Music, sustainability, and public radio

    Although we had little down-time at the cultural sustainability conference, early in the mornings before breakfast I listened to Vermont Public Radio, broadcasting NPR’s ubiquitous news program, Morning Edition. One of the flashpoints for music’s sustainability is its future on US public radio--what used to be called noncommercial radio, and now should be called brief commercial radio based on those 3-sentence announcements naming corporate underwriters, what they do, and how to contact them. Whereas music programming, particularly classical music, once dominated public radio, in the new millennium it’s gradually lost its hold, to the point that today most public radio stations broadcast news and talk shows over the air, having moved classical music to the Internet or to broadcast channels that conventional radios cannot receive. I've blogged here before about classical music's future, on radio and elsewhere. Meanwhile, music of many kinds still can be heard on several low-power, local community radio stations.
    In New England, I date the public radio all-talk trend from the 1990s, the decade when Boston-area WBUR-FM gradually removed music from prime time to its peripheral schedule, late at night and on weekends. In 1997, despite much protest, WBUR dropped music programming entirely, in favor of news and talk shows. WBUR’s award-winning and highly popular late night jazz show, hosted by Tony Cennamo, was among the programs eliminated. Boston’s WGBH-FM still provided much music programming, including the paradigmatic Morning Pro Musica, hosted by Robert J. Lurtsema, aired also by many other stations in New England, including Maine Public Radio. But in the new millennium, after the charismatic Lurtsema died in 2000, WGBH-FM also pushed music gradually to the side, and today it too is all-talk, all the time. What of Vermont?
    I didn’t hear enough public radio in Vermont to get an impression, but after returning to Maine I looked up its programming schedule. Not to my surprise, I found that Vermont had followed the trend, and was programming news and information almost exclusively. What did surprise me was that in some of the on-line articles I read about how Vermont made that transition, the man behind the trend was identified as Vermont Public Radio’s Mark Vogelsang. In 2012, Vogelsang left Vermont to become head of Maine Public Radio. Would Maine now follow Vermont? Most likely.
    Since Vogelsang took over, peripheral blocks once reserved for music have been replaced by talk shows. The 11 p.m. hour, once a haven for soothing music (“Echoes,” with John DiLiberto), is now punctuated by the noisy drumming that introduces segments of On Point, produced, incidentally, by WBUR, but on air there in the mornings when the drum-banging is a little less annoying. Maine weekend early mornings, once given over to classical music, now feature information shows: On Being, Living on Earth, Only a Game, and Bob Edwards Weekend. These shows do have their merits, but to music listeners, airing them on early weekend mornings is especially galling, as the classical music host, Jennifer Mitchell, used to start with Robert J. Lurtsema’s signature show-opener, a dawn-chorus of bird sounds, appropriate at that early hour—although not as rewarding as the real thing one could hear through an open window.
    Another ominous sign was the departure, last month, of Maine Public Radio’s morning classical music host, Suzanne Nance, for a position at a commercial, all-classical music station in Chicago. Morning classical music remains from 9 to noon on Maine Public Radio, but now with rotating local hosts while the station says it’s undertaking a national search for a replacement. Maine is the New England morning classical music holdout. If and when it goes, it will join Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, none of whose public radio networks broadcast classical music in the morning (or, for the most part, anytime else day or night).
    A word about Suzanne Nance is in order. For several years she not only hosted the morning program but also was a strong, public voice for classical music live performance in Maine. Herself a singer, she could be heard in concerts in Portland and elsewhere in the state; importantly, she hosted on her program visiting composers, conductors, soloists and chamber groups for a half hour, on average one day a week; and besides talking about their upcoming concerts in the state they sometimes played live music on her show. Not everyone liked her enthusiastic, up-front personality; and some thought she didn’t program enough music from before 1800; but no one doubted that her presence boosted classical music in Maine. Thus, her departure as radio host is an even greater loss for classical music in the state.
    By chance, a little after returning to Maine from Vermont, I met someone who until earlier this year had worked for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. I asked about Suzanne Nance’s departure. “Well,” the answer came, “I shouldn’t talk out of school. But since I am out of school, I will.” Having left the job at MPBN, the person (who will remain nameless here) told me that Suzanne “read the tea leaves and decided that she ought to move on. She’d been looking for another position, and when this came along, she decided to go.” I asked if this was a career move up for her. “More of a lateral move,” was the reply. “What did she see in the tea leaves?” I asked. “The new head, Vogelsang, wants to make it all news and talk radio. That’s what he did in Vermont. You can see he’s gradually doing it already.” “Yes,” I said, “I’ve noticed.”
    What prompts this blog entry is that Vogelsang himself spoke for nearly an hour today, on MPBN, in response to listeners’ questions. He confirmed that his plan for Maine Public Radio was to move towards two separate stations, one for news and information, and the other for classical music. Of course, this means no jazz, no folk music, no popular music; it means the end on Maine radio for shows like A Prairie Home Companion, for years arguably the largest fund-raiser for public radio; it means the end for other staples that the Maine audience likes, such as alternative music and singer-songwriters; and it’s already the end for shows like American Routes, hosted by folklorist Nick Spitzer out of New Orleans, which went off the MPBN air last spring.
    These programming changes are cause for a measured lament, and the lament goes beyond music programming on public radio: it is a lament for a generation and a way of life that included listening to music on radio, particularly classical music; it is a recognition of the passing of a segment of a generation for whom classical music on radio represented more than merely music, but also a set of values, values increasingly out of step in a contemporary, diverse global society. Vogelsang dropped the statistic that most people under 30 don’t even own radios, and don’t listen to them except perhaps in their automobiles; and we are hearing that this young generation doesn’t own nearly as many cars as past generations did. The automobile, once the symbol of freedom, is being replaced by the smartphone, the symbol of connectedness. Culture is rapidly changing; those who wish to address questions of musical sustainability will need to look elsewhere besides public radio.
    Radio executives like Vogelsang are consumed with other survival issues, not least the survival of public radio itself, as it moves in the digital direction and its Internet presence becomes more important than over-the-air. All programs need to be available on the Internet, he said; that will become our primary means of delivery. When news breaks, should it go immediately on the public radio website, or do we wait until it’s broadcast and only then put it on the website? This is the kind of nuts and bolts question that radio and television executives think about, not what they will do with their music programming. They already know the answer to that one. And when pressed on it, as he was by at least one listener this afternoon, Vogelsang said it wasn't going away: classical music would be available 24/7 on another MPBN station, as it is on the Internet right now. (MPBN streams it from its website.) And after all, music of all kinds is available elsewhere on the Internet. Indeed, with Internet services like Pandora and Spotify and now Apple’s iRadio along with iTunes, the under-30 generation is able to hear the artists and individual music tracks they want there. Most won't realize what they are missing: voices like Suzanne Nance’s, which helped sustain the live classical music performance community in the state of Maine, for example; or the history and biography and other context that once came in the liner or brochure notes that accompanied a record album or CD, now replaced by "album art."
    Measured lament behind us, the transition to news and talk on Maine Public Radio offers the chance for MPBN to become a conduit for civic dialogue in the state. Vogelsang understands this, and has initiated programs like Maine Calling, now expanded in prime time, the noon hour, to four days a week. People are invited to call in from all areas of the state to discuss issues of local, regional, and national importance. This was the show he appeared on today, and I was one of the callers. Rather than prolong the lament, I decided to focus on the possibility of a future in which MPBN became more of what local community radio in this area already is, on WERU-FM, a “voice of many voices.” I suggested they make an effort to get out of their regional news focus on Portland, Augusta, and Bangor (the three major Maine cities) and get their news and information teams out across the state to find out what is going on in the Maine forests, the blueberry lands, the fisheries, and rural life all over Maine. I suggested that there be more working-class voices heard on air (and Internet), adding that it could increase their contributor base enormously. (Vogelsang asked me, “How do you do that?” One answer: get those news teams out into the whole state, talk to the people, and record their voices.)
    The future of classical music on public radio—let alone the future of music on radio—let alone the future of radio itself—is debated within a larger context that involves globalization, unprecedented connectedness and decreasing privacy, changes in media and transformations in daily life and experience. In this discussion, sustainability cannot simply mean preservation of an older set of experiences--that is impossible--but, rather, reassessment, continuity, and possibilities previously unrealizeable.
   
       

Syrup and sustainability

    Maple syrup and milk, closely associated with Vermont in the public imaginary, add value to the region, just as Maine benefits more than economically from lobsters and blueberries. As Michael Lange, presenting at the cultural sustainability symposium in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, pointed out, sugaring from the sap of the sugar maple trees is paradigmatically associated with the state, both as product and symbol. As a natural resource-based product, maple syrup is an important part of the Vermont economy; and Vermont accounts for nearly 40% of the US maple syrup production. But its economic value goes well beyond the product itself, for sugaring conjures up images of old-fashioned, wholesome rural lifestyles that attract tourists to the state, images that over the years also have attracted in-migrants. In this way, the tourist dollar value of a heritage symbol is enmeshed in cultural as well as natural resource sustainability.
    Although most sugaring operations sell to the wholesale trade, some also offer a portion of their product to the general public in small shops attached to the sugarhouses. In the state of Maine, which accounts for 20% of the total amount of US maple syrup production, it’s not uncommon to see homemade signs along the road during late winter sugaring season, advertising a local sugar-maker’s product, which is sold out of the home. But Maine does not have the large sugar-making operations that not only serve the wholesale trade but market under their own name and at the same time create tourist stops where visitors to Vermont may see demonstrations of sugar making and taste the product, year round. A few of these are quite large, rivaling living history museums in size and attractiveness; they also are competitive, and each has its partisans. In fact, when Lange named a few of them, Vermonters in the room immediately spoke up in favor of this one or that one; and if Lange hadn’t stepped back in, a lively debate on whose syrup was best would have interrupted the presentation.
    Lange placed these large sugar making tourist attractions squarely within the cultural heritage industry, and with it the ongoing debate among culture workers over the hells and benefits of heritage tourism. Although he didn’t elaborate on it, sugaring (like lobstering) is dependent on an ongoing natural resource, which brings in sustainability issues, international trade and competition (for maple syrup, the competition is with Canada, which subsidizes its sugar makers), state and federal regulation, and so forth, often putting sugar makers at odds with regulators over best practices. The ongoing health of the sugar maples in the forests, just like the health of lobsters in the oceans, will depend in part on the effects of climate change. We don’t expect the Vermont forests to look like those south of the Mason-Dixon line anytime soon; rather, the warming climate brings changes to the ecosystem in the form of pests and predators that the sugar maples have not previously had to combat.
    Vermont prides itself on the quality of its syrup and, indeed, offers it in four grades: fancy, grade A medium amber, dark amber, and grade B. No other state makes such fine distinctions. But ironically, this grading system works against Vermont syrup outside of the state. Grade B is considered inferior because of the labeling, whereas outside the state much ungraded Canadian syrup that would be labeled grade B in Vermont doesn’t carry the same negative connotation. A further irony is that the fancy syrup, being the purest and most delicate-flavored, has the least amount of maple taste; those wanting a stronger taste of maple use the darker syrups. The state legislature this year debated whether to endorse grade inflation: all Vermont syrup would henceforth be labelled grade A, and the distinctions would be made on the basis of color and the degree of maple taste. A Boston Globe article concluded by quoting an eighth-generation sugar maker, Doug Bragg: “Most of our customers are asking, why do we have to do this [change in the grading system]? There’s a logic to it, no question about it. It’s still annoying, though.” (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/02/19/lawmakers-consider-streamlining-maple-syrup-labeling/au9YAbugZwBs0npLlUG4hL/story.html)
    As heritage tourism is a frequently-discussed topic on this blog, there’s no need to review it fully here. But maple sugar tourism differs from that revolving around much traditional music in the US in that sugaring is a viable industry and would remain one without heritage tourism, whereas heritage tourism often gives traditional music a second life, one that would not be viable without it. Like lobsters and blueberries, maple sugar tourism offers not just an education but a food reward at the end of the lecture. Forestry tourism doesn’t do that, which may be why in Maine, for example, it’s not as attractive as lobsters and blueberries. Nor has Maine capitalized on sugaring tourism anywhere to the extent that Vermont has done.
    Lange concluded his presentation by discussing a different kind of educational involvement with sugar making, a program at an elementary school in Fairfield, Vermont, where youngsters participate hands-on in sugar-making, presumably giving them a deeper involvement than the tourists get, and also a deeper understanding of what this symbolic state industry involves at the ground level. Such innovative programs could also involve field trips and nature-study, a curriculum that has gradually been disappearing from the schools in favor of the abstractions of modern science.
    In our own field trip, to a former dairy farm, we grappled with economic and cultural sustainability issues surrounding the other picture-book Vermont industry: dairy farming. I will have more to say about that shortly.

Seed saving and cultural sustainability

    An educational and cultural project involving home garden seed saving was the centerpiece of Rosann Kent’s presentation at the cultural sustainability symposium last month at Sterling College. Hers was one of the talks that engaged with my own work, for I’ve been an organic gardener and seed saver myself now for some thirty-plus years. After all, a university’s academic year calendar permits faculty time in the summer to do research, write, and in my case, also to tend an organic garden and orchard. Hand-work is complementary to head-work, and the easy pace of gardening frees me for creative daydreaming. If I had to make a living as a farmer, I’m sure that my mind would be full of worry about the year’s crops, the weather, and market prices; but growing for home use (with surplus for friends) involves a different kind of accounting.
    Rosann Kent’s school, re-named the University of North Georgia earlier this year, resulted from the merger of the North Georgia College & University, and Gainesville State College. Its website proclaims it “The Military College of Georgia,” and Kent was quick to state that one would not normally associate seed saving with a military college. Nonetheless, the university’s Georgia Appalachian Studies Center, where Kent serves as a faculty member and the director, recently completed a project entitled “Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories,” which not only gained a good deal of local attention in this fastest-growing region of the state, but also was featured in a forum on local food systems and sustainable agriculture last year, sponsored by the Appalachian Regional Commission.
    Seed saving brings together culture and agriculture, a unity famously inscribed into the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s by Wendell Berry, whose words were prophetic then and whose voice remains essential today. Kent’s project was designed not just to inventory varieties of home garden seeds that had for years been saved and shared by local families, but also to collect and then present the stories that went along with the seeds. Stories connected with seeds may seem a little strange to anyone who either hasn’t either grown up in a family that keeps heirloom seeds, or hasn’t encountered the practice of storytelling surrounding the intersection of generations on the land through such things as names of places. Even the name of an old fiddle tune, when played in a circle of friends, if it names a place or person (or even if it doesn’t), often will draw forth a short story, or a reference to a known story, of the place or person named, or the fiddler from whom the player learned it, or an occasion on which it was played and something unusual occurred.
    In 1990 when I taught for the spring semester as Goode Visiting Professor of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, in Kentucky, I spent most weekends in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky; and one of the things I did was ask the people I got to know, the ones who had home gardens, whether they saved seed. Among other things, as a seed saver myself, I was interested in trying new-to-me varieties of heirloom non-hybrid seeds, and swapping some I’d saved with theirs.

My garden bean field, 2013. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon

This is one of the things seed-savers do; we swap seeds. Every seed variety has a name; they are not just “bean seeds.” Otherwise we couldn’t keep track of their differences very well. When I asked them what they called these bean seeds, or those tomato seeds, the answer often was something like, “Oh, those are Joe beans.” “Joe beans?” I would reply. “No, I mean what variety of beans are they?” “Well,” the answer would come, “these are greasy beans, if that’s what you’re getting at. Lots of folks around here grow greasy beans. These are ones that go back to old Joe Caudill, whose home place used to be up here (points up higher on the creek bed) where he grew them, must have been one hundred years ago.” And then the lady would go on to tell a little story that revealed old Joe’s character, or maybe something about one of his descendants, or she might say she went to school with so-and-so who was old Joe’s nephew’s cousin’s niece, or something like that. In this way, the seeds, the land, and the families all were put into meaningful relation. Their “use-value,” so to speak, was cultural as well as agricultural. Saving seeds also meant saving culture.
    Kent’s presentation added another cultural layer. This part of north Georgia was being inundated by people “from away,” as we would say in Maine, contrasting them with “natives.” In Kent’s country, the same distinction was between “came heres” and “been heres.” As in Maine, each group had its own notions of what it wanted. The “came heres” wanted Starbucks and services they were used to in the big cities; they thought that the “been heres” were culturally deprived and they wanted to “help.” The “been heres,” of course, had a culture of their own; and seed saving was an unimaginable (to the came heres) part of it. Kent had her students go out into the community and talk to the been heres who had home gardens about the seeds they saved, and of course just as had happened to me nearly a quarter century earlier and in a different part of Appalachia, they not only got seeds but also stories. So the seed saving project, along with the oral histories and stories, was presented in the community, and the came heres began to understand something about the been heres, while the been heres were reassured about their own culture.
    In our cultural sustainability symposium, Kent not only talked about this project, but she got us all into a workshop where we told each other family stories, something that might have gone on all afternoon—but there were other presentations to hear, and besides, all this talk about food made us hungry for the farm supper that was only a couple of hours away.    

The language of avoidance

    All of the presentations at the recent cultural sustainability symposium at Sterling College interested me, but in this and the next few entries I’ll single out some of those that linked most directly to the kind of thinking that’s engaged me on this blog: those by William Westerman, Mary Hufford, Rosann Kent, Nancy Menning, Michael Lange, and the field session with Farley Brown and Ross Morgan that concluded the symposium.
    Westerman spoke about the need to understand, confront, reveal and undermine those social, political and economic forces whose actions “disrupt local cultures with destructive, sometimes even genocidal, impact.” As he pointed out, people make decisions that set those forces in motion. They often are hard to identify because the disruption is often chronicled in the passive voice—events just seem to occur, and causation is not assigned.
    Much of what Westerman said is congruent with my own argument that culture workers must consider economic and environmental threats to cultural continuity, rather than confine ourselves to helping communities promote and maintain their traditional and characteristic artistic expressions, be they music, ethnic foods, religious folklife, dance, and so forth. Culture workers, who are trained to identify and document tradition-bearers (folk artists), ought also to direct efforts at identifying and documenting those people who give agency to the disruptive and destructive economic and environmental forces, and to exposing them.
    But Westerman’s focus on the language in which these problems are addressed is absolutely critical (a theme, also, of Mary Hufford’s presentation). It isn't just about what we say but how we think and therefore how we know, and how we can know. (The technical term for this is epistemology.) When one says, “The New York and New Jersey Coast was devastated by Superstorm Sandy,” that is the passive voice: the Coast “was devastated.” The fact is stated but the cause is not identified. If, instead, one says “Climate change is causing violent storms like Superstorm Sandy that devastated the New York and New Jersey Coast,” we have the active voice, which identifies the actor (cause), in this case climate change. Examples like this are more useful than contrasting sentences such as "The ball was hit to center field by John" versus "John hit the ball to center field." Of course, it's possible to identify actors in the passive voice ("by John" in the above contrast); but often the actor is absent, and sometimes on purpose.
    Westerman’s concentration on the evasive language of the passive voice reminded me of “Strunk and White” (The Elements of Style) with its prescription to use the active voice, chiefly to make writing vigorous. Contemporary contrarians have delighted in pointing out grammatical errors in their examples of the passive voice. But Strunk and White isn’t about grammar: it’s about style. And using the active voice is about more than style; it’s about naming “whodunit.” The passive voice, as George Orwell pointed out more than sixty years ago in his essay, "Politics and the English Language," is the deadening language of government bureaucracy. It’s a language of avoidance; it’s “official language,” it’s what my own freshman English teacher, William E. Coles, Jr., back in the day, used to call “bulletproof language.”
    Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer understood the paralyzing consequences of Lyndon Johnson’s bulletproof language. In one of the finest analyses of the failures of the passive voice, Mailer critiqued Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign book, My Hope for America. Mailer's book, Cannibals and Christians (1966), contains that essay. In it, Mailer showed just how Johnson’s passive voice avoided naming and blaming, and in failing to say what were the causes of, say, poverty in America, Johnson’s language disabled him (and others) from thinking clearly about it and therefore from effectively addressing its causes.
     I was reminded, also, of a Cambridge Forum broadcast from October of 2011, featuring Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry, in honor of Thoreau’s essay on "Civil Disobedience." In the midst of the discussion, someone asked Berry why he was still willing to talk to those coal barons responsible for mountaintop removal when it was obvious that they weren't listening. The gist of his reply was that good people can still do terrible things, and if they're good people we must talk to them and try to reach the good within them. They need to know that "they're in the house that they're burning down. . . . and maybe we can help them put the fire out.” (View Berry's entire response at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY_o6lpXlMo).
     In other words, it's not enough simply to say that the house is burning down, or we're in ecological crisis, or that local cultures are disappearing. They are "being disappeared," as Tony Seeger reminded us at the symposium; and it's up to us culture workers to identify the people who hide behind the passive voice, and to try to keep a dialogue open with those powerful "good people who do terrible things." The language of avoidance blinds them to causation, keeps them from knowing that they are burning down the house that we all are in. But the spirit of non-violent resistance appeals to the good in them, in hopes that they will listen and we can put the fire out together.

Cultural sustainability in the Sterling College setting

      

Sterling College. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon.

The site of the cultural sustainability symposium last weekend was Sterling College, in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. Founded in 1958 as a boys’ boarding school, it is now an accredited, B.A. degree-granting work college combining environmental study, activism, and work on the college farm. The college motto is “Working Hands, Working Minds.” As I told them, I thought they were trying to make Wendell Berry’s idea of “discipline and hope” into a grounded, secular reality.[1]
    Most colleges in the United States today try to practice conservation, or as the saying goes, be green; whether in recycling trash, giving uneaten dining hall food to homeless shelters and soup kitchens, maintaining a small organic garden where students can grow vegetables, encouraging faculty and staff to sign up with CSAs in the area, and so forth. My school, Brown University, does all of these. Our motto in this regard is, of course, “Brown is green”; but in fact Brown is many other things besides. The Brown community does not emphasize any one of them over all the others but, rather, sees itself as offering diverse opportunities.   
    Some colleges have made more of an effort at sustainability than Brown. Berea College, in Kentucky, where I taught as Goode Visiting Professor of Appalachian Studies a little more than 20 years ago, moved in that direction, seeking among other things to make the college a self-sustaining energy community. They had an advantage here, because the College happened to own and operate the town’s electrical plant.[2] And Berea's commitment is serious and pervasive; see http://www.berea.edu/sustainability/ for more information. At Sterling College, on the other hand, green is the raison d'être: learning green, doing green, and promoting green. There is nothing more important. 
    With approximately 125 students, an average class size of 10, and major concentrations available in ecology, sustainable agriculture, environmental humanities, outdoor education, as well as curricular combinations put together by the students themselves with faculty approval, it must be one of the smallest colleges in the US. (Interestingly, there is another Sterling College, not related; it is in Kansas.) The average cost is about $18 thousand per semester, while the average financial aid award per semester per student is around half that. Of course, $20 thousand per year for college still represents a large sum. By contrast, Amherst College, my undergraduate alma mater, costs twice that; and it is one of the least expensive so-called top-tier colleges.
    One way Sterling keeps costs down is with a relatively small administrative staff. Another is by employing students to work at the college, in the dining room, on the farm (which supplies much of the delicious organic food), and on other parts of campus. Students earn a small portion of their tuition in this way. Based on what I saw, and what the students who were there told me about it, the Sterling students are strongly committed to the College and its work program, understanding that they are contributing to keeping the costs down for all. All students at Berea also participated in the College’s work program, but the jobs were for the most part menial and upon asking them, I learned that the students were less than enthusiastic about the work. Of course, this was 20+ years ago;  student work attitudes at Berea may be different today.
    Because Sterling offers less than a half-dozen named major concentrations, it doesn’t maintain the broad range of professors, courses and majors in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences that the majority of colleges (including Berea) do. This sharp focus is another way to trim costs, but it also means that Sterling can't provide students with a broad, traditional liberal arts education. Yet that liberal arts education—one which I myself had as an undergraduate at Amherst College—has been under challenge since the 1960s. Charges ranged—and range—from elitism and lack of diversity to insufficient opportunity for specialization and depth, not to mention relevance (can a humanities major find a job?) and expense. Sterling’s focus on environmentalism is one answer to that challenge.   
    After all, in the first half of the 20th century, American undergraduate education had moved away from what remained of the traditional classical education (Latin, Greek, the humanities, philosophy, Greek and Roman history, mathematics, natural history, English literature) and toward a more contemporary one, which included modern science, modern languages, the social sciences, and American as well as English literature. Equally important was the persistence of breadth, for although curricula had become more specialized (the result of an increasing faculty orientation to research and a professionalization of academic disciplines), undergraduates were required to take at least one elementary course in the main divisions of the college (arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences) in what usually was called a “distribution requirement.”
    The liberal arts ideal, especially as embodied at colleges like Harvard and Columbia, and at my own undergraduate college, Amherst, was that an educated person ought to be familiar with the way artists and critics and philosophers and historians and scientists defined their subjects and thought about them, even though the students would surely not be pursuing careers related to all of them. In addition, most of the educational establishment, at the mid-20th century, believed that students ought to know how to write a proper, persuasive essay; and to be familiar with the great works of art, literature, music, and philosophy, at least at an elementary level of appreciation and understanding; and that they ought to be able to read and speak a modern foreign language, like French or Spanish. The colleges most committed to this ideal adopted, for the freshman and sometimes the sophomore years, a core curriculum of required courses. In this way, no matter what career they chose—and a liberal arts college education was not thought to be career-preparation except in the most general sense—students would be able to read, write, figure, know the past and how it informs the present, have a well-developed sense of ethics, think critically and intelligently, and take their place in the nation as effective and well-informed citizens. Liberal arts education of this sort embodied the Greek concept of paideia, educating for good citizenship.
    That ideal of a liberal arts education came under increasing pressure in the second half of the 20th century, to the point where colleges now find it impossible to maintain it publicly, even if some would wish to. Sputnik struck the first blow. In response, American science education was reformed from the high school level up. Research scientists argued that if the US was going to “win the space race,” a concept that did not seem silly during the Cold War because of the possible military consequences of winning or losing, the world’s leading scientists ought not to have to waste a lot of time in college taking courses in subjects that were irrelevant to their future scientific research. It was good for the nation’s future (non-scientist) leaders to learn how scientists defined their subjects and how they thought about them, so that they could work intelligently with scientists on national and international issues. But the nation’s future scientists ought not to be required to fill their undergraduate transcripts with courses broadly distributed throughout the arts and humanities; they didn't have time to learn how to work with humanists, I guess.   
    Next, beginning in the late 1960s, the traditional arts and humanities curricula were critiqued as elitist, and as a result curricula became far more inclusive. The Great Books with their heritage of classical learning were thought to offer a narrow, Eurocentric, racist, sexist and colonialist worldview. Therefore they could not equip a contemporary student to understand and act in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing, globalized world. The list of great works now expanded to include women and authors of color the world over, and the ancient heritage and contemporary history and thought in Africa and Asia, not merely Europe and North America.
    Eventually, the traditional liberal arts education itself came to be seen as elitist. Efforts to maintain distribution requirements gradually weakened, and today they are very modest. The argument runs that those who wish such a broad education ought to be able to get one through a combination of electives in a diverse curriculum with good advice from professors; and that such an education would now be much more inclusive than it was fifty years ago anyway, and better. But where some see diversity, others see fragmentation and disarray. The humanities have been in retreat; according to a recent Harvard study, only half as many students major in humanities now as did fifty years ago.
    The latest blow comes from a growing consensus that middle-class American families no longer can afford to pay for college, even with diligent, long-term savings and student work-study programs, plus scholarships and loans. College costs have been in the news recently, partly because it’s getting harder and harder for students to bear the burdens of increasing college debt when for years tuition, room and board costs have been rising faster than the inflation rate. When I was a college student, the price of a private college for a year was about as much as one would have to pay for a compact car; today, one could buy three or four comparable entry-level automobiles for what it costs to attend most private colleges, and it's not because cars are cheaper than they were. Students are graduating deeply in debt. Is it worth it? No wonder there's such pressure on colleges to prepare students for careers instead of preparing them for life. Not only does the public wonder why colleges are charging so much more these days, but also whether that model can possibly be sustainable.
    Neither Tufts nor Brown are quite the country-clubs that some critics of higher education make the top-tier private colleges out to be, but they each have a large administrative superstructure (many special schools, such as engineering, medicine, undergraduate liberal arts, a graduate school, etc., each with their own staffs of deans, associate deans, assistant deans, and administrators; higher administrators such as provosts and the president, each with their associates, assistants, and staff; financial officers, development officers, and so forth). Colleges like to brag about their low faculty-to-student ratios; they don’t publish administrative staff-to-student ratios. I’d like to see figures charting changes in these ratios over the past fifty years. I’ll bet that the proportion of administrators and staff to students (and to faculty, for that matter) has increased significantly while the others have declined. Of course, I have a faculty bias here. But one figure is not in doubt: the price of attending as a student.
    It’s also true that support services and quality of life amenities for students at private colleges have increased in the past fifty years, whether better food and housing, or wellness and counseling services, or a myriad of other things. This has to be paid for. Colleges and universities have also made large investments in computers and information technology, not to mention their science labs. At Sterling, at least according to their advertising literature, the college community as a whole seems to take care of counseling and problem-solving, placing additional advising burdens on faculty, who inevitably must get to know the students as people, not just as students. At a university like Tufts or Brown, it is an unusual professor these days who would know more than a few of their students each year as people, or feel part of a residential community in the same way that those who live at Sterling must. In that regard, Sterling may more resemble a private boarding school, with resident faculty who spend a good deal of time with students outside the classroom as well as inside.
    It’s impossible to tell, based on a few days of meals there, about the year-round food at Sterling; but based on what we had in the student dining hall—to be sure, in the middle of a summer harvest—it is plentiful, healthful, varied, and delicious. A college emphasizing environmental studies might favor vegetarian diets, but in fact a variety of meat was also served. The cooks knew what they were doing—one had been trained in cookery at Johnson and Wales University in a previous life, for example. Certainly, the food we (and the students who were there) enjoyed was far better than the school food served at colleges fifty years ago, where our choices were often limited to “mystery meat,” “elbow patches,” powdered potatoes, and canned vegetables boiled beyond recognition. At the same time, Sterling's wasn’t the trendy and upscale food served up in some college dining halls, either.
    The student dorm rooms where we stayed, on the other hand, were about as elemental as one could imagine. They would have seemed spartan even to a hired farmhand. Mine was about eight feet wide by about eighteen feet long, equipped with a bunk bed, a small table and chair that would serve as a desk, an overhead lamp, a bureau for clothes, no closet (but four hooks to hang things), and some shelves. Bathrooms were shared and similarly basic. Although these could be made more comfortable with student belongings, it would plainly be hard to spend time in them doing much other than sleeping, dressing, or working at a computer. Nesting in dorm rooms was discouraged by the nature of the nest. Instead, students would be far more likely to be outside of their rooms, either working at the college, involved with classes and study, or socializing in the community.
    The Sterling model, I believe, has a better shot at sustainability than the liberal arts one I’m most familiar with as a student and professor. I’ve told my Brown students, more than once, that because of rising costs and increased competition among them, in fifty years most universities like Brown will be able to exist only as living history museums, like Old Sturbridge Village, populated by actors and tourists. And many fewer of them. On the other hand, this Sterling model, if it is a model, does not pretend to offer a broad liberal arts education. Yet it offers enough to set the students on their way in the humanities, if they so choose. In the environmental humanities division—I envision an education in ecocriticism here—there is, for example, a course in nature writing; I would welcome such a course in the regular English curriculum at any college. And no doubt through this course, the students will become acquainted with some classic and modern authors of the first rank who write about the natural world, Thoreau as well as Leopold and Erdrich and Kingsolver. And they will become acquainted with the natural world by farming. Sterling College's advertising brochure states that they emphasize experiential learning: some colleges have a farm; Sterling is a farm.
    And so, turning now from the setting to the conference itself, a college that emphasizes farming, conservation ecology and environmental humanities was a very appropriate place to hold a symposium on cultural sustainability. Coupling “cultural” with something that the general public links primarily with science and technology brings a humanities and social science dimension to the discussion on sustainability. But at Sterling it is already there.
    I did meet and talk with several Sterling faculty and students over the course of the symposium. A few students attended the symposium sessions. One of them, a young woman named Jessy, got into a spirited discussion with me when over supper on the first evening, I asked her what her major was. “Ecological philosophy,” she replied; it was a major she was putting together herself, with help from some others in the community. She had, in fact, been working closely with the Dean of the College, Pavel Cenki, on this, and her hands-on experience combined with readings and discussions made her an interesting and challenging conversationalist. We got to talking about “altruism” in the natural world and, somewhat to my surprise, she took the position that it did not exist. She was willing to grant the reciprocity of symbiosis, but pure altruism she believed could not be found anywhere—even among humans. The philanthropist who gives anonymously and expects nothing in return still gets the satisfaction of giving. Such satisfaction, for her, represented a return (not a gift) gained from the transaction; therefore, it could not be an instance of altruism. Nor did she consider altruism in the zoological sense to be true altruism; that is, when one animal gives to another at its own expense.[3]
    In the coming days I will write here about the symposium itself, not only my keynote address but also some things I took away from the presentations and discussions, and from a field trip where we had a chance to learn something about cultural sustainability in the local economy. Of course, it wasn’t all intellectual discourse. In the evenings we played music—I played fiddle some, and guitar; it’s a pleasure to make music with Tony Seeger and his wife Judy, and to meet new musicians such as Carol Dickson, who favored Quebecois fiddle tunes. It was good to be with some old friends, Mary Hufford among them, and make new ones. In the coming days I’ll also try make a few observations here on what remains to be done as we try to understand sustainability in a cultural setting. As Rory Turner, the founder of the cultural sustainability graduate program at Goucher College said, in his concluding remarks, cultural sustainability remains an ongoing conversation and a work in progress.

    [1] Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope,” in his collection of essays, A Continuous Harmony.
    [2] When I taught there, I saw college ownership of the electrical plant as part of the College’s totalizing tendencies, which included a history of paternalism toward faculty as well as students. For example, faculty were paid lower salaries than they might earn elsewhere, but the college provided free houses (some quite nice) that were to be returned to the college after faculty left Berea. I now see this differently: we are, after all, only stewards of the houses we think we own. Nevertheless, it was pointed out to me by some disgruntled faculty then, that they would be better off owning their houses and building equity. Given the recent severe fluctuations in the real estate market, though, building equity in one’s home isn’t the sure bet it once was.
    [3] The problem here, I think, is with the purity of the student's definition; it is easy to get boxed into definitional difficulties whereas the more important things go beyond definitions to acts of generosity, giving, and reciprocity. Relational epistemologies, which is what is at stake here, do not depend on reductionist definitional procedures; rather, they are given life through expansion and interdependent connection. 

Upcoming Cultural Sustainability Symposium at Sterling College

     I've been away from this blog for a little while, as I prepare a keynote address for the symposium on cultural sustainability, which is to take place in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, at the end of this week, August 15-18, on the campus of Sterling College, a small, liberal arts college emphasizing conservation ecology.
     The symposium is open to the public: general information may be found here:

http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/education/cultural-sustainability/symposium.php

and the schedule of presentations here:

http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/education/cultural-sustainability/schedule.php

     The convergence of college and place, conservation ecology and commons, ought to inspire us all and I'm very much looking forward to meeting new colleagues and re-connecting with old ones there. Among those who will be presenting at the conference is Mary Hufford, an old acquaintance whose work on commons in the Appalachian forest was (and is) very important to my own thinking in this area. We met in the 1980s when she was working at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. She was one of a few scholars back then who was interested in my research into the Appalachian mountain farming ecology, a community worldview based in family, farming, and religious tradition, united by the concept of husbandry, which was an early version of what I now think of as stewardship. She asked me to write about that for the Encycopedia of Appalachia, which I did, and we had many interesting talks in the next decade, as she developed her research into forest commons and shared resources. At that time my research site had shifted south within Appalachia from Virginia to Kentucky, and to Old Regular Baptists, where I found the same ideas of husbandry and a mountain farm ecology. I also found the Lilley Cornett Woods, a preserved old-growth forest that one of the mountain patriarchs (Lilley Cornett) had stubbornly refused to sell out to the timber companies who were clear-cutting the forests in the early 20th century. Today the Lilley Cornett Woods is maintained by the University of Kentucky, and it is the only old-growth forest in the state. Cornett himself was quite a character, and I've mentioned him here before (see the blog entry for Feb. 7, 2011); but he and his forest deserve a separate entry, which I hope to make soon. At any rate, I recall speaking with Mary Hufford, who was at that time doing research into Appalachian forest ecology, and the "falling forest,"  very excitedly about the Lilley Cornett Woods and what it represented, in terms of resistance to the timber and coal corporations that were just beginning their cultural, economic, and environmental genocide in the region.
     For the conference keynote, I sent in the following abstract: "How may we contribute to the struggle for cultural sustainability in the face of increasing environmental, economic, and social injustice? Resilience thinking—today’s fashionable replacement for sustainability—puts us in a defensive posture that by itself is ultimately unsustainable. Nor will a greater reliance on Western economic reason lift all boats on a rising tide. On the contrary, economic reason, based on neoclassical assumptions about 'economic man,' has only exacerbated the current crises. Sustainable alternatives to economic rationality may be found in folklore’s emphases on commonality and orality. Commonality: folklore is not owned, but shared in a cultural commons. Cultural memory sequesters tradition by keeping it available; folklore is preserved by giving it away. Orality: sound vibrates us into co-presence with other living beings. Sound bundles human beings into relationships; economic man isolates individuals. Both commonality and orality may be observed at work in nature as well as culture. An enlightened cultural policy would borrow four principles from conservation biology: diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship. But the relationship between culture and the environment goes beyond analogy. The commonwealth of culture is entwined directly with social, environmental, and economic justice. It is impossible to contribute effectively to one without working for all." I'm scheduled to stand and deliver it Friday morning at 9:30 to open the conference, and am very much looking forward to it, and to continuing the conversation about commons, conservation ecology, and cultural sustainability.

ABET workshop wrap: when unofficial music gains official endorsement

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

Managing for Musical and Cultural Resilience?

     By now, faithful readers of this blog won’t need to be reminded of the “four principles” (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, stewardship) that I’ve been advocating for cultural policy. At the ABET workshop on music and sustainability, I proposed those four for discussion. Indeed, some of the speakers at the ABET conference were acquainted with them from my essays in The World of Music.[1]  As these principles were developed by conservation ecologists, not cultural policymakers, one might ask what are the grounds for guiding cultural policy by principles derived from attempts to manage the natural world. What does it mean, in other words, to apply an ecological or environmental (they are not the same) way of thinking to cultural policy? And what would such a way of reasoning be? If conservation ecology applies ecological thinking to managing the environment, how would this translate into the world of cultural policy? What is an ecological cultural policy that would enable musical sustainability? It’s important to try to frame these questions carefully, because the nuances in the way they are framed will suggest alternative routes for answering them.

    And so it’s important to ask, first, whether cultural engineering is likely to do more good than harm. Why not let culture take its course, as one would manage nature by letting it alone, to be as wild and “natural” as possible? After all, if plants and animals have natural cycles of birth, growth, decline, death and decay; if species rise and fall, adapt and sometimes become extinct; if ecological communities themselves change beyond recognition, why not simply let nature (and culture) be? Why manage nature, or culture, at all? Isn’t it, perhaps, un-natural to try to intervene? And why presume to manage for sustainability using ecological thinking, when the components of ecosystems die natural deaths? Why shouldn’t musics, languages, and other aspects of culture also die natural deaths? Isn’t that ecological?

    To which we may ask, what is a natural death, if it is caused by human interventions that wreak havoc on individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems? How many species have gone extinct within the past two hundred years—roughly, since the start of the Industrial Revolution—as a result of human impact on ecosystems, compared to the number that would have gone extinct anyway? The answer to why conservation ecologists should attempt to manage nature at all, of course, is that nature is already being managed, badly. Letting nature alone would mean abandoning nature to the land developers, the oil companies, the timber cutters, the mining companies, agribusiness, and so forth. Does the same analogy work for culture? Those who say no to applied ethnomusicology tend to do so on the grounds that music is best left alone to take its natural course. But what is its natural (cultural) course?

    When I was participating in a meeting of the folk arts panel for the National Endowment for the Arts about 30 years ago, one of the panelists urged this hands-off approach. We were trying to decide whether to recommend for approval a grant proposal that would give money to an organization that was attempting to manage the flow of music in its city by encouraging musicians in underserved communities to set up a music school. One of the panelists objected, saying that it seemed to him like the organization was interfering in the natural (cultural) flow of music in that city. “We shouldn’t be meddling in their affairs,” the panelist concluded, with a flourish. Bess Hawes, director of the Folk Arts Program, seldom spoke at these meetings; she felt she should not try to influence the panelists. But here was a fundamental challenge, and if the answer was no meddling, no attempts to manage, then her organization might as well cease to exist. And so when the panelist said we shouldn’t be meddling, she responded by saying something like this: “Of course we should meddle! Everyone else is meddling with culture and the arts. Some institutions think only fine art is worthy of support, and that’s where they put their money because fine arts aren't self-supporting. Other people think that the only worthwhile art is art that makes money, so they want to get rid of all support. Some people think that the arts are the finest expressions of human life. Others think the arts are useless. Everyone is meddling; why shouldn’t we? We want to encourage the folk and traditional arts. Not many others do. Why shouldn’t we act on our beliefs, if we truly believe in them? Why shouldn’t we meddle? Supporting folk arts is meddling. Not supporting folk arts is another way of meddling. We are all meddlers no matter what. Why shouldn’t we try to meddle for good?”

    Needless to say, her argument carried the day. But the position that one should stay out of the way and let nature or culture take its course might be supported on other grounds. Neoliberal economists rely on their interpretation of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand: that each party acting out of economic self-interest results in a market that is guided (by an invisible hand) for the common good, and so that economy is best which is managed (regulated) least. The same would be true, by analogy, in the realm of culture and the arts: an invisible hand would ensure the best outcome.

    Now, Adam Smith did write that an invisible hand guided self-interested actors to work for the public good. Here is the relevant excerpt from The Wealth of Nations: ““Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it ... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

    But although Smith thought that an invisible hand guided self-interest toward public good, he did not go on to derive the neoliberal principle that market regulation was largely unnecessary. In fact, he believed that markets should be managed and regulated. Therefore, the neoliberal argument for laissez-faire rests on a misunderstanding of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” and so it would be wrong to rely on Smith’s authority here. Of course, that does not prevent neoliberals from deriving laissez-faire and less government regulation from the so-called invisible hand. But this is wishful thinking. If the hand is invisible there is no way of knowing whether, or how, it works—or if it works at all. Experience suggests the contrary: that self-interested actors guide their own hands toward wealth, and without regulation the result is income inequality and cycles of boom and bust, not to mention social injustice and ecosystem exploitation.

    Given that conservation ecologists do attempt to intervene to prevent the extinction of species by managing ecosystems in the environment, and allowing that their “meddling” is meant for the benefit of all, we return to the question of how conservation ecology transfers over into the realm of cultural sustainability, particularly for music but also for other aspects of expressive culture. And that is where the “four principles” come in. Why these four principles and not others? Why not, for example, manage for a “balance of culture” or cultural equilibrium? Isn’t that ecological?

    Here it’s helpful to understand that ecological thinking has undergone a sea change regarding how nature “naturally” behaves. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, most scientific ecologists agreed that, left to its own devices, an ecosystem moved towards a balanced equilibrium, a dynamic, but stable, state. Of course, ecosystems were subject to disturbance (fire, drought, etc.) but they tended to restore themselves to a stable “climax” condition, or at least move in that direction until the next disturbance.

    But a paradigm shift occurred during the last 40 years or so, and now most ecologists no longer believe that nature “naturally” moves toward a dynamic, balanced equilibrium. The “balance of nature” paradigm was replaced by a new one that emphasizes change and disturbance. The new paradigm admits that nature may achieve equilibria, but these are temporary and, for a given ecosystem, they occur at different points of balance, with the result that there is no longer any “climax” state towards which nature moves, but rather a series or scale of different possible equilibrium points, some advantaging certain species, some others. Ecosystems are not self-restorative. Instead of sustainability, with a view toward achieving it through encouraging the balance of nature, the new paradigm centers on the concept of resilience, or the degree to which an ecosystem resists disturbance. Ecosystems are managed, now, to increase resilience to damaging changes. Of course, a resilient ecosystem does manage to achieve a degree of sustainability, if only temporarily; but not in the same way as a stable, balanced one.

    Will managing for cultural (and musical) sustainability be replaced, then, by resilience? So far, it does not appear that “cultural resilience” has caught hold. Possibly it will, and perhaps it should; so let’s anticipate a little bit what it would mean. Cultural policymakers managing for sustainability, such as those involved with UNESCO, or the “big three in DC” (the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Folklife and Cultural Studies, and the Folk and Traditional Arts division of the National Endowment for the Arts), have also been managing for resilience as a means toward sustainability, chiefly by encouraging activities involving the traditional arts and their continuation, strengthening institutions and attempting to add value to those arts, particularly among the younger generations who must be the ones to continue them. “Resiliance management” might not come as news to these culture workers, or to those who have been partnering with musical and other traditional arts communities through participatory action research. Alan Lomax’s 1972 call for action against what he termed “cultural grey-out” was a resiliency response to a perceived disturbance.

    But there would, I think, be some subtle differences in managing for resilience rather than for sustainability. For one thing, resilience would suggest that managers (whether for culture or nature) adopt a defensive posture and be vigilant against disturbance, which means anticipating possible changes to the natural (or cultural) ecosystem and planning for them. Again, the obvious example is global warming, and the need to plan for this major change and the disturbances that it is bringing, such as an increase in violent weather that damages the natural and built environment, or the need to transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of energy. In a way, of course, this is common sense. In the cultural arena, resilience planning would involve such things as responses to new communications models, such as the Internet: how can expressive culture be encouraged in an environment where so many musical exchanges, so to speak, take place virtually, over the Internet. Not that virtual music is new; it’s been around ever since recordings, and arguably is embedded in musical notation. But the Internet fosters new models for virtual communication, new opportunities for co-presence (whereas recordings were not traditionally interactive in this way).

    The downside of resilience is that the defensive posture puts managers in a response mode in which cultures are regarded as reactive rather than dynamic or innovative. That is one problem. Another is this: if change is the rule in nature, why not also in science? If nature does not progress to a climax, why should science? What grounds have we for believing in resilience? Is it just that it seems to fit today’s world better than balance? And if so, is that good enough—for now, until another paradigm comes along?  In future blog entries I will have more to say about my reservations about managing for resilience.

[1] "Economy, Ecology and Music: An Introduction," and "Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint," The World of Music, Vol. 59, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5-16 and 119-138.

Fieldwork and Applied Ethnomusicology

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

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

ABET in João Pessoa

     Addendum, Dec. 29, 2013: My ABET keynote address, "The Nature of Ecomusicology," has just been published in the Association of Brazilian Ethnomusicologists' annual journal, Music e Cultura, Vol. 8 (2013). A free pdf may be downloaded from the journal's website, here:

http://musicaecultura.abetmusica.org.br/index.php/revista/issue/current

       I'm writing this evening from João Pessoa, in northeastern Brazil. In fact, the easternmost point in the Americas is on a spit of land no more than 1/4 mile from me. The occasion is the biennial conference of ABET, the Association of Brazilian Ethnomusicologists. The theme of their conference this year is music and sustainability, and they invited me to give the keynote (opening) address, which I did Monday afternoon-evening, after a roundabout trip from Providence that unexpectedly took me on a flight through Panama after the original flight was cancelled, thence to Recife and then by ground transportation north to Joào Pessoa, arriving at 5 a.m. Monday. 
     I was uncertain about whether to make this trip at all, because I speak not a word of Portuguese, the principal language of the conference; but my expenses were paid by ABET and I was able to travel with my colleague Tony Seeger, who was one of the pioneers of Brazilian ethnomusicology--he did his fieldwork and taught as a professor in Brazil in the 1970s, and has been active in Brazilian ethnomusicology circles ever since, while holding professorships at Indiana University and UCLA, and also spending a dozen years or so as the founding director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Besides, Tony speaks fluent Portuguese, and he and a few others at the conference were able to translate what I said in English to the Brazilians and what they said in Portuguese to me. I was very warmly welcomed and have felt very comfortable here, even to the point of playing some of my compositions on guitar, at the beginning and also at the end of my address.
     After the lengthy flight I had no trouble sleeping till noon, and gave the keynote five hours later. I chose to speak on "The Nature of Ecomusicology," and by that I mean two things: (1) how ecomusicologists are defining this new field through their practice--the kinds of work they are doing, and (2) the ways ecomusicologists are thinking about nature. Ecomusicology itself is a very recent field, combining literary ecocriticism with musicology. The 2013 (new 2nd) edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music, commonly referred to as the Amerigrove, has an entry, written by musicologist Aaron Allen, that defines it: "Ecomusicology is the study of music, culture and nature in all the complexities of these terms." It is the study of music, nature, culture, and the environment at a time of environmental crisis. More about ecomusicology may be found here: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecomusicology  -->

     Although I could have addressed the keynote more directly to music and sustainability issues, I thought I should bring them new work for the keynote, and reserve a workshop I am to lead for a couple of hours tomorrow for topics such as applying principles from conservation ecology (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship) to cultural policy for managing music with the goal of sustainability. Other topics I will talk about include enlisting heritage tourism and the so-called creative economy in the service of sustaining music; the kinds of fieldwork conducive to musical sustainability, particularly with indigenous peoples; and the difficulties of enacting official cultural policies designed to sustain unofficial music. 
      Readers of this blog have read quite a bit about the first two topics, but let me add just one more thing here regarding heritage. The Brazilians use the word patrimonia for heritage. In Brazil, as in the US, patrimonia (or patrimony) is the portion of a father or male ancestor's estate which by law is passed down to the children. I was told by the Brazilian ethnomusicologist Samuel Araujo that "patrimonia" therefore has, in Brazil, an unavoidable economic connotation, that of money or land or other kinds of material wealth. In this way it is somewhat in tension with "intangible cultural heritage," because patrimonia is material and tangible rather than intangible. However, in this usage it is always paired with the term "cultural" and so it becomes "cultural patrimony." Tony Seeger later noted that the term comes to Portuguese through UNESCO discourse, which is initially in French. Complicating matters further, although in English the common term is heritage rather than patrimony, the US has not signed on to the UNESCO Geneva Convention treaty which made the term operational in the international realm. As Welson Trimura pointed out, sometimes it is better not even to try to translate literally at the word level, but to try to translate ideas in other words that convey the thought better than a literal translation would do.
      Within the next few weeks I will write more about these workshop topics here, and also about the keynote address regarding ecomusicology and nature. 

 

WIPO wipeout

 

Foodini, the puppet-magician, whose tricks always failed.

            Protecting the rights of indigenous cultural groups to their cultural heritage with intellectual property law is but one of the UN's World International Property Organization (WIPO)’s many aims. Its international anti-piracy efforts are meant chiefly to protect individuals and corporations, not indigenous cultures. After all, national copyright law was initiated originally to protect authors and publishers from copying and mass marketing without permission. Authors and publishers must grant permission, and they commonly do so in exchange for appropriate payment. Patents are meant to protect inventors and trade-mark protection was added to the mix.

            Looking at WIPO's self-descriptions, it is plain that beyond the human rights rhetoric, they regard cultural heritage as property assets needing protection; further, that their intellectual property law-in-the-making is meant to encourage “sustainable development” (an oxymoron; see my blog entry for Sept. 2, 2010, "Why Sustainable Development Must Be Abandoned"). They divide cultural heritage into three components: traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and traditional cultural expressions (or folklore). On their website they state that these are “economic and cultural assets of indigenous and local communities and their countries” and that “WIPO [is undertaking] negotiations with the objective of reaching agreement on a text of an international legal instrument (or instruments) which will ensure the effective protection” of these three components of cultural heritage ( http://www.wipo.int/tk/en/igc/index.html).

            WIPO’s cultural asset-think continues in its document entitled WIPO Overview 2011 (WIPO Publication No. 1007E/11). Primarily, they envision an economic marketplace with commodity exchanges of intellectual property: “The intellectual property system provides a way for these intangible assets to be owned, disseminated and traded, thus enabling creators or owners of intellectual property rights to reap some benefit from their own work or from their investment in a creation.” This protection is justified not only by asserting proprietary rights, but also by proposing that copyright stimulates creativity and invention. The possibility of making a profit encourages (the jargon word here is incentivizes) people to come up with more ideas, some of which will be good ideas that will not only enrich the creator but also ensure the progress of humankind. Note the rhetoric: “In this way, the intellectual property system serves its fundamental purposes of stimulating innovation and creativity and of contributing to market order.” Market order? Yes, protection from such things as piracy. “Innovation and creativity,” WIPO goes on to assert, “increasingly play a role in the development of solutions to such emerging challenges as climate change, food security, and public health.” No doubt, but one wonders what proportion of copyrights and patents are going to alternative energy compared with those going to the fossil fuel companies, what proportion are going to organic and local agriculture compared with Monsanto and agribusiness, and so on. “By providing a stable environment for marketing products protected by intellectual property [law, WIPO] also oils the wheels of international trade” (What Is Intellectual Property, WIPO Publication No. 450[E]. p. 22).

            Returning to WIPO’s discussion of cultural heritage, the Overview 2011 document repeats the statement about developing international legal instruments. But it also states that “Indigenous and local communities seek appropriate and practical ways of preserving, promoting and protecting their cultural and intellectual heritage as a means of sustaining their cultural integrity and promoting their own sustainable economic development consistent with their collective values.” Here, WIPO not only acknowledges its orientation to the commodity marketplace, but also couples cultural heritage to sustainable economic development, with the caveat that this be consistent with the indigenous peoples’ collective values. What if those values are not oriented toward economic development? Wouldn’t international protection of cultural heritage as intellectual property under copyright law tip the playing field in favor of economic development? The indigenous culture that refuses to protect heritage by copyright risks exploitation in the international marketplace. If their cultural values are not commodity-oriented, if traditionally they view heritage (including music) as a bundle of relationships, copyrighting culture would pressure them to think of culture as an economic asset instead. 

              From the point of view of WIPO, the International Monetary Fund, and others whose goal is to lift indigenous cultures out of material poverty through sustainable economic development, this change in indigenous worldview would be a positive good. But for those who think that “bundle of relationships” thinking is an important and potentially viable alternative to cultural asset-think, it would be a disaster. The way to prevent environmental catastrophe is not through encouraging technological innovation, commodity exchange and marketplace rewards, for that is what got us into the global environmental crisis in the first place, not to mention the economic crash of 2008 and growing income inequality throughout the world. Only when we stop objectifying, only when we stop putting an economic value on everything (for even so-called cultural value turns out to have a market price, David Throsby notwithstanding), only when we begin to realize that living beings take precedence, that we exist in a “bundle of relationships,” with one another, and with the planet, only then will we begin to understand how we may change course to reduce poverty (material and experiential) and injustice, and avoid environmental catastrophe.

            The bundle of relationships argument asserts the primacy of the gift over the commodity exchange, something I’ve been writing about for a number of years here and elsewhere. When I was a youngster, my schoolteacher said that Peter Minuit, representing the Dutch colonists in New York, supposedly bought the island of Manhattan, from the Indians who were said to own it, in exchange for wampum worth $24. Our class of students was told that the Dutch got the better of the bargain: the “savages” were stupid to have sold Manhattan for a ridiculously low price. Later I came to realize it wasn’t stupidity. They did not have the same concept of property rights and ownership as the Dutch settlers who paid them. They thought they were giving the Dutch the right to use the land, not to own it. Owning it was a concept foreign to them. The European colonists were more powerful and able to force their concepts of property ownership on the Indians. If the indigenous Americans had been more powerful, the European ideas would not have prevailed. Nor would they have prevailed if international law prohibited this kind of exploitation. In the same way, if indigenous cultures conceive of traditional music as a bundle of relationships, that leaves them open to economic exploitation from outsiders. 

              The solution to this problem, WIPO would argue, is not cultural relativism, but international law which protects their music as intellectual property, whether they have the concepts of property and ownership or not. Nonetheless, the idea that a bundle of relationships, with their ensuing obligations takes precedence over any economic value is a useful insight for cultural policymakers like me who are interested in promoting the kinds of amateur musical communities, such as the old-time string band revival which I have written about earlier, as a model for the circulation of music in general. The answers are not to be sought in propertizing and marketing culture, but in relationships, rights, and reciprocal duties.