Agawu, Waterman Critical Review 5

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

"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

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?

Wagner

...or "Walla walla"

I watched "Das Rheingold" today. It was the 1976 staging directed by Patrice Chereau. It accomplished three things.

1. reinforced my fear that I am just a cog in the industrial machine

2. inspired a game called "Bayreuth" similar to another one with a similar name.

3. Wagner was an asshole

I enjoyed it immensely and will be watching a more traditional staging of die Walkure very soon. I also listened to a lot of rain hitting my window. Why practice with my "Studying Rhythm" book if I can just learn from nature? I suspect professor Cole will not appreciate that question.

SEM POST

Or..."Dear Society for Ethnomusicology: Is that seriously your journal cover?"

I went to town!

The first thing you notice when you go through the earliest issues of Ethnomusicology is how it seemed to function as a networking journal as opposed to a place where people published their findings. It's historical roots as an offshoot of musicology and its relative novelty are really highlighted by the first few issues. There is a clear intent to really try and flesh out the discipline

The earliest issues are dominated by studies of decidedly "exotic" cultures. Throughout many of the earlier articles, I got the distinct impression that these ethnomusicologists perceived the people they were studying as "primitive." They also read very scientifically, with very little usage of the first person and almost no personal narrative. The scientific approach to ethnomusicology and the purposeful placement of distance between them and their subjects was probably intentional, almost in the same way scientists avoid "contaminating" their samples.

They earlier articles tend to focus more heavily on notation, recording, and form. In "A Transcription Technique Used by Zygmunt Estreicher," Roxanne McCollester talks in very precise detail about how to transcribe a melody. "The transcription process should now proceed by listening again to the music at half speed...to pick up as many as possible of the 'microrhythmic' relations..." It seems that early ethnomusicology was very involved with finding new ways to fit (more like force in) and bend non-Western music systems into the Western tonal system.

The articles we've read and the articles posted in 2000 and beyond tend to focus more on music and its cultural context. The earlier articles seem to treat music as a product of the society, to be taken back to the laboratory and examined like a physical object. The earlier articles also seem to be more like research papers than what we would consider an "ethnography." We talk about how the ultimate goal of fieldwork is an ethnography, but that doesn't seem to be the goal of these ethnomusicologists. Perhaps our modern conception of "ethnography" is drastically different? Or maybe they were trying to do something else completely!

I think as a modern student, it's great to look back at some of these articles and see how attitudes have changed in society as a whole. In a 1961 article by Ed Cray entitled "An Acculturative Continuum for Negro Folk Song in the United States," the tone and language strongly suggest that the author thinks of music produced by African Americans should be considered in a context completely separate from the music of "mainstream America." I think this is an interesting snapshot of how people perceived the "otherness" of African Americans in the period before the civil rights movement went into full swing. Also, I think any modern listener of American music would agree that it is impossible to separate it from its African American influences. "R and B records are being replaced by rock and roll, essentially a white musical style." lol.

Titon 2002, Barz 2008 Critical Review

Jeff Titon has such a reassuring and gentle writing style. Jeff Titon WILL teach you how to do field work! I like the idea of a video series.

There were a few things I thought were interesting about the Titon article. I get the impression from this and our past readings that modern ethnomusicology is all about the participant-observer dynamic and is concerned with the balance field research has to strike between the two. The consistent warning is to always be self-aware, because "your very presence as an observer alters the musical situation...In many situations you will actually cause less interference if you participate rather than intrude as a neutral and unresponsive observer." (Titon, 2) But if there is such an emphasis on interfering as little as possible, why do modern fieldworkers believe they must "give back to the people?" By acting as a cultural and musical advocate, don't you change the musical situation even further by adding even MORE observers? I think what that does is freeze the group in a place and time and wall it off from the natural changes it would have gone through had an ethnomusicologist not acted as an advocate.

The introductory and instructive way the Titon article is constructed forces is it to make a few simplifications and generalizations. He says "ethnomusicologists say..." or "fieldworkers think..." as if there is a consensus among them. An instance he uses this is when he talks about cultural advocacy: "It is humankind's advantage to have many different kinds of music, they believe. For that reason, they think advocacy and support are necessary..." To me, this sounds like even more intervention and touches on a debate I've encountered in other classes about globalization and homogenization.

If forces were at work to make music "sound alike" the world over, is that a bad thing? Does a musical culture ever willingly accept one of these homogenizing forces, or is it imposed upon them? I think there are some really interesting parallels with language. When students in other countries learn English, do they have agency? One could argue that they make a conscious decision to learn it, but others would argue that Anglo-American power structures necessitate the adoption of English. If an indigenous language dies out as a result of this, whose fault is it?

I hesitate to argue that the death of musical cultures is just the way things work, but musical cultures and languages have been disappearing and being replaced by new ones ever since people have been making music. Does being a cultural preservationist mean you're opposing the "march of history?" (I hate saying that).

But returning to the idea of observing as opposed to participating, Barz brought up something I didn't really think about when he mentioned that taking field notes was a performative act. But so is being in a musical group. When I am in my samulnori ensemble, I go through a series of rituals throughout the rehearsal that people expect of me. Photographing, tape-recording, and taking field notes would require me to deviate from these standard rituals and norms. If you are a participant in a string quartet, for example, and you whipped out a notebook during rehearsal, that's just weird. What if you just recorded things without them knowing?

Titon emphasizes that you need to make sure you have consent. I wonder if a more genuine observation of a group would arise if you observed them without their consent.

Film Scoring

...or, "Why Listening to James Cameron's 'Avatar' Soundtrack Left Me Throughly Uncomfortable and Unimpressed. Also Kind of Offended," and "This Chorus Singing in Latin Does Not Belong in This Movie."

I love movies! I go to them all the time for the feeling of being in a large theater surrounded by other people. I also like watching previews and often enjoy them no matter how terrible they are. I love going with friends and sometimes even go by myself!
...Actually, I just actively seek out socially acceptable settings to eat entire boxes of junior mints.

But really, I rarely go because of the score. In many instances, the score is supposed to be background music--stuff composed so you are supposed to ignore it, but should intensify your experience. I hate to say this, but the New Moon soundtrack did a good job of this. Not gonna lie.

But I always notice the background music. Maybe it is because of my musical training, but sometimes I just space out and just pay attention to the music. And sometimes when I do this, I feel uncomfortable. Here are some of the things that make me uncomfortable in a film score:

1. The usage of non-western instruments to make something sound more exotic (wtf is that erhu doing there?)
2. The Random Latin Chorus3. When I know what the next four chords are going to be
4. When a solo female voice starts to sing modal-y melodies in another language/with no words at all
5. Similar to 4, those goddamn boy sopranos.
6. Any time anything by My Chemical Romance makes its way into a soundtrack
Okay, so my main problem with the "Avatar" soundtrack was when there were these scenes that were totally taken out of the Pocahontas "Colors of the Wind" scene in which the attractive indigenous woman takes the white dude out and shows him her culture. In the movie, this involved lots of DRUMMING. It came out of nowhere. Why do all "natives" enjoy percussive instruments? I don't know.

I don't know about you, but if I were a blue, humanoid alien organism, I would probably play the French horn. Think about it. Think about it really hard.

Of course it is wise to use the instruments of a culture you are trying to depict in a movie. I just thought it was a bit offensive because the Avatar Na'vi were supposed to be extraterrestrial. Not African.

Next, let me take a moment to describe a phenomenon called "Random Latin Chorus," or RLC. Yes, I actually use this terminology in real life and enjoy instances when it comes up. You probably know exactly what I'm talking about. RLC happens during seriously epic scenes during a war with a bunch of dudes charging towards the enemy or when there are a swarm of demons, or when there are a bunch of vampires standing around in a candlelit room doing something dramatic like sacrificing a virgin. Or attacking the president! RLC in X-men 2

Sometimes, it is totally okay. I mean, "Gladiator" was all about Romans, so it makes sense. It's a context thing. I know this is all my opinion, but sometimes it just makes me uncomfortable. It doesn't even have to be in Latin to unnerve me. There are, however, instances when it's done pretty well.
Next thing. When I saw the Lord of the Rings, I enjoyed the soundtrack. I did! I promise. Did you know that the "Hobbit" theme sounds almost exactly like the Lutheran hymn "This is My Father's World?" Beyond that though, the Hobbit theme also sounds like every wistful, pastoral, village-y song ever written. Wind instrument playing over strings! While this doesn't really make me uncomfortable, it gets annoying when you hear it everywhere! Off the top of my head: Avatar, Eragon, Stardust, Harry Potter.

Another film scoring phenomenon I like to talk about that makes me uncomfortable is something I am going to call "Everything goes silent except for solo female voice singing in another language." You know what I'm talking about. Picture a hero in battle. He is running towards the enemy and he has some bad wounds already, but you know he will keep on going. Suddenly, it goes silent and a woman starts to sing in the background while he raises his sword and starts slashing at a Persian or something. Why is that woman singing? More importantly, why is it in a harmonic minor/mode? Also, what are all these semitones I hear? Most imp

ortantly, WHY IS IT ALWAYS ENYA?!

Going off on this, I hate boy sopranos. This is an opinion. I used to be a boy soprano (and in a way, I still am). They pop up EVERYWHERE!

Unlike boy sopranos in real life, they have many uses in film scoring. They can be really angelic and uplifting OR absolutely terrifying. Actually, I take that angelic and uplifting part back. Boy sopranos are inherently terrifying. This is a fact. I challenge you to challenge this fact.

Finally, I hate "My Chemical Romance." I was unable to enjoy "Watchmen" for this reason.

Yes, I know discomfort is a really awkward and subjective way to describe my feelings about these musical idioms, but it's true. I think the most interesting thing though is the fact that these musical idioms exist. I don't believe there is something inherent about the music and the performance style that lends itself to be used in a particular place in a film. However, I think that each sound has a social context and has a lot of social meaning ascribed to it.

For example, the whole boy soprano thing. We think of little boys as innocent and cute, so a scorer might have a vocal line sung by one to suggest something like paradise. However, when they're used in a creepy way, it highlights the drama because it sort of twists are expectations.

The Latin chorus too. I think it's supposed to invoke images of church, of the middle ages, and the institutions associated with those things because that's what we think of when we think of a chorus singing in Latin. I have no goddamn clue where the solo woman singing thing comes from though.

In conclusion, My Chemical Romance sucks and if you've composed it, there's probably already a Lutheran hymn of it.

(left) MCR. Worse than every boy soprano ever? Make your call.