Oral History and Music

Abstract

From 1968 to 1972, when I conducted oral histories on the life and work of American composer Charles Ives, I was motivated by the urgent need to search out Ives's friends and colleagues while they were still alive. At the time I was not aware of oral history as an independent discipline, one with a national organization and numerous workshops, courses, and archives around the country. It was only after the Ives Project was completed, its materials published and hailed as a new kind of biography-the first documentary oral history on a composer-that I became fully aware of oral history and its potential for use in musicological research. Ironically, musicologists, those studying music as the art of sound, lagged behind scholars in other disciplines in applying oral history documentation techniques, in part because of basic premises of traditional musicology and in part because of deeply ingrained attitudes in the world of academic music. Oral history presupposes contemporary or recent activities. In contrast, traditional musicology, based on a Germanic pre-World War II discipline, came to the United States with the attitudes that the twentieth century was not yet old enough to qualify as history and that American music was unworthy of study.' The student musicologist is trained to delve into the distant past; musicological studies include the development of bibliographic skills and research methods for examining primary and secondary sources, often in a foreign language. Furthermore, the musicologist tends to work alone, burrowing into library stacks and archival collections. Except for preinterview preparation, which requires familiarity with existing sources, oral history methods are the antithesis of musicology. The act of interviewing resembles performance more than research. It requires two players who perform (and sometimes improvise) to create an artifact that did not exist previously. The slow acceptance of oral history in music has been also due to the longstanding divisions between musicology and ethnomusicology and between concert music and popular music. Until recently, musicology did not encompass folk or popular music. The lines were clearly drawn: concert music for musicology; folk music for ethnomusicology; popular music and jazz for an occasional renegade scholar or for cultural historians. Considering the divisions in the music world, it is hardly surprising that the oral