Reflections on Oral History and Quanto-History: The Larger Context

Abstract

These thoughtful presentations by Shelly, Jere, Marie, and Alan are reminders of both the importance and the problematic nature of historical writing and research. The limitations of oral especially with respect to its veracity, and the twists of statistical analyses should temper our enthusiasm even as we employ them. You know the movie called Born to Raise Hell [2010]? Well, as college professors, we are born to be skeptical, and it is professionally comforting to see a high level of critical attitude demonstrated by this panel. Oral and quanto-history were popular during the social history movement that peaked in the late 1980s. Social history was inspired by the work of Lucien Lebvre and Marc Bloch of the French Annales School of historical scholarship. (1) The Annales historians emphasized in their work the longue duree--translated extended periods of time, associated thought with culture and geography, saw history as a continuity, used sociological theory and statistics, and gathered large quantities of evidence in hopes of seeing historical problems within the mentality (mentalite in Annales-speak) of an age. A big order. Cultural determinism in the extreme. (2) Though Annales-type social history is no longer pursued so exclusively and with such orthodox purity, it has left its mark on historical writing, (3) and several of us in music education have been much influenced by it. In the context of our subspecialty, it is instructive to look at criticisms of this new history, because we can learn something about the relationship of oral history and quanto-history to larger syntheses. (4) The old view, that of von Ranke, is history from the top down, produced from government documents or the documents of large organizations with emphasis on political and military events--quite the opposite of social which has been most often written from the bottom up, emphasizing the mentality of the everyday population. With the decline in popularity of the social history movement, the writing of history did not return completely to the von Rankean baseline. The nearest equivalent of the von Rankean approach in music education is the work of Birge, whose organization-oriented history we still sacralize. (5) In our mental conceptions, true or false, our subspecialty remains Birge-brained. (6) Criticisms of social history emerged slowly to the larger historical field, much of it from the practitioners of social history itself. For these historians the problem was that analysis of specialized material trumped narrative. Social historians became experts of this or that technique and stuck with it. Data were broken into bits and pieces and huge piles of information collected, resulting in less attention to how it fit the larger historical pattern; that is, less synthesis and consequently less intelligibility. (7) Much social history began to reflect the reductionist fallacy. There was focus on the aspects of evidence, its cuteness, rather than on the interpretion of evidence itself. Like other scholarly trends, these techniques are now moderated, becoming largely integrated into standard historical practice. (8) Obviously, handling a large amount of material and maintaining the story line is a scholarly juggling act. An interesting solution to this is that of Pulitzer Prize-winning David Hackett Fisher, an enthusiastic Annales follower, who has combined narrative with oral and quanto techniques in an arrangement he calls the braided narrative--a story with asides in thick footnotes and extensive appendices--an attempt to understand the mentality of a situation in true Annales style, with depth and completeness, without impeding narrative. (9) The first time this researcher read Fischer's books in the late '80s, he was thrilled about the possibility of documenting and explicating the complexity of music learning. (10) This researcher's Lowell Mason, Samuel A. Worcester, and the Cherokee Singing Book, published in the Chronicles of Oklahoma in the 1990s, had this thickly documented approach and sought to connect music education with the larger narrative of American history and thought. …