Toward a Sound Ecology

 
My new book, Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays, was published a few days ago by Indiana University Press. It is available in paperback, or clothbound, or as an eBook, either from the Press here, or from major booksellers, or from your favorite independent bookshop. The book is my selection of twelve previously published essays, plus a new essay published here for the first time, “Sustainability and a Sound Ecology.” 

This is the table of contents, with the year that the essay was written in parenthesis following the title:

Introduction

Section I: Field Work: Folklore and Ethnomusicology
1. The Life Story (1978)
2. Ethnomusicology as the Study of People Making Music (1988)
3. Text (1995)
4. Knowing Fieldwork (1993)
5. Applied Ethnomusicology: A Descriptive and Historical Account (2015)

Section II: Cultural and Musical Sustainability
6. The Real Thing (1999)
7. Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint (2009)
8. Sustainability, Resilience and Adaptive Management for Applied Ethnomusicology (2015)

Section III: Toward a Sound Ecology
9. A Sound Commons for All Living Creatures (2012)
10. The Nature of Ecomusicology (2013)
11. Thoreau’s Ear (2014)
12. The Sound of Climate Change (2014)
13. Sustainability and a Sound Ecology (2018)

In the previously unpublished “Sustainability and a Sound Ecology” I ask what happens in those moments when we are in the world and know the world chiefly through sounds? What if we gave pride of place to sound worlds rather than object worlds, social group worlds, or text worlds? To put it yet another way, what happens in those moments when we feel our sensations, our being, and knowing centered in sounds? If we privilege how we feel and what we come to know in those re-oriented moments, how might we re-form our communities, economies, and ecologies and how would these differ from those as humans conceive of them at present? Is it possible by means of a thought experiment based in a sound connection to erect a just alternative to the alienated communities, neoliberal political economies, and behaviorist ecologies that drive humans toward injustice, and the planet toward extinction? To do so is to put us on a path of sound ecological rationality, which I believe will lead every being to a more sustainable world. This sound ecological rationality contrasts with and stands in opposition to the now-dominant instrumental economic rationality.

I’m grateful to the editors of the series it appeared in, Music, Nature, Place (they are Denise Von Glahn and Sabine Feisst), to the editors at the Press who kept after me to make this collection (they are Raina Polivka, Janice Frisch, and Gary Dunham), to the external reviewers who told the Press that it was worth publishing (I learned only recently that they were Kate Galloway and David McDonald), and to the production staff at the Press for producing a very attractive book.

Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays

Indiana University Press has announced my new book, Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays, to be published in August, 2020. The book gathers together a dozen of my published articles from 1980-2015, along with a new essay that's a summary of my ongoing sound ecology project. The table of contents:

I. Field Work
     1. The Life Story (1980)
     2.  Ethnomusicology as the Study of People Making Music (1989)
     3.  Text (1995)
     4.  Knowing Fieldwork (1994)
     5.  Applied Ethnomusicology: A Descriptive and Historical Account (1995)

II. Cultural and Musical Sustainability
     6. "The Real Thing": Tourism, Authenticity and Pilgrimage among the Old Regular Baptists at the 1997 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (1999)
     7. Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint (2009)
     8. Sustainability, Resileience and Adaptive Management for Applied Ethnomusicology (2015)

III. Toward a Sound Ecology
     9. A Sound Commons for All Living Creatures (2012)
    10. The Nature of Ecomusicology (2013)
    11. Thoreau's Ear (2015)
    12. The Sound of Climate Change (2016)
    13. Toward a Sound Ecology (new)

I've discussed aspects of much of this writing in previous blog entries. Here instead it might be of some interest to recap a few of the steps that led to this book. This could be helpful to other scholars thinking of publishing with a university press.

Book publishers are always looking to find good manuscripts to publish, and university presses, which publish scholarly and scientific work, are no exception. But whereas the commercial (trade) presses usually deal with agents that try to sell their authors' books to the highest bidder, academics who publish with university presses very seldom have agents while the presses usually don't give advances on royalties. Younger scholars--that is, those who have not yet published a book or very many essays in scholarly journals--are best advised, when they have book manuscripts in mind, to seek out university presses known to publish heavily in the area of their specialty. For example, in American folk and popular music, these are the presses associated with the universities of Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, Indiana, Wesleyan, Oxford, and California. 

Editors from these and other presses regularly attend the annual conferences of scholarly societies such as the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the American Folklore Society, the American Musicological Society, and so on. Of course, other academic disciplines have their own societies and conferences: for instance, the American Anthropological Association, the American Psychological Association, the Modern Language Association, and many others. Younger scholars are well advised to travel to these conferences and seek these editors out at the book exhibits and make appointments with them to meet in person at the conference and discuss the book they have in mind. Most often, it's a book that's based on their PhD dissertation. The editors will show varying degrees of interest, usually writing down the details and, if they think the topic fits within the scope of the books they're currently bringing out, asking the scholar to contact them when ready with a book proposal detailing the book's projected contents, and saying something about the market that the author envisions--chiefly for libraries and for students taking courses, or with some appeal to a general audience as well. 

The young scholar then submits the proposal to the press that seems to have the best "fit," the one that is most desirable, and/or with the editor who's shown the most enthusiasm for the book project. The press conducts an in-house review of the proposal, and they may also send it to an external reader. If the proposal generates enthusiasm, the press will offer the scholar an advance contract (though usually without a monetary advance). The contract usually states that the author will submit the manuscript to this press (and no other) when it's ready, and that the press will then give a formal review to the mansucript and let the author know their decision. Such a contract doesn't guarantee the author very much except for a review, but it does provide psychological help to know that a press is interested. 

After the young scholar submits the manuscript, it gets an in-house review and, assuming it's positive, the press then sends it to external readers, usually two of them, for their assessment. This external review is often conducted "blind" -- that is, the reviewer isn't told who is the author, although often it's easy to figure it out if the reviewer so chooses. If the external reviews are negative, the press tells the author that they won't go ahead with publication. If they're positive, they usually come with some suggestions for revision, in which case the press asks the author to respond to the reviews--that is, to write a response--and then to make the revisions that they think will be helpful. Often there's some negotiation here between the author and the press over how much revision is needed or wanted. Regardless whether the reviews are negative or positive, the names of the reviewers are withheld from the authors. With positive reviews, suggestions, and negotiations, the author revises the manuscript and re-submits. Often the revised manuscript is returned to the external reviewers for their approval, but not always. The press then usually decides to go ahead with publication, and the author prepares the manuscript, obtaining necessary permissions, making certain that it conforms to the "style" that the press follows (footnote form, bibliography, citations, references, etc.), and then returns it to the press. Some time later, the press puts it into production and gives it to a copyeditor who may make suggestions for improving the writing (usually for clarity) and will make sure it conforms to the press "style." It's then returned to the author who reviews the copyedits and makes further revisions before sending it back to the press. The press then gives it over to a printer who makes page proofs. These are then sent back to the author who checks the whole manuscript for accuracy. At this stage only very small changes in the form of correction are permitted. Returned once more to the press after the proofs are checked, the printer is given the go-ahead and the book takes its place in line at the printer's, to be published some months later. 

In its entirety this is a time-consuming process. My first book, for example, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, grew out of my dissertation. I completed the dissertation in 1971 and sent it to the University of Illinois Press. They returned it with an advance contract and some suggestions for revision made by an in-house editor. Because I was also teaching full-time, it took me quite a while to turn it into the book I wanted. In January of 1974 I sent the press my revised manuscript, and they sent it to two external readers. After six months passed, the press sent me back the reports, which were positive. I made some revisions and returned the manuscript at the end of 1974, and they issued me a formal contract. I had no more to do but review the copyedits and page proofs. For reasons having to do with the press' production schedule, and the fact that they wanted to put the book into a new series they were launching (Music in American Life) but not as the first book in the series, publication was delayed until 1977. When it fell out of print about fifteen years later, the University of North Carolina Press asked me if I'd write a new Afterword for a second edition. I agreed, and they published the second edition in 1995.

After an author has published a book or several articles and begins to get a reputation as someone who's knowledgeable in an academic field, it is easier to find a university press. After an author has become an acknowledged expert, press editors may be the ones to initiate contact with authors, asking them if they are working on a book manuscript that would be suitable for them. For example, in 1977 I'd won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a list of fellowship recipients was made public along with the research subjects the scholars proposed to work on. A month later I received letters from editors at the University of Texas Press and the University of North Carolina Press asking me what I was working on and to keep them in mind when it came time to publish. Nevertheless, even with established scholars the same review process takes place, involving a proposal, review, manuscript submission, further review, etc. It took me another ten years to complete the book for which I'd held that fellowship. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church was published by the University of Texas Press in 1988. It fell out of print about ten years later, but it was published in a second edition, with a new Afterword, in 2018, by the University of Tennessee Press.

In 2013 an acquisitions editor at Indiana University Press inquired about my work in ecomusicology. Possibly my name had been recommended to her by one of the editors of a new series they were starting, called Music, Nature, Place. It happened in 2012 I'd given a paper at an ecomusicology conference, and in 2013 just before she contacted me I'd  given a keynote address on ecomusicology to the Brazilian Society for Ethnomusicology. A year earlier I'd also published my appeal for a sound commons for all living creatures. I forwarded them to this editor who read them and said that if I were working on a book in this area, she'd like to be able to consider the manuscript for IU Press.

Toward a Sound Ecology was solicited in this way: in 2015 the same IU Press acquisitions editor asked me if I'd have lunch with her and the director of the press, at a folklore conference. At the lunch they asked me whether I'd made any progress on my sound ecology project and I replied yes, but that completion was likely still many years away. I told them I'd been asked to step out of retirement to occupy an endowed chair as a visiting professor, and that one of my duties was to give a series of four public lectures. I intended to explore four aspects of that project, one in each lecture: sound presence, sound community, sound economy, and sound ecology. The project, I said, was still expanding and I kept getting new ideas. They then asked me then whether I'd be willing to propose a different book to them for now, one consisting mainly of my already-published essays on topics that were still current, including a few of my most recent ones on aspects of the sound ecology synthesis that I was seeking, adding one or two new essays to the group. I said that I'd be happy to do so, and that is how this forthcoming book was born. Its third section, "Toward a Sound Ecology," gathers some of my essays related to that topic, and ends with a new one that summarizes my thinking at the time of its completion last summer. 

Surveillance, Fieldwork, and Sustainability

Ninostoko interprets a song he sang, as recorded by Frances Densmore, 1916

Secret recordings made in the workplace, surveillance videos made in public spaces, smartphone recordings that capture police brutality—these have been in the news for the past few years and have come to be accepted by the news media, if not the general public or the law. National Public Radio (NPR)’s All Things Considered broadcast a news story about them on August 28th, highlighting workplace recordings (those made in the White House, and others made by a federal employee whose boss, Mel Watt, was interested in sexual favors in exchange for a pay raise). NPR was interested in whether these surreptitious recordings were legal, even when this was the only way the complainant could provide what seemed like incontrovertible evidence. Undercover workplace recordings are now commonplace, according to NPR. But the laws covering them are complex. In most states they are legal; in eleven states, however, consent of the recorded is required. NPR was interested in how this atmosphere is changing the atmosphere of the workplace, making everyone far more careful about what they say to each other. The result is an increasingly toxic workplace culture. On the 29th, during a related discussion of the news media itself, a NPR interviewee pondered whether the public thought internet searches were reliable, and whether their technology was sustainable.

     Listening to this, it occurred to me that somewhere, when a recording is played back as evidence in a court of law, the defendant will reply, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying ears?” For recordings are easily edited, just as pictures are easily photoshopped. Reality itself is challenged; but that is not news in a post-truth society that challenges the rule of law. But laws are one thing, and justice is another. Thinking about this in the last couple of days reminded me about the debate in the 1970s among those of us who did and do fieldwork, over whether, transcribing the contents of the interviews we recorded, to transcribe every word or only what we thought were the important parts, to be edited into a more coherent conversation or narrative than the original had been. 

     There was no debate over secret recordings, then. We chose not to make them. The people we recorded in the field, still called informants (they would later be called field partners or consultants), had the right to know they were being recorded, and the right to know what would happen to those recordings—would they be deposited in an archive, might they be published at a later date, what control would they have over what they had said after they said it—because the words they spoke, or the songs they sang, were their property, not the property of those of us who were recording them, even if we possessed the tapes. For those reasons, secret recordings were unethical. Also, if an informant objected to being recorded, we didn’t record. We recognized that setting up a recorder would make the events un-natural to some degree; but then interviews were un-natural in the first place, while the very presence of the fieldworker, whether recording or not, altered the events being documented. We felt that the more honest and trustworthy the fieldworker, the more accurate the documentation would be. Ethics was aligned with truth. There was no "speak my truth" then; there was only one truth, the truth.  

     In the early 1980s I learned about Lawrence Gellert, a folksong collector in the 1930s who was said to have made secret recordings of direct racial and social protest songs sung by African Americans. (Although other contemporaries had recorded protest songs, the lyrics were coded as metaphors, not direct.) During the Depression era he published two books featuring these songs, but the accuracy of his work was challenged because he refused to name the singers, the places where he recorded them, and so forth. He was accused of making the lyrics up. After many years researching his life and examining his papers and his recordings, his biographer, Bruce Conforth, concluded that he did fabricate lyrics; nonetheless, his collection of blues and religious songs is valuable even if the songs do not differ much from the songs recorded by other collectors in the 1930s. Yet a reviewer, Jerrold Hirsch, contends that Conforth is wrong and that Gellert’s collection was genuine. 

     When challenged, Gellert said he could not reveal names, dates and places because he had gone undercover to make the recordings. To my generation of scholars, he stood as an outlier, an example of someone whose work was compromised by a failure to provide proper documentary annotation, by his secrecy in making the recordings, and by his supposed fabrications in presenting the songs to the public. Hirsch, on the other hand, in a review coincidentally published today (August 30), takes a much more positive view of Gellert and calls for revisiting his work. “Gellert . . .  looked not to a folklore from the past, but to a folklore of the present, a folklore-in-the-making, as a contemporary creation contributing to the understanding of American class conflict, emerging class consciousness, and realization of liberal/Marxist radical ideals on the American left,” Hirsch writes in the Journal of Folklore Research, reviewing Conforth’s 2013 biography of Gellert.

     Gellert's recordings were published in 1983. They were not remarkably different from recordings of African American songs other collectors had recorded during the 1930s. In the early 1990s the subject arose yet again, this time in a presentation before the Society for Ethnomusicology, in a paper that I heard when it was delivered there. Its author, Jay Pillay, had gone undercover in apartheid South Africa, recording conversations that revealed the prejudicial use of music in education for non-White youth. The project, and the paper, was annotated insofar as possible, and the documentation was not doubted; in fact, the paper won the Seeger Prize for the best student paper presented at the annual conference, and as a result it was published in Ethnomusicology, the Society’s official scholarly journal. And yet although this project continues to have admirers, it's thus far remained an outlier, not a signal of a new direction or a model for future research.

     These examples present contemporary fieldworkers with a dilemma that goes beyond the current discussion of de-colonizing ethnomusicology and other fieldwork-based disciplines. A pervasive atmosphere of surveillance works against the possibility of trust in any field research situation. Smartphones and smart homes may be too smart for us. Apple’s facial recognition program for the iPhone X, coupled with the possibility of constant smartphone GPS tracking our whereabouts, to send it—where?—along with reports that so-called smart speakers like Alexa are recording us in our homes, is enough to make anyone refuse to cooperate with anyone who proposes a documentation project, without, perhaps, a legal contract. And, I would argue, a legal contract is a far less trustworthy instrument than the trust that arises from rapport that is achieved over time, much time, that fieldworkers and field partners spend together when working toward the same agreed upon goals. Of course, fieldwork changed in the last century, becoming more self-conscious, more tentative, and more reflexive. But today, recording has become a victim of its own success. What resilience strategies will fieldworkers adopt to maintain the integrity of ethnographic research and writing in the face of the challenges and opportunities posed by a surveillance society?

Experiential Ethnomusicology (Phenomenology and Ethnomusicology, 2)

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

Ninian Smart (1927-2001)

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

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

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

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

Alan Jabbour (1942-2017), Sustainability Champion

    Alan Jabbour, who died on Friday the 13th of this month, was a leader in the cultural sustainability movement before the term sustainability came into fashion. Based in Washington, DC, from 1969-1999 he led three important federal organizations involved with musical and cultural conservation. In addition to his main work as an organization leader and administrator, he was a musician and a scholar. Besides, he was a loyal colleague to hundreds of public folklorists, and dozens of ethnomusicologists, who were active from the 1960s until now.
     As a graduate student in the 1960s at Duke, Jabbour was exposed to traditional fiddle music and eventually met Henry Reed, an octagenarian fiddler from Virginia whose music represented a 19th-century upland South fiddle repertory and style of playing. For Jabbour, who had been trained as a classical violinist from childhood, Reed became a mentor and his music a revelation, a window on an elegant era prior to commercial recordings, an era when amateur musicians played in their family circles and supplied music for community gatherings. Jabbour’s field recordings of Henry Reed’s fiddling may be enjoyed at https://www.loc.gov/collections/henry-reed-fiddle-tunes/about-this-collection/.
    After a brief period as an English professor at UCLA, Jabbour left to work in Washington as head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (1969-74). In 1974 he moved to the National Endowment for the Arts, leading their newly formed Folk-Jazz-Ethnic division. In 1976, he returned to the Library of Congress to direct the newly-formed American Folklife Center (AFC), now incorporating the Archive of Folk Song. In these positions, he initiated, coordinated, and administered various projects to conserve traditional cultures, their music and folklore. Notably, the AFC undertook field documentation surveys of folklore in various regions of the US, from the late 1970s through the end of the 20th century. These constitute an important snapshot of folklife in the last 25 years of the last century. These were professionally done, by folklife specialists trained in interviewing, recording, photographing, and so on. They are appropriately preserved in the AFC’s archives, while some of the highlights are available today on the AFC website. Decades hence, I believe, they will be recognized as a contribution as important as the FSA photographs and other cultural documentation undertaken at the Roosevelt Administration’s initiative during the late 1930s.
     None of this would have happened without Alan’s skillful leadership from the AFC, where the decisions were made concerning which regions of the US would benefit from surveys, where the negotiations were undertaken with the Congressional representatives from those regions, and with the local community leaders; where the teams of folklorists were assembled and instructed—always accompanied by some of the folklife specialists from the AFC—and where the materials collected were taken, inventoried, where the exhibits were designed, and where all the documentation eventually was housed. The results of these were exhibited in their regions and are housed permanently in the Archives of Folk Culture at the AFC, which incorporates the older Archive of American Folksong.
    Under Jabbour’s direction, the Center also sponsored conferences, where practitioners at the cutting edge of cultural conservation gathered to exchange ideas and information. At the same time, the Archive of Folk Song grew to become by far the leading repository of field-recorded traditional music from regional and ethnic groups throughout the US, at the same time encouraging the publication of the best of this music. Much of their work was documented in the Center’s Newsletter, which is now available on line.  As an administrator, he did not have as much time to work on his own projects that he would have, had he continued as a professor at UCLA. But he directed an organization that left an unparalleled cultural sustainability legacy, and many young folklorists who worked on AFC projects acknowledge their debt to Jabbour and the permanent staff of folklife spcialists who worked for him at the Library of Congress. He retired in 1999 for the next seventeen years pursued a career both as an independent folklorist and consultant, and also as a fiddler, appearing in concerts and teaching workshops at old-time music camps, always championing the music of his mentor, Henry Reed.
    In person, Alan—I will call him Alan from now on, because we knew each other—was a very tall, gentle man with a noticeably deep, echoing bass voice, a southern drawl acquired in his native Florida, and a courtly manner. He directed with a light hand, understanding that people did their best work when they could add their own ideas to the mix. He was very supportive of those whose work he admired, and quick to appreciate it. He bent over backwards to help those in need—so much so that when he stood up, he even appeared to be bending backwards.

Alan Jabbour with Gene Reed at Henry Reed's grave

    My own relationship with the American Folklife Center goes back to the 1960s, when I began depositing my field recordings of blues and African American preaching in the Archive of American Folksong. After the Archive became something more encompassing, a Center that initiated projects rather than chiefly acting as a repository for recordings and related material, I borrowed field equipment from them to make high quality recordings, contributed essays to several of their publications, worked as a consultant with Alan and some of the other folklife specialists on various projects, and continued to deposit field recordings. Most of my original field recordings are now in their archives, except for those I made in Kentucky. My Kentucky recordings are in the Sound Archives in the Special Collections of the Hutchins Library, at Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky.  
     Alan and I met, also, as fellow old-time string band musicians. I’ve written here, before, about Breakin’ Up Winter and the special musical community surrounding the old-time string band revival; and I’ve written elsewhere about the special bond that can occur among musicians who, on account of achieving musical rapport, feel as if they’ve come to know one another more deeply than otherwise. We also became interested in each other’s scholarship on the subject—something that was an old interest of Alan’s and that gradually became an interest of my own. One of Alan's most important observations was that the main reason for the differences between the fiddle styles of Yankee New England and the upland South were the syncopated rhythms that the southern fiddlers had incorporated into their bowing technique, specifically the way they placed a strong accent on the back-beat, or offbeat, or upbeat, as it is variously called. African American fiddlers had originated it, he thought, and by the Civil War white fiddlers were also doing it.
    After Alan retired, I saw him less often, but he still came to American Folklore Society (AFS) conferences, and I can recall playing with him at the jam session when AFS was in Quebec City, and again at Breakin’ Up Winter only a couple of years ago. He also had begun to speak about the early phase of the old-time string band revival, in which he’d played such an important role, from the perspective of his own experiences with Reed and with the Hollow Rock String Band.
    I’m sure Alan left several unfinished scholarly projects at his death, as well as recordings that he made with his musical partner, Ken Perlman, and others. There may even be recordings of his fiddling along with the incomparable banjo of Blanton Owen, a feature of the AFS conferences in the 1970s. Probably he wouldn’t have wanted some of these to appear in the form he left them, but others—for example, papers that he presented publicly—will, I hope, be gathered in a collection and published by a university press or, perhaps, by the AFC that he loved and served so well for nearly 25 years.

Team Fieldwork

I've neglected this blog while completing work on the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology and preparing and delivering a keynote address for the Ecomusicologies 2014 conference that took place in Asheville, North Carolina a few weeks ago. That was an extremely stimulating conference and I plan to say why in due course. Much of my reading lately has been in the area of sound communication among animals, following up on the ideas about sound signaling presence and co-presence. That field is dominated today by a cluster of assumptions coming from game theory, natural selection, and bio-economics. I will be posting some things about that in the near future.

Last week there was a lively discussion on the public folklore list concerning team fieldwork and the use of still photography. Betsy Peterson, head of the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress, asked for information on those topics from those folklorists who undertook fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s. Shortly after the AFC was founded, in 1976, it sent teams of folklife specialists into particular geographical areas to survey the folklore in the region and, usually, turn the documentation into an exhibit which toured in that region and then was deposited in archives there or in the Library of Congress or both. Usually the teams were led by employees of the AFC, but they also utilized local-based folklorists who already knew something about the region's folklife. Although teams of two or three researchers were not new in folklore, these AFC teams were larger and in some ways resembled the teams of anthropologists and sociologists who assessed the social lives of people in a given geographical area. My response to Betsy was this:
    
     "Speaking from my North American perspective—I don’t know how this all went down in Europe or elsewhere back in the day, but when I studied folklore in the 1960s, what I encountered was “collecting” or survey work, rather than “fieldwork” in the longitudinal, Malinowskian ethnographic sense, or in the sense of some of the collaborative long-term team fieldwork projects that anthropologists were doing. Folklorists went into the field to survey and find and “collect” folklore, either individually or collectively (no pun intended). If memory serves, the language of the American Folklife Center’s early team projects was also expressed in terms of field surveys, which is what I understood them to have been. Documentation was part of the process of collecting. Earlier examples of collaboration in folklore field collecting include Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the late 1930s collecting epic songs together in Yugoslavia, and the collaborative field trips undertaken by Alan Lomax with Zora Neale Hurston and also with John Work, not to mention those that Alan went on with his father John. At some point in the 1960s/1970s the ethnographic turn in folklore seems to have replaced the idea of collecting (surveying). Now fieldwork was no longer regarded primarily as collecting folklore, but as doing ethnographies of expressive culture, in an anthropological sense, longer term and in one place. My work on the Powerhouse projects, Henry Glassie’s work in Ballymenone—there are several examples from the 1970s. My work on the Powerhouse project was collaborative, by the way. In anthropology, examples of larger teams doing anthropological fieldwork include the long-term projects undertaken by professors at Harvard and the U. of Chicago and their graduate students, after World War II. This isn’t to say there were no folklorists in the 1960s doing longitudinal work with individuals or in particular places, nor that they didn’t conceive of it as fieldwork; but it wasn’t the norm.
    When I studied ethnomusicology beginning in 1966 I encountered the term fieldwork, and I also encountered it the same year in an introductory anthropology course. Of course, the idea we were taught way back then was that a fieldworker was, ideally, a scientific observer, fly on the wall, investigative reporter, even when fieldwork was done by a group of fieldworkers; the notion that fieldwork involved collaboration among fieldworkers and “informants” (or what we’d call nowadays field partners, consultants, teachers, co-subjects, etc. as discussed recently on this listserv) was being advanced back then only by a few of the more radical action anthropologists.
     My own fieldwork in the 1960s I think of more as visiting than fieldwork, something I’ve actually written about here and there, the idea of visiting and friendship, collaborating with blues musicians, learning music from them, helping them in their careers by getting them gigs, recording contracts, etc. and mostly hanging out with them, not just learning about music but about a way of being in the world. There was a group of blues musicians in Minneapolis, Lazy Bill Lucas, JoJo Williams, Mojo Buford, Sonny Boy Rogers, kind of a floating group that congregated at Bill’s apartment on Lake Street, where we ate Bill’s fried chicken, drank Fox Deluxe beer, played music, and “shot the shit” (talked, as it was called back then) about life and love and music, made plans, and so forth. In the 1970s most of my fieldwork on the Powerhouse project was collaborative, with Ken George, who was a grad student in folklore at Chapel Hill at the time. (He’s since gone on to become a well-known anthropologist; taught at Harvard, Oregon, and Wisconsin, and is now teaching in Australia.) But even before then I wasn’t alone in that kind of fieldwork; when I taught at IU for a summer, Sandy Rikoon and I went together to a few Pentecostal and Baptist churches, where we documented the services, interviewed the evangelists, and so on. Sandy would remember that.
     Re visual documentation, again, this was something that was part of the ethnographer’s toolkit as I learned in studying ethnomusicology and anthropology back in the 1960s. I don’t recall it being a part of folklore studies, but certainly there were folklorists back then who were doing it intensively and well—Bruce Jackson and John Cohen spring immediately to mind. My own introduction to photography came from my father, who had me taking pictures and working in a darkroom as a young teenager; and after devouring _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ in high school, I decided I wanted to do what Agee and Evans did, which meant among other things making documentary photos. My dad had brought back a couple of 35mm cameras from World War II, a Leica and a Balda; he gave me the Balda to use. Interestingly, until he died I never saw the WWII photos he made in France as part of the American liberating army; he was one of those who never talked about the war, but he did save the photos and I have them now. In the 1960s I shot some 8mm movies of my blues musician friends and tried to synch them up with reel tape recordings I made at the same time, but I could never keep them in good synch and gave up. How I wish I’d had enough money or a grant to rent Super-8 synch sound equipment to do that back then. When I went with Bill and his friends to perform at the Ann Arbor Blues Festivals in 1969 and 1970, I made 5” reel tape recordings with a Sony TC-800B (called, at the time, the poor person’s Uher) portable recorder and shot still photos, this time using my dad’s Leica which by then he’d given to me. In the mid-1970s I got a $1500 grant from the NEA Folk Arts division (back then it had the words jazz and ethnic in its name also) for fieldwork with Rev. C. L. Franklin and with the grant money I promptly bought a videotape recorder, a combination of a reel video tape machine that could fit on a large backpack frame, along with an outboard video camera. It was called a video “portapak” and shot grainy black-and-white video on 1/2” reels, and I used it to make videos in the Powerhouse project as well as the Franklin project. I also took it along when Sandy Rikoon and I visited those churches in Indiana nearly 40 years ago."

     Last April I showed one of those old videos from 1977 at the conference celebrating Rev. C. L. Franklin's legacy, more than 35 years after I shot it, and nearly 30 years after Rev. Franklin's death. It turns out that the seven videos I shot of his preaching--all complete sermons, in 1977 and 1978--with that technically challenged portapak, are the only visual documentation made of his preaching; yet he was widely acknowledged as the finest African American preacher of his generation: as a preacher, of course. Martin Luther King, Jr. was his contemporary, and of course King's sermons were magnificent political orations. But Franklin was regarded as the finer preacher.

Applied Ethnomusicology and the University: A Fraught Relation

    In the previous entry I said I’d return to the reasons why the false dichotomy between applied and academic ethnomusicology persists in the academic world itself. In the last paragraph there, I summarized four reasons, all of which I characterized as institutional. Not too long ago, Anthony Seeger wrote about “lost lineages” in ethnomusicology, pointing out that those academics who have constructed their histories of the discipline have neglected several people who might be considered applied ethnomusicologists.[1] These included Alan Lomax, and also Tony’s own grandfather, Charles Seeger, whose later theoretical contributions are part of those histories, but whose earlier work on behalf of music and social justice has been overlooked. Like me, Seeger thinks the reasons for this are primarily institutional and bound up with the professionalization of ethnomusicology as a discipline. He points out, also, that contemporary academics tend to pick and choose their own ancestors, with a view to finding a lineage that leads to their own way of thinking about their profession. He asks the question, Who is an ethnomusicologist? In what follows I would like to pick up some of the threads of his essay in order to account for the continuing confusions over applied ethnomusicology within the academy, noting again that those confusions are embedded in and result from ethnomusicology’s disciplinary culture and the academy’s orientation itself. As an aside, I note another reason why academics neglected applied ethnomusicology for so long: the suspicion, among the generation that founded the Society for Ethnomusicology in the 1950s, of those who would use the arts for political purposes, or as propaganda. Fresh in their minds were examples from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Bloc. But I will leave that point for a later publication.
    Let me return to Seeger’s question, Who is an ethnomusicologist? Ask most people outside the academy and they’d answer, A what? Some journalists do use the term popularly to refer to people who write about music, particularly world music. Academics get upset when media-types use the term so loosely. (See the update at the end of this entry.) Ask a professor of ethnomusicology at a college or university and the considered answer likely will be this: an ethnomusicologist is someone with graduate professional training in ethnomusicology; that is, someone who has absorbed its subject and methodologies; someone who understands its history, its scope, the questions that are properly asked of people making music, past and present; someone who knows the kinds of answers that are credible and those that are not; and someone who does scholarly research in ethnomusicology. The ethnomusicologist probably teaches at a college or university, or aspires to do so; and the career of an ethnomusicologist almost always includes publication as well as research. A US ethnomusicologist also belongs to the Society for Ethnomusicology, the discipline’s professional association. I myself qualify on the basis of all those criteria, but Alan Lomax, who practiced applied ethnomusicology, and who published scholarly research, did not. He never had graduate training in ethnomusicology and did not fully understand it as a professional discipline. His understanding remained original and idiosyncratic. In the 1940s, after he had been in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress for several years, with extensive experience in folk music collecting, in operating an archival repository, and in what we would now call public ethnomusicology, he did attempt to study with George Herzog, the leading ethnomusicologist in the US at that time.[2] Herzog, teaching then at Columbia University in New York, would not take him on as a student, though, and what Lomax learned of ethnomusicology he learned through acquaintance with the subject more or less on his own, as well as with some folklorists and ethnomusicologists who were willing at a later date to work with him as a colleague. (I was one of those.)[3]
    Lomax’s difficulties derived from an old division within fields like anthropology, folklore, and going back even further, natural history. Back in the day—way back in the day—people working in these fields were sorted out into traveling correspondents and those theorists whose work was more systematic and synthetic. Correspondents were collectors who sent specimens to the theorists who stayed put (for the most part) and worked on classification, speculating and building systems. Based on comparative analysis these theorists attempted to answer questions about origin, diffusion, development and the larger scheme of things. In the early days of comparative musicology (predecessor to ethnomusicology), when collecting, musical transcription, description and comparative analysis comprised the discipline, the distinction was made between what was called field work (the collecting work of traveling correspondents) and desk work or lab work (the analytical work of the theorists). This distinction was still current about 1950 when Curt Sachs described the field of comparative musicology thusly in his book, The Wellsprings of Music.[4] A few years later the Society for Ethnomusicology formed, adopting ethnomusicology as the new name for the discipline, reflecting a new American emphasis on the cultural study of music; but if you look in the Society’s early newsletters you’ll see “correspondence from the field” as well as analytical and interpretative essays. Of course, some of the notable theorists also did fieldwork; and based on anthropological models it wasn’t long before graduate training in ethnomusicology expanded in the US in earnest. Professional ethnomusicologists might rely on others' fieldwork but also spent much time doing their own. Travelers, correspondents, amateurs, and mere collectors were regarded now as unprofessional. Professional ethnomusicologists were those who had graduate training inside the academic world; the others were relegated to a second class status at best.
    Although this explains the academic vs. non-academic, professional vs. amateur divide, it doesn’t do justice to the reasons for it. In fact, amateur research and scholarship have long been valuable and valued, especially in fields such as ornithology and astronomy. But in the last century as anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology sought to establish and solidify their footing as relatively new disciplines within academic institutions where specialization, professionalism, and the appearance of scientific procedures lent prestige, it became important for them to distance themselves from the amateurs who operated on the outside. (This was, and remains, particularly difficult for folklorists, as the general public has its own idea of what folklore is and who folklorists are. Ethnomusicology had, at least, the advantage of unfamiliarity and more syllables.) Also, as Anthony Seeger pointed out in his “lost lineages” essay, academic institutions are engaged in, among other things, replicating themselves. Their “products” are not merely graduates, research and the dissemination of knowledge, but also professionally trained graduate students, who will in turn become professors and administrators inside the academy. And their professorial work is judged based on their teaching and the quality of their research, chiefly in print publication and by peer review. Applied projects accomplished by academics are much fewer in number, and difficult to endorse by the same scholarly criteria, especially when aimed at the general public.
    Although I knew this was so after fifteen years of teaching at Tufts, it was when I came to Brown to direct a PhD program in ethnomusicology that it became fully impressed on me. In one of my early meetings with the dean of Brown’s graduate school, I argued for the expansion of our ethnomusicology doctoral program, saying that our graduates would go on to careers not only in college teaching and research, but also as archivists and research scholars in museums and libraries, and as applied ethnomusicologists both inside and outside the university world. The dean countered by saying that the latter two goals were not unworthy, but that because Brown was a top-tier school she would offer graduate fellowships only to students who were likely to end up teaching at peer universities, for as I well knew, that was how we made our reputation for excellence, and not on the basis of how many librarians or community musical activists we turned out. That we did manage to “turn out” archivists and community activists and a fair number of applied ethnomusicologists (most of whom have remained in the academic world) in the 27 years that I led the program occurred despite the institutional pressures for self-replication, and because students were attracted to those ways of doing ethnomusicology after they arrived with their fellowships and decided that they wanted to do applied work, if not immediately, then eventually.
    A final reason for the persistence of the mistaken dichotomy of academic vs. applied ethnomusicology has to do with the isolation of universities from public life in the US. This separation has a history in the private institutions, particularly those in my section of the US (New England) with a reputation for elitism. Public institutions such as land-grant universities ought to have much more connection with the public sphere, but apparently they do not. Indeed, state legislatures have systematically cut their budgets, and relations between public universities and state governments are fraught, while federal funding of research also seems on a downward spiral. Universities' Internet front-pages are forever advertising the scientific research they have accomplished for the public good, but town-gown relations are perennially at a low ebb. If there were a strong cadre of public intellectuals in the US, or if academics took more of a role in public discourse, or if there were more intellectual public discourse—the level of discussion on the media talk shows discourages it, while the news media themselves do not permit it, instead offering up only one-way news stories and so-called expert opinion—perhaps things would be different. Although a few journals, such as the New York Review of Books, do carry on an intellectual public discourse at a high level, their audience is mostly confined to other academics. As a result that discourse, mainly critical, doesn’t influence public opinion.  The popular stereotype of the intellectual in the US is of an egghead unfit for anything but the classroom: “Those who can’t do, teach.” Academic institutions don’t as a rule supply our presidents or federal or state representatives, though international relations units within them do supply diplomats and occasional advisers. Our representatives move from government to the corporate/legal world and back far more than to and from academia. The usual preparation for government is law school and a legal or business career, not graduate school or university teaching. Such institutional academic isolation makes it all the more difficult for academics to conceive of applied work, and for non-academics even to imagine that professors might engage in it.
    Powerful currents within the academic establishment and outside of it are aligned to perpetuate the error of opposing applied to academic ethnomusicology. Yet there are some signs of change. SEM has various interest groups, or sections; the aforementioned Applied Ethnomusicology Section happens to have more members than any other, signaling the tremendous interest in this ethnomusicological subfield. Those within the Section who are employed in the university world are already doing, or will be doing, applied work; those who are graduate students would like to do it, but if they enter academia they may have to wait until tenure before they undertake it to any large extent. Working against that, the proportion of tenured and tenure-track positions at colleges and universities has been shrinking for at least a few decades, as academic institutions hire an increasing proportion of adjunct professors in lower-paying jobs with fewer benefits and without job security. Given the state of the academic job market at present, which tends to mirror the economy at large, some of those graduate students will choose, or be forced to choose, employment outside the academy, where they are more likely to begin by putting their ethnomusicological skills and knowledge to practical use. It’s clear to me that applied ethnomusicology is a growth field, but growth within the academy will depend on whether a sufficient number of professors turn to applied work, and whether they are willing to put applied ethnomusicology into the curriculum in a meaningful way.

     [1]. Anthony Seeger, "Lost Lineages and Neglected Peers: Ethnomusicologists Outside Academia." Ethnomusicology, Vol. 50, no. 2 (2006), pp. 214-235.
     [2]. Lomax's letters while he was employed at the Library of Congress say more about his encounter with Herzog. As I read them, Lomax didn't think he needed to take the course Herzog considered a prerequisite to the one Lomax did want to enroll in. Herzog wouldn't budge from the requirement, and Lomax came out of the meeting with the impression that Herzog was a "neurotic" little fellow. Indeed, Herzog had a reputation for being difficult. See Ronald Cohen, ed., Alan Lomax, Assistant-in-Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).
     [3] My acquaintance with Lomax began in the early 1970s when I wrote to him requesting copies of his then unpublished Cantometrics training tapes. In exchange for letting me hear them, he asked me to test their effectiveness with students in my ethnomusicology classes at Tufts, which I did over a period of a few years.
     [4]. Curt Sachs, The Wellsprings of Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955).

Update, March 28, 2014: On this evening's NPR "The World" broadcast, PRI host Marco Werman introduced the show's daily world music track by saying he would play an "altiplano" selection and then apologized for "going all ethnomusicology on you." I couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the popular/academic divide.

Applied vs. Academic Ethnomusicology: A Persistent Error

    Why do people continue to believe, mistakenly and with harmful consequences, that applied ethnomusicology stands in oppostion to academic ethnomusicology? I wrote about this in passing, in a 2011 blog entry. Here, as I prepare my part of the Introduction to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, which I'm co-editing with Svanibor Pettan, I return to explain the reasons. The mistake arises out of a confusion of what applied ethnomusicology is, with where the person doing it is employed. Think of a grid with two fields and two categories. The fields are places of employment: either (1) inside colleges and universities, or (2) outside them. The categories: (1) ethnomusicological reseach and scholarship, and (2) ethnomusicological research and scholarship put to practical use--i.e., applied ethnomusicology. None of these is mutually exclusive. Ethnomusicologists do scholarly research whether employed in the academic world or not. Ethnomusicologists do applied work whether employed inside the academy or outside of it. In fact, considered as a worldwide phenomenon, more academics than non-academics are engaged in applied ethnomusicology.  
    One recent example of the persistence of this false dichotomy: At the 2013 conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), a meeting of “program heads” was convened for the first time, bringing together representative directors of university doctoral programs, faculty from colleges offering only undergraduate degrees, and heads of institutions doing applied ethnomusicology in the public interest, such as Smithsonian Folkways Records, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. For those who may not be aware of their work in this area, Smithsonian Folkways promotes the music of traditional musicians in minority groups and cultures, while the Rock and Roll museum has a large educational music outreach program. The convener of this event asked me (as a co-chair of the Applied Ethnomusicology Section of SEM) to suggest names of people who would represent “public sector ethnomusicology”—that is, ethnomusicology practiced by those employed by taxpayer dollars in government-funded institutions at the federal and state level. Not only did such a charge overlook the NGOs doing applied ethnomusicology, but it was based on the same mistaken bifurcation of academic vs. applied, while locating applied ethnomusicology as something done outside of the academic world, in the public sector. And at the program heads meeting, I noted that most of the "heads" unthinkingly adopted the same bifurcated view.
    As an aside, the term “public sector ethnomusicology” hearkens back to the 1980s when public folklore was called “public sector folklore.” This was a misnomer then, as it is now; and it arose out of the same mistaken dichotomy between academic and public in the folklore world, which dichotomy was valiantly opposed by the then-president of the American Folklore Society (AFS), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in her 1988 address to the AFS, later published in the Society’s Journal. Must ethnomusicology repeat folklore’s agonies 25 years later?
    Why, then, does this division persist in the minds of ethnomusicologists? I don't think it's only a matter of confusion, and that once the facts are on the table, the error will disappear. The reasons for it are deeper, and the explanation is cultural--in the cultures of our own institutions. Unless those cultures change, the division will persist. One way to pursue it is to ask why so many ethnomusicologists employed outside the academic world are content to equate applied with non-academic. In the early 2000s, on the initiative of its Applied Ethnomusicology Section, SEM regularly sponsored panels on alternative careers where practitioners employed outside academia spoke of how they did applied ethnomusicology in their work. Among these were public folklorists specializing in music. The Section also invited people from the corporate and government worlds to speak to SEM. They included, for example, field recordists who had produced a significant body of world music recordings, such as David Lewiston with the old Nonesuch Explorer series. I think it’s a stretch to call what he did applied ethnomusicology, but it surely was a different kind of career from university teaching and research, and it did involve making field recordings of the kinds of music that academic ethnomusicologists recorded and studied. The difference was that these were aimed at the general public. Ethnomusicologists employed outside academia welcomed these presentations not only because they provided models but also as opportunities to learn how to navigate outside the academy in the corporate and government worlds. They also were attractive to younger ethnomusicologists, including graduate students, concerned about whether they would ever become tenured academics. In addition, some ethnomusicologists employed outside the academy have mixed feelings about the academic world, viewing it as privileged and elitist, thinking it ought to be more involved in the world outside the ivory tower, and regarding it as mired in useless theorizing and arcane scholarship which has little or no practical use. Ethnomusicology graduate students stronger in music performance than in musical and cultural theory may become resentful when they are unable to compete with talented scholars. Applied ethnomusicology outside of the academic world then becomes a more attractive alternative. In short, ethnomusicologists outside the academic world persist in equating applied ethnomusicology with non-academic employment because they look at their cohort and find that to be true about themselves. They overlook the fact that academics also do applied ethnomusicology.
    Another way to ask why the false dichotomy between applied and academic persists is to shift the question to the academy and ask why many US professors do not place a high value on applied work. Of course some academics, myself included, do place a high value on it; but frankly within the academy we are a minority, particularly in the US. Besides, we do research and publish scholarship as well. Here, the problem seems to be institutional, tied to the nature of the research university and the ways academic disciplines operate in them. Research and scholarship are more prestigious and result in more rewards than applied work, or teaching for that matter. To get tenure and remain in the university world today, young professors, no matter how good in the classroom, need to earn a strong reputation by publishing their research. The ways academic institutions must reproduce themselves by training graduate students in their own image is another reason. The need for a relatively young field such as ethnomusicology to establish its credentials among the academic disciplines, and to institutionalize itself within the structure of colleges and universities, is a third reason. Finally, whereas outside the US professors often are involved in politics and the public sphere, inside the US there is no such tradition, despite the cries from the conservative right that professors lean left. Taken together, these cultural aspects of US academic institutions make applied ethnomusicology difficult to practice while employed in them, particularly prior to tenure. I will have more to say about them in the next blog entry.

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.