Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- end of 2024

An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since my last update, on Dec. 16, 2023, which writing projects have progressed, which have been published, and which have seemingly stagnated? On my academia.edu page and also in my twitter (now X) @jefftoddtiton and bluesky @jefftoddtiton.bsky.social profiles I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What research and writing are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. Here is the list of publications and works in progress:

1. “Ecojustice and Ontological Turns: a Response to Marshall and DeAngeli.” Written in 2021, I drew on some earlier writing ("The Nature of Ecomusicology," 2013) on relationality and reciprocity by proposing that the concept of ecojustice includes social justice by extending respect to all living beings, not just humans. This is congruent with the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Robin Kimmerer and Zoe Todd in past dozen years or so as well even though they don’t use that term. It was published in Ecomusicology Review, Vol. 8 (2020-2021).

2. "Folklife, Heritage, and the Environment: A Critique of Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Settler Ecology," was published in January of 2024 in the Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 137, No. 543, pp. 61-84. The article was derived from my 2021 oral presentation on folklife, heritage and environment for an American Folklore Society Fellows-sponsored webinar. 

Coal loadout, near Hazard, Kentucky, 1996. Photo by Jeff Titon.

 3. In January of 2023 Ross Cole invited me to contribute a chapter on “Observing and Collecting” for The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music. I completed a draft in November. It took another year for all the authors to complete their draft chapters. Currently the book manuscript is under the usual external review process. Depending on the suggestions from reviewers, I will make revisions and return the chapter to Cole. I imagine publication will occur sometime in 2026.

4. In January of 2024, Portia Maultsby invited me to contribute a chapter on blues to the 3rd edition of the textbook, African American Music: An Introduction, edited by Maultsby and Cheryl Keyes. Before accepting the invitation I requested and received permission from the publisher Cengage, to write what might have seemed to be something similar (in subject) to my chapter on North America/Black America in the ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music, which took on blues as a case study. I was careful to write it with a much different emphasis, completed the chapter shortly before Christmas and sent it to the book's editors.

5. Late in the spring of 2024 a Cengage editor wrote to ask for a 7th edition of the introductory ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music. This book has been in print continuously since 1984, with the 6th edition having been published in 2015 and the shorter version of the 6th edition in 2017. I've been a contributor (3 chapters) and general editor ever since Dave McAllester, Jim Koetting, Mark Slobin, David Reck, and I wrote the first edition in the late 1970s. I polled the current co-authors to see whether they would be willing to revise their chapters for a new edition. I decided, additionally, that given my age it would be wise to become a co-editor for this edition, so I asked Tim Cooley (one of the co-authors) if he would be willing to share the task of editing, and he kindly said yes, he would. The upshot was that we needed two new co-authors to replace two from the previous edition, while five others were willing and able to continue. By November we had the two new co-authors in place, and in December the contract was completed. Cengage is eager to bring out the new edition and wants us to finish the revisions by the end of 2025. We will do our best, but I've warned Cengage that this would be an unusually quick manuscript completion time, given that the past revisions have taken from two to three years, and given that we will have two fully new chapters to replace two of the current ones. 

6. In the fall of 2024 I accepted an invitation from Sabine Feisst to write a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology, which in her words "brings together (ethno)musicologists, music theorists, and sound scholars to critically examine the interrelationships between music, sound, and human and more-than-human environments. It aims to consolidate existing knowledge about ecomusicology and significantly broaden the scope of ecocritical studies of music. The handbook also seeks to decenter the Western music canon and expand the geographical scope of ecocritical music studies." This is a re-start of a stalled project that was in the works about eight years ago when I'd also accepted an invitation to write. I said that I would most likely write about ecomusicology and a sound ecology, with some reference to the idea of a sound commons--ideas that I'd been developing for more than a decade.

Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- end of 2021

Scholar interrupted at his writing, by Gerrit Dou, c. 1635

    It’s been more than a year since I took stock of the research and writing projects I’ve been working on. Which of them has been completed, which are published, which are still in progress, and what are the new ones? On my academia.edu page I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. It’s a question that academics often ask of each other when getting together for conversation at conferences. For the past couple of years, though, most conferences have been virtual; and the times when that question could be asked and answered diminished as conferences became far more focused on presenting information in organized sessions, with little time for ordinary conversation.
    Last October, then, I mentioned a few essays that were completed but not yet published, and a few more that remained incomplete.
    1. “Ethical Considerations for Ethnomusicologists in the Midst of Environmental Crisis.” In August, 2020 I’d finished this essay for a book in progress edited by Jonathan Stock and Beverley Diamond called the Routledge Companion to Ethics in Ethnomusicology, to be published by Routledge. Then on October 23, 2020 I presented a brief portion of the chapter, virtually, at a roundtable at the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology. On September 23, 2021 I received an email from Jonathan Stock saying that the editors were still waiting for a few more authors who agreed to write essays for the book to complete them—more than a year after the deadline—and that those of us who, like me, had finished up could expect to hear from the editors during the weeks ahead if they had any questions or concerns. That was the last I heard. It is not unusual for authors to go a few months beyond deadline in projects such as this one, but to go more than a year beyond it is uncommon. It is also a problem, in the sense that the other authors’ contributions become dated the longer publication is delayed. This is an issue that Aaron Allen and I also faced as editors of our book, Sounds, Musics, Ecologies. We have thirteen contributors, and each of them met the deadline. More on that book later in this post.
    2. “Ethnography in the Study of Congregational Music.” This was a chapter on doing ethnographic fieldwork, with special attention to prospects and problems with ethnography in religious music-cultures. I’d been asked to write it in 2015; completed it in 2016; but no doubt some contributors went well beyond the deadline. I did not see my copyedited chapter until September of 2020. Having waited four years to get to this point, I was given 7 days to attend to any questions from the copyeditor, and make any alterations. This is typical of scholarly book publishing and the way publishers treat contributors to edited books: wait, wait, wait, wait, then hurry up. At any rate, the book (Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives) was published in February, 2021. It has not yet been reviewed in any scholarly journals, to my knowledge.  
    3. “A Sound Economy.” This essay was an expansion of one of the four topics of my “sound ecology” project. It was written in 2017 as a chapter for a book entitled Transforming Ethnomusicology, edited by Beverley Diamond and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco. The book contains essays based on many of the presentations from the 2015 “Transforming Ethnomusicology” conference in Limerick, Ireland, including mine. Oxford University Press published this book at last in two volumes, in March of 2021. It has not yet been reviewed in any scholarly journals, to my knowledge. If ethnomusicology was being transformed in 2015 to a more politically engaged scholarship, signaled by this conference, it was even more radically transformed and re-oriented in 2019-2020 by a series of anti-colonialist, anti-racist upheavals in the membership of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
    4. “An Ecological Approach to Folklife Studies, Expressive Culture, and Environment.” This article was published in September, 2021 by the University of Illinois Press in Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, edited by John McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Touhy.
    5. “Earth Song: Music and the Environment.” This short essay, written for an Alexander Street Press curriculum accompanying albums featuring music and environment, was completed in 2019 and remains in production at the Press, as far as I know.
    6. A “response” chapter based on my presentation for an online conference at Dartmouth College, entitled “The Power of Song: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe,” which took place in December, 2020. This was changed by the book’s editor to an introductory essay for a section of the book on musical icons. I finished up the chapter last spring and revised it a little in response to the book editor’s suggestions. As far as I know, the book manuscript is now with the publisher.
    7. “Eco-trope or Eco-tripe? Music Ecology Today.” I completed this chapter earlier this year. It’s for the book edited by Aaron Allen and myself, Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, under contract with Oxford University Press. We have all the revised chapters from our contributors and, after receiving various other things from them such as cleared permissions, illustrations, contracts, and so forth, we are about to send the entire manuscript to Oxford University Press for their  external review process.

    All of those writings were either in progress or completed and waiting for publication at the end of October, 2020. Three were published; the four remaining are completed and awaiting publication. Since October 2020 I’ve also taken on some new projects, some lecturing, and some writing:
    8. “Public Folklore, Heritage, and Environmental Sustainability” was a lecture that I gave for the American Folklore Society on March 10, 2021 at the invitation of the Society Fellows. It was part of a webinar with a follow-up “salon” that I led, with the welcome assistance of Rory Turner and Mary Hufford. About six weeks ago the Society Fellows asked me to turn it into an article for a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, and I agreed. In my lecture I spoke about experiential knowledge mediated by cultural tradition, and how this can become folklife, or cultural heritage. I went on to discuss the difficulty of accounting for the kind of cultural heritage that rests in local, experiential knowledge about the environment, in the various policy documents that guide international planning for wise and sustainable uses of environmental resources, such as the 2005 UN Millennium Assessment Report on Ecosystems and Human Well-being and its more recent manifestation in the 2018 UN Regional Assessment for the Americas report from the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES for short. I asked what are the consequences of thinking of folklife and the environment as natural capital, providing ecosystem services that include cultural heritage, whose financial worth must be measured? Should public folklorists and other heritage practitioners endorse and work within this predominant contemporary policy paradigm, one that considers the environment to consist primarily of economic assets, with measurable market values that enter into cost-benefit analyses during resource allocation planning and decision-making? Or, to reprise an old theme in this blog, do we have built into the assumptions and mechanisms of these assessments a confusion of economic value with cultural values?
    9. “The Place of Music in the Social World: Whose Music? Whose Social World?” This was a public lecture I was invited to give on September 29 to a group of ethnomusicologists in Europe, for a lecture series on ethnomusicology that was based in Geneva, Switzerland. Although I would have loved to travel to Geneva on their invitation, the August return of COVID-19 in the form of the delta variant made this impossible and so I delivered the lecture virtually. I spoke about my sound ecology project and my proposal to consider the place of sound in the social world of all living beings.
    10. “Adaptations: Confronting Climate Change Amidst COVID-19.” The City University of New York held a week-long conference early in October 2021, on “Responses to Music in Climate Change.” I was asked to give a brief presentation on a roundtable with other scholars in ecomusicology: Aaron Allen, Denise Von Glahn, and Holly Watkins among them. I spoke for about ten minutes about the effects of COVID-19 and the perceptions of climate change among two marginalized religious groups that I’ve visited in and written about for many decades, the independent Baptist congregation in Virginia’s northern Blue Ridge, and the Old Regular Baptists of southeastern Kentucky. I was the only panelist whose presentation was based on ethnographic fieldwork, and yet most of it was fieldwork conducted by telephone on account of COVID-19 and the inadvisability of travel. I already knew about the Blue Ridge group’s ideas concerning climate change, because when I last visited them, in 2016, the subject arose and we discussed it. In essence this group of evangelical fundamentalists agrees that the climate emergency is real and that human beings are the cause of global warming, but they don’t believe that God will let His people or the Earth perish. I wrote about this in the Afterword to the 2nd edition of Powerhouse for God, published in 2018. But to prepare for the presentation I had to find out about how COVID-19 was affecting both groups, and how the Old Regular Baptists I knew were responding to climate change, via phone calls. Being there in person would have been much better, but even so I felt that because I’d known the people I spoke with for many years, that telephone fieldwork in this case was an acceptable option. Still, I wished for in-person visits and look forward to seeing them again when it becomes possible.
    11. A panel discussion in Music4ClimateJustice stream to accompany the COP-26 conference on the climate emergency, in Glasgow, Scotland, early in November, 2021. Warren Senders asked me and two other ecomusicologists, Jennifer Post and Mike Silvers, to talk about our work in ecomusicology and climate change for about an hour as part of an AV stream broadcast to the delegates at COP-26. I chose to talk about sonication, or bumblebee pollination of flowers in the nightshade family, such as those of tomatoes, and blueberries; and the damage that global warming is doing to bumblebees. For those who don’t know, these flowers hold their pollen inside their closed-up anthers, making it inaccessible except to pollinators like bumblebees who can pry them apart. In this case the bumblebee vibrates its wings and body, making its characteristic buzzing sound; and this buzz pollination vibration opens up the anther when the bee lies atop it, whereupon the bee is able to bathe itself in the pollen.
    12. “The Sound Commons and Applied Ecomusicologies.” This is an article co-authored by Aaron Allen, Taylor Leapaldt, Mark Pedelty, and myself, for a book in musicology edited by Chris Dromey and to be published by Routledge. This article has already been in progress for a few years. In it, I start off by explaining my idea of the sound commons and its application to applied ecomusicology, at least in theory; then Mark and Taylor discuss one case-study application of the sound commons, and Aaron Allen discusses another. Aaron has been spearheading this joint effort; I’ve just been doing my part when asked. I completed my section of the article in 2019, and the others followed; we revised in 2020 and sent the manuscript to Chris, who returned it with suggested revisions last spring. We responded to those and revised yet again, and the last I heard, Aaron was collating the changes as of last July with the intent of returning the article to Chris once more.
    13. “Ecojustice and Ontological Turns: a Response to Marshall and DeAngeli.” This was part of an E-seminar that the Ecomusicology Review has been conducting in the fall of 2021 within the ecomusicology Google Group. Kimberly Marshall and Emma DeAngeli wrote an essay to which Sebastian Hochmeyer responded, whereupon they wrote a rejoinder. Mark Pedelty followed with a second response. Aaron Allen asked me if I too would respond, and so I wrote a brief response, starting with my reaction to a disagreement between Marshall and DeAngeli on one hand, and Hachmeyer on the other, over the relevance of the so-called ontological turn in anthropology to the project of social justice. Rather than take sides, I proposed that ecojustice would resolve the disagreement by including social justice in the larger framework of relationality and by extending reciprocity and respect to all living beings, not just humans. This is congruent with the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Robin Kimmerer and Zoe Todd in past dozen years or so as well even though they don’t use that term. Aaron intends for all these to be published in the Ecomusicology Review, though I’m not sure when. I expect that Marshall and DeAngeli will reply to Mark and to me before it all sees the light of publication.

Folk Knowledge and Environmental Sustainability: AFS Webinar March 10

Upcoming on March 10, 2021, six folklore/folklife specialists will be presenting briefly in a Webinar for the American Folklore Society, followed by open discussion. The topic of the Webinar is "Folklife, Heritage and the Public Sphere." It is free and open to all, but attendees must register by going to the AFS website. I was asked to speak on public folklore, heritage, and environmental sustainability. I've written a draft of my ten-minute presentation, which looks like it will be the last of the six:

“Public Folklore, Heritage, and Environmental Sustainability”

I begin with a story about folklife, heritage, the environment, and traditional, local ecological knowledge. This is the kind of heritage that is expressed in everyday occupational life. Although there’s a tourist product involved, my story is about scientific versus folk knowledges. I will ask you to bear my story in mind as I reference the 2005 UN Millennium Assessment Report on Ecosystems and Human Well-being and its more recent manifestation in the 2018 UN Regional Assessment for the Americas report from the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). These collaborative, science-informed documents are major international efforts intended to guide policy and decision-makers towards wise and sustainable use of environmental resources, including cultural resources. I will end with a few discussion prompts for you about my folklife story and how it aligns and does not align with the UN and IPBES policy recommendations. 

         First, the story. In 1979 I bought a summer house on an island off the coast of Maine. In retirement I live here year round. The island where I live contains a working waterfront that is central to the state's lobster fishing industry which today is worth nearly half a billion dollars. More lobster is landed on this island than any other port on the east coast, quite an accomplishment for an island of less than three thousand people. You have all tasted lobster I hope; it is one of the great delights of this world. Lobster fishing on the Maine coast has been integral to the folklife of its inhabitants since the 1840s. The lobster fishery is a classic example of a commons. Until the 1930s it was an unregulated commons; anyone could set their baited traps in the waters near the shore and haul them up hand over hand with a pulley, using a traditional locally built skiff called a peapod on account of its shape. By the end of the 19^th century lobstering was Maine’s most valuable fishery. In the early 20th century the industry grew larger. Live and canned lobster was exported out of state, while boats became motorized, the trap ropes were hauled up with power winches, and productivity increased exponentially to meet the demand. But without a good understanding of how lobsters reproduce, the lobster population went through boom and bust cycles in the 20^th century until conservation measures were introduced. Some of these were science-informed state regulations such as bans on fishing during certain times of the year. This is still the most frequent conservation measure for fisheries, even though it is a blunt instrument. Only this past summer the state of Massachusetts initiated a so-called “pause” in lobster fishing, despite the likelihood that the population decline was not because of overfishing but the result of lobsters migrating northward on account of the warming ocean. Other conservation measures have been introduced by the fishermen and women themselves, such as limitations on the number of boats permitted in a given area; and the catch, release, and v-notching of egg-bearing females. Taken together these measures smoothed the up-and-down population cycles somewhat but did not eliminate them.

In the early 1990s, when the lobster population was in steep decline, the Maine state fish and wildlife scientists diagnosed the cause as overfishing and proposed to the legislature a severe moratorium on lobster fishing. A local lobsterman and citizen scientist, Ted Ames, was skeptical. A moratorium over a period of years might keep the fishery afloat but it surely would sink the fishermen. Like most of the people on the island he was convinced that the lobster population was down because scallop draggers were wreaking havoc with the ocean bottoms where the female lobsters laid their eggs. Ames knew lobsters had favorite spawning grounds but he didn’t know just where they were, so he interviewed the elder island fishermen and in their oral histories he found out where the spawning grounds most likely were to be. So Ames and the local representative to the state legislature proposed an alternative: that instead of imposing a blanket moratorium they prohibit all fishing in a few designated areas. The legislature agreed to give it a try, the lobster population rebounded, and Ted Ames received a MacArthur Genius Grant. With the money he started a lobster research institute.

         Next I discuss the 2005 UN Millennium Assessment Report on Ecosystems and Human Well-being and its more recent manifestation in the 2018 UN Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. These assessments and recommendations impose an economic calculus upon human well-being and the environment. Their framework is economic rationality, which thinks of the environment as a natural resource for human beings; that is, as natural capital. Natural capital provides ecosystem services including materials for food, clothing, shelter, fuel, manufacturing, and recreation. These ecosystem services are quantifiable and valued in market dollars. However, in somewhat of an afterthought, these international, intergovernmental experts acknowledged that ecosystems provide human beings with qualitative cultural services. Some of these so-called cultural services are education, beauty and inspiration; physical and mental health; and what they term “identity support“ through sense of place, purpose, and the sacred. Also among the cultural services that ecosystems provide are Indigenous, traditional and local knowledges. This is one place where folklife culture fits, as for example in the knowledge that the old salts from the island provided about the lobster spawning beds. The IPBES report admits that the value of cultural services is often difficult to quantify, measure, and enter into an economic calculus of cost-benefit equations for policy and decision-making, especially when conflicts arise among stakeholder populations having different worldviews. The IPBES punts here, and I quote:

 

While attempts at monetization of ecosystem services may lead to some insights on the values of nature, broader considerations related to spirituality, cultural identity or social cohesion are not easily characterized in this value system, making them too often underrepresented in decision making and in scientific assessments at subregional and regional levels… (Chap. 2, p. 88). Thus a multiplicity of valuation methodologies will be needed, as well as methods for combining the results in ways that do not selectively favor one worldview over [an]other. Such methodologies and strategies for combining results are not yet fully developed.… (Chap. 1, p. 24).

 

The pecuniary value of the old salts’ ecological knowledge is calculable in terms of the dollar equivalent of the catch; but there are cultural aspects of lobstering that are incalculable. My late friend Hap Collins spoke of taking pleasure in the beauty of fishing when you're out in your lobster boat on the ocean alongshore at dawn, the ocean fog is clearing off, the air is warming and the water is calm, you have a cup of coffee in your hands and you're approaching the area where your traps are and you anticipate your catch of the day. I know something of what Hap meant because I went fishing with him and I experienced it for myself. The MA and IPBES reports acknowledge the incalculable value of what we would call an affecting presence, yet they think of it as another aspect of natural capital for the benefit of human beings; and don’t quite know how to factor in its importance. Does it make any sense to speak of an economy of contemplation?

Finally, some prompts. Consider my lobster fishing story in light of the UN and IPBES assessments and recommendations. What are the consequences for public folklorists of thinking of folklife and the environment as natural capital, providing ecosystem services whose pecuniary worth can be measured? Was it a given that the government would agree to give Ted Ames’ proposal a try? Would a different state legislature have sided with the state fish and wildlife scientists, laughing off Ames’ oral history project and the old salts’ superstitions? What are the advantages and disadvantages of thinking of the environment as natural capital that delivers to humans ecosystem services, including cultural services? Should public folklorists concerned with heritage endorse and work within this predominant contemporary policy paradigm that considers the environment to consist primarily of economic assets with measurable market values that enter into cost-benefit analyses during resource allocation planning and decision-making? More generally, how dependent is human well-being on economic success beyond a level of basic comfort? Should the well-being of other living creatures be considered? And is it folly to ignore that thinking of the environment as natural capital is what got us into our current environmental emergency—global warming, extinctions, pandemics—in the first place? Is it wise to think that having failed spectacularly in trying to control nature, the solution is for us to try to control nature more? Are other frames more desirable (e.g., deep ecology; rewilding; commons; environmental justice; etc.) and if so to what ends? You may recall the proverbial expression that the world does not owe you a living. Does it still make sense to think about rights and obligations relationally and interdependently: if the ecosystem owes us, what do we owe the ecosystem?

 

Craft Heritage and the Sustainable Marketplace

Last month the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage began an online marketplace for “authentic craftwork created by artisans representing communities from recent Festival programs: Armenia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil, along with other countries around the globe, with more to come in the future.” Most of the crafts are traditional and reflect something of a community-of-origin aesthetic. A father-and-son duo from Brazil, to take but one example, “share [with whoever will buy them] hand-painted and woodblock prints that are traditionally used as covers for cordels, or epic poems,” according to the Center’s press release. The woodblock prints feature stylized natural objects such as birds and stars. But instead of being used as cordel covers, they are framed and for sale to anyone who would like to display them in their homes. The financial arrangement is intended to benefit the artists, less the costs of marketing and sales. It appears that some of the traditional uses for these crafts also continue, while others are endangered. In addition to benefiting the artists, these sales are intended to help sustain the craft traditions themselves. The buyers are like tourists at the Festival, who may purchase what they like, not only for display but possibly also as an investment that could appreciate in value, the way some folk art has done over the decades.

In the past here and elsewhere I’ve written critically about tourism and the heritage marketplace, wondering about the differences between the community aesthetic that produced such crafts and the tourist aesthetic that purchases them. I also worried about the effect of the tourist marketplace on the motives of the artisans and on the traditions. Folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett pointed out in the early days of heritage tourism that marking someone or something as cultural heritage added value to the person or product. I wrote about the dangers of confusing values with value: that is, confusing the cultural values of a community craft tradition with the pecuniary value of an art object in the heritage economy. I was concerned about the emphasis on exemplary artisans, in those instances when the object or skill was something functional  that nearly everyone in the community was expected to be able to accomplish. I recalled conversations from my time serving on grant-awarding panels for the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts, where passing on traditions within communities was favored over anything that smacked of commercialism. And yet what is to happen with craftwork that has outlived its usefulness within the community? Should it become extinct, or perhaps be kept alive as part of a diversity of cultural expression, for possible future usefulness?

Lobster fishing in a peapod, Maine, early 20th century.

In this connection I think now of the fifteen-foot, highly maneuverable rowboats that were in use for lobstering along the rocky coast of Maine, peapods as they were called on account of their shape. They were rowed from a standing position. Seaworthy craft, well-fashioned and graceful, they arose in the 19th century but nearly became extinct by World War II as lobster boats became motorized and traps attached to ropes were hauled up with power winches instead of by hand. A gradual increase in interest among tourists and newcomers and a repurposing of them primarily for recreation has insured their revival. No doubt heritage adds to their appeal; and besides, it is not as if peapods were not bought and sold in the marketplace when they functioned as lobster boats.

In the first half of the century a man living on the Maine coast might learn a number of craft skills with which to make a living. I knew one such, Hap Collins (d. 1990), who had learned how to mill shingles, how to fish for lobster, how to build rowboats, how to twitch logs out of the woods with work horses, how to build chimneys out of fieldstone or brick, and how to play the fiddle. In his old age he earned part of his living making paintings and model boats and selling them to tourists. I think of Hap and how he would embrace the online marketplace for his goods without a second thought. 

ABET workshop wrap: when unofficial music gains official endorsement

    I promised to write about the other two topics raised at my ABET workshop: heritage and the so-called creative economy in the service of sustaining music; and the difficulties of enacting official cultural policies designed to sustain unofficial music. I’ve treated the first topic extensively over the past five years here, and while the second topic isn’t as prominent in this space, I wrote about it in my essay “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint.” The citation for that essay may be found in my prior blog entry, “Managing for Musical and Cultural Resilence.”
    It was not clear to me whether the creative economy argument gained traction in Brazil, but heritage (partimonia) is alive and well, particularly because Brazil has signed on to the UNESCO treaty safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, and UNESCO in turn has inscribed Brazilian musical traditions on its representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. UNESCO's list includes samba de roda of the Reconcavo of Bahia, a tradition involving music, dance and poetry that is said to have developed in the seventeenth century and drawn on the music and dance heritage of the Afro-Brazilians as well as on Portuguese culture. It influenced the evolution of the urban samba in Rio de Janeiro that in the last century became a marker of Brazilian national identity.
    With a commitment to indigenous and minority cultures, the Brazilian government has embraced the UNESCO initiative and patrimonia, to the extent that, as Tony Seeger explained to me, numerous anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnomusicologists are employed documenting oral traditions in various Brazilian regions. (If and when the US signs on to the UNESCO treaty, employment opportunities for culture workers would improve greatly.) Identifying, documenting and describing these traditions is required if they are going to be safeguarded. More of them will surely be nominated for the UNESCO list. The economic value connotation of patrimonia suggests cashing in on these traditions. Tourism is the usual means, through performances at festivals and such. Additionally, samba de roda has been identified as an endangered tradition, would enjoy the status of a roots music, and might well be marketed on its own in hopes of reviving it, particularly among the younger Brazilians.
    In this case, official cultural policies from UNESCO combine with Brazilian government efforts to sustain samba de roda. It can be seen on YouTube, downloaded from the Internet, purchased on CDs, and so forth, as a google search reveals. What the long-term effects of these efforts may be, remains to be seen. Sometimes the imprimatur of official culture adds value to musical traditions and helps galvanize sustainability efforts within the community that identifies with those traditions. So, for instance, the Old Regular Baptists in southeastern Kentucky are more likely to conserve their tradition of lined-out hymnody as a result of official cultural attention from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. Tourism does not play a part in this: the Old Regular Baptists are not interested in attracting them, and neither is the music likely to do so. It is a participatory music, not the kind of music that is presented from a stage. In other circumstances, unintended negative consequences may result from official recognition, as occurred with the gu-qin (7-string zither) tradition in China. One kind of tourist will seek out sites that official culture has recognized as significant; another kind of tourist is suspicious of official cultural recognition and the mediation that accompanies it, and instead seeks music that is relatively obscure and unmediated, usually justifying this quest for authenticity on the grounds that once a music is marketed to tourists, it is inevitably transformed so as to please the tourist audience.

Music is not a cultural asset (1)

   Once again this semester at Brown University I'm leading a seminar in music and cultural policy. In that seminar we've returned to ideas discussed in the first few years of this blog, those involving the dominant concepts operating in the arts policy world today, namely heritage, cultural tourism, and the arts as cultural assets. Using the term "asset" brings the arts into the sphere of economics, one which met initial resistance from arts administrators who voiced fears that commerce runs counter to the spirit of art. That resistance dissolved as arguments about the "creative economy" began to persuade government decision-makers to spend money to stimulate the arts. But thinking of the arts as economic assets also runs counter to what we now know about sustainability. I believe that a policy which views music as a cultural asset will not sustain music—or people making music—in a way that is worth having. Quite the contrary, it will transform music—and people—into things not worth wanting.
    In his book The Economics of Cultural Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2010), David Throsby makes a powerful argument for the economic value of the arts; that is, an argument that the arts do not merely cultivate the personality, provide aesthetic pleasure and civilized refinements. Throsby argues that the arts also stimulate personal creativity. Creativity leads to innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit, required for individuals and businesses to compete successfully in today's globalized, corporate world. For that reason, corporations, foundations and governments should invest in the arts--and such patronage, along with the new economic value that is placed on the arts, will assure their sustainability. This is a seductive line of reasoning for cultural policymakers because if true, it makes the arts (and their advocates) much more powerful players in public policy debates. Yet despite the argument’s sustainabilty-friendly appearance, I remain concerned that something bad happens to arts and people when objectified into economic assets. In the next blog entry I will critique Throsby’s argument. It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned it on this blog, but because it is winning more and more allies in the world of arts and politics, it’s important to come to come to grips with its limitations. But first, some background. How did we get to the place where support for the arts is thought to yield economic benefit?
    As Throsby notes, thirty and forty years ago government, corporate and individual patrons sustained the arts in Western nations mainly with financial grants to exemplary artists and arts presenting institutions, such as “educational television” (as PBS was called then), museums and symphony orchestras. Then, policy discussions took up such issues as how the arts “contribute to a civilized society, how more people could be introduced to the benefits of artistic consumption, and how the arts content of education systems and the media could be improved” (p. 1). In the early 1980s when I helped the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment of the Arts distribute nearly $3 million in grants per year, our awards went in this direction, often to sponsor specific events such as festivals, arts education workshops, and media productions targeted to a large audience. Gradually, these cultural policy agencies began to move away from event-centered arts patronage and towards arts infrastructure support. A guiding principle, cultural conservation, began to be articulated. As in natural conservation, the idea was a series of targeted interventions that would enable folk and traditional arts cultures to maintain themselves and, as the N.E.A. guidelines put it, “move confidently into their futures” secure in their connections with the past.

Guitar as folk art.
Photo by Jeff Todd Titon, Bangor, ME, 2011.

    The apprenticeship grant was regarded as an outstanding example of this new kind of initiative in cultural conservation. An apprenticeship grant meant money paid to a master traditional folk artist such as a Portugese fado singer or a Penobscot basket maker to teach a worthy tradition-bearer in the younger generations how to master this art, usually in a one-on-one collaboration over a period of months or years, with a young person who had shown much talent and serious interest and was likely to make it a career (or as much of one as was possible, if such a career wasn’t very remunerative). This kind of grant was thought to have more long-term positive effect in sustaining the tradition than a one-time festival or workshop, or a media product that had only a short presentational life before it was put on the storage shelf. Grants also were given in increasing numbers directly to arts agencies themselves—that is, to local NGOs consisting of culture workers encouraging folk and ethnic arts activities, who would themselves offer assistance to local arts-presenting organizations. It was not a coincidence that the cultural conservation initiative took hold at a period in the United States when support for the arts was being challenged by political conservatives. Just as the welfare state was reformed in the 1980s and 1990s, so arts support thinking moved from welfare to conservation.
    Along with the change in thinking from welfare to conservation, the word “culture” began to be used more and more as in anthropology, referring a people’s way of life, what’s learned and passed along from one generation to the next, the non-biological inheritance. But how to fund cultural conservation efforts remained a problem. Yet a solution, as I pointed out years ago on this blog, was already available—in the arena of historic preservation—and what worked over there could be used to fund the arts. In so doing, tourism, the economic lifeblood of historic preservation, was brought into cultural conservation. Not that arts tourism was unknown, but for more than a century it had been aimed at the fine arts objects in museums, cathedrals, and the like. Traditional arts, on the other hand, could become the focus of arts tourism in living history settings. These arts were alive; the artifacts could, as one museum executive director put it, emerge from their glass cases and reunite with their makers who would demonstrate their making for the tourists.
    Historic preservation sounded a little too musty for the arts in this context, though. UNESCO in particular took the initiative and settled on the concept of heritage, which is to say history with a certain kind of cultural value placed on it. With UNESCO, heritage was already in use to describe historical monuments, and so the somewhat awkward contrast was made between tangible heritage, such as a historic building, and intangible heritage, such as a traditional art, understood both as cultural knowledge and expression or product. Eventually the term in use, intangible cultural heritage, became shortened to its acronym, ICH.
    Although usually pronounced eye-see-aitch, the UNESCO policy regarding ICH also itched, or irritated, some cultural policymakers for a number of reasons: fuzzy conceptualization and problematic implementation, for starters. Nevertheless, cultural policymakers throughout the world began using intangible cultural heritage and the arts, particularly traditional music, to promote tourism and then, the argument ran, with tourist dollars not only sustain the arts but also pour money into the local economies.  At a time when, in the so-called developed world, manufacturing had been outsourced and economies had changed to largely service and information providing, when income inequality was increasing, and when local economies were under great stress, arts tourism seemed an avenue worth encouraging. Soon arts were being regarded as potentially powerful economic assets.    
    In the next blog entry I will critique the argument for sustaining music and the arts by treating them as economic assets, particularly when termed cultural assets. I will reveal the confusion underlying Throsby’s attempt to differentiate between art’s economic value and cultural value, while assigning a measurable worth to each. I continue to believe that local, participatory music in small groups, based on commons, social networks and gifts exchanges, is a better alternative for long-term sustainability than economic asset-think which, despite Throsby’s seductive presentation, makes neoliberal assumptions concerning economic growth and competition that are inimical to both music and sustainability.

Sustainability Unbound (3): Collective Being

    Lewis Hyde gave the second presentation at the Sustainability Unbound symposium last month at the University of New Hampshire. He titled it "Cultural Commons and Collective Being." He began by saying how reviewers had misunderstood his recent book on copyright, intellectual property, and the cultural commons, which embraces more than the digital commons--it represents cultural heritage, music included. Copyright is in the news these days because record companies and film companies want to copyright works almost forever, and not too long ago US copyright law changed to accommodate them. At the same time, many young people think that music and movies should be freely available to them--they resent having to pay high prices for music, textbooks, videos, and so forth. Without copyright, of course, this intellectual property could be freely copied. That is what copyright is, after all--the right to copy.

    Some reviewers pointed to the fact that Hyde had copyrighted his book--so how could he advocate for a cultural commons? This was inconsistent at best, hypocritical at worst. Other reviewers thought he was strong for copyright. He wanted to be sure we knew where he stood. Deflecting criticism, dismissing incompetent reviewers, and anticipating the details of a later argument, Hyde proclaimed his agreement with the original US copyright law, a renewable 26-year term, and then the product passes into the public domain--no copyright. Fair enough, but as we shall soon see, not a solution to the problem of individual versus collective rights. What did he mean, then, by collective being? This seemed more promising.

    To digress a moment, authors hope for understanding reviews. Sometimes it feels more rewarding to be understood than praised. When my first book was published, in 1977, I received high praise in a review from a renowned scholar of African American music, but she praised it for reasons of her own--reasons that had not occurred to me. It was her agenda, not mine. I would call that a favorable review but not a sympathetic one. I have told this story many times since then. The details are not important here. No one is more interested in the reviews of one's own work than the author, despite frequent author claims to the contrary. "I never read the reviews," they say. "Critics--they are like crickets!" says another author. Don't believe them.

    I was less interested in copyright law and more interested in Hyde's exploration of collective being, perhaps because it was a good and (for me) a new way of thinking about how tradition works its way into a person and what that person says and does. (My agenda--not his.) Ownership of intangible cultural property--heritage--is problematic for many reasons, not least among which is the question whether a single person can claim ownership rights to something that is also arguably the end-product of a group, even if that group has been internalized and the immediate product is made by an individual. Despite claims of individual authorship it can be argued persuasively that traditional music is a product of the community, over time--the melody comes from the common tune stock and proceeds by the compositional grammar that the community of composers has developed over the years. Lyrics, arguably, may also be traditional in subject and form and even particular phrases that recur in various songs--"Woke up this morning," for instance, in blues music. The result is a combination, as Eliot wrote, of tradition with the individual talent.

    Back in 1981, I worked a couple of weeks every year for the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts. We were discussing whether to single out a particular individual for one of the first folk heritage awards. She was an exemplary singer of ballads from a particular part of North Carolina--Beech Mountain--where many generations of singers had preserved this traditional song style and repertoire. My colleague Dan Paterson argued against awarding the honor to any one individual. Not only was this a collective tradition with many fine representative singers, but singling out one singer would elevate individuals to a role that the community (let alone those individual singers) did not consider appropriate. Turning the individual singer into a celebrity within her community would transform the community's view of the tradition. It would take it in the direction of individual property and commodity and away from the commons. It was best, in such a case, not to make the award to an individual, Dan argued--perhaps the entire community could be honored? But it couldn't; the rules were that these awards must go to individuals.

    Hyde's notion of collective being bears on these issues. He came at it by questioning individual ownership of intellectual property when the invention or creation was really the result of a group effort, either explicitly so, or when the inventor or creator relied a good deal on the help of others--"stood on the shoulders of giants," as Newton wrote. He went on to point out that in the days when American copyright law was being written, certain of the founding fathers had no use for it at all. Franklin, for example, deliberately did not patent the Franklin woodstove, a more efficient kind of heat source than the usual fireplace, though not as heat-efficient as today's airtight wood stove. That is, Franklin knew he might have patented it and earned money from it, but he had already enough for his needs, and thought that the stove ought to serve humankind, not himself. Franklin is also credited as the discoverer of electricity in lightning--who doesn't recall stories about Franklin and his kite? But what is not so well known is that Franklin did his experiments as part of a group of amateur scientists, and always gave the credit to the group, not to himself.

    Franklin's creative or inventive self, therefore, was not an individual self but a kind of collective being; as such, claims for patents or copyrights from individuals were inappropriate at best and dishonest at worst. Franklin understood the difference and refused to profit from work that he knew was collective. Think further, then, of other claims concerning intellectual property--how many of these are collective in Franklin's sense? What is invented out of whole cloth? (Of half cloth?) Hyde's question strikes at the heart of intellectual property and copyright law in the same way that tradition overrides individual talent in the cultural production of intangible heritage such as music. This way of thinking was not new to me, but the context--Franklin and the founding generation and their ideas about copyright law (they did not all share Franklin's view, of course)--was new and helpful in extending the reach of tradition into the idea of collective being.

    Finally, like tradition, collective being strikes me as superior to the critique of the individual self provided by cultural theory and post-structuralist thought. Does the individual self exist as an inner self, a personality, an authentic being, what one thinks of in saying that one is "true to oneself?" Or, as many cultural theorists claim, are selves socially constructed, with multiple, emergent, and situationally-appropriate identities? Are selves (in the most pessimistic formulation) chiefly the product of ideologies from without--capitalism, marxism, sexism, born-again Christianity, you name it? Collective being, along with tradition, combined with individual agency, is a more hopeful way to conceive of the place of the self in sustainability.

Ruled for dollars and cents

The sustainability discourses, as I’ve written earlier, are strongest in ecology and economics; and the two are not unrelated. That is to say, economists map scientific views of the natural world onto the economic world, and vice-versa. For example, according to intellectual historian Joel Kaye, the rise of empirical science in 14th-century Europe was likely the result of a craze for measurement made necessary by the monetization of society—the rise of a currency economy, which impacted the scholastics in the universities who, as a consequence, began observing and measuring the natural world (Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century [Cambridge University Press, 2000]). Conversely, in the 18th century, economic theory was influenced by concepts borrowed from science (natural philosophy), as Margarat Schabas argues in The Natural Origins of Economics (University of Chicago Press, 2005). For example, the idea that electricity was a fluid led classical economists to the idea that money flowed through the economy, while gravitational forces were translated into market forces.

Disentangling the two discourses, particularly when, as noted, they rely on the same word root (oikos = household), is a perpetual struggle; they seem to be in constant attraction, as two particles, one with a positive and the other a negative charge. And so today they mingle in concepts like heritage tourism, where heritage represents either a music-cultural ecosystem, or a natural one; and where money from cultural tourism or ecotourism is meant to sustain them.

Even Thoreau, despite trying to live a simple, thrifty life free from materialism, had a hard time keeping the two realms apart. He left us his ecological observations in 37 notebooks—his journals, a priceless legacy. And yet, as he observed, in his essay “Life without Principle,” “I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are all ruled for dollars and cents.”

Save the National Heritage Fellowships

In its unwisdom the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has decided to eliminate the National Heritage Fellowships for folk and traditional artists, folding them into a general category of arts fellowships called Artists of the Year. Folk and traditional artists would have to compete against fine artists for these fellowships, and given the composition of the NEA and its panels, they wouldn’t fare well. The end result would be fewer, or no, fellowships for folk and traditional artists. These fellowships were designed to help save the traditional arts in the United States and now they themselves are endangered.

In 1978 the NEA established a separate division for the folk arts. I had the pleasure of serving on their folk arts panels from 1980-83 and again in the late 1980s, and I was involved in the creation of these fellowships. The idea, initiated and championed by the division's director, Bess Lomax Hawes, was to model them on Japan's awards to individual artists whom they deemed national treasures. NEA—Folk Arts formally established the National Heritage Fellowships in 1981; the first awards were given out in 1982. Every year, a dozen or so exemplary folk and traditional artists were selected—singers, musicians, poets, painters, weavers, blacksmiths, saddle makers, and so forth, representing all regions and ethnic groups in the United States and its territories. They came to Washington to receive their awards. In the first decade or so, CBS newsman Charles Kuralt presented them in a ceremony at the Ford Theater.

 These awards were part of a the division’s strategy of targeting endangered folk arts for cultural survival, by honoring exemplary practitioners. It was hoped that the fellowship money would help the artists continue to practice their arts, and that the fellowship’s aura would uplift the status of the artist and the art within the community where it was practiced. They have been given out each year now for nearly thirty years; many had the desired effect of raising the profile of the artist and the traditional art, with the result that others in the communities recognized its worth and some determined to carry it on. This was one aspect of the NEA—Folk Arts division’s forays into cultural sustainability, based on the idea of cultural conservation through the arts. And these are the awards that a short-sighted NEA has determined to get rid of. Even though I believe, now, that there are better means of sustaining musical cultures than targeting endangered ones and singling out exemplary artists for special awards, I find myself upset about the consequences of losing these fellowships.

If Congress had threatened to eliminate these awards, opposing the cuts would be a straightforward act for culture workers to engage in through lobbying. But the NEA itself has offered up these cuts, and so those of us who would mount a lobbying campaign in Congress need to oppose NEA policy and ask Congress to restore the National Heritage Fellowships. Specifically, we are asking that Congress reject the edits proposed in the NEA 2012 Appropriations Request (p. 11) to the General Provisions within the Department of Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriation Act, SEC 419 (1), and restore the words “National Heritage Fellowships.” This would not mean increasing the NEA budget.

Readers of this blog who agree with me may act now and bring this matter to their representatives in the Senate. The paragraph just above has sufficient information to identify what needs to be done. The budget hearing for NEA funding will take place on April 6th. Several public folklorists, applied ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, oral historians, and others interested in cultural sustainability are engaged in this lobbying effort. Please join us. Now is the time to get in touch with your Senator and staff in Washington and urge that the National Heritage Fellowships be saved.

The creative economy and the gift of music

As readers of this blog know well, I’ve been speaking and writing about an ecological approach to musical sustainability, suggesting that the idea of Nature’s economy and that four principles borrowed from conservation ecology (interdependence, diversity, limits to growth, and stewardship) will help us move towards better best practices in cultural policy. But in my lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, on February 11, I wanted to explore another aspect of cultural policy, the economics of music in terms of the classic distinctions between gift and commodity exchanges. I devoted my lecture to formulating the following question: how can civil society sustain the gift of music when cultural policy is becoming an arm of economic policy?

Music, bought and sold in the marketplace, is usually regarded as a commodity. As a product, such as a recording, music has a commodity value and a market price. As a created object, as intellectual property, music can also be copyrighted and owned; not merely the creation but also the performance—and they may be owned separately, as indicated by the different copyright symbols © and ℗. As an aside, the notion that a person can own a recording, such as a CD or an mp3 file downloaded from the Internet, but not the right to copy and sell that recording, is peculiar. I will have more to say about that in later posts.

Music is also regarded as a gift. That is, music is sometimes experienced as a gift, and one cannot put a price on such an experience. Composers say that sometimes they experience moments when pure inspiration produces music effortlessly and it is as if they are merely the vessels bringing music into the world from another source. Musicians say that sometimes their playing is equally a gift. In many cultures, musical talent is regarded as a gift, innate, and although it can be developed, it cannot be bought or sold. Listeners sometimes say that they experience music as an invaluable gift that enhances their appreciation and understanding.

My friend Lewis Hyde—we first met when he was an undergraduate and I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota—has written about experiencing art as a gift. In his widely-read and deservedly influential book, The Gift, he recalls that “I went to see a landscape painter’s works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and colors I had not seen the day before. The spirit of an artist’s gift can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. . . We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation” (Lewis Hyde, The Gift [Vintage Books, 1983, p. xii]).

It was the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss who, nearly 100 years ago, drawing on Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders, posited a difference between societies where economic exchange took place chiefly in the form of gifts, and those societies such as our own where commodity exchange was the norm. His original insight was that in commodity exchanges, the legal contract between buyer and seller obviates the need for any ongoing personal relationship among them; whereas in gift exchanges, the receiver is personally obligated to the giver, ethically if not legally. That is, the receiver feels obliged to give something back, in exchange, to the original giver; or to circulate the gift further.

But cultural policy is quickly and willingly becoming an arm of economic policy. As David Throsby writes in his book The Economics of Cultural Policy, until a decade or so ago, cultural policy among the Western nations was devoted chiefly to subsidizing the arts with direct financial support, whether from corporations, government, or philanthropic individuals. These subsidies were given chiefly to arts organizations such as symphony orchestras, museums, dance companies, and so forth; some monies came to artists directly in the form of fellowships. But in the past decade, according to Throsby, cultural policy has increasingly been positioned as part and parcel of economic policy, and a new term has entered policy discourse to describe this meetingplace: the “creative economy.”

Cultural policy-makers argue that art grows the commodity economy. It does so in three ways. First, cultural tourism which takes in the arts brings tourist money to local economies where heritage spaces, museums, concert halls, and other presentational venues attract an audience. Second, the cultural industries themselves, those involved in the production of mass market art—particularly music—have a large and growing impact on the economy. Third, education in the arts nourishes creativity, and creativity leads to innovation in technology and business, which leads to a competitive edge and economic growth. Cultural tourism, the culture industries, and the way the arts nourish the qualities needed for creativity in the marketplace constitute the creative economy.

Thus my question: how can civil society sustain the gift culture surrounding art in general and music in particular, when music is increasingly viewed as a commodity and when cultural policy, which is the way civil society encourages music, is increasingly becoming an arm of economic policy?

Music Appreciation, Cultural Tourism, and Cultural Capital--What Is It Worth Today?

    In this blog's entry dated January 21, 2009, “Is music useless,” I wrote about the classical music appreciation industry, with its paraphernalia of college courses, professors, composers, musicians, concerts, concert-goers and critics, and its media presence, all supported by private, corporate, and government patronage. I’ve also written here, frequently, about heritage and cultural tourism. Now I want to bring the two together, and think about music appreciation as cultural tourism. For if we want to think critically about the contemporary practice of sustaining the traditional arts by constructing them as heritage and then marketing them for tourists, we can look to an earlier model of this very same process in the rise and fall of the classical music appreciation industry, one which is losing relevance daily as the contemporary media engender enormous changes in the way people receive information and in the kind of information we do receive. What might we learn from this example?

    Several years ago I revised my syllabus for an introductory course in ethnomusicology, one meant for music majors at my university. For the most part these are practitioners of music, ones who will take many courses in music-making, and whose courses in music theory, history and appreciation will be taught at a deeper analytical level. The introduction to ethnomusicology course is required of our majors, many of whom would prefer to be off making music themselves, composing, or practicing their vocal or instrumental techniques, than to ponder the ideas and musical curiosities that we ethnomusicologists like to vex ourselves with. I decided to try to reach the students a little closer to where I thought they were, and to turn an ethnomusicological lens on the classical music industry. Never mind that I overestimated their interest in classical music; based on their previous training in Western art music they felt, at least, on more common ground. I decided it would be enlightening to have a look at the prefaces and introductions to the twentieth-century music appreciation textbooks to see what they said about what they were doing and why. We noticed in these textbooks, first of all, a defensive tone—why study music, why is art important in a world where most people are concerned with getting and spending, with family and neighbors and politics and power and war and peace and anything and everything but music?

    These appreciation textbook authors were not hedonists; they did not justify the pursuit of music on the grounds of pleasure, or as aesthetic object, “music for music’s sake.” Such a justification, though it  gains assent from music-makers and music-lovers alike, was not suited for the music education business. There must be Purpose, and the purpose was Culture. The authors of the textbooks usually justified appreciation in terms of “acquiring culture,” in the sense that one’s mind and soul would be improved, ennobled, and liberated by encountering the great cultural monuments of the past—Our Musical Heritage, as one textbook was titled. (Interestingly, this particular textbook took a very broad view of that heritage, but that is another story.) Engaging with Great Ideas, Great Art, Heritage, “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold put it in Culture and Anarchy, was, of course, the purpose of a liberal arts education—uh, wasn’t it? This engagement developed taste and refinement in one's personality, a more "civilized" human being, a better person. It is no accident that this is the same justificatory rhetoric that was used to promote the actual Grand Tour, cultural tourism, the European monuments, the museums, the cathedrals, for a century and a half.

    What the authors of these textbooks did not say was that taste, or aesthetic discrimination, leads to collecting and connoisseurship (getting and spending); and that appreciation creates a class of patrons who support the arts. Late twentieth-century cultural theory informs us that music (and art) appreciation builds a kind of cultural capital (that is, knowledge and taste as a stock of cultural goods and strategies) as well as a refined personality that once served the middle classes well in their striving for power.

     But I write "once served," in the past tense, because it is becoming clear that taste matters less and less in the world of common culture (the information commons) and (un)civil discourse, a world dominated by celebrities whose confrontational behavior (whether among politicians or on talk radio or FOX news) is not considered rude and boorish, except by a generation of old-fashioned elders and a small group of young idealists. Ironically, the cultivation of cultural capital is now proving an obstacle, as the refined public personality is no match today for the angry naysayer in the public sphere, or “shock and awe” on the battlefield.

    I am reminded of an observation told to me some years ago by a professor of music, whose  discriminatory powers were highly developed. It concerned the makeup of the student body in the appreciation course being taught that semester. “A majority of them are Asian!” the professor exclaimed. “Not that I have anything against people of Asian extraction," he added, "but where are those whose Heritage this really is? They’re the ones who should be taking this course.” But they weren’t, perhaps because they were unconvinced that the course would provide much useful cultural capital for the twenty-first century. And so we may ask what kind of cultural capital, if any, will be useful in our still-new century?

Heritage and Colonialism Revisited

In response to an earlier blog post, from January 18 of this year, "JS" asked "Whose version of 'genuine,' 'relevant,' and 'authentic' do you use? Whose taste, judgment and critical thinking is supported? How is the folklorist reconciled with the ethnomusicologist?"

The short answer is that heritage sites support heritage managers' tastes, judgments, and critical thinking. Such thinking is informed by a critical discourse surrounding the "genuine," the "relevant," and the "authentic," concepts that have been attacked (some would say destroyed) by critical theorists yet that continue to be defended by culture workers. Critical theorists today by and large take the position that such concepts are irrelevant and not helpful in understanding how cultures produce their subjects and objects. Heritage managers continue to use a version of these concepts based in traditional folklore and (to a lesser degree) ethnomusicology. Regina Bendix's book, In Search of Authenticity, is a history of folklore that is useful in this context.

The point I was making in the blog post is that ethnographic research and heritage management both appear as artifacts of the bureaucratic state, which is a handmaiden of colonialism. That is disturbing when the ideology of sustainability is meant to be enabling rather than stifling.

In recent months I've been turning to the writings of Herman Daly, an ecological economist; and to the concept of co-evolution, to see if they present a pathway out of this paradox.

America's Best Idea?

News that an old colleague, Chuck Perdue, is near death prompted me to think about sustainability, conservation, and the US National Parks, the subject of a recent film series by the enormously popular documentarian Ken Burns, who calls the Parks "America's Best Idea." Not yet having seen this film series, I won't comment on it except to say that for the folks living back in the 1920s on the land that became the Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Park wasn't America's best idea; it wasn't even a good one. The federal government forcibly removed and resettled the inhabitants to make way for the Park. Chuck and Nan Perdue's research into the Park removals overlapped with my research in the early 1980s on the families that lived in that region and who were the ancestors of the church congregation that became the core of my book, Powerhouse for God. I wanted to explore the relation between land and life, husbandry and religion, the ecology and human ecology of the region, and how lived traditions enter community life.

The mountain farmers did not leave their land willingly. Park supporters argued that their lifestyle, scratching out a subsistence living from scraggly mountain crops and from pigs running wild in the forest, was outdated and used the land badly. It was a poor adaptation, and the mountain poverty of the people was the result. They could be resettled in modern towns in clean, small houses with garden plots and indoor plumbing. Yet somehow those who were resettled in those modern circumstances felt claustrophobic and did not thrive. They longed for their unbound life in the mountains.

In the name of conservation, then, a Park was created chiefly for recreational purposes, to serve (as it was then argued) the population of Washington, DC who might travel to the Park for a weekend and come back to government work refreshed by experiencing the natural world. Of course, the Park had to be transformed back to Nature; it had been badly used, it was said, by the farmers. Today scarcely a trace beyond an old cellar hole remains. At Big Meadows, a natural clearing in the center of the Park, and a feature that was noted by travelers as early as the 1700s, stands an Interpretive Center, where the history of the land is told. When I last visited it fifteen years ago, there was no mention of the removals.

Today it is the mountaintops themselves that are being removed, for coal. Such removal is consistent with the ideology that Nature is a resource to be used. Wisely used, but used. This was the ideology that drove the Conservation Movement in the US during most of the 20th century; its champions were Theodore Roosevelt, and the Yale man Gifford Pinchot. Of course, along the way, compromises need to be made for the greater good. If a local population must be removed, or if its way of life must become as polluted as the mountain streams after the giant machines slice off the mountain tops, the damage is slight compared to the greater good that comes from the cheap energy of coal that heats the power plants that give us all so much electricity--and if they contribute to global warming, why, technology will give us "clean coal," whatever that may be, at some point before the planet warms beyond saving. So goes the rationalization and justification, but it rings hollow.

In my thinking about music and sustainability, I have wondered to what extent music should be regarded as a resource--a renewable human resource, of course, not a finite natural resource like coal. Does resource thinking about music inevitably put us on the same path as resource thinking regarding natural resources? When heritage and cultural tourism are the outcomes of musical and cultural conservation movements, must heritage organizations inevitably exploit resources? To what extent are people and cultures objectified in these constructions? How are those resources constructed and given value, and in what would their exploitation consist?

Sustainable Music in China

As I wrote earlier, I was invited to China, to deliver a series of lectures on music and sustainability, at the Central Conservatory of Music, in Beijing. I was there from Oct. 31 through Nov. 9, delivered three lectures (I will post summaries shortly), and had a chance to learn from Chinese colleagues something of the Chinese view on music and sustainability. Indeed, this is something they have thought about and done something about.

Perhaps one of the reasons the Chinese have implemented a cultural policy meant to preserve traditional music is that since the Chinese Revolution (1949) and particularly during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) traditional expressive culture was under threat from the government itself. One of the foci of the Cultural Revolution was the abolition of the "four olds": old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Another possible reason is that in the reaction against the Cultural Revolution, tradition was revalued; certain musical traditions like that associated with the guqin (ku-chin) zither, an ancient music known since the time of Confucius, were singled out by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. Unlike the US, China has signed the UNESCO treaty on ICH, so it has even more reason to endorse it.

To show me an example of Chinese cultural policy meant to preserve the heritage of traditional music, I was taken to Qujiaying village, where I witnessed a concert performance by the village music society. This is the full orchestra, consisting of percussion (drum and cymbals) and winds (reeded end-blown flutes, transverse flutes, and sheng (a traditional Chinese mouth organ; note the vertical tubes):

The tour group included our host, a group of visiting performers and scholars from New Zealand, some students from the Conservatory, and myself. Qujiaying music dates back to the late Yuan dynasty. It originated in Buddhist funeral ceremonies. According to the official literature that we were given, "experts [from the Chinese Art Academy] think Qujiaying classical music is of great artistic and precious cultural value. It enjoys the reputation of the living fossil and the Treasure of the Chinese Culture."

This is the Qujiaying village percussion ensemble (a subset of the orchestra) in concert. The music performed, I was told, was ancient and originally played at village funerals, and still is. Interestingly, there is a notation; and in the museum we saw some very old examples. The musicians do not play from notation, though. After visits from prominent international music scholars, beginning in 1986, to this village and its music, the Chinese government began to pay attention to their' accolades. They designated the music as Chinese national heritage and poured $2 million dollars into the village. A museum and a concert hall (temple) were built. Now the music is performed for visitors in the temple, as it was for us. There is plenty of money to secure a continuing supply of instruments. Master village musicians teach a younger generation. The continuation of the music is assured. In 2000, it was awarded the first prize in the contest to celebrate China's 50th national birthday. In 2006 it was listed in the Catalogue of World Cultural and Natural Heritage.

 

Indeed, the music was wonderful. To hear an excerpt, click on the arrow in the picture just above. With the full orchestra, much was played in a free rhythm, with the winds in heterophonic unison. With the percussion ensemble, there was a definite pulse beat, and much repetition, and syncopation, leading to trance.

Our trip to and from Qujiaying village involved a police escort along the 2-lane highway, a patrol car with siren blaring, clearing a way for our bus to pass between the cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. After the concert we had a delicious late lunch, with the governor of the district and, I was told, various Party officials. No visiting ethnomusicologist would ever have been treated like this in North America!

After we returned from the village, I heard some discussion of the music in terms of heritage. I had lectured only the day before on some of the problems with cultural tourism, and here I was--a cultural tourist experiencing musical heritage in China. Was the music the same in concert as at a funeral? Not precisely; some was strung together in a kind of "suite." It is compared, in the official literature, with Western music: "it includes 13 divertimentos. . . and the melody of the four season. It also has seven concerto grossos." I assume these comparisons are meant to enhance its prestige as a classical music, but in my view the music does not profit from this kind of uplift. I heard, also, some questions about exactly where the $2 million went. It looked to me as if the buildings would have taken it all, buildings plus instruments plus costumes and salaries for the musicians; but there were those who wondered whether some of the village businessmen had also gotten some of it. But on the whole if there was criticism, it was muted. I noted that there were no CDs of Qujiaying music for sale. No admissions charge. No commodification of the music at all. A handsomely produced booklet with many color photos and some text (including a page in English) was given to the visitors.

Many village officials were there during the concert. Some began talking loudly and their voices could be heard in the soft passages. It occurred to me that at funerals this conversation would have taken place. For them, the music might not have been remarkable. But in the concert setting, it interfered with the visitors' experience of the music. A few visitors scowled. Perhaps someone said something to one of the hosts. Then one or two of the hosts went to the back of the hall and hushed them.

As our visit came to a close, I sought out the head of the village music society and thanked him. His picture is at the left. He was too old, I imagined, to perform with the group; but I surmised that at one time he'd been a master musician. Now he led us on the museum tour and described the instruments. In the museum old instruments were in glass cases, labeled. On the walls were pictures, including photos of some of the visiting scholars who had come to the village since 1986. Many--most--of the people there had digital cameras and were using them often. I was told that some day our pictures might appear on the wall.