A Hoosier Mediation

Update: as of Oct. 1, 2012, a video of the keynote address that I gave at Indiana University (see below) in 2011 was posted in three parts on YouTube by Michael Goecke. I didn't know that a video was being shot of my presentation, but I don't mind its being on YouTube. It can be found and viewed here:
          Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm-RieiUJA8
          Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03feYtGVvkk
          Part Three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwJ1ij0jwGk

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      Last fall I was invited by the graduate students in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University to give the keynote address at their 4th annual graduate student conference, on March 25, 2011, a conference in which they combine with graduate students in folklore and ethnomusicology from the Ohio State University, to present papers discussing aspects of their current research, usually either completed research based on Master’s theses, or ongoing research that is forming their PhD dissertations. In so doing they are getting professional training in research presentation, while they also have an opportunity to focus their research and get feedback from an audience of their peers and the various professors at the two universities. Indiana University has the largest and oldest folklore doctoral program in North America; with the demise of the folklore doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana's is also clearly the most distinguished. Their ethnomusicology graduate program, one of many distinguished programs in North America, was also one of the earliest, having begun when comparative musicologist George Herzog and anthropologist Alan Merriam joined forces on the faculty there in the early 1950s.
       When I asked why they chose me, I was told that my own research and publications had combined the disciplines of ethnomusicology and folklore for four decades; that in addition to having taught those subjects to graduate students at two universities, I had directed the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at Brown for 25 years and had been elected as a Fellow of the American Folklore Society 13 years ago. I could also have told them that I taught, briefly, at Indiana University’s Folklore Institute in the summer of 1977, just prior to undertaking the documentary research that would form the basis of the Powerhouse for God projects (book, LP recording, and documentary film) although at that time I did not have anything more than a documentation project in mind.
       I could have told them that in 1977 I had the pleasure of a brief meeting with George List, then blind, but still the director of the ethnomusicology program at the Folklore Institute, and heir to the legacy of George Herzog, a student of Erich von Hornbostel, the father of ethnomusicology, and himself the most influential ethnomusicologist in the US between roughly 1930-1950. I could also have told them that I was invited to the home of Richard Dorson, the long-time director of the Folklore Institute. There, Dorson pointed to a line of books above his lengthy mantelpiece—a yard and a half long--written or edited by Dorson himself. 
       When I saw it, I was reminded of Thoreau’s sardonic remark that he owned a thousand books in his library, 900 of which he had written himself. That was because his books scarcely sold during his lifetime, and his publishers had sent the remaining copies back to the author. Of course, he is much read today. Dick Dorson was much read then by “professional folklorists,” a term that he insisted in using to distinguish those with the doctorate in folklore (or, I suppose, a reputation among academic folklorists for professional research, as his own doctoral degree was in American studies—the same as mine). Dorson also wrote and edited popular books of folktales for a general audience, lengthening the line of books on his mantelpiece more quickly than if he had limited himself to research monographs. These popular books were always well annotated, to distinguish them from those written and edited by amateurs. Dorson's ambitious plans for the Institute, partly realized, were cut short only a few years later when he died of a heart attack on the tennis court. 
        As a booster of graduate education and the professionalization of folklore as a discipline, Dorson had no equal. At the time of his death, strong doctoral programs in folklore could be found at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA as well as at Indiana. Today only the doctoral program at Indiana survives, and folklore as a discipline is much more diffuse than it was in Dorson's era. Folklorists have gone from a concentration in verbal forms such as the folktale, and an emphasis on folklore as text, to a variety of interests and methodologies, with verbal forms, material culture, aesthetics and the ethnography of everyday life among the most popular. An emphasis on folklore as process and performance, rather than as text, unites the academic discipline to some extent.
        Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, with fewer and fewer academic jobs available, professional folklorists began entering the public sector and non-profit worlds as arts administrators. Today more than half of the members of the American Folklore Society who hold full-time jobs (that is, excepting students) are employed outside of the academic world. When I joined both the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) in the 1970s, there were about half again as many members of the former society as the latter. That percentage stayed roughly the same until about 1990 when the number in AFS began gradually to decline while membership in SEM gradually increased. Doctoral programs in ethnomusicology, based in music departments or schools of music, can be found today in many fine US universities, including Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, Indiana, Illinois, Washington, Ohio State, Wesleyan, Berkeley, and my own university, Brown, where one was started in 1967.
       Today the membership in AFS and SEM is the reverse of what it was about 37 years ago: SEM has about half again as many members as AFS, chiefly academics although an increasing number combine academic and applied work and some applied ethnomusicologists are employed outside the academic world. Nonetheless, folklorists continue to obtain academic jobs at various colleges and universities, in departments as various as history, anthropology, English, sociology, women's, cultural and American studies; whereas in my generation and earlier folklorists were housed chiefly in English departments. In addition, folklorists are enjoying distinguished academic careers, if not building doctoral programs in folklore, at various universities. In some places, folklore has colonized American studies programs; in others, folklore has gained sub-concentrations in traditional disciplines such as English; and in others, such as Western Kentucky and North Carolina, fine graduate programs have continued at the MA level. Of course, the economic downturn that began in 2008 has hurt the academic job market in folklore, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines in the humanities.
        It was good in 2011 to see the folklore and ethnomusicology graduate students at Indiana and Ohio State enjoying each other’s company and appreciating one another’s work. That was not the case at Indiana in 1977; and there was scarcely any ethnomusicology at Ohio State then. I had assumed, back in 1977 when I went to Indiana to teach in their summer session, that because the ethnomusicology doctoral program was housed within the Folklore Institute, that ethnomusicologists and folklorists would have had much to share in the study of music, which at that time was a more important part of folklore studies than it is today. I knew that several students of American folk music were there at the Institute pursuing a doctoral degree in folklore, and I assumed that they would benefit from a context where they could pursue their work in both folklore and ethnomusicology, as I had done in my own graduate studies a decade earlier at the University of Minnesota where I had studied ethnomusicology with Alan Kagan and folklore with Art Geffen and Marty (he never went by Martin) Roth.
        But a happy marriage between folklore and ethnomusicology was not what I found within the Folklore Institute in 1977. The folklore graduate students I spoke with who had wanted to do doctoral work in music had been diverted (and in some cases prevented) from doing so if they did not already have the equivalent of an undergraduate music major, including advanced training in music theory. If they had had it—and none of them did—they would have been welcomed into ethnomusicology courses; without it, they were not only prevented from those courses but also told by Richard Dorson that they did not have the professional qualifications to do research in music. Besides, Dorson distrusted these “folkies” interested in American folk music; to him they appeared too much like amateurs and indeed many of them actually sang and played this music—horror of horrors, as if in one’s heart one could be only either a musician or a scholar but not both. Never mind if they had serious research interests in the music they were singing and playing; in Dorson's view (and List's) they did not have the requisite distance from their subject to attain the necessary objectivity needed for professional research.
        In addition to the oral histories and tragic life stories that I was hearing from my new acquaintances among the graduate students—one of them, Neil Rosenberg, later wrote movingly about his frustrations (“Picking Myself Apart: A Hoosier Memoir,” Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 108 (1995): 277-286)—I heard an opposite point of view from the ethnomusicology graduate students. I recall a meeting with them in which they expressed to me their opinion that this requirement (a strong background in Western music history and theory) for folklorists (and others) studying American folk music (or any other music, for that matter) at the graduate level was both necessary and appropriate; and did I, as someone who had had that background and was teaching both folklore and ethnomusicology at Tufts University then, not agree with them?
        Indeed, I told them, I did not. I told them I thought music could be studied “professionally” from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. I told them I thought there was a distinguished history of literary critics’ studies of lyrics, insights which people like themselves, without an education in literature, probably would not have. I told them I thought there was a growing and fine sociologically-based study of music in the field of what was then called “popular culture studies,” later to become cultural studies. In the next few decades cultural studies, of course, produced many more studies of American popular music than ethnomusicology did. I told them that many folklorists had, in the past, made important scholarly contributions to the study of folk music, without having had the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in music. I asked them if they thought that Albert Lord, or for that matter Francis James Child, had undergone such music training? They had not. Finally, I told them it was arrogant to erect and maintain such barriers, and that they were wrong in thinking that in doing so they were shutting others out. In truth, I said, what they were really doing was shutting themselves out, out of what I saw as a growing interdisciplinary conversation about music that was taking place not only in folklore but also in sociology, popular culture, literary criticism, history, philosophy (aesthetics), and anthropology. 
       Ordinarily I would not have been so oppositional as a guest, or as bold and forthcoming as a young, visiting assistant professor. But I felt strongly that this policy, one that I understood was determined by George List (Dorson, who it was said didn't much like music anyway, simply enforced it), not only was hurtful to the folklore students interested in music, and of course to their career hopes; but it would also prevent a lot of good research from being done, and set back for years the study of American folk music. No other educational institution was so well positioned as the Folklore Institute to create a strong curriculum that would enable the most interested scholars, those most seriously committed, to research American folk music and obtain the doctorate with that specialty. (I should add that very few ethnomusicologists were interested in studying American folk music at the time; most were interested in exotic music and wished to travel to far countries.) Besides, things had happened fast to me while I was out there in Bloomington, in May and June of 1977. I could now speak to them from a position of security that was not simply intellectual, for my scholarship and teaching had just been independently validated. I suddenly had a research fellowship and, for as long as I wanted it, a guaranteed academic job. I had learned from the National Endowment for the Humanities that I'd won a year-long fellowship, and Tufts had just let me know that I was among the ten percent of their faculty that year who had been awarded tenure.
        I could have devoted the keynote address to this bit of history and personal drama--the topic was up to me--but because relations among folklore and ethnomusicology graduate students had greatly improved at the Folklore Institute during the past three decades, and this conference was proof of that, it would have been ancient history, sleeping dogs that should not be stirred, relevant only to those asking why it was that two generations of folklorists (my generation and the next) had not done as much research in United States folk music as one might have hoped, given the interest in the subject among the general public in the last half of the 20th century; or why it was that folklorists in the United States were so far behind their European counterparts in the study of their own folk music. And so I left these subjects, even though they have been on my mind for many years, for another time and place.
        But instead of exploring another facet of my argument concerning music and sustainability--authenticity--I decided to relate my interests in music and sustainability to the conference theme, which was “mediation,” broadly considered. One kind of media-ation relates to the information revolution and how people all over the world are increasingly surrounded by media representations of “the real thing,” or simulacra as Baudrillard put it. Besides, the folklorist and the ethnomusicologist are mediators in many ways. We mediate between our academic cultures and their people, on the one hand, and our subject cultures and their people when we do fieldwork. So, for example, I wrote an essay about mediation back in the early 1980s, discussing the navigation of roles, stances, and identities that the researcher (myself) assumes in doing fieldwork with religious groups, particularly when these groups were absolutist in their beliefs about the world. In my world, academics are relativists who “bracket” or suspend both belief and disbelief about such things as, for instance, whether God exists and whether one religious doctrine is true and another is false, while doing their research. Meanwhile we concentrate on ethnographic work: that is, trying to document and report accurately what it is that the people they are studying believe, the "native's point of view" as Malinowski famously put it nearly a hundred years ago. I added that it was ironic that one felt forced into this kind of objectivity when one does this kind of research without being a cultural insider or believer in the religious doctrine under study. On the other hand, many ethnomusicologists believe that participant-observation is usually a better path toward understanding than mere observation itself; except in cases like this where participation may be impossible. ("Role, Stance, and Identity in Fieldwork Among Folk Baptists and Pentecostals in the United States." American Music, Vol. 3 [1985]: 16-24.)
        I chose to speak about a different kind of mediation: a musical instrument as a mediator, in three different ways; and the instrument I chose was one of several which I have played for more than thirty years: the banjo. I spoke about the banjo as a social and cultural mediator; as a taxonomic mediator; and as a performance mediator in terms of its role in the old-time string band. Particularly in its role in the old-time string band, the banjo encourages the kind of creative improvisation that both sustains the the people who make music (makes it continually challenging and interesting) and also in so doing sustains (conserves) the music, gives it a future as well as a present.
        As a taxonomic mediator, the banjo troubles the most fundamental boundary level in the famous Sachs-Hornbostel musical instrument classification, between membranophone (the banjo’s skin head is a membrane and a sound producer) and chordophone (sound produced from vibrating strings). In terms of its physical construction it is both a membranophone and a chordophone. In one sense it is a mediator between the two classes; in another sense it is unclassifiable.
        As a sociocultural mediator, the banjo was brought to the New World by Africans. In the 19th century it was played by African-Americans and by the European-Americans who learned it from them. The banjo was crucial in the ongoing Black-white musical interchange, one that already, prior to the Civil War, had resulted in the first distinctively American music. This was long before ragtime and jazz, the musical genres that are usually (and incorrectly) pointed to in that regard. In this fusion the banjo and fiddle (an instrument that many Black Americans learned, as they furnished much of the dance music in the Colonies and the new Republic) were key. They altered the 19th century American musical soundscape, and set it in a direction—swing, flow, drive, pulse, participatory discrepancies, whatever one wants to call this rhythmic feel—that would integrate itself into popular dance music of all kinds in the 20th century. As Alan Jabbour has persuasively argued, Black ways of bowing the fiddle “spoke” syncopation and became a sine qua non of dance fiddling in the South. The same could be said of the banjo, whose drone string when played in the stroke or minstrel style gave the music an offbeat emphasis and a new rhythmic feel: swing.
    To illustrate the Black-white musical interchange I showed some of the paintings that William Sidney Mount rendered from the 1830s through the 1860s. Mount was the first and one of the few 19th century artists in the United States to paint vernacular musicians accurately and frequently. Usually regarded as a mere "genre painter," he was nevertheless a serious and fine artist whose work is unusually valuable to the music historian. The only other painter of comparable--actually greater--stature who painted fiddlers and banjo players was Eastman Johnson, and he was both a generation later and not as realistic or as detailed in his representations of instruments, playing postures, and the like. I myself became aware of the Mount paintings and sketches in the 1960s while a graduate student, and I reproduced one in my doctoral dissertation (1971) and my book that came of it (Early Downhome Blues [University of Illinois Press, 1977]). The Mount painting of a Black banjo player ("The Banjo Player," [1856]) has graced museum greeting cards and is well known to anyone with an interest in the history of the banjo; but here just below is one, "Dance of the Haymakers" (1845), that shows a young Black lad playing percussion and patting his foot (outside the barn) in a rhythm that very likely "swings" and encourages the white fiddler playing the tune, and the two young men dancing. Up in the loft a little white girl and her black companion (standing), possibly a "nurse," look on:

Of course, as would be appropriate at that time and place, he is outside the barn, not quite a part of the instrumental ensemble socially; but he is part of it musically. Mount painted music in his community on Long Island, New York. He was, himself, a fiddler and a tune collector and transcriber as well as a painter. He invented a cornerless fiddle that he called "The Cradle of Harmony," but he made his living as a painter, chiefly from portraits that were commissioned by patrons who could afford them. Among his genre paintings were about a dozen non-commissioned canvases depicting fiddlers, banjo players, and dance music. Most found buyers. His brother Robert was a fiddler and dancing master who traveled and instructed dance classes in the South. 
       While it is appropriate to give any artist license to paint from an inner vision, and not to take quite literally the representations that they make, however realistic they seem, in the case of Mount's music paintings there seems little reason not to take them as accurate renderings of the music in his community, though to be sure they are overlaid with sentimentality. It is hard to believe, for instance, that the little dog in the foreground would not be tearing into the carcass of the bird on the plate at the edge of the barn. But the musicians seem to have been real. In fact, the names of most of the musicians depicted in Mount's paintings are coming to light. They were local musicians that Mount saw and heard frequently. Some, like the fiddler depicted in Mount's painting "Just in Tune," he knew intimately: the model was his brother Robert. I told the audience that my musicologist colleague Chris Smith has been researching this and other aspects of Mount's work and is preparing a book discussing Mount and the evidence that these paintings and sketches provide for this musical interchange, and its sociocultural implications; and that it will surely be an eye-opening work of scholarship. Interestingly, because the Mount paintings of Black and white fiddlers and banjo players have been familiar to me for so many years, I had neglected to anticipate that they might be unfamiliar to this conference audience, even though many were doing research in American music. Indeed, they were unfamiliar; but the group of graduate students and professors were quite taken with them. If that is any indication of the potential audience for Chris Smith’s book, it will be even more appealing and important.
        Finally, I spoke about the banjo as a mediating instrument in the performance of old-time string band music, and I took up a subject that I’ve been fussing with for many years: how an old-time string band musician (in this case, a banjo player) learns to play a tune by ear as it’s being played, over and over again, a tune that he or she has never heard before. I am particularly interested in how the tune appears in the mind and in the fingers, how it is presented to the musician’s consciousness successively, each time it flies by, so to speak. To use a technical term, this is a phenomenological inquiry. As I’ve been trying to write an essay on this subject (and trying to use evidence not only from introspection based on my own playing, but also from others’ testimony as how the tunes appear to their consciousness—and not everyone reports this to be the same) for a number of years, I’m going to have to leave it at that, here. 
        I concluded the keynote address on the banjo as a mediator by emphasizing the creative aspects of learning to “set” a tune (either on banjo or fiddle) by ear, a tune that one has not heard before, in real time; and I tried to indicate that the pleasure and the craft satisfaction found in doing it well (or reasonably so) is sufficient to make this way of making music fill a large part one’s musical life, sustaining both oneself as a musician and in the process sustaining a musical tradition. It is not an easy skill to learn, by the way; it may take several years, and it is particularly difficult on the banjo, because it is not possible to render the fiddler’s melody exactly as the fiddler plays it, at least not without sacrificing the rhythmic drive and swing that is the making of this old Southern sound; and so the banjo player must create a melodic setting that is complementary to that of the fiddle. These skills are not the same as those that improvising jazz musicians develop, by the way, although they are related; but that is yet another story which must be left for another time.
        After this keynote the audience engaged me in conversation about it for more than an hour. They were chiefly interested in the Mount paintings and what they might mean. I was happy to discuss that, and reminded them of Chris Smith's forthcoming book. I tried to steer the conversation back to music and sustainability when I could, emphasizing the Black-white interchange as an instance of the ways innovation gives life and sustains music while transforming sound and enhancing its bodily experience. We adjourned to a delicious and appropriate pot-luck dinner at folklorist and professor John McDowell's home in Bloomington, where the conversation continued for a few more hours before, exhausted from my flight from Providence that morning and my endeavors that afternoon, I left the gathering for the motel and a sound sleep.
   

The Curry Lecture: Applied Ethnomusicology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound Sacralizes Space

Let us once again enlarge the discussion from music to sound, a move toward the soundscape that I have been led to make over and over again. As Theodore Roethke wrote, "I learn by going where I have to go." By now I hope the lesson is learned. At any rate, shifting attention from music to sound has been very helpful to me in thinking about the role of music--and sound--in sustaining life on planet Earth.

Sound sacralizes space through co-presence. That is, one senses the presence of something greater than oneself through sound. It is not only sound that does this; touch will do it as well. But sound is present from a distance and can be present virtually whereas touch cannot be.

Space, or place, may become sacralized visually as well as aurally. One experiences the sublime in the presence of Nature, the natural world, visually and aurally. When you close your eyes, the visual world disappears while the aural world remains. Open your eyes and the visual world reappears as it was. Sound, on the other hand, comes and goes. It is ephemeral. Its sudden appearance and disappearance does not depend on opening and closing one's ears; it is there and then not there. Sound's sacralization of space is sudden, dramatic.

Secular sounds sacralize place, memorialize people. The names of fiddle tunes--"The Brushy Fork of John's Creek" (memorializing the last battle in Pike Co., Kentucky, during the Civil War); "Bill Brown" (memorializing a peddler who was murdered); "They Swung John Brown from a Sour Apple Tree"--these are among tunes I play, and they invoke co-presence. Often an old-time string band fiddler will say the name of the person from whom he or she learned the tune, just before or after playing it, invoking the co-presence of the source musician.

Co-presence, a concept developed by the sociologist Shanyang Zhao, refers to "a sense of being with others," both physically (face-to-face) and virtually. The concept has been useful in exploring ways in which people feel connected on the Internet even though they are not physically present to one another. Here I want to extend co-presence to the sense that when sound sacralizes space one feels in the presence of something greater than oneself. There is a kind of virtuality in that the "greater than oneself" is felt but the presence does not take on a particular physical embodiment.

Back in 1971 the blues singer Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston reminisced to me about working as a sharecropper when he was a teenager. Out chopping (weeding) corn, he used to sing out a field holler, "the old cornfield blues without an instrument," and he remarked that the sound would carry far out there in the country soundscape. "Lazy" Bill Lucas, blues singer and pianist, was there too, and he responded that the woods were like an echo chamber, that those field hollers would carry for miles and that others would hear them and answer them with their own field hollers. Co-presence. The holler organizes the fields and woods aurally much as Wallace Stevens's jar organized the Tennessee wilderness visually ("Anecdote of the Jar" is the Stevens poem I'm referring to here.) In those days I was thinking about field hollers as a musical genre and precursor of the blues, but Baby Doo and Lazy Bill were trying to tell me about something else: the field holler as soundscape, sound sacralizing space. You can hear what they say and then hear Baby Doo sing a field holler on the CD set accompanying the book Worlds of Music.

Soundscape, a concept developed by R. Murray Schafer (his book, The Tuning of the World [1977] is definitive), refers to the acoustic environment. It is a back-formation from the word landscape. His work on soundscape included exercises for paying attention to sound (what he termed "ear-cleaning"). His work arose in the context of noise pollution; he was a historian of sound, and a social engineer interested in acoustic design in the service of more healthful soundscapes. In Schafer's view, soundscapes contained keynotes (background sounds, such as wind, insects, birds), signals (foreground sounds that are present to consciousness), and soundmarks (sounds unique to particular communities, which need protection). Endangered musical cultures possess soundmarks.

Schafer also coined the term schizophonia, referring to a feeling of unease with the doubleness of sound when the sound is separated from the source of its original production, as when one listens to a recording of a live performance. Schizophonia (a back-formation from schizophrenia) is also an instance of co-presence, and is experienced today without unease or confusion by many; but for Schafer it was a modern disease. It need not be; it also characterizes community on the Internet; that is, the kind of co-presence one feels when socially networked with others on listservs and other kinds of Internet communities, such as Facebook.

A realist, Schafer was not so much interested in sound as socially constructed, or the soundscapes of memory, as I am. Much of my ethnographic research in music has been research in sound. My Powerhouse for God project (documentary LP, 1983; book, 1988; documentary film, 1989 which is stream-able free on folkstreams.net) started with music but quickly moved to sound: the book's subtitle is "speech, chant, and song in an Appalachian Baptist church." Music was one thing, knowable; but the holy whine of the preacher's voice and the sung prayer was mysterious, as well it should have been, the peculiar sound marking (in the churchmembers' worldview) the presence of the divine and thereby sacralizing the sanctuary space of the church. That presence is a co-presence, not corporeal. The project I did with Rev. C.L. Franklin focused on his sung sermons ("whooping," as it is called in the Black churches), not on the magnificent gospel music, spirituals, or lined-out hymnody in the church--which, after all, was where his daughter Aretha made her bones, so it must have been wonderful--and it was. But I was drawn even more to the sound of the preaching, the moments when speech turned to chant and sound sacralized space and place.

It was in the 1990s when I visited the Old Regular Baptists in southeastern Kentucky that I encountered people who spoke explicitly of sound transforming and sacralizing space, whether singing in the coal mine or the sound of the singing coming down from the mountains or echoing outside the churches on a Sunday morning, heard by the children playing up and down the creek beds. Their words about sound may be heard on the first of the two CDs that Smithsonian Folkways released from my field tape recordings: Songs of the Old Regular Baptists. To close out the CD we chose to present excerpts from some of their statements about the singing, and many mentioned the sound and its "drawing power." Elwood Cornett, the moderator (head) of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, said: "When I came into this life there was that sound. I hope that when I leave here, that I leave the same sound that I found when I came here." The Old Regular Baptists weren't thinking about their music as music; they were talking about the power of its sound to open a communication channel in the co-presence of the divine.

An acoustic ecology devoted to music and its role in sustaining life on planet Earth would do well to understand, before engaging in social engineering and managing soundscapes, how sound sacralizes space and place.

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.”

Systems and sustainability at the EPA

The federal Environmental Protection Agency “is undertaking what some call a ‘seismic shift in the way it works: making ‘sustainability’ its central goal,” said Bruce Gellerman on this morning’s public radio broadcast of Living on Earth. Jeff Young interviewed the new head of the EPA, Paul Anastas, who explained that instead of targeting for specific interventions, he “wants his scientists to think more broadly about systems and sustainability.” Anastas explained using climate change as an example: “Climate is inextricably linked to energy, energy inextricably linked to water, water to agriculture, agriculture to health, and we could go on and on. If we start saying that the entirety of our approach to sustainability is simply to reduce our carbon footprint or to look at any one aspect, then we will not be getting the power and potential of the synergies of looking from a systems approach.”

Anastas’ adoption of the systems approach indeed represents that shift from conservation thinking, in which particular problems such as endangered species are addressed by specific interventions, to ecological thinking, in which the principle of interconnectedness guides policy makers to look at the consequences of specific interventions in the context of the interdependence of the whole system or ecosystem. This is precisely the shift in thinking that I have been proposing for cultural interventions, based on the principle of interconnectedness, one of the four principles I’ve been speaking and writing about. I explain it most thoroughly in my essay, "Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint," in The World of Music, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2009), pp. 119-138.

 This kind of thinking underlies my proposals to feed the cultural soil, so to speak, rather than the particular arts or genres; in other words, to concentrate efforts in musical and cultural sustainability on improving the conditions that give a life to traditional music and expressive culture, rather than simply targeting endangered musical cultures for support, as UNESCO (the major institution involved in cultural sustainability throughout the world) has been doing in its efforts to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. I would hope that the same kind of shift in strategy that the new EPA head is espousing would translate to the institutions that are making cultural policy—not only UNESCO, but national agencies as well, such as arts councils, museums, historical societies, and traffickers in cultural and musical heritage.

But I’d add a word of caution. This kind of holistic thinking, which Anastas is adopting at the EPA, envisions a paradigmatic environmental system, one that claims that large ecosystems move through a succession of stages towards a balanced state in dynamic equilibrium. The climax forest concept is the usual example. But some contemporary ecologists have discarded this model of a balance of Nature in favor of one based in evolutionary biology, with blind chance and mutation as the driving factors over the (very) long term. This newer paradigm challenges Nature's economy (a concept that, incidentally, Darwin himself believed) and posits disturbance and disequilibrium as the new normal. Climate change on Earth, as it has occurred over hundreds of millions of years, is taken as the usual example. Because my thinking here is informed by ecology, it would be irresponsible not to consider this newer paradigm—welcomed in some quarters, damned in others—and its consequences, for music, cultural policy, and sustainability. I intend to do so in a number of future posts, particularly as I examine the role of music and sound in evolution. Evolution, as I wrote here many months ago, was once a forbidden topic among ethnomusicologists, but climate change effects ideas as well as temperature.

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?

A visit to Portland, Oregon

    I'm just back from an exciting trip to Portland, Oregon, one of the most environmentally conscious areas of the U.S. Professor Darrell Grant, of the music department at Portland State University, invited me to speak on how music might take a seat at the table where sustainability was under discussion. He'd told me that sustainability was an important topic of conversation in his city, and that much good work was being done; but people were puzzled about how music fit into the civic dialogue. Darrell Grant is an active member of the university and the Portland community, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, a highly regarded teacher and jazz pianist, and a citizen concerned with the health of the music community and the Portland soundscape. Last fall, out of the blue, he invited me to kick off a series of lectures on music and sustainability sponsored by the music department as part of the university's sustainability initiative. He'd run into this blog, read it, and hoped I'd be willing to share some of my thoughts with the Portland community.

    In addition to the lecture, Darrell arranged a 90-minute morning round table to which he'd invited not only members of the music department and the university at large who were interested in the topic, professors from sociology and English, for example, but also several people involved with the city's soundscape, including urban planners, acoustic ecologists, arts administrators, architects, and the president of the local musicians' union, all for a dialogue around music's place in the city's ongoing efforts at sustainability.

    On Friday morning while eating breakfast I read the city paper, The Oregonian, and found an entire section devoted to "How We Live: Sustainability." The lead article was on Oregon State University's new green energy center; other articles discussed an exhibit of Whale Island petroglyphs from the Wampanum tribe, a documentary film entitled The Economics of Happiness, sponsored by Portland's Center for Earth Leadership, a public symposium on policy planning for the Williamette River watershed, a tree plantation repair work project, meant to improve stream health and restore wildlife habitat, and seeking volunteers; a film about the vanishing bees; and more. Writer Carrie Sturrock's column, "PDX Green" (PDX is the abbreviation for Portland), quoted Dick Roy, of the Center for Earth Leadership: "If everyone became a naturalist and understood the geology of the region and the history of the region and had a commitment to place, then the place we are isn't just a commodity. Then you have a foundation of people living in place who accept deep responsibility for it." Sturrock concluded that "Consequently, it becomes more easy and natural to support local businesses and farmers rooted in place." I felt grateful to be in such an environmentally-conscious place as Portland, with like-minded people.


    The music department representatives spoke about the mission statement they'd drafted concerning music and sustainability, in the process discovering many different interests and voices. I likened this, and the additional voices at the table, to the acoustic ecology of the tropical rain forest, where the voices of birds, reptiles, insects (yes, they make sounds by rubbing parts of their bodies together), and other animals all can be heard, not in a cacophony but each species with their particular acoustic niche, and where they can communicate with one another. A sociology professor picked up on this idea, saying that in her work she's very much concerned with the role of music in the health and solidarity of human communities.

    One of the Portland city community members spoke about music's quality of resilience, both in preference to the term sustainability, and as a supplement to it. He was speaking about the resilience of musical cultures and musicians as well, and instanced resilience as a quality that enabled music to survive in the face of change. This stimulated me to suggest to the group that resilience was one of the more important ecological concepts. A few of the people at the round table were aware that in the last  forty years or so the idea that ecosystems tend toward a state of dynamic equilibrium, exemplified in the climax forest, has been severely challenged by an opposite hypothesis, namely that disturbance rather than equilibrium is the natural tendency, that the ecosystem is no system at all, and that entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics characterize the natural world. Against this movement toward disorder, randomness, and chaos, however, I said that the natural world does exhibit resilience; and certainly the resilience of musical cultures is analogous.

    After everyone had a chance to speak and introduce themselves and their concerns, I noted that their concerns fell broadly into two topics: (1) the sustainability of music into the future, and (2) the role of music in the sustainability of life on planet Earth. These concerns, I said, lead us to formulate cultural policy in regard to music. Sustainability is a new word, but cultural policy has been concerned with the sustainability of music for a very long time. For example, music education has been going on for centuries; its goal is the sustainability of music and musical cultures. Beginning in the nineteenth century, efforts were under way to preserve musical artifacts in museums; before that, in private collections. Conservation was another form of cultural policy, ancient in regard to patronage, such as music supported by courts and governments throughout the world; but in the last part of the 20th century, cultural policy involving conservation began to target endangered musics for support, just as conservation efforts in the natural world were targeting endangered species.

    After critiquing targeted interventions, I pointed out that in the last decade or two, cultural policy has moved from conservation efforts in support of music to a view of music as an arm of economic policy, and I mentioned the ways in which cultural policymakers were bringing music and the arts into what was being termed the creative economy, as a spur to technological innovation and economic growth. It was interesting to see some resistance at the round table to the creative economy argument, as if there were something crass about it. Instead, as one of the community members put it, cultural policy should view music as an important component of happiness and well-being. I told them that music, art, gift, commodity, and the creative economy is an area I will be exploring in invited lectures later this winter and spring.

    Toward the end of the long and productive discussion, the talk turned toward the influence of the Internet on the future of music. Professional musicians, indeed the profession of music itself, was going to have to change, said the president of the musicians' union. How would it be possible for professional composers and musicians to continue earning a living, if society was moving away from the idea that musical product and performance is intellectual property that should be protected by copyright? Some felt that it would be difficult for older musicians to adapt, and that the future would see more musicians making less money. Some of the younger people at the table pointed out that while the Internet was moving toward free delivery of recordings, the circulation possibilities for music and access for musicians were increasing enormously, to the point that more musicians would be making more money in the future, not from music available on the Internet, but from concerts and recordings sold at concerts (which were not available on the Internet). Afterward many of the participants mentioned that they had been reading this blog with pleasure and were glad to meet the author; some had been reading it for more than a year or two.

    Friday evening’s lecture concentrated on the implications of the Four Principles from conservation biology (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship) for cultural policy regarding music. I spoke about these, thinking that in such an ecologically-conscious community, this aspect of the topic would be of more interest than others. I spoke about stewardship and partnership, had them sing an Old Regular Baptist lined hymn with me, and then talked at length about how the Old Regular Baptists had been able to conserve and revitalize their 425-year-old singing tradition.

    I was going to conclude by talking about the Lilley Cornett Woods, the only old-growth forest left in eastern Kentucky, but I ran out of time. The Lilley Cornett Woods is located in the same southeastern part of the state as the Old Regular Baptists. In fact, the hymn we listened to, and then sang, was one that I recorded in a church not more than a few miles away from the Lilley Cornett Woods. So I will leave for another time the story of Lilley Cornett and the 500 acres of original growth forest he bought after World War I on his miner’s wages, and preserved because he wouldn’t sell out to the timber cutters and the coal companies. Nor would the Old Regular Baptists sell out to the musical reformers, whether the purveyors of music literacy, shaped notes and gospel music in the 19th century, or the dominance of gospel music (what some of them call "radio songs") in the 20th. It’s not a coincidence that the Old Regular Baptists and the Lilley Cornett Woods inhabit the same geographical and cultural space.

Asking good questions

This research blog has been a great help in getting some ideas on music and sustainability out there, and in getting some feedback. The seminar I taught last year at Brown in Music and Cultural Policy was also very helpful. At the moment what I'm thinking is this: what are the best, that is, the most fruitful, questions to ask about music and sustainability? As usual, in doing the kind of exploratory research a humanities scholar does, I've been following my interests and inclinations, rather than going along a predetermined route. This is new work; there is no predetermined route, and I believe it would have been premature to try to plan one when I started on this road years ago. As Theodore Roethke wrote, "I learn by going / where I have to go."

Of course, this blog is filled with questions, some asked, many implicit. What are the first ones, the ones that lead down the most promising paths, roads, highways? What are the ones that will help to run patterns and orders that will help us best theorize sustainability and music? This is another way of saying I want to start organizing this research in a systematic way.  I've been speaking out and writing about various aspects of the research for six years, and it's getting to be time to put it together in a book before books (or I) become obsolete. This semester is both busy and fortunate in that regard--busy because of my full load of classes and several invited lectures at other universities, and fortunate in that these invitations are to speak about music and sustainability. I look forward to learning a great deal from these interactions, all the while trying to settle on an order and patterned relationship in the questions to ask--and there are many. I'm hoping, through these invited lectures on music and sustainability, all during the next three months at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Portland State University, the University of Michigan, and Indiana University, to organize the questions that will best theorize the topic in an understandable and helpful way. And, of course, I'm hoping we can move further in developing some answers.

Cultural Rights, the Internet, and Sustainability

Cultural rights are the inherent rights that social groups possess, rights which permit them to sustain their distinctive cultures—in other words, to sustain their ways of thinking and doing. UNESCO extends its proclamations of individual human rights to the distinct ideas and practices of indigenous societies, ethnic minorities, and other social groups whose ways of life are threatened with exploitation or alteration or even with extinction. In the intellectual worlds of folklore and ethnomusicology that I inhabit, Alan Lomax’s “Appeal to Cultural Equity” (1972) is cited as an early statement of cultural rights in the face of what he called “cultural grey-out.” By grey-out he meant that when indigenous societies modernized, they lost their cultural distinctiveness as their people began to think and behave like those in the developed world—for example, as consumers. For Lomax, cultural grey-out was most obvious in music. Western popular music, in particular, Lomax regarded as a homogenizing force.

    As Lomax’s cultural grey-out hypothesis was put to the test, it became clear that societies tended to resist homogenization, particularly in their expressive cultures—the folklife of traditional foodways, song, dance, habitation, myth, craft, and so forth. Nonetheless, Lomax’s proposed solution to musical grey-out was a “global jukebox,” freely available to everyone, and containing recorded (audio and film) examples of all the diverse music found throughout the world. The inherent force of these authentic expressions would overwhelm listeners and ensure their preservation. Lomax was working on this project until he had a stroke in the early 1990s. Nevertheless his dream became a reality in short order, and today the global jukebox is available here and there and everywhere on the Internet.

    Ironically, while the Internet works against cultural grey-out by delivering an enormous amount of distinct information, relatively inexpensive to mount on the world wide web and representing widely differing ways of thinking and doing, this very information revolution is pressuring us toward adopting new and, to some, troubling ethical principles with regard to privacy and intellectual property rights. This pressure affects cultures as well as individuals.

    On one hand, as consumers we want—no, we deserve—free access to information on the Internet, whether music, images, video, opinions, bank and credit card accounts, recipes, consumer guides, newspapers, books, not to mention people's personal information and their whereabouts, blogs and tweets. We envision a future in which all information is on the Internet—everything on an iPhone or an iPad viewed in the palm of the hand and plugged a-socially into the ears. Is this how music will be sustained? Cultures? People? (Never mind, for the moment, that it's all virtual representation, not live performance.)

    Free access is quickly achieving the ethical status of a natural right, a democratization of the information commons. No one will ever have to visit a library or a record or video store again, let alone attend a live performance. Bookshelves?—you don’t need them. Filing cabinets?—digitize what you have and move into the paperless world. Desks? Pens? Paper? Postage stamps? No way. You’ll feel good about it too because your stuff won’t take up so much of a carbon footprint (not to mention physical space).

    On the other hand, what happens to the rights of the creators of this information? International law grants creators intellectual property rights; no one can copy without permission. But the desire for free access on the Internet is changing society’s conceptions about intellectual property. People are talking about “creative commons” and other ways of changing the legal notion of “fair use.” What about cultural rights to traditional knowledge shared by an indigenous group? Doesn’t a social group, in other words, have the right to protect its way of life from exploitation in the marketplace? Instances of cultural robbery abound—songs that have been sampled and stolen without financial or other compensation; native medicinal plant knowledge that “big pharma” has exploited for profit; and so forth. What about cultural knowledge gathered by ethnographers and stored in archives under restricted conditions of access; can archives afford to safeguard this information without delivering it on the Internet?

    The Internet, then, is delivering virtual sustainability while pressuring ethical and legal conceptions of individual and cultural rights. A recent discussion on one of the listserves I follow is a case in point. An archivist who is well aware of the ethical obligations that ethnographers and culture workers feel toward the people and groups from whom they gather information, nevertheless maintains that archives should obtain both ownership and copyright of materials that are donated, so that they may decide without outside restrictions on how to care for and make accessible the information. Rather than act as stewards on behalf of the depositors, archives should give preference to those deposits they will be able to control. Control is one thing if the material is in a locked room and access is granted only to qualified individuals, but it is quite another when the material is on the Internet. As the Internet becomes the only cost-effective delivery system, it will be harder for archives to justify spending scarce resources on maintaining physical materials. It won’t be long before the cultural artifacts moulder away as surely as the objects that once filled the dry storerooms of natural history museums.

    In this way, the Internet enhances cultural rights and sustains culture, but it also diminishes cultural rights and fails to conserve that which cannot, or should not, be represented on it. In promoting free access it brings about the triumph of consumers’ rights at the expense of producers’ and moves toward the elimination of intellectual property rights, whether individual or collective. Nowadays the best way to preserve intellectual property is to give it away. Soon it may be the only way. But heaven help you if you wish to earn your living from it.