Interview: Brian Guest and the Tuba

Monday, March 15, 2010
...or, "Kegs and Kettledrums" and "OH! LORD NELSON!"

My first interview of two I did today was with Brian Guest, a freshman who plays tuba in the Brown Band.

JR: Singing on the bus?
BG: Yeah, Singing...partying...
JR: Partying?
BG: Yes, partying. A lot of band is partying.
JR: What made you join in the first place? Were you searching for a musical group?
BG: Well, I joined for musical reasons. I heard it was fun, but I didn't know about the singing about the partying. I would say it is split between partying and music.
JR: Can you talk more about the social aspect?
BG: Well, when you're on a bus for the two days, those are the people you're hanging out with. Overnight trips happen for, let's see...Cornell is two nights, Columbia was one night...and the winter trip is one night. Almost everyone in band is friends with each other--it's extremely inclusive.

JR: How different is the Brown band from high school band?
BG: Well, I wasn't in a marching band in high school. I was in an orchestra before. I guess the fact that there are student conductors, student arrangers, and everything is run by students.
JR: How do you think that changes the dynamic of the band?
BG: Well, it's really laid back...you still have a chance to make music whenever you want to.

JR: When I came to ADOCH, I remembered hearing this incredibly raunchy script.
BG: Yeah, I've seen that on the internet (laughter) Well, at sports events you still have to get it by the athletics department. But usually at away games, you don't have to run it through the other schools. You have to keep the other schools in mind...I mean, we got kicked out of Holy Cross for being too offensive.
JR: So how to other bands react to you guys?
BG: I would say that the other bands we play with...they're pretty similar to us and have the same attitude. All the ivy bands except for Cornell are scatter bands. Some are a bit more organized, but they are all mostly student-run.

JR: So what do you play at these games? I remember hearing "Bad Romance" at the hockey game. Who chooses the music?
BG: We just had a song-reading practice to try out songs. These were mostly arranged by professional arrangers, like Dr. Worm. Bad Romance...Nick Hagerty just arranged it. I mean, Bryan Chu does a lot of arranging--he's the conductor.

Discussion of the band structure.

"Some of the seniors go to the GCB"

BG: There's a historian in charge of leading singing on the bus.
JR: Singing on the bus?
BG: A lot of them are based on fight songs of other schools. And there are some that are just based of of...other songs. Most of them are Brown songs. I mean, we have a lot of raunchy songs like ADPhi songs.
JR: What's an example of one of those songs?
BG: Well, we have one we can't sing to Freshman until october to not scare them away. It's called the S&M song (laughter). A lot of the songs we sing we also play, because they're Brown songs. Like "I'm a Brown Man Born." So we play those at games a lot too...and the pop songs, which we sing on the bus. Like at the last trip we ran out of songs so we started singing "Don't Stop Believing" and "Bohemian Rhapsody." But usually at the parties, the soundtracks are all band songs, like the pop songs.

BG: We added a bong. (In reference to the Clarkson cup)
(discussion of Clarkson cup here)
(Story about Brown Band's relationship to Clarkson)

(Discussion of band relationships)

JR: So what keeps you in Brown band? What about your involvement in the future?
BG: That's kind of what I look forward too. It's sad that we're done with games this season for a while. Our next thing is lacrosse in the beginning of May. We do other things like surprise shows.
JR: Surprise shows?
BG: Oh, like we hide in the bushes and jump out...like when people are going to classes.
JR: You guys should surprise me. I would really like that.
BG: Especially...I dunno there's a really great draw for me. The people, and just being able to play music without worrying about whether you're perfect or not. There's this one girl who just started to learn trumpet. It usually starts with percussion. There's a kid who kept on coming to home games and he always sat near us so we said "oh, you should join Brown band" but he said he was really busy but maybe next year and he didn't play an instrument. And we said "it's just another hour and a half on Tuesday you come to the home games anyway." And in the future, I don't really know what band board position would be good for me, but I would definitely consider running.

Nettl Critical Review #6

...or "I gotta get me some of them Mozart balls"

Nettl's article talks about ethnomusicology at home and is a self-reflective (though I think he claims it isn't) look on western art music, the people who produce it, and the people the study it. By studying the way a group of midwestern universities ("Heartland U") are organized, he tries to make a larger argument that cultural structures tie into musical structures and the structures of musical societies.

He begins by presenting an approach to music in relation to the culture that produces it. Music is a part of culture, it is a microcosm of culture, and it is a commentary on culture. Though he makes a disclaimer that there should be a healthy bit of skepticism towards this view, this is the stance he decides to take. I understand that what a culture produces (in this case, music), will obviously be a reflection of it. But I am skeptical that the power structures within a musical culture reflect the culture at large. More on this later.

Then Nettl goes into a fascinating, tongue-in-cheek discussion about the way Heartland U. treats the great composers in the western art music canon. An ethnomusicologist from Mars would see Heartland U's society worshipping a Pantheon of great and lesser gods. This deity-worship is something I am familiar with and I think it is a good way of presenting the treatment of figures like Wagner, Mozart, and Beethoven and it highlights the musical hierarchy-cultural hierarchy connection pretty well.

The most interesting part about this section was the connections Nettl constantly makes between talent, genius, and the divine. The way we think of "genius" is a figure who almost can do no wrong in terms of what he or she produces. Nettl mentions this in the way we catalog composers' works and release them in compilations, as if all their works are masterpieces by virtue of being associated with the composer. The little bit about relics was cool too.

Then Nettl attempts to consolidate his argument. I don't think this was particularly well done. Essentially, he is trying to make the argument that the polytheistic nature of Western Art Music is reflected in the culture of Heartland U. I found his Mozart-Beethoven inspiration-hard work dualism frame very weak and forced.

He then discusses uniforms, the orchestra, and how they relate to Western society. I liked the idea of the rise of the modern orchestra corresponding with industrialization or militarization and the power structures that formed as a result. In my experience, orchestras are like machines, where the individual is obliterated in favor of a collective existence lol. Uniforms would probably help in doing this. The discussion of the clothes people decide to wear were also interesting because I see people go to the opera dressed very formally. Dress codes are a very potent reflection of societal power structures and it was cool to see it addressed in the article.

One question I didn't feel like was answered very well: Why did "western" society gravitate towards the composer as deity set-up?

more somewhat related questions:
Why has the orchestral set-up remained so static for the past 50 or so years?

Most "pop" music "deifies" the performer and their body of work (the Beatles come immediately to mind) as opposed to the composer. Is this a reflection of the shift away from the composer-performer setup of WAM, or does this reflect a change in societal attitudes towards music and its production?

Agawu, Waterman Critical Review 5

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
In his article, Agawu describes the pervading exotification and misrepresentation of Africa and African musical cultures. He talks in depth about "rhythm" and criticizes other academics' practice of ascribing a "unique rhythmic sensibility" to "Africans" and as a result marking them as somehow inherently different.

He describes how people have misrepresented African rhythms as inherently more complex and incompatible with any sort of western notation system.The misrepresentation he describes has many problems. Though it helps in simplifying the discourse, it simplifies it to the point that it fails to address the huge amount of musical, linguistic, and political diversity on the African continent. In that respect, I see very little difference in saying "African music" as opposed to "the African," the latter being a political incorrect term but functioning the same way in the former. Most importantly, it marks "Africans" as inherently different, which is really what racism is. In the Waterman article, "the American Negro" is referred to as having different musical sensibilities by virtue of his/her race.

I wonder, though, if we misrepresent European music in the same way. In all the discussions where European music was compared and contrasted to African music, many people seemed to make similar generalizations like "more complex harmonies" and "less complex rhythm."

The Waterman article was interesting in that it helped contain the "otherness" concept within the United States. Continentalizing Africa in the colonial period was largely the product of the clash of unequal powers. In the United States, the same thing occurred (and still occurs) except on a smaller scale.

I found his discussion about the shortcomings of western notation interesting. He says that even in our own musical systems, the way we notate things do not ever really take into account things like timbre. When I play a melodic line on the cello, I was taught that I had to phrase a line with small breaks, going slower and some portions, faster in others. I see none of this notated on the page, yet we call this ability to interpret "musicianship."

Agawu then makes the argument that it is okay to try and notate other musics with notation familiar to scholars. Though some of the notation systems he discusses were interesting, I fail to see how they could be helpful to anyone.

The only solutions to the myriad problems Agawu presents that he offers is a relatively weak one. He suggests that African musicians make their own notation systems and hopes that they can one day represent themselves to the world. Though it is a weak conclusion, a system developed by the performers would make the most sense to the performers, which is really the only reason a notation system should exist anyway--to be read and understood.

What was interesting about the Waterman article was how it had a disclaimer at the opening which made clear that the music of Africa was very diverse, and that he was oversimplifying it throughout his article. It was written in the 50's and still addressed what Agawu criticized. Cool!

Can a discussion about musical sophistication ever occur? I feel like different cultures value very different things in their music, and you will always be appraising another musical culture's music through comparison with your own. If your own musical values differ, how "sophisticated" can anything be?

How much of the language of race and colonialism play in the discussion of non-Western music by western authors? I found some great examples in the two articles.

And now a somewhat personal experience with musical representation::

Samulnori is a Korean drumming style that serves as a blanket term for Korean folk music. I learned the four basic instruments and was trained as a vocalist during my childhood. When I learned Samulnori, I learned from repetition and vocal instruction. When notation was presented to us, it was similar to the way western percussion instruments are notated. It was helpful, but we were told to only use it for basic learning because there were things we could only learn from our instructors.

Samulnori music can be broken down into units, each unit with its own time signature, dances, and transitions. Within each unit each instrument has their own sub-rhythms. However, they all share the same downbeat at the beginning of each sub-unit. At the "heart" of the music is the breath, which everyone is expected to share.

More on this later!

Critial Review: Wong

Wednesday, March 3, 2010
"Finding an Asian-American Audience: The Problem of Listening" uses one man, Rod Ogawa, to tell a larger story about Asian-American musical consumption and how people's tastes are formed in general. Wong's focus is on listening, or where "considerable slippage occurs between agency and coercion."

The focus of her article is to present ideas on a seldom-explored topic: the consumption of American music by Americans who perceive themselves outside or in between the Black-White dichotomy of American "culture." I do not think that she ever pretends to present the musical tastes of Asian-Americans. I'm sure she is well aware that it would be impossible with only one person's life experiences to draw from. I personally found it a relaxed and compelling way of presenting the subject.

I found her choice of subject really interesting. Rod isn't "any more or less interesting than any other Asian-American listener," but he gives a very thoughtful picture of the listening habits of a Californian Japanese-American during the 50s and 60s. Most contemporary papers on Asian-American communities that I've read address immigrant enclaves of non-English speakers. Rod's experience as a post-internment Japanese American before the massive influx of Asian immigrants in the 60s was interesting for two reasons. The first is that Japanese Americans are now considered among the most "assimilated" of Asian ethnicities. The second is that he came of age and went to college during the civil rights movement, which probably gave him a different perspective on the place of Asian-Americans than someone growing up now.

It is also interesting because Deborah is also Asian-American, yet chooses someone else to write about. She is probably extremely aware of her own musical tastes and where they come from and could easily have written about herself. Is there a taboo to do this in an ethnography? As a participant in the group that "listens," she is as good a candidate as any. But interviewing Rod adds legitimacy to her arguments and in some bizarre way, allows her to find a narrative to compare hers to, which probably helped inform her conclusions.

I find her discussion of listening the most interesting. She claims that there is nothing inherent about music that makes it compelling--people make choices about what they listen to. She discusses the coercive aspect of listening later, which makes me think that your taste is really the combination of choice and coercion. I think is especially interesting when considering the unique place of Asian Americans in American society.

On a personal note, this article made me think more critically about the music I consume and the contexts I do that in as an Asian-American. The "otherness" ascribed to Asian Americans is something I'm constantly reminded of in a variety of contexts, whether it is in pop culture, the media, or in everyday social interactions.

My parents were avid listeners of "classical" music and I was encouraged to think that it was the only music I should consider "music." I'm a huge fan of it and listen to and participate in its production even now. To what extent was this a personal choice? My immediate social environment (my family) growing up put a high value on the appreciation and consumption of this kind of music. I wonder where and when this value was assigned.

Ultimately, I think it boiled down to the "immigrant mentality," a term I take issue with, but works in this particular case. To the Asian immigrant's mind, I think there exists some hazy conception of "American." Or, more accurately, "upper-class White American." Although its arguable the extent to which immigrants want themselves and their children to "assimilate," the particular community I grew up in placed a large emphasis on involvement in what were perceived to be "White" institutions like Ivy League universities and classical music ensembles.

However, a lot of my peers rejected their parents' musical tastes. Coming of age as an Asian-American in the United States was a bizarre and often confusing experience for me. Many New York Asian Americans live in or on the border of immigrant enclaves, where one sees signs in foreign languages as far as you can see. Therefore, there was a constant influx of immigrants, bringing the tastes they developed in their home countries with them. I had as much Korean pop music as I did American pop music on my computer. I spoke in English and had American friends, but participated in a variety of communities (mainly church), that consisted of a mixture of immigrants and their immigrant or American children.

The section on the "army of clarinets" was really interesting, because I had a similar experience with string instruments in high school. If you wanted to learn the definition of "AZN invasion," you would just have to look at our string orchestra. For some reason, all our parents made us learn an instrument. There were a variety of hypotheses--to get us into college was a particularly compelling one. I liked Wong's idea of the "imagination of social mobility." In the same way people around the world consider it a good investment to learn the language of the hegemon, I think people decide to participate in a musical culture.

What makes music "White" or "Black" or even "Asian?" In my particular case, it seemed that one small subsection of what my non-Asian peers deemed to be "music Asians listened to" was more than often not produced, performed, or composed by Asians at all.

Critical Review #3 Agawu

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
The "ethical attitude" Agawu advises ethnographers to have didn't do anything for me. He gave a weak survey of ethics within the ethnomusicology community and didn't offer any real solutions, approaches, or conceptual frameworks that I felt particularly satisfied with.

I had some issues with Agawu's discussion on how to approach the ethical systems of other communities. He cites another researcher in saying that African ethical thought are "as follows: traditional societies are communitarian...rights are essentially 'corporate'...the structure of thought is antiuniversalist." According to him, "...this is only true of precolonial or traditional society." Coming into another society with this "knowledge" might encourage aligning experiences with these generalizations, which I personally am uncomfortable with. Assigning this sort of inherent cultural character to a group of people seems irresponsible.

He then asks about how to approach communities who have "encountered" Christianity, Islam, and "modernizing forces." We've discussed in class how ethnomusicology has acquired a normative component of preservation and advocacy. I wonder if it is ethical to do this. There may be a desire among ethnomusicologists (a self-interested one, even) to thematize and align their experiences in the field with the world views they encounter in academic research. Agawu brings up a great question: "Could it be that protecting the BaAka...is a way of protecting our research? Do we want the BaAka to remain different so that we can continue to thematize them in our writing, exploit them intellectually?" I've discussed before the perils of wanting to separate and isolate a musical tradition from modernizing forces because it just isn't the way things work. Field researchers of popular music address these forces all the time and seem to be fine.

However, he says some interesting things about how an conceptual framework for ethics can only come from a community. But is the imagined community of academia really that different from our more traditional conception of a community? With better communication and more opportunities for exchange, is it possible for it to synthesize a system of ethics?