Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- End of 2025

The Scholar and His Books (1641), by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since my last update, on Dec. 30, 2024, 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. So far nothing new has been published in 2025, but see #1 below.

     1. 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, 2023. According to the Cambridge University Press website, publication is scheduled for December 31, 2025.

     2. 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. I completed the chapter shortly before Christmas, 2024 and sent it to the book's editors. About nine months later they replied saying that the chapter was in fine shape. I imagine they may still be waiting for other contributors to complete their chapters, because mine hasn't gone into copyediting yet. It would seem that the book could be published sometime in 2026 or 2027.

     3. Late in the spring of 2024 a Cengage editor wrote to ask for a 7th edition of the introductory ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music, for which I am both general editor (now co-editor with Tim Cooley) and a contributor. 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. As I write at the end of December, 2025, we now have four of the eleven chapters written; three have gone through copyediting. It's possible that in this, the final week of 2025, one or more additional chapters will come in; but it's almost certain that we won't make Cengage's initial deadline, as I'd predicted. It's hard for me to predict when the book will be published but I would guess either 2026 or 2027.

     4. 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." I promised her I'd have it to her by the end of this calendar year. This past autumn I started writing the chapter; a few days ago I finished up and am letting it marinate, so to speak, for a few more days before sending it to Sabine. In the chapter I've tried to integrate my idea of the sound commons into my sound ecology framework. It will, I think, be markedly different from the other chapters in the book, which chapters will be much more directly concerned with music; but we shall see. I can't predict when this book will be published; it depends on how far along the other authors are with their chapters.

     5. In the fall of 2025 I accepted an invitation from Esther Morgan-Ellis to write a short chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Participatory Music-Making. My subject will be, chiefly, old-time music jam sessions, which I've written about several times before as participatory music, but not in a sustained way. I imagine that I will also touch on other participatory musics that I've been involved with, and that I will continue with the phenomenological approach to old-time music jams that I began in my chapter, "Knowing Fieldwork," published in Shadows in the Field, edited by Greg Barz and Tim Cooley (Oxford U. Press, 1997), and continued in my article for Folklore Forum on the banjo as a mediating instrument.

     6. I would like to get back to the book project that's been on the back burner for more than ten years now, my book on a sound ecology. I have many parts written but need to do more research especially with recent publications on sonic experience and sound communciation in the nonhuman world.

Participatory Music and the COVID-19 Challenge

Old-Time Music Jam Session, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

    Live, participatory music-making is social, and the sociality of participatory music-making is threatened under the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve written extensively about how the sociality of making music together in groups such as the old-time jam session models participatory democracy, face-to-face exchanges in community, and a sound economy. Nowadays many of us are reduced to making music via Zoom, which on account of time delays built into the transmission of sound, is a poor substitute. Instead of all playing simultaneously in each other’s presence to create an emergent group sound that is greater than and different from the sum of its parts, we mute our microphones while playing along with a single unmuted leader who can’t hear what the others are doing. Nor can the non-leaders hear one another. Instead of participatory democracy we have a single leader and many followers. The followers can hear the leader but not each other. Leaders can only hear themselves. This is the opposite of the jam session ideal, socially and politically as well as musically.

Music's Carbon Footprint

Photo by Helgi Halldorsson

          Music and sustainability involves both the sustainability of music as it is practiced, and the sustainability of the planet. The first involves the sustainability of traditional music cultures and genres, whether indigenous traditional musics endangered by modernization, or music in developed countries such as blues and classical music. Periodically journalists and scholars ponder the future of these musics. Even though we know that these musics have always been adapting and changing, we wonder whether they will change so much as to lose their integrities and identities, becoming so different that they no longer resemble what they once were. The second involves the relationship between music as practiced and the environment. Anyone concerned with music and environmental sustainability will have wondered about music’s carbon footprint. How much does music contribute to habitat loss, species extinction, and global warming?
         For the first half-dozen or so years of this blog on music and sustainability, the sustainability of music as it is practiced was my main concern. But in applying an ecological approach to this problem, one that borrowed principles from conservation biology to see how they might apply to musical and cultural sustainability, it was inevitable that the topic of music and environment would become a concern. At first it surfaced within the larger topic of sound in the environment, and more specifically in the importance of animal sound communication for survival. This topic brought me to ecomusicology, where I found scholars interested chiefly in musical practice and the environment. Many ecomusicologists wrote about composers whose compositions involved nature and environments in one way or another. Other ecomusicologists were interested in music and musicians who were singing to save the environment; that is, to protest environmental degradation and raise consciousness in order to fuel a mass movement. Yet others explored the impact of musical instrument construction on endangered plant species, especially the woods used in making guitars and violins, within the context of environmentally sound forest management. In the hallways during ecomusicology conferences I sometimes heard people wondering about the impact of musical practice on climate change, but until 2014 I didn’t think about addressing this issue.
         In 2014 Denise von Glahn asked the provocative question, “What is the sound of climate change?” and one result was a symposium on “Music in a Changing Climate,” held at the University of Minnesota in 2015. I’ve written about that symposium elsewhere on this blog. But “music in a changing climate” can evoke traditional subjects for ecomusicologists—attention to composers concerned with nature, musicians protesting global warming, and music’s impact on endangered species. For the symposium I took a different approach, asking what sound in a changing climate sounded like, and what it signaled; and in “The Sound of Climate Change” I described the sounds and ecological significance for climate change of a horrific storm I experienced on the Maine coast in the fall of 2014.
         Recently I’ve been thinking about the differences global warming and climate change have made to sustainability thinking in the 21st century, and what this means for music, sound, and cultural sustainability. Before the new century, sustainability thinking was not directed at music nor was it about climate change; it had to do with the Earth's resources, its carrying capacity, and the future of both the environment and life on the Planet, mainly human life. To be sure, conservation biologists were interested in endangered species and habitat loss, but the bulk of sustainability thinking occurred in connection with developmental economics and human ecology, where the major problem was how to feed an exponentially expanding human population, given that the Earth has finite natural resources. The technological solution offered by developmental economics increased agricultural productivity many times over by introducing modern farming methods including the massive use of chemical fertilizers and large machinery. More food could, and did, support an increasing population. Critics, however, pointed out that this came at a cost of traditional ecological knowledges, and traditional cultures. Also, the increase in farmland devoted to monoculture crops pressured biodiversity as it altered habitat and impacted animals as well as plants. Finally, it became obvious that the technological solution involved an enormous increase in energy use. According to a study published in Science in 1976, researchers at Cornell University found that whereas in nonindustrialized agriculture manual farming produces 5 to 50 calories of food energy for each calorie of energy used in producing it, industrial agriculture requires 5 to 10 calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food energy. That is, 5 to 10 calories of energy from fossil fuels and other sources, mainly non-renewable, were used to produce chemical fertilizers, build and run farm machinery, etc. in order to get a single calorie of food energy. This appeared unsustainable on its face, but in the last century even though some were warning about carbon emissions from fossil fuel use and the warming planet, most sustainability thinkers were more concerned with the problem of how to feed an exploding human population and how to raise the living standard in third-world nations where the population increase was greatest.
         But if the major sustainability problem in the last century was the Earth's carrying capacity in the face of increasing human population, today the major sustainability problem is the Earth itself as we know it in the face of global warming and climate change. The link between energy use, carbon emissions, and global warming became well established and accepted in the scientific community in the 21st century, with models showing potentially catastrophic climate change if humans don’t significantly lower our carbon footprint in the near future. The caloric example in the previous paragraph takes on new meaning in this century: not only does it seem outrageous to expend so much more energy to produce a calorie of food, a back-of-the-napkin calculation of energy expenditures related to the production, distribution, delivery and consumption of music today gives cause for alarm. How much does music contribute to our carbon footprint?
         To answer that question we’d need to ask how much energy is expended in the production and consumption of musical instruments, for example, and not just ask about endangered species and habitat loss, important as they are. We’d need to take into account the energy expended in the production and consumption of music’s part of the economy, everything from the food needed to keep people alive and making music, to the energy needed to support music-making (concerts, sound reinforcement, heating large indoor spaces, musicians’ travel, manufacture of music products, etc.), to the energy needed to deliver music on the internet, including the manufacture of computers, smartphones, tablets, the network of cell towers and internet providers, and so on. Insofar as music is a significant part of the economy, it requires a significant expenditure of energy to produce, distribute, and consume. It might be useful in this regard to contrast nonindustrial music-making with industrial (and post-industrial) music-making, just as researchers at Cornell did for agriculture in the last century. How much energy is required for participatory music-making with acoustic instruments, versus presentational or hi-fi music-making as it is delivered in concert tours and over the internet? I suppose that the results will parallel those for nonindustrial versus industrial agriculture.
         We may ask, also, about the social ecology of nonindustrial farming versus industrial, and participatory music-making versus presentational and hi-fi. I’ve written about the latter, contrasting the community-building aspects of participatory music-making with the isolating aspects of presentational music. Wendell Berry has for more than fifty years been making a similar point about farming, contrasting the communal nature of tobacco farming in rural Kentucky with the isolating aspects of so-called family agribusiness industrial corn and soybean farming in the Midwest today. I needn’t go into that here; Berry’s work is widely available and he is much honored in his sphere.
         There is more to say about energy use, fossil fuels, the economy of music and the sustainability of the Planet. I’ve been thinking about this for several years now, and I know other ecomusicologists have been, also. It’s time to channel more of our efforts in this direction. 

Music is not a cultural asset (2)

    David Throsby is today’s foremost theorist writing about the economics of cultural policy. Concerned with putting the arts (including music) on a sustainable footing, he argues that the arts are best viewed not as an alternative to or a respite from a base and commercial world of money-making but, rather, as an engine of economic competition and growth. The arts, he reminds us, have significant economic consequences, whether local or global. His argument that the arts are economically valuable cultural assets, though persuasive today among arts advocates, rests on a problematic distinction between art’s economic value and its cultural value.
    When Throsby writes that the arts have economic value he refers to the fact that arts are products involved in commodity exchanges, supported by a massive entertainment arts industry that involves venues, art products, advertising, gear, and so forth. We contract to buy music, whether in concerts, on CDs, over the Internet, or in the form of instruments, music lessons, and so forth. As long as we buy it and it has a price, as long as the money we pay supports the arts industry, art has an economic value. In fact, music and the entertainment arts represent a significant portion of the consumer economy.
    Throsby also claims that music and the arts have what he calls cultural value. He lists several kinds of cultural value: aesthetic, spiritual, social, historical, symbolic, authenticity and locational. Cultural value is realized in collective, not individual terms: “collective benefits that cannot be factored out to individuals and yet are important.” Cultural values are those aspects of a group’s lifeways that members of the group have strong feelings about, either positive or negative. That is, they have aesthetic feelings, spiritual feelings, feelings concerning social solidarity or solitude, and so forth. Cultural value is difficult to quantify. It seems to be outside of, or in addition to, the realm of commodity exchange. Throsby’s usual example is the collective benefit of a traditional art to a group of people who identify with that art. So, for instance, an ethnic group identifies with a music that it calls its own, and this has a value that seems beyond price.
    The cultural value argument is seductive; surely those of us involved in promoting traditional arts believe that it expresses group cultural identity. Indeed, folklorists and ethnomusicologists have been making a similar point over and over again in case studies of traditional and contemporary art in various cultural groups for the past fifty years. The notion that traditional art expresses, reinforces and even constitutes collective identity has become a truism.
    If we agree that the arts have cultural value, it does not necessarily follow that arts are cultural assets. Throsby wants to translate cultural values into cultural assets; that is, he believes that cultural policymakers can—and should—factor cultural values into the economic worth of artistic activities and products. The problem turns on the different meanings of value. When Throsby writes of economic value, he is thinking of price, what the art would be bought for as a product in a commodity exchange. But when he writes of cultural value, he is thinking not of price but principle. Cultural values are ideas, principles that guide individual and group behavior. As Throsby recognizes, cultural values are not the result of commodity exchange. They are “values added” but not measurable as added value. Cultural values are invaluable.
    Throsby’s dual use of value conflates value (price) with values (principles) and in so doing it tricks cultural values, which operate chiefly in the arena of gift exchange, into becoming assets with measurable worth which can enter a calculus for a cultural policy operating within the framework of an economic neoliberalism based in property rights, economic deregulation, competition and growth. Then, instead of operating as a critique of the social structure, or as providing an alternative social structure (e.g., commons, gift exchanges, egalitarian democracy), the arts are enlisted to serve a very different end, global corporate capitalism. According to Throsby, they do so by stimulating the creativity required for business innovation and successful competition, which leads to improved technology and continual economic growth, a rising tide that is supposed to lift all boats. Unfortunately, however, this set of economic assumptions is what has made our world unsustainable in the first place.
    Throsby’s argument leaves out the most important aspect of trade: the personal relations that obtain as a result. In a commodity exchange—say, a purchase of an mp3 over the Internet—the legal contract between buyer and seller obviates the need for any personal relationship at all. In a gift exchange, even when the gift is a commodity with economic value—say, a DVD that I purchase and give to you—there is no legal contract between giver and receiver, only a set of personal obligations which I have discussed in earlier blog entries. Throsby’s concept of cultural value recognizes the gift exchange aspect of the arts, but transforms its consequences. Music has economic value, but it may be involved in both commodity and gift exchanges. One of the characteristics of music and the arts is that compared with other goods they partake of a greater proportion of gift exchanges; in fact, the arts often are regarded as belonging to a collectivity, not a single individual.
    Indeed, many artists have testified that they feel their ability is a “gift,” which is not far in concept from the more common notion of “talent” as something one does not earn but either has or does not. Recall the story old-time fiddler Clyde Davenport told me about a rich man who came to him and asked Clyde to teach him. After a few lessons, Clyde advised the man to give up. “But I’ll pay you anything if you can teach me to play like you!” said the rich man. Clyde replied that he had found something money could not buy. Clyde’s ability, he said, was a gift.
    Insistence that art is a cultural asset objectifies and propertizes it. When music is regarded as private property, whether intellectual property or something tangible that one can collect, social relations arising from music exchanges are defined by legal contracts among individuals (or corporations acting under the fiction that they are individuals), instead of by the obligations of gift-giving and friendship within collectivities operating as social networks. As economic value increases, cultural values decrease. What, then, are the alternatives? How does local participatory art, gift exchanges within social networks, operate largely outside this neoliberal economic mainstream, and how may it become a viable alternative? In truth, it already is becoming one; and in future blog entries we shall be seeing where and how.

Sharing music at a festival.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Green.

Breaking Up Winter 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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