Musical Ethnography Research Articles

ІННОВАЦІЙНА ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ ПНДЛМЕ 1990-х – ПОЧАТКУ 2000-х РОКІВ: РЕАЛІЗАЦІЯ ПЕРШОГО ЕТАПУ РОЗРОБКИ ФУНДАМЕНТАЛЬНОЇ ПРОБЛЕМИ „НАРОДНА МУЗИКА ГАЛИЧИНИ ТА ВОЛОДИМИРІЇ”

The article considers versatile ethnomusicographic activities of the Research Scientific Laboratory of Music Ethnology (RSLME) in initial period of its activity (1990–2004) under the direction of Bohdan Lukaniuk. A brief historical outline of the ethnomusicological studies of the Lviv Conservatory has been submitted, the chronology of educational reform in pedagogy and scientific ethnomusicological studies of higher education has been presented, which resulted in the establishment of a new scientific institution, the Scientific-Researching Laboratory of Music Ethnography, on the basis of the Office of Folk Music as early as 1990’s. The main innovations introduced by B. Lukaniuk in the etnomusicology and education were outlined. PSRLME in cooperation with Music Folklore Department of the Mykola Lysenko Lviv High Music School has rapidly developed into a trusted ethnomusicological institution well established in Ukraine and abroad. The main innovations were: carefull planning of all activities of the Laboratory as an integral part of the project “Folk music of Galicia and Volodymyria”; the methodological and practical reform of musical education; establishment of an careful field research and archiving strategy as integral part of historical and ethnomusicological research programmes of the Western Ukraine ethnomusicological areals; a reform of Ethnomusicographic data archive: careful planning of field research programmes, establishments of new funds and collections, systematic archiving of current & historical records, etc. The results of the initial period of the activities of PSRLME in the field of musical and ethnographic data archives are summarized, including the historical timeline of the implementation of as much as two dozen research programs and sub-programs which were then initially established, and a series of indicators has been created to provide historical timeline reference. The article is prepared on the basis of the data archives of documentation and printed sources. Tags: music folklore, ethnomusicology historical records, etnomusicological data archives, archiving data strategies, Bohdan Lukaniuk, PSRLME.

An Introduction to the Music Ethnography of Nikko Shugen: With a Focus on the Analysis of Rhythm in Gomaku and Ennen

An Introduction to the Music Ethnography of Nikko Shugen: With a Focus on the Analysis of Rhythm in Gomaku and Ennen

Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform by Merih Erol, and: Music in Cyprus ed. by Jim Samson and Nicoletta Demetriou, and: Translation and Popular Music: Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations by Şebnem Susam-Saraeva

Reviewed by: Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform by Merih Erol, and: Music in Cyprus ed. by Jim Samson and Nicoletta Demetriou, and: Translation and Popular Music: Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations by Şebnem Susam-Saraeva Panayotis League (bio) Merih Erol, Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform. Ethnomusicology Multimedia. Bloomington Indiana University Press. 2015. Pp. xix + 264. Cloth $35.00. E-book $34.99. Jim Samson and Nicoletta Demetriou, editors, Music in Cyprus. Surrey and Burlington Ashgate. Pp. xiv + 196. Cloth $89.60. Şebnem Susam-Saraeva, Translation and Popular Music: Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations. New Trends in Translation Studies 18. Oxford Peter Lang. 2015. Pp. x + 180. Paper $68.95. Despite Greece's historical position as a literal crossroads of Mediterranean cultures and the region's staggering variety of fundamentally hybrid musical genres, the last several decades saw relatively little English-language scholarship on music making in the Greek Aegean. For reasons bound to the institutional and political history of their discipline, ethnomusicologists and other [End Page 570] music researchers working in the Balkans have paid a disproportionate amount of attention to Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania as sites for ethnographic fieldwork, largely neglecting these nations' southern neighbor. In the last few years, however, a number of promising young scholars from American and British universities have produced doctoral dissertations on popular and traditional music in contemporary Greece, and the rapid expansion of ethno-musicology programs in Greece has introduced a new generation of talented students to musical ethnography. Major academic presses have recently begun to pick up on this trend, particularly in terms of studies focusing on the extent of the cultural exchange between Greek and Turkish speaking populations over the last five centuries—long a predominant feature of both academic and popular discourse in the Eastern Mediterranean. Music's privileged role as a mediator of this relationship, from the Ottoman era to the 1923 population exchange to the latest period of gradual rapprochement, is the common subject of three important 2015 publications that speak eloquently to both the diversity of the musical dimensions of Greek-Turkish relations and the broad range of interdisciplinary approaches employed by scholars investigating the subject. Straddling the boundaries of ethnomusicology, historiography, anthropology, media studies, translation studies, and other related disciplines, this trio of books—including two monographs by Turkish women and a collection of essays edited by a Greek Cypriot woman and an Englishman—bodes well for the future of music scholarship in the Greek world. The symbiotic relationship between Greek and Turkish song traditions is surely no surprise to anyone familiar with popular culture on either side of the Aegean, considering the wealth of pieces with versions in both languages (not to mention the many songs that switch back and forth between Greek and Turkish) and the recent popularity of, for example, rebetika in Turkey and arabesk in Greece. Yet the centrality of translation in this process of musical exchange—not only its mechanics but also its role as an engine for stimulating emotions, the intellect, and empathy, as well as the boundaries of its power to do so—has until now received scant attention. Şebnem Susam-Saraeva's excellent monograph Translation and Popular Music: Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations steps in to fill this lacuna. Susam-Saraeva, who grew up in the Aegean coastal city of İzmir, matches her analytical rigor with a deep emotional attachment to, and understanding of, the artistic traditions of both countries. Susam-Saraeva's stated goal is to explore the intersections of popular music, translation, sentimentality, and nostalgia in the context of relations between Turkish and Greek society [End Page 571] and their respective nation-states by examining the production, consumption, and discourse around popular music in the form of audio recordings as it crosses back and forth between the two countries, frequently changing form and function. She does this by drawing from recent work in a host of disparate fields, including translation studies, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, sociology, fan studies, comparative literature, and Mediterranean studies. Ambitious though it may be, this approach largely pays substantial dividends...

A etnografia musical como meio de desenvolvimento artístico: um relato

This article presents an account of the musical ethnography developed in the Master’s thesis entitled “Violão-Canção: diálogos entre o violão solo e a canção popular do Brasil” [Guitar and Song: Dialogues between Solo Guitar and Popular Song in Brazil]. It is based on interviews with seven artists that are references in this field: João Bosco, Sérgio Assad, Luiz Tatit, Paulo Bellinati, Paulo César Pinheiro, Marco Pereira and Guinga; and it is developed through the points of contact between the universe of the solo guitar and the song, as well as between artistic and scientific achievements, taking advantage from both resources from classical music – related to music score and written tradition – and resources from current popular song. Its effective support is the recording audio and video. Thus, the project generates its own set of tools which have been shaping its developments, which are gradually released, such as films, books, and websites

Discos em construção – Etnografia dentro de estúdios

Neste artigo, apresento uma etnografia musical de processos de produçãode discos dentro de estúdios paulistanos, descrevendo e discutindo as práticascriativas observadas. Entre 2011 e 2013, pude acompanhar de perto ostrabalhos de três artistas ativos na cena musical paulistana contemporânea: TatáAeroplano, Rodrigo Campos e Kiko Dinucci. Trago aqui as experiências etnográficasdo disco Tatá Aeroplano e do disco Metal-Metal. Procurei delimitar osaspectos mais significativos que caracterizam o fazer musical desse grupo sonoro,fornecendo indícios para uma reconfiguração do disco como objeto artístico nocenário musical contemporâneo. O disco emerge como agente social que transforma a vida dos artistas.

La tambora lobana: acercamiento a un proceso de investigación de campo, divulgación y apropiación con fines pedagógicos

La tambora es una manifestación de tradición oral que celebran los habitantes de los municipios ubicados en las riberas del río Magdalena, principalmente al sur de los departamentos de Bolívar, Cesar y Magdalena. El presente artículo se centra en tres municipios de la Subregión de Loba que divulgan dicha manifestación, y tiene como propósito evidenciar la importancia que puede representar la investigación de campo de carácter etnográfico para incentivar procesos investigativos en el desarrollo de las prácticas artísticas al interior del aula de clase. A continuación, se presenta una etnografía musical como alternativa metodológica emergente, que contempla la realización de algunas transcripciones del son de tambora y las dinámicas internas del contexto sociocultural. Así mismo, su divulgación en circuitos académicos y la apropiación de dichas estructuras rítmico-melódicas con fines pedagógicos.Palabras clave: tambora, investigación etnográfica, subregión de Loba, músicas, enseñanza.

Lack of musicality? Explaining anomalies in some senior Korean Christians’ hymn singing

AbstractThis article launches an inquiry into the ways in which some senior Korean Christians sing Protestant hymns at a Korean church in Cleveland, OH. The majority of the church members sing hymns as they are written; several older members (aged 65 or over) born in rural Korea, however, systematically transform them. The older singers tend to turn any diatonic hymn into a pentatonic melody, lowering fa down to mi and pulling ti up to do. Drawing on a variety of disciplines such as music theory, psychology, ethnography, and cultural history, I propose categorical perception as a key to understanding melodic transformation. Even though the piano accompanist at the church—who is rigidly Western music oriented—criticizes the older singers for their lack of musicality, numerous psychological studies suggest that the older Korean singers transform the hymns, precisely because they are musically trained, albeit in regional Korean folk singing practices. My fieldwork at the Annual Hymn Competition and my interv...

Music and Music Ethnography as Reflexivity Tools in Adult Learning

Music and music ethnography can evoke reflexivity in adult learning. The aim of the text is to highlight -out of two “ethnographic” cases- the ability of using music and ethnographic research as tools of transformative learning in adult education through recollective experiences. Reflexivity, as an analytical and interpretive tool in music ethnography, is used in the design of a research, in the discussion between ethnographers/musicologists and musicians or non musicians -carriers of a “tradition”- or in the composition of an ethnographic “text”. In reality, discussing with the different “other” is posing questions to oneself. Listening to a melody as adults, we associatively re-create memories and older experiences. The research was based on the use of music and musical ethnography as tools of transformative learning in two cases: firstly, in culturalists of the tertiary education of the Hellenic Open University and secondly, in adult students of the secondary education who were carrying out researches in the frame of a project entitled “Narrations about music and dance: Narrations about life”. The research took place in the years 2012-2013 and was based on qualitative methods of analysis (interviews and participatory observation were used). Visual arts are already used as analytical tools in adult learning. This article underlines the necessity of initiating a fertile discussion on the embodiment of music and ethnographic research, as useful reflexivity tools, in adult learning. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n3s1p247

George Sand and Music Ethnography in Nineteenth-Century France

In Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes (1851–1853), George Sand responded to the French government’s newly announced project of collecting the ‘popular’ or folk songs of France, with a critique of their methods of collection as perfunctory. Sand was adamant not only about a more rigorous approach to amassing the nation’s folk songs but also about the inclusion of the music with the lyrics, and her concise, insightful critique of archival methods came after nearly two decades of her own occupation with rendering music in her fiction and, more immediately, a decade focused on folk music in many of what are known as her ‘rustic’ novels. In particular, I bring to the fore in this article discussions in Sand’s expansive novel Consuelo; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842–1844) which both insist upon the historical, cultural and personal significance of the preservation of folk music and navigate the tensions of preserving an art form that is fundamentally non-static and ephemeral, in order to articulate the value Sand places on musical sensibility, memory and heritage. I argue that Les Visions de la nuit dans les campagnes stands along with Sand’s fiction as an ardent defense against the loss of the musical heritage of provincial France in the hands of the state’s archivists. This article thus situates George Sand’s investment in the cultural production from the Berry region within the early history of nineteenth-century music ethnography in France, while maintaining Sand’s own understanding of her cultural production as poetic rather than scientific.

Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890) the Founder of Musical Ethnography in Poland

Abstract The article presents the greatest Polish ethnographer, who was also a professionally educated musician. He concentrated his activities on the oral musical culture, still vital in the 19th century but liable to changes. Culture studies by Kolberg concerned mainly rural communities, statistically dominating in those times. He planned to edit 60 volumes geographically covering the first Polish State from before 1772; he managed to print 33 of them in his lifetime and prepare many further anthologies for editing. Up till now, the editorial work is still in progress. The already edited 80 volumes show us an old social culture, folk ceremonies, musical repertoire including ritual singing, songs and instrumental pieces. Kolberg’s printed monument is a source of reflection on the past and can inspire social studies, ethnomusicological research as well as musical ensembles performing traditional ethnic music of peasant origin. The size of Kolberg’s documentation means that a special Institute of Oskar Kolberg had to be established to continue editorial and research work. In spite of his positivistic and empirical attitude, Kolberg still kept a romantic faith in the significance of folk songs and singing for the preservation of national components in cultural consciousness. Simultaneously, he developed a model for structural analysis of popular/folk culture and intended to build a cultural atlas of the country, building on the work of his father, professor of the University of Warsaw, an outstanding cartographer. But the core of Kolberg’s programme, its “planetary centre”, was always music. It was music that gave him the stimulus to interpret the culture of Central-Eastern Europe. To preserve regional diversity, he wrote down more than 20 thousand vocal melodies, song texts and instrumental pieces, paying special attention to variants and ornamentation. For the contemporary composer, Kolberg’s volumes are a useful musical reader. These huge anthologies of elementary but highly integrated musical concepts demonstrate the collective creativity and a fascinating prefiguration of mass culture, still open to symbols and to poetry. Kolberg’s music transcriptions, catching music in the process of performance, should not be treated as unchangeable patterns for copying, but rather as a source that helps understand creativity in traditional oral culture.

Tabla Tuning on the Workshop Stage: Toward a Materialist Musical Ethnography

Focusing on the climactic moment when a customer comes to the shop to collect his or her drum, this article describes the fine-tuning of tabla in great detail. In the process, the paper addresses the dexterous manual gestures and acts of diagnostic audition performed by tabla makers, relationships between players and makers, as well as the interconnection between material and interpersonal constraints that influence fine-tuning. This musical ethnography of tabla tuning is grounded in a methodology based on new materialist scholarship such as object-oriented ontology and actor network theory. It advocates for greater acknowledgement of the ways in which instruments influence musical practices as well as the musical contributions of instrument makers, and it demonstrates the practical application of materialist scholarship to the study of musical practices.

Drumming for the Orisa: (Re)inventing Yoruba Identity in Oyotunji Village

AbstractI explore the ways identity is constructed among a group of drummers at Oyotunji Village, South Carolina. Oyotunji Village was founded by Oba Oseijeman I, born Walter King of Detroit, in 1970 with the purpose of providing African‐Americans in the United States with a geographical, political, and cultural space to experience African culture. Modeled after Yoruba culture of southwest Nigeria, members of the community practice a religion known as orisa‐voodoo. Throughout the year, festivals are held dedicated to various orisa, “deities,” in which the drummers play a crucial role in the religious experience of the orisa‐voodoo adherents. An essential part of Yoruba culture, drumming acts as a musical bridge between humans and orisa, enabling orisa‐voodoo practitioners to petition the orisa for guidance and intervention in their daily lives. Drumming traditions at Oyotunji Village provide drummers with a repository of cultural knowledge and practices from which to draw, while at the same time offering them a creative outlet capable of reshaping and redefining those very same traditions. I examine various processes of identity formation among the drummers as part of their musical apprenticeship, during which they learn not only how to play the instrument but also about Yoruba culture in general. I employ an analytical framework proposed by Timothy Rice (2003) involving a “subject‐centered musical ethnography” within a threedimensional space of musical experience including time, location, and metaphor.

Urban music from Kosovo and Metohija in the researches of Serbian ethnomusicologists up to the second half of the twentieth century

Folk music of Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija is considered to be archaic in popular discourse. From the scientific side, that is supported by the ethnomusicological printed and sound recordings, which are one of the first sources about Serbian music folklore. Ethnomusicology in Serbia is based on the results of music ethnography of the nineteenth and the twentieth century, and because of that, it is primary focused on rural tradition. Also in the last years’, popular music arrangements of some of these songs are often, whereby music from Kosovo and Metohija is usually perceived as the rural heritage. Nevertheless, music recorded during pioneer ethnomusicological fieldworks in Kosovo and Metohija is mostly noted in the cities, in organized “unauthentic” situations, and the performers were craftsmen, traders and teachers. Although in the latter ethnomuscological literature music classification according to the ritual background was common, the most of the songs recorded on Kosovo and Metohija have not (strict) ritual function and subject matter. The analysis of the Kosovo and Metohija songbooks of the eminent ethnomusicologists from Serbia proved that urban folk music was very present in the field, but troublesome for regular ethnomusicological classification and interpretation, and also that there were several informants with urban settlement who performed for these ethnomusicologists plenty of folk songs. Since the first half of the twentieth century, these ethnomusicological results have had great result on the popularization of Kosovo and Metohija music heritage. The main goal of this paper is to point on unjustified marginalization of the urban folklore at the ethnomusicological discourse, to illuminate the approaches of the pioneers in ethnomusicology in Serbia to the music heritage which has special significance not only in expert framework and to discuss the role of ethnomusicologist in the creation of the notion of “folk song”.

Reconciling Geppetto: Collaboration, (Re-)Creation, and Deception in the Practice of Hip Hop Music Ethnography

Reconciling Geppetto:Collaboration, (Re-)Creation, and Deception in the Practice of Hip Hop Music Ethnography Anthony Kwame Harrison (bio) Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story of wood coming to life.1 Certainly all wood is at some point alive, but Pinocchio’s story is about the resilient life-force of “a regular woodpile log” (Collodi [1883] 2009: 3). The log first announces its animation through voice. “Don’t hit me too hard!” (3) it pleads to an old carpenter looking to make a table leg. When the carpenter’s neighbor, the spry and hot-tempered Geppetto, acquires the log, he first names it Pinocchio (after a family he once knew) and then carves it into a marionette—both acts that further anthropomorphize the wood. As the story unfolds, Pinocchio walks out on Geppetto, journeying into a world full of talking animals and zoomorphic humans.2 One overriding theme in Pinocchio’s adventure is transgression—described by Charles Klopp as “the testing if not the breaking of . . . social norms” (2006: 28). The rebellious Pinocchio refuses to conform. Rather than being “obedient” and “going to school,” which is what proper boys do (91), Pinocchio the scamp wants to pursue the trade of “eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, and wandering wherever [he likes] from sunup to sundown” (14). That such characteristics are typically associated with the lives of entertainers should not be lost here. Indeed Pinocchio, who is most concerned with satisfying his immediate wants, is initially lured from his path to school by “the music of fifes and the beats of a big drum” (27) and goes on to spend a short stint as a stage-performing jackass. In his introduction to Geoffrey Brock’s 2009 English language [End Page 38] translation of the Italian classic, Umberto Eco insists that though “simple in its prose—and musical in its simplicity . . . Pinocchio is not a simple book” (2009: x). Surpassing the protagonist’s propensity to tell falsehoods—a quality responsible for engendering the puppet’s most memorable physical attribute—Pinocchio’s greatest character flaw is his insatiable wanderlust, which encourages an astonishing gullibility that makes him easy prey for swindlers like the Fox and the Cat. Yet by the end of the book, or the key sequence that Dennis Looney describes as “the beginning of the story’s end” (2006: 38), Pinocchio’s seemingly tragic shortcomings come back to save the day. After he reunites with Geppetto in the belly of a monstrous Shark, it is Pinocchio’s refusal to accept his fate that prompts him, against his father’s “better” judgment, to lead their escape—and when the initial effort fails, to “try again” (150). It is this deep desire to explore, discover, and above all else, survive that carries Collodi’s hero from the stacks of a woodpile along the circuitous road to full humanity. The following essay consists of three sections. In the first—the Adventures of Mad Squirrel—I narrate the development of my scholar-practitioner identity as both an ethnographer and a member of a Bay Area underground hip hop collective.3 This includes an elaboration on the network of interpersonal relations and tensions I entered into as a result of my decision to follow such a research path. I also reflect on the nature of collaborative ethnography and discuss how several issues surrounding it apply to both popular music studies in general and the context of my research in particular. In the second section, Forest Fires Collaborations, I outline several registers through which my collaborative ethnographic research and relationships resound. By considering key dynamics and moments in these ethnographic partnerships, I underscore the different ways in which knowledge emerges through complex and shifting negotiations of power. More specifically, I argue that participatory participant observation renders a different epistemological basis of inquiry, which recasts the ethnographic “field” as a dynamic and conceptually bounded space of knowledge acquisition and production. In the final section, I problematize the notion of research collaboration by discussing the multiple and ambiguous tensions between trust and deception that saturate these in-the-field relationships. My overall aim is to direct attention to the chorus of possibilities that [End Page 39] collaborative...

MUSIC OF THE SIKH DIASPORA: DEVOTIONAL SOUNDS, MUSICAL MEMORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

This paper explores the role of devotional music in the construction of Sikh identity in diasporic contexts. In particular, it examines a heterodox Sikh community in the UK and an orthodox Sikh community in Hong Kong from a comparative perspective, showing how music helps to clarify continuities and discontinuities in Sikhism worldwide. I provide ethnographic accounts of musical performances in different locales within gurdwara-s. Following a summary of current conventions in Sikh music performance and pedagogy, two ethnographic accounts are provided. The first is a musical ethnography of the Namdhari Gurdwara in Leicester where Hindustani classical music is performed alongside traditional ritual genres. The second site is a similar ethnographic study of the Khalsa Diwan Gurdwara in Hong Kong where the issues of diasporic identity and musical memory are foregrounded.

A Curricular Vision: General Music for Grades K-6 at Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones Elementary

There are four considerations that must be explored in a successful music curriculum: (1) Elliott’s praxial model of active musicing; (2) a student-centered approach to instruction, as outlined in the ideals of Critical Pedagogy; (3) educators cannot ignore the Autism epidemic that is facing our students; and (4) music educators should carefully consider repertoire choice when planning instruction. Curricular decisions in this thesis will be inspired by the demographics and musical ethnography of the students of Mary Harris Mother Jones Elementary, supported by the current scholarship of others, and evidenced by my Curriculum Map.

The Individual in Musical Ethnography

The Individual in Musical Ethnography

Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music

AbstractThis essay discusses the study of musical communities, taking as its point of departure the growing avoidance of the term “community” within much of recent musical scholarship. After exploring factors that have been responsible for the move away from community studies, the paper details both the creation of new nomenclature and the discourse surrounding the introduction of these new terms. Based on insights drawn from musical ethnography with recent African immigrants to the United States, the paper goes on to propose a revised framework for approaching “community.” It suggests that attention to processes of descent, dissent, and affinity both elucidates music's generative role in shaping new collectivities and unsettles the notion of music as a static sonic marker of social groupings. The conclusion touches briefly on new research from the sciences that is beginning to shed new light on music's role in generating social outcomes and the potential it holds for future collaboration with music scholars across disciplinary boundaries.

“We’re Talking about Practice(-Based Research)”: Serious Play and Serious Performance in the Practice of Popular Music Ethnography

“We’re Talking about Practice(-Based Research)”: Serious Play and Serious Performance in the Practice of Popular Music Ethnography

Songs from the Second Float: Music from the Island of Takū

Richard Moyle has a long-standing relationship with Takū, an atoll in the far reaches of Papua New Guinea, over two hundred kilometers northeast of Bougainville. In the last decade, Moyle has produced a number of publications from his work on this atoll, including the collection of oral literature Nā Kkai Takū: Takū's Musical Fables, published by the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in 2003, and the monograph Songs from the Second Float: A Musical Ethnography of Takū Atoll, Papua New Guinea, published by the University of Hawai'i Press in 2007. This CD of music recordings, released prior to the monograph, is a companion to it. [Preview]