thank you, Jorgette Lago!

    [1]Jeff Todd Titon, “Music, the Public Interest, and the Practice of Ethnomusicology,” Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, no. 3, 1992. Special issue on music and the public interest, pp. 315-322. See also my essay “Knowing Fieldwork,” in Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley, ed., Shadows in the Field, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 25-41. Of course, this is not to say that some of the "old" fieldworkers did not practice the new fieldwork; notably there were some, like the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, who did.
    [2] Both kinds of fieldwork aid sustainability, of course; archives of scholarly data are useful to communities wanting to know about the music of their past. Wayne Newell, for example, found that the J. Walter Fewkes recordings of Passamaquoddy songs made more than 130 years ago opened a window on his indigenous group’s music-making that had been shut. Advocacy, applied ethnomusicology, and the new fieldwork offer ongoing opportunities for partnerships in sustainability efforts, ultimately social and political.

Cultural rights are not property rights

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         David Throsby’s view that music is a cultural asset cohabits with the argument that cultural heritage is intellectual property and should therefore be protected by international copyright law. Indeed, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), an agency of the United Nations, has gathered international legal experts to write that law. Propertizing cultural heritage in this way confuses cultural values with economic value, pushing heritage further into the marketplace. I have already written about this in relation to the economics of cultural policy as Throsby understands it. WIPO’s work, still on the drawing board, is potentially even more troubling than Throsby’s, because it would have the force of international law. How did we get to this place? What is the problem that propertizing traditional culture is meant to solve?

            In a word, exploitation. The instances where European and American musicians have profited enormously from copying indigenous music include Paul Simon’s album Graceland, Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” (from his Headhunters album), and the French duo Deep Forest. Simon later did help the black South African musicians whom he drew upon, but neither Hancock nor Deep Forest appear to have shared their wealth with the African pygmies whose music they copied and sampled. Indeed, when ethnomusicologist Steven Feld asked Hancock if he felt any obligation to compensate the pygmies, he replied that this kind of borrowing was normal in African and Afro-American culture: “It’s a brother thing,” he was quoted as saying.

            Such musical exploitation pales in comparison to better-known ripoffs in other areas, such as pharmaceuticals derived from indigenous medical knowledge, and textiles imprinted with native art. To cite just one example, treated at length in anthropologist Michael F. Brown’s intelligent and even-handed discussion of Who Owns Native Culture? (Harvard University Press, 2003), an Australian Aboriginal artist named Johnny Bulun Bulun, along with the head of his tribal clan, sued an Australian textile company for putting a design from one of his paintings (hanging in the Metropolotan Museum of Art, no less) on fabric without asking permission or offering compensation. The textile company’s argument was that these images were folkloric, in the public domain, and that anyone could use them—the artist, and also the textile company. In a complex Australian court decision, the textile company for the most part prevailed. To protect indigenous artists and cultural groups from such exploitation, WIPO is propertizing culture—indeed, it must be said that in these instances it had already been propertized (by the musicians, the drug companies, and the textile manufacturers). WIPO could be viewed as simply trying to protect the original owners.

            Of course, intellectual property protection is known to readers of this blog. Records and books carry copyright notices. The law does not permit me to take your song, your poem, your photograph or your short story and market it as if it were my own creation. Or as yours, for that matter, without your permission to do so. In fact, you do not need to publish or market your creation for it to be protected by copyright; US law treats your unpublished ideas as your intellectual property. Therefore, the argument runs, why not consider cultural heritage the intellectual property of cultural groups, and protect it with international copyright law?  

            Protecting cultural heritage by declaring it the intellectual property of cultural groups has implications that reach well beyond discouraging, if not preventing, commercial exploitation. Acknowledging that cultural heritage is intellectual property gives legal approval for, and provides an even greater impetus toward, thinking that heritage is a cultural asset whose primary value is economic and whose proper location is in the commodity marketplace where it may be sold, bought, and collected. I think there are better ways of approaching a solution to this problem, ways that I hinted at in the last paragraph of my second entry “Music is not a cultural asset” (March 11, 2013). Rather than helping to sustain a music worth having and a culture worth wanting, efforts to propertize culture only exacerbate the problem of exploitation, substituting one kind for another. 

             But for now, let us stay with our question: are cultural rights property rights? Should cultural heritage be subjected to international copyright law? Just as we have laws to protect private property (including property owned by corporations, NGOs, etc.) and public property (such as roads, public schools, hospitals and prisons), so we might have, or make, laws to protect heritage as if it were property. Property laws already do apply to certain kinds of tangible heritage. Historical buildings, for example. Intangible cultural heritage, which is based in living history, involves cultural know-how and ways of doing things. Clearly these are ideas and actions; they may result in performances, not always in tangible products. Intellectual property law, which operates through trademarks, patents, and by copyrighting ideas, would seem to apply. 

            Music and Cultural Rights (University of Illinois Press, 2009), edited by ethnomusicologists Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung, begins by stating that “Cultural rights refer to both proprietary and proprietary-related assertions based on cultural grounds.” Proprietary rights are property rights. The introduction, written by Weintraub, continues: “Cultural rights claims have become increasingly prominent in discourses of human rights, international law, and struggles for social justice throughout the world . . . . especially in advocating rights of indigenous peoples to political self-determination, economic development, land, and education” (p. 1).

            Weintraub questions the wisdom of treating traditional music as intellectual property belonging to a cultural group. “Intellectual property rights laws were created for Western music made for (potential) profit, with specific characteristics (namely, an original work by an author that is fixed in a tangible form of expression). These conditions are antithetical to the collective nature of traditional music” (p. 7). That is, traditional music often (though not always) does not have a known author. In some indigenous cultural groups, when the author is known, it is a bird or jaguar or some other living being, not a human. Moreover, there may not be an object such as a musical score or recording that establishes the work in a fixed form subject to copyright. Instead, traditional music usually is shaped by many co-authors who have changed the music over time, and as it is still changing in expression—that is its living nature—it cannot, must not, be fixed in one tangible form. Finally, Weintraub quotes the author of one of the essays in the book, Felicia Sandler, who wrote that WIPO’s idea of intellectual property rights differs from most indigenous people’s understanding of rights, for WIPO regards them as economic rights whereas indigenous people comprehend them as “a bundle of relationships” (8). By a bundle of relationships is meant a series of obligations that take precedence over economic value. This is a common insight from cultural anthropology.

            These are intelligent critiques, but they are also subject to counter-argument. Even if copyright law was devised to protect intellectual property rights of authors of original works, why could it not be extended in scope to protect a collectivity’s rights to its group intellectual property? After all, group ownership of property is common: we have highways, bridges, public schools, and so forth. Yet, as Lewis Hyde points out in Common As Air (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), copyright law is meant to protect ownership rights for a limited time only, after which time no one owns the property—that is, it becomes part of the public domain and anyone may copy and market it. A time limit on copyright protection for cultural heritage would solve the problem of exploitation for only so long; after that it would be open season. But without any time limit, indigenous cultural groups could conceivably sequester anything they claimed to own, in perpetuity; and they could remove from the public domain ideas, artifacts, and anything else that is currently in circulation. 

            Do the Samoans object to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa? Do Native Americans object to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology’s series that documented their culture a century ago? Do the French object to the way French history is presented in the Encyclopedia Britannica? Then remove them from sale; take them out of the public libraries; ban the books, put history and cultural anthropology out of business! Of course, the exact opposite is happening: more and more of the public domain is available on the digital commons. That is, while copyright law attempts to tighten its grip on intellectual property rights—the length of time for copyright protection has been extended from 28 years to the owner’s lifetime plus seventy years, which would be two lifetimes before intellectual property entered the public domain—the digital commons of the Internet exerts a powerful counterforce to traditional copyright law. WIPO may well be too late.

            In the next blog entry, I will take a closer look at WIPO, and at the “bundle of relationships” argument, which is the same position that I have been developing over the years, in this blog and elsewhere, when discussing gift exchanges and gift cultures such as the old-time string band community, where music is freely exchanged and relationships among musicians—among the current custodians, and between them and those who were stewards of this musical tradition in an earlier time—are critical to the experience and continuing sustainability of the music. 

Breaking Up Winter 2011

We are almost to the first day of spring. In a musical celebration of the end of winter, the Nashville Old Time String Band Association has hosted a “Breakin’ Up Winter” event for the past sixteen years, at Cedars of Lebanon State Park, near Nashville, Tennessee. (The title also refers to a well-known old-time fiddle tune, "Breakin' Up Christmas.") I’ve gone to three of these events, including the 2011 event only a few weeks ago. At Breakin' Up Winter, a group of mostly amateur musicians who love the fiddle, banjo, and guitar music played in the nineteenth and early twentieth century upper South, the so-called “old time music,” a community listening and dance music which preceded bluegrass, and which bluegrass updates and re-presents, gathers for four days at the Park, chiefly to play music together informally in small groups, or “jams.” Other stringed instruments are played in some jams, particularly the string bass and mandolin. It's an oral tradition that we've learned by ear and we know it by heart. Although some can read musical notation, it's not really a part of this tradition and even though tune books exist--I have compiled one myself--they are used for reference only. Similar jam-oriented events take place at "festivals" of old-time music in the upper South every week during the summer. Thousands of musicians attend these.

This is a participatory music, not a music designed for audiences. The musicians play with, and for, each other. In an old-time jam, some of the musicians may never have played with one another before. The music consists chiefly of “fiddle tunes” which all play together. The fiddles play the melody, and if there's more than one fiddler each usually will have their own setting and play the melody slightly differently, setting up a sound that's sometimes a bit out of phase. The banjo players (some groups prefer no more than one banjo player) play a version of the melody, somewhat simplified but also slightly contrapuntal, partly improvised in response to the fiddle melody. The guitar accompanies on the beat with bass notes and harmonizes with light, chordal strums; if a mandolin is present, the player may chord along in the background in rhythm or play the fiddler’s melody or alternate between the two. The bass usually plays on the roots and fifths of the chords that harmonize the tune, sometimes playing passing notes ("bass runs"). Unlike bluegrass, in which each instrumentalist takes turns playing “solos” (as in jazz) with the rest accompanying, in old-time the musicians continue to play the tune over and over, on a more or less equal footing (although the guitarist really does have an accompanying role—and yet the rhythmic anchor that the guitar (and if present, the bass) provides enables everyone to feel, and play, better). Jams may be as small as two people or as large as thirty, but the usual preferred size is between three and eight.

Every tune is led by one or more musicians who is capable of playing the tune well, or reasonably so. The other musicians may also have played the tune before, but their knowledge of the tune will vary from those who have never heard it, through those who have played it a few times long ago, to those who need only to be reminded of it to play it well again. But a good old-time musician plays by ear and has developed the ability to learn (or re-learn) a tune on the fly (albeit usually a simplified version of the tune). Banjo players in particular must have this ability, because each fiddler’s setting (melodic version) of a tune is apt to be a little different, and those differences make all the difference. A good banjo player is sensitive to a fiddler’s particular setting, adapts to it, and interacts melodically with it--all by ear, while catching the tune on the fly. Just as it can take many years to learn to be a good old-time fiddler, it can take years to develop the ability to play the banjo passably well in this way.

Old-time musicians seek the “musical high” which a good jam can provide, a feeling that is at once intense and satisfying, full and creative and relaxing. At events such as “Breakin’ Up Winter” most of the music takes place in informal jams, out in the Park, inside community buildings, inside cabins, and on porches, all day and much of the night. Everyone eats together in a mess hall. Also, each day the event provides a few formal jams led by experienced musicians, as well as teaching workshops in which these musicians teach repertoire by ear. Often there is a dance or two, sometimes there are performances by guests who have been invited to teach and lead jams and workshops, and occasionally, as in this event, visitors also give lectures on their involvement with old-time music, which may include stories of encounters with older musicians, documentary recordings which they have produced, and so forth.

I was invited to Breakin’ Up Winter back in 2008 to do all of the above, and again earlier this month, to lead a jam, teach a workshop, and give a lecture. My lecture took up the relation between musical sustainability and old-time music communities such as this one, which involve themselves in music that is largely participatory and operates with exchanges that are primarily gift exchanges (although there are commodity exchanges, and a minority of the music is presentational for an audience).

This is a subject that I’ve thought about for many years—the musical community which is largely participatory and operates through gift exchanges, and the social and political implications of this sharing kind of community, rather than one that is based on individual property and ownership, for the future of the human community in general. I can recall discussing it with other musicians as far back as the 1960s. I don’t want to claim originality here, but I will affirm my persistence.

Nor do I wish to suggest that the old-time musical community embodies an ideal based entirely on equal participation, gifting, and sharing. Particularly when it comes to musical instruments, many old-time musicians are conspicuous consumers. Commodity fetishism describes the fascination that many collectors have with musical instruments, which they buy, admire, collect, trade, sell, and play. A collecting impulse also extends to recordings of old-time tunes. A small number of recordings on CD and the Internet are available for sale, and a few record companies specialize in this; but it is a niche market and no one grows wealthy from it. A small number of old-time musicians supplement their income playing for dances, and for audiences, but there are very few touring groups—and when these play for audiences, they do not jam, but rather they sing songs and play an occasional instrumental piece in a virtuoso style, altering the music to please an audience that expects to be entertained. Few audiences are entertained by old-time jams; the jam is participatory. A bumper sticker reads, “Old time music: better than it sounds.” This aphorism means it is better played than heard.

It is also true that members of the old-time music community have different ideas about inclusiveness. Some are willing to play with musicians who are not as skilled as they, even though it is more enjoyable to play with those who are at about the same skill level, and even more so with musicians who are even better. They understand that once they were not so skilled and they believe it is important to share with others and bring more people into the community; some teach, as I have done for nearly thirty years, without charging for lessons. (Most teachers do charge, however. It’s not that I’m a purist; for twenty-five years I’ve taught a weekly class in old-time music at Brown which is free and open to the community, and I don’t get paid by my university or anyone else for doing so. It costs me only my time—a couple of hours each week—and I’m happy to donate it.)  Yet other old-time musicians, particularly among the most skilled, prefer to play with those of their own level, and try to avoid jams with less skilled musicians; for the better the skills of the musicians, the more complex and interesting and pleasurable is the playing experience.

And yet despite consumerism, commodification, and exclusivity in some aspects of old-time string band music, it is marked chiefly by sharing and gift exchanges, of tunes and in jams. The differences between commodity exchanges and gift exchanges are many, because gifts generally incur various obligations that commodities do not entail due to the legal contract involved in buying and owning a commodity, which makes the commodity exchange impersonal. Gift obligations include, among other things, not hoarding the gift, passing the gifts along (gifts circulate), giving back, and also not selling the gift and changing it to a commodity. Gifts engender reciprocal relationships, obligations among giver and receiver, that commodity exchanges do not. Givers and receivers are responsible to one another, and to the gift—and this forms the basis for community relationships of mutuality and trust. Participatory music like old-time music involves a great deal of gifting—passing along tunes, playing with others, learning from others, sharing, and coming together for events such as Breakin’ Up Winter to do all of this. Of course, it can be and more usually is done with musical friends in their homes and yours, nearby. This is the kind of community music-making, amateur music for the love of it, that is most sustainable. It is not limited to old-time string band music, needless to say; many kinds of amateur music are participatory and the majority of exchanges are gifts, beginning with music in the family and neighborhood.

It is easy to romanticize old-time music, and to imagine that the jam at its center is an ancient practice reflecting communal relationships in a preindustrial world. Evidence suggests that this is not so, and that the jam is a product of the folk music revival of the mid-20th century, and that it arose both in bluegrass and old-time music more or less simultaneously. To be sure, old-time musicians got together to play earlier than this, in families and communities; yet the jam as a social institution does not seem more than about sixty years old.

Finally, I want to emphasize once more that among some members of the old-time music revival, the ways in which the old-time jam models social relationships is a topic of conversation that has been going on for some decades. I remember conversations about this that I had with my musician friend Cameron Nickels, going back to the late 1960s when we were both in graduate school at the University of Minnesota. Cameron went on to a career as a professor of English at James Madison University. His research specialty was American humor, and he wrote a couple of books about it—one on New England humor, and a recent book on humor in the Civil War. (Yes, there was a good deal of it.) He retired a few years ago, and from time to time we still discuss this subject, usually vie email. And yet it has not been much written about. I addressed it directly in the Introduction to my book, Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (University Press of Kentucky, 2001). Tom Turino, like me an old-time string band musician, has written about it in his book. Music and Social Life (University of Chicago Press, 2008). I view it as a topic, theme, and piece of the puzzle in working out issues involving music and sustainability, and an example of sustainability thinking before it was given the name “sustainability.”