Theorizing Heritage Author(s): Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Source: Ethnomusicology , Autumn, 1995, Vol

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Theorizing Heritage Author(s): Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Source: Ethnomusicology , Autumn, 1995, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 367-380 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/924627 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.com/stable/924627?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms VOL. 39, No. 3 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FALL 1995 Theorizing Heritage BARBARA KIRSHENBLATrr-GIMBLET he invitation to deliver the Charles Seeg with a codicil that is both liberating and u to talk about music, I was told. Don't talk ab are currently writing. In keeping with th about my attempt to theorize heritage. I con is not immediately apparent from the title ties, Virtualities, and Other Dilemmas of D temperate rainforest of New Zealand, whe fully, the remarks that follow will make go have chosen for the published version of the insights gleaned during a season on two s As a folklorist, I was trained to study tradi States, tradition was still a given. It was not y Terence Ranger had not yet declared the " worthy of serious study in its own right their distance from the popularizers, whose w took with tradition and the uses to whic anthologies of folklore, commercial record festivals, careers as performers, and the like. academic folklorists and popularizers, as the important to the institutionalization of the have discussed elsewhere, we were all seventies and even more so during the e professional folklorists than the academy that we failed to expand the discipline w demand for more of our graduates. Gifted folklorists turned to the public arena than folklore in the academy, judgin for public folklorists and the prodigious wor producing. One of their most important con ? 1995 by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 367 This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 368 Etbnomusicology, Fall 1995 crisis of conscience and consciousness they have precipitated. Their work has forced the discipline to reexamine its very foundations. It has shaken the stability of folklore's disciplinary subject, and it has made the division between academic and public folklore more difficult to sustain. Of course, it does not help that the very term folklore has acquired negative connotations in both general and academic parlance. Or, maybe the repudiation of the term folklore is good for us because it unsettles the old assurances with which we have worked. The bad rap may prompt us to move in new directions. We used to fight the general perception, codified in the Oxford English Dictionary, that folklore meant misinformation. Or, as Richard M. Dorson characterized the problem, "To the layman, and to the academic man too, folklore suggests falsity, wrongness, fantasy, and distortion. Or, it may conjure up pictures of granny women spinning traditional tales in mountain cabins or gaily costumed peasants performing seasonal dances" (1972:1). The current president-elect of the American Folklore Society, John Roberts, has objected to the folklorizing of African Americans-to what happens when they are, as he puts it, "folked up" (pers. comm. 1992). Jeff Titon speaks of performers being "folked over" (pers. comm. 1994). Hasidim among whom I have worked look with disdain upon the idea that their Purim plays or music or legends would be studied as folklore. To think of what they do as folklore is to be an unbeliever; by not believing, folklorists devitalize what Hasidim do. A second life as folklore is just not as good, from their perspective, as a first life as faith. Anthropologist John Comaroff remarked in a speech to University of Chicago alumni several years ago that "folklore, let me tell you, is one of the most dangerous words in the English language" (Gray and Taylor 1992:2). The danger arises because the term often obscures "a highly unreflective populism." Latin American intellectuals object to folklore because they associate it with official heritage as opposed to popular (and resistant) culture (Rowe and Schelling 1991). Franz Fanon conceptualizes folklore as a stage to pass through in the creation of a post-colonial national culture. He delineates this sequence: first, native intellectuals embrace the colonial legacy; then, they valorize native traditions; finally, they reject both in an effort to create a new national culture (1968). Johannes Fabian speaks of folklore as a mode of production (1990:270-75), a formulation that informs my thinking on the subject. To survive as an academic discipline and without a change of name, folklorists have generally fought the rising tide: we have corrected the "misperceptions" and revisioned the field in more contemporary and sophisticated terms. I would like to suggest that there is good news in the bad press. Folklore as a discipline will not survive by defending the status quo. It must reimagine itself in a transformed disciplinary and cultural This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Theorizing Heritage 369 landscape. If taken seriously, bad press can be catalytic in the discipline's self-assessment. It is in this spirit that I will ask, if folklore is such a bad word, why heritage is such a good one. I will take my lead from the proposition that folklore is made not found-which does not mean that it is fabricated, though fabrication does of course occur. The ballad forgeries in the eighteenth century are a case in point (Stewart 1991). Folklore's facticity is rather to be found in the ways that particular objects or behaviors come to be identified and understood as folklore (Bausinger 1990). This is the enabling moment for the discipline, for folklorization is something we do in order to create our disciplinary subject, even if those caught in our disciplinary drift net protest. The discipline is deeply implicated in the historical unfolding and political economy of its subject (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1990a). In my presidential address to the American Folklore Society two years ago, I argued that the discipline was in a state of crisis and explored two of the reasons. The first is topic drift: the term folklore has drifted farther and farther away from what it once signified. Folklorists hold to the term but keep tinkering with the disciplinary subject. The second reason is the discipline's difficulty in constituting a truly contemporary subject. My goal then was to imagine what folklore's contemporary subject might look like. I explored why the field, historically constituted as "the science of tradition," had so much difficulty coming to grips with the contemporary. My objective here is to return to the problem of tradition-not in defense of folklore's canonical subject, but rather to take the popular "misperceptions" of folklore as indicative of the truths of heritage as they emerge from contemporary practice. Heritage, for the sake of my argument, is the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct. Heritage is created through a process of exhibition (as knowledge, as performance, as museum display). Exhibition endows heritage thus conceived with a second life. My argument is built around five propositions: (1) Heritage is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past; (2) Heritage is a "value added" industry; (3) Heritage produces the local for export; (4) A hallmark of heritage is the problematic relationship of its objects to its instruments; and (5) A key to heritage is its virtuality, whether in the presence or the absence of actualities. Heritage is a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past. Heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation, restoration, reclamation, recovery, recreation, recuperation, revitalization, and regeneration, heritage This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 370 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1995 produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past. Such language suggests that heritage is there prior to its identification, evaluation, conservation, and celebration: "Pieces of history are yours to find. ... The past is waiting for you to explore in The Central West Coast" of the South Island of New Zealand, the flyer beckons. By production, I do not mean that the result is not authentic or that it is invented out of whole cloth. Rather, I wish to underscore that heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. It is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past. Heritage not only gives buildings, precincts, and ways of life that are no longer viable for one reason or another a second life as exhibits of themselves; it also produces something new. If a colonial past, a past of missionaries and forced acculturation, threatened to produce "de-culturation," the heritage industry does not so much reverse that process, even though its discourse of reclamation and preservation makes such claims. Rather, the heritage industry is a new mode of cultural production and it produces something new. There is no turning back. If heritage as we know it from the industry were sustainable, it would not require protection. The process of protection, of "adding value," speaks in and to the present, even if it does so in terms of the past. Heritage is a "value added" industry. Heritage adds value to existing assets that have either ceased to be viable (subsistence lifestyles, obsolete technologies, abandoned mines, the evidence of past disasters) or that never were economically productive because an area is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too remote. Heritage organizations ensure that places and practices in danger of disappearing because they are no longer occupied or functioning or valued will survive. It does this by adding the value of pastness, exhibition, difference, and where possible indigeneity. The Value of the Past Thanks to the heritage industry, "the past is a foreign country" (H 1953). Interfaces like historic villages and re-enactments are time mach a term coined by H. G. Wells in his 1895 science fiction story, Th Machine. They transport tourists from a now that signifies hereness to that signifies thereness. The attribution of pastness creates distance th be traveled. The notion of time travel is explicit in invitations to "take through history" (Taranaki Heritage Trail) or "walk down memory (Howick Historical Village) in New Zealand. The very term "historic" ca This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Theorizing Heritage 371 taken as an indication of obsolescence: no calls can be placed from the "Historic Telephone Box" on the Heritage Trail in Palmerston North. It is enshrined by the City Corporation with the words, "This is a protected building," but its windows now display real estate listings for Harcourts, a business older than the box. Harcourts, which has been operating since 1888, is not on the Heritage Trail. The Value of Exhibition Tourism and heritage are collaborative industries, heritage conver locations into destinations and tourism making them economically viable exhibits of themselves. Locations become museums of themselves within a tourism economy. Once sites, buildings, objects, technologies, or ways of life can no longer sustain themselves as they once did, they "survive"-they are made economically viable-as representations of themselves. They stage their own rebirth as displays of what they once were, sometimes before the body is cold. In East Germany, tourism is stepping in where the heavy industry encouraged by the communist regime is in decline. Thuringa is selling the good old days of Luther and Goethe by featuring its medieval castles, Renaissance town hall, and churches (Kinzer 1993a). Just north of Berlin, on a former army base, "the bad old days" are the subject of a museum and theme park. The museum will present the political and social history of East Germany; the theme park will recreate communist life in East Germany. "Clerks and shopkeepers will be surly and unhelpful. The only products for sale will be those that were available in East Germany" (Kinzer 1993b). Scotland has transformed "an underground bunker, once a nuclear shelter for British Government Ministers," into a "national museum to the Cold War." Golfers putt on the lawn, while 33m beneath them "visitors can explore the nuclear command, computer and communications rooms, dormitories and broadcast studios, all equipped with original artifacts" (Holden 1994). Tourism thrives on such startling juxtapositions, on what might be called the tourist surreal-the foreignness of what is presented to its context of presentation (Clifford 1981:563). The Value of Difference It is not in the interest of remote destinations that one arrives in a p indistinguishable from the place one left or from thousands of oth destinations competing for market share. "Sameness" is a problem t tourism industry faces, for standardization is part and parcel of economi of scale that high volume tourism requires. Tourists spend much of their t in the grips of the industry, in planes, hotels, buses, and restaurants, in This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 372 Etbnomusicology, Fall 1995 infrastructure. Because infrastructure and interface are what add value and generate revenue, there is even greater pressure to elaborate them, even when doing so works counter to the seamless experience of unmediated encounter that tourism promises. The infrastructure becomes the attraction, and hotels become events unto themselves. Gagudju Crocodile Hotel in Kakadu National Park, Northern Australia, is being marketed as "the only crocodile-shaped hotel in the world." And if tourism is too successful, if the town is full or the island overrun, the industry can make an infrastructural intervention. "We couldn't create a new Hawaiian Island, so we built a new kind of Hawaiian resort"-the advertisement in Conde Nast Traveler (June 1994) is for Ihilani Resort & Spa, "a twenty-five minute drive from Honolulu International Airport but worlds away." Or it can create a new interface of magical lands, such as Disney's Tomorrowland, Adventureland, and Fantasyland in Anaheim, California. Hotels, transportation, and restaurants are often similar from place to place. First, vertical integration in the tourism system places much of this infrastructure in the hands of a few national and multinational corpora- tions-the biggest earner is international flights, followed by hotel accomodation. Airlines often own interests in hotels. Second, the industry requires a reliable product that meets universal standards, despite the dispersal of that product across many widely separated locations. Third, sameness can arise from the overzealous dedication of a location to its tourists. Queenstown, the tourist mecca of New Zealand's South Islan concerned about the proliferation of signage in Japanese. According to C Ryan of the New Zealand Tourism Board in an interview on Radio Zealand (8 September 1994), Japanese tourists who come here f distinctly New Zealand experience" may feel like they never left To Spending on average $3148 per person per visit ($257 a day), these are ve desirable tourists. There is also the impracticability of providing signage all the languages spoken by tourists who do not know English, and people resent the transformation of the town and the perceived insulari non-English speaking tour groups. Rapid growth has its down side. Fourt the very interchangeability of generic products suits the industry, which quickly shift destinations if one paradise or another is booked solid o by a typhoon, political unrest, or currency fluctuations. For this and ot reasons, the discourse of tourism marketing is so consistent that onl insertion of place names tells you which getaway or which natural wond you are being sold. "It took over 5000 years to build the perfect res Where? "Israel, on a TWA Getaway vacation" (New York Times, 22 Novem 1987). Or, as Mel Ziegler quipped, "Now that it's easier to go anywhere, i harder to really get away" (Banana Republic Catalog #4, 1987). This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Theorizing Heritage 373 Heritage produces the local for export. The heritage industry "exports" its product through tourism. Tourism is an export industry, one of the world's largest. Unlike other export industries, however, tourism does not export goods for consumption elsewhere. Rather, it imports visitors to consume goods and services locally. To compete for tourists, a location must become a destination, and heritage is one of the ways locations do this. Heritage is a way of producing "hereness." However many tourists arrive in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, or Dunedin, these cities complain that they are only gateways. Tourists pass through them on their way to tourist regions on their outskirts, rather than staying for several days. While a boon to those promoting recreational fishing in Auckland reservoirs, Ben Wilson's dream of "the day when Auckland will have fishing guides based in the city to whisk international travelers straight from their plane or hotel by helicopter to the dams to chase rainbows" is the urban tourism industry's nightmare (South 1994:44). As a 1994 visitor information leaflet tries to persuade the tourist: "Hokitika, 'A Place to Stay for More than a Day."' A burgeoning industry in its own right, heritage and its legislative muscle are instruments of planning and urban redevelopment. They work synergis- tically with tourism. Salem, Massachusetts, has attempted "for almost a decade ... to augment its declining industrial and regional retail economy with a more vibrant tourism industry," according to the 1 August 1993 real estate section of the New York Times. Two hundred million dollars are being infused into this small town of 38,000 to capitalize on its six hundred buildings dating from the 1600s. Kevin J. Foster, chief of the National Maritime Initiative of the Park Service, projects that "Salem-which in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthth centuries was an important mercantile center-could become an even greater tourist attraction" (Diesenhouse 1993). Similarly, more tourists will pass through Ellis Island Restoration, located on a small island off the tip of Manhattan, than did immigrants through Ellis Island, a processing center in its heyday at the turn of the century (See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1990b). A hallmark of heritage is the problematic relationship of its objects to its instruments. The heritage industry produces something new. Its instruments are a key to this process. Dance teams, heritage performers, craft cooperatives, cultural centers, arts festivals, museums, exhibitions, recordings, archives, indigenous media, and cultural curricula are not only evidence of heritage, This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 374 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1995 its continuity, and its vitality in the present. They are also instruments for adding value to the cultural forms they perform, teach, exhibit, circulate, and market. Much is made of the traditions themselves, as if the instruments for presenting them were invisible or inconsequential. This point is not missed by those who oppose the placing of Maori weaving on the National Qualifications Framework within the New Zealand educational system, on the grounds that this would "tamper with the traditional methods of transfer of knowledge," with negative effects on community cohesion (Kani 1994). Heritage productions, like tourism more generally, proclaim the foreignness of objects to their contexts of presentation. This is the appeal of Ihilani Resort & Spa, near the Honolulu airport, which was designed "to create a paradise that offered everything you could want, in a setting where you never thought it could exist" (Conde Nast Traveler, June 1994). But heritage productions also tend to conflate their effects (preservation) with the instruments for producing them. A key concept here is the notion of interface and the possibilities interface affords for conveying messages other than those of heritage. Landmarking, historic recreation, cultural conservation, and heritage tourism are not transparent. They are the very instruments for adding value. It is therefore important to examine them and the assumptions guiding them-not only what they produce, but also how. How is value added or lost when taonga, Maori treasure, is exhibited in an art gallery or museum of natural history or used on a marae(Maori meeting place)? When Maori weaving is taught in school? When Cook Island heritage performances emulate Broadway production values and figure in ceremonies welcoming a head of state to an academic conference? When the Pintubi paint on canvas rather than on their own bodies and circulate their work within an international art market (Myers 1991, 1994)? When a few days b Scottish Week in Wellington or NAIDOC (National Aborigines' and Islan Day Observance Committee) Week, to honor Aborigines and Torres Islanders in Australia? When farmers gather for a World Ploughing Ch onship in Dunedin? When sheep line up on a stage? When their sh "demonstrate" their work? The instruments for adding value-the interface between "traditions" and tourism-connect heritage productions to the present even as they keep alive claims to the past. A hallmark of heritage productions-perhaps their defining feature-is precisely the foreignness of the "tradition" to its context of presentation. This estrangement produces an effect more Brechtian than mimetic and makes the interface a critical site for the production of meanings other than the "heritage" message. Messages of reconciliation, of multiculturalism or biculturalism, or of development are likely to be encoded in the interface. This in part explains why the Uluru cultural center under This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Theorizing Heritage 375 construction at Ayers Rock in the Australian desert would make hypervisible the infrastructural management of the site jointly by aborigines and rangers, and why Sir Geoffrey Henry would want to compare the quality of Cook Island performers with the Bolshoi ballet. The call for "realness" requires that the interface, the means by which the representation is staged, be muted or concealed. Demands for "ethnographic" realism are thus politically fraught. The kind of authenticity that requires the recession of the frame represses what is at stake for those whose heritage is exhibited. The feeling that you are there and nothing is between you and it is like photographs that conceal the camera or photographer that made them. These are illusions with a price. The interface-folk festivals, museum exhibitions, historical villages, concert parties, postcards-are cultural forms in their own right and powerful engines of meaning. A key to heritage productions is their virtuality, whether in the presence or the absence of actualities. I am especially interested in rethinking authenticity, invention, and simulation. One way to shift the ground is to anchor the issues in cases where authenticity is irrelevant or where it ceases to explain anything. The atavism of something genuine or real, even if it never materializes, is present in Eric Hobsbawm's notion that organic community and custom are genuine, while Scottish kilts are invented (1983), and in Jean Baudrillard's precession of the simulacrum (1983). I prefer to think in terms of actualities and virtualities, in terms of a collaborative hallucination in an equivocal relationship with actualities. Consider pilgrimage itineraries. The most ambitious pilgrim can follow a circuit through the entire Indian subcontinent. Alternatively, he can walk the circuit within a region, or within a town, or in a temple, or on a miniature map of India, or even contemplatively in his own mind. One can trace Christ's last steps anywhere, which accounts for the Stations of the Cross processions on Good Friday all over the world. And more to the point, no one asks if the stations are authentic. Actual Destinations, Virtual Places The Automobile Association Book of New Zealand Historical Places (1984) recognizes the inadequacy of many actual sites to reveal what they are about. "Throughout our history, people have left very different marks on the New Zealand landscape, some faint and some clear. In some cases there is no mark at all, but the place is still historic because we know some important event occurred there" (Wilson 1984:7). This is precisely why both This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 376 Etbnomusicology, Fall 1995 museums and tourism are largely in the business of virtuality, but claim to be in the business of actualities--of real places, real things, and real experiences. "Hereness," as the AA Book of New Zealand Historic Places understands all too well, is not given but produced. The production of hereness, in the absence of actualities, depends increasingly on virtualities. The frenzy of memory in downtown Milwaukee requires the instruments of historic walks, plaques, historical societies, museums, tours, and exhibitions because Old Milwaukee is a phantom. It hovers in the spaces cleared by freeways, parking lots, hotels, and convention centres. It does not penetrate the monumental structures that now enclose several city blocks in another Rouse Company mall except as souvenirs and architectural detail. It animates a flourishing heritage industry, thanks to which the phantom is anchored to a patch of sidewalk by means of a plaque that marks where an African American church once stood. Or, it attaches itself to one of the old buildings still standing in a downtown that is otherwise vacated and devitalized, most of its architectural past razed. The very proliferation of "spaces of memory"-what Pierre Nora calls lieux de memoire-in the form of memorials, archives, museums, heritage precincts, and commemorative events are, in his view, an indication of a crisis of memory (1989). Memory requires its prostheses, and never have they been as numerous or as inventive as in our own time. Those who read American Airline's inflight magazine on the wa Milwaukee learned about the Abbey Church of St. Peter and St. Paul 1804) in Cluny. The size of two football fields, this church outliv usefulness with the decline of the vast Benedictine monastic order for which it had been the center. Shortly after the French Revolution, the Burgundian village in which it was found allowed the massive church to be dynamited and the stone sold. Not until protective legislation halted the process in the late nineteenth century did the village realize the value of what had been destroyed. As Robb Walsh, a travel writer, reported, "Last year 700,000 tourists came to see Cluny and the church that isn't there." As he explains, "the only thing larger than the empty space where a church once stood is the legacy of its destruction . . . Like an amputee who still feels sensations in his phantom limb, the ancient village of Cluny is still haunted by its phantom church." What do visitors find there? "Towers of the transept, and bases of the interior pillar, the great church's foundations exposed and left vacant." They also find a virtual church: A museum dedicated to the church stands a few feet away from the excavation. Inside, I look at an animated, three-dimensional computer re-creation on videotape that shows views of the structure from all angles while a Gregorian chant fills the background. Back outside, I stare again at the void. The computer model is still so fresh in my mind that an image of the enormous edifice seems This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Theorizing Heritage 377 to appear before me. I'm not alone in this optical illusion: everyone leaving the museum seems to do the same double take outside. It's as if we're having a mass hallucination of a building that no longer exists. (Walsh 1994:15) The museum is an integral part of the site. Whether it provides an orientation or interpretive interface for Napier's art deco architectual heritage or for the Waitomo Caves, the museum does for the site what it cannot do for itself. It is not a substitute for the site but an integral part of it, for the interpretive interface shows what cannot otherwise be seen. It offers virtualities in the absence of actualities. It produces hallucinatory effects. On the basis of excavation and historical reconstruction and in collaboration with visitors, the museum openly imagines the site into being-in the very spot where it should be still standing but is no more. Like museums, tourism is predicated on dislocation: on moving people and, for that matter, sites from one place to another. Take Luxor-Luxor Las Vegas, that is: Luxor Las Vegas, which opened on October 15, is a 30-story pyramid encased in 11 acres of glass. The hotel's Egyptian theme is reflected in the decor of its 2,526 rooms and 100,000 square foot casino. Guests travel by boat along the River Nile from the registration desk to the elevators, which climb the pyramid at a 39-degree angle. Other features include an obelisk that projects a laser light show in the pyramid's central atrium; seven themed restaurants, and an entertainment complex offering high tech interactive "adventures" into the past, present, and future. Double rooms at the Luxor, 3900 Las Vegas Boulevard South, are $59 to $99. (New York Times, 7 November 1993, Travel Section) Is getting to and from the registration desk to the elevators by boat along the River Nile any stranger than squeezing the Temple of Dendur into the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Any stranger than travelling to Luxor, Egypt, itself? Travel Plans International (1988) promises a cruise up "the legendary Nile in a craft that surpasses even Cleopatra's barge of burnished gold. ... It is a yacht-like 44-passenger vessel carefully chosen for its luxuriously intimate appointments. Each cabin provides panoramic views through picture windows as well as the convenience and comforts of private showers, individual climate control, and television." Several years later, "tourism in Luxor has all but ended because of violence" (Hedges 1993). Islamic militants have been planting bombs in Pharonic monuments, both to drive out tourists and to wipe out traces of idolatry. Increasingly, we travel to actual destinations to experience virtual places. This is one of several principles that free tourism to invent an infinitude of new products. The Business of Tourism, a recent textbook, states that "the beauty of tourism is that the number of products that can be devised to interest the tourist is virtually unlimited" and, I would add, particularly prone to fashion, though some are astonishingly durable (Holloway 1994:147). This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 378 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1995 In New Zealand, you can "spend the night in jail 'for a farm stay with a difference,"' at Old Te Whaiti Jail, as it advertises itself. Refashioned as living accommodation, this historic jail wears the irony of its second life as heritage with pride and humor. You can eat in a cowshed. The Cowshed Cafe markets itself as "New Zealand's only restaurant in a once operating dairy shed (no shit)" (West of theAlps 7 [1994]:2). Tourism boosts a declining rural economy by integrating farm life into its network of accomodations and attractions. As Destination New Zealand: A Growth StrategyforNew Zealand Tourism explains, "while our cultural heritage can be presented as 'entertainment' in the hubs, it can be experienced as 'lifestyle' in the regions," particularly when their economic base is in decline and their lifestyle is in jeopardy (1990:23). Actuality and virtuality are different approaches to the production of realness. Both of them operate in heritage productions, even though those who create them may insist otherwise. Can or should the presentation of heritage aspire to the special effects of Jurassic Park? Spielberg's film imagines the condition of the ultimate museum, for it goes beyond displaying the remains of a bygone age. It brings the dinosaurs back, not from the dead, but from life-from the archive, the museum, of its genetic material. The problem with the lifelike, however, is its lifelessness. What is this passion for aliveness within the historic village? To quote Raymond Williams, "a culture can never be reduced to its artifacts while it is being lived" (1960:343). This, however, is what museums have tended to attempt. The issue in this case is not lifelike, the work of the undertaker, but life force, the work of survival. The lifelike is not to be confused with the truly alive. For taonga Maori the issue is not a second life as an exhibit. What is at stake is the restoration of living links to taonga that never died. They were removed from circulation. They were withheld. Some of these objects will forever remain orphans, their provenance unknown, which is a point brought home by the permanent installation of taonga at the Manawatu Museum in Palmerston North. The vibrant relationship of particular objects in the collection to actual people and communities is dramatically displayed in the opening gallery. Nearby, artifacts about which little is known are exhibited separately. Severed links, these isolated objects are a poignant reminder of the circumstances of their acquisition. The life force of taonga depends not on techniques of animation, but on the living transmission of cultural knowledge and values. What is at stake is not the vividness of a museum experience, but the vitality, the survival, of those for whom these objects are taonga. And that depends on intangible cultural property, which lives in performance. It must be performed to be transmitted; this is the source of its life. This is also the source of its vividness, This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1Theorizing Heritage 379 for nothing is more multi-sensory than the lifeworld itself, particularly in its most intense, which is to say its most performative modes. As academics and public folklorists and ethnomusicologists, we are actively "producing" heritage, in the sense argued here. Whereas we have tended to focus on that which counts as heritage, much remains to be done on the instruments for producing heritage. In attending to these issues, we are forced to rethink our disciplinary subjects and practices. Theorizing heritage is a place to start. Note 1. This article is a revised version of the Charles Seeger Lecture presented at the annu meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the American Folklore Society, Milwaukee, W 21 October 1994. It is drawn from an ongoing project, various parts of which have be presented at the Chicago Art Institute, the Sixth National Folklife Conference (Melbour Australia), the Museum Directors Federation symposium (Wellington, New Zealand), and th joint conference of the Museums Association of Aotearoa New Zealand Te Rotu Hanga Kaup Taonga and Museum Education Association of New Zealand (Palmerston North). References Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitc New York: Semiotext(e). Bausinger, Hermann. 1990 [1961]. Folk Culture in a World of Technology, translated by Elke Dettmer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clifford, James. 1981. "On Ethnographic Surrealism." Comparative Studies in Society and History 23:539-64. Diesenhouse, Susan. 1993. "$200 Million in Projects to Build Tourism." New York Times, 1 August (Real Estate):5. Dorson, Richard M. 1972. "Introduction: Concepts of Folklore and Folklife Studies." In Folklore andFolklife: An Introduction, edited by Richard M. Dorson, 1-50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1990. Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1968. "On National Culture." In The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farigan, 2068. New York: Grove. Gray, Judith, and David Taylor. 1992. "Cite Unseen." American Folklore Newsletter 21(4):2. Hartley, L. P. 1953. The Go-Between. London: H. Hamilton. Hedges, Chris. 1993. "The Muslim's Wrath Doesn't Spare the Mummies." New York Times (International), 23 July (A):4. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, editors. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holden, Deborah. 1994. "When All the Fun Is Getting There." New Zealand Herald, 30 August (3):6. Holloway, J. Christopher. 1994. The Business of Tourism, 4th edition. London: Pitman Publishing. Kani, Wynn Te. 1994. "Letter." Kia Hiwa Ra National Maori Newspaper (New Zealand), August:4. This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 380 Etbnomusicology, Fall 1995 Kinzer, Stephen. 1993a. "Luther and Goethe Breathe Life into a Dead Land." New York Times (International), 20 May (A):4. . 1993b. "For East German Theme Park, the Bad Old Days." New York Times (International) 9 November, (A):4. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1988. "Mistaken Dichotomies." Journal ofAmerican Folklore 101:140-55. . 1990a. "Problems in the Early History of Jewish Folkloristics." In Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of ewish Studies, Division D, Volume II, Art, Folklore and Music. Jerusalem, 1989, August 16, 21-31. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies. . 1990b. "Producing Ellis Island." Artforum 9 (December):17-19. Myers, Fred. 1991. "Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings." Cultural Anthropology 6:26-62. . 1994. "Beyond the Intentional Fallacy: Art Criticism and the Ethnography of Aboriginal Acrylic Painting." Visual Anthropology Review 10:10-43. Nora, Pierre. 1989. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire." Representations 26:7-25. Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling. 1991. Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America. London: Verso. South, Bob. 1994. "Water Low, Trout High." Southern Skies (Ansett New Zealand) August:4244. Stewart, Susan. 1991. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment ofRepresentation. New York: Oxford University Press. Walsh, Robb. 1994. "Phantom Church of Cluny." American Way(American Airlines) 27(19): 1516. Williams, Raymond. 1960. Culture and Society, 1790-1950. New York: Anchor Books. Wilson, John, comp. 1984. AA Book of New Zealand Historic Places. Auckland: Landsdowne Press, for New Zealand Historic Places Trust. This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 05:31:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Worlds of Music AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MUSIC OF THE WORLD’S PEOPLES FIFTH EDITION Jeff Todd Titon GENERAL EDITOR WITH Timothy J. Cooley David Locke David P. McAllester Anne K. Rasmussen David B. Reck John M. Schechter Jonathan P. J. Stock R. Anderson Sutton Australia • Brazil • Japan • Korea • Mexico • Singapore • Spain • United Kingdom • United States Worlds of Music An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples Fifth Edition Jeff Todd Titon, General Editor, with Timothy J. Cooley, David Locke, David P. McAllester, Anne K. Rasmussen, David B. Reck, John M. Schechter, Jonathan P. J. Stock, and R. Anderson Sutton Publisher: Clark Baxter Senior Development Editor: Sue Gleason Senior Assistant Editor: Emily A. Ryan Editorial Assistant: Nell Pepper # 2009, 2002 Schirmer Cengage Learning ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 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Art Director: Maria Epes Manufacturing Buyer: Rebecca Cross Text and Cover Designer: Marsha Cohen, Parallelogram Graphics Photo Researcher: Bryan Rinnert Copy Editor: Molly Roth Cover Image: R. Anderson Sutton Compositor: Macmillan Publishing Solutions Printed in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 12 11 10 09 For your course and learning solutions, visit academic.cengage.com. Purchase any of our products at your local college store or at our preferred online store www.ichapters.com. The Music-Culture as a World of Music JEFF TODD TITON The Soundscape The world around us is full of sounds. All of them are meaningful in some way. Some are sounds you make. You might sing in the shower, talk to yourself, shout to a friend, whistle a tune, sing along with a song on your mp3 player, practice a piece on your instrument, play in a band or orchestra, or sing in a chorus or an informal group on a street corner. Some are sounds from sources outside yourself. If you live in the city, you hear a lot of sounds made by people. You might be startled by the sound of a truck beeping as it backs up, or by a car alarm. The noise of the garbage and recycling trucks on an early morning pickup or the drone of a diesel engine in a parked truck nearby might irritate you. In the country you can more easily hear the sounds of nature. In the spring and summer you might hear birds singing and calling to each other, the snorting of deer in the woods, or the excited barks of a distant dog. By a river or the ocean you might hear the sounds of surf or boats loading and unloading or the deep bass of foghorns. Stop for a moment and listen to the sounds around you. What do you hear? A computer hard drive? A refrigerator motor? Wind outside? Footsteps in the hallway? A car going by? Why didn’t you hear those sounds a moment ago? We usually filter out “background noise” for good reason, but in doing so we deaden our sense of hearing. For a moment, stop reading and become alive to the soundscape. What do you hear? Try doing that at different times of the day, in various places: Listen to the soundscape and pick out all the different sounds you may have taken for granted until now. Just as landscape refers to land, soundscape refers to sound: the characteristic sounds of a particular place, both human and nonhuman. (The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer developed this term; see Schafer 1980.) The examples so far offer present-day soundscapes, but what were they like in the past? What kinds of sounds might dinosaurs have made? With our wristwatches we can always find out what time it is, but in medieval Europe people told time by listening to the bells of the local clock tower. Today we take the sounds of a passing railroad train for granted, but people found its sounds arresting when first heard. The American naturalist Henry David Thoreau was alive to the soundscape when he lived by himself in a cabin in the woods at Walden Pond 160 years ago. As 1 CHAPTER 1 2 CHAPTER 1 CD 1:1 Postal workers canceling stamps at the University of Ghana post office (2:59). The whistled tune is the hymn “Bompata,” by the Ghanaian composer W. J. Akyeampong (b. 1900). Field recording by James Koetting. Legon, Ghana, 1975. he wrote in Walden, “The whistle of the steam engine penetrated my woods summer and winter—sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard.” After this ominous comparison—the hawk is a bird of prey—Thoreau describes the train as an iron horse (a common comparison at the time) and then a dragon, a threatening symbol of chaos rather than industrial progress: “When I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder—shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new mythology I don’t know.” Writing about his wilderness soundscape, Thoreau first made sure his readers knew what he did not hear: the crowing of the rooster, the sounds of animals—dogs, cats, cows, pigs—the butter churn, the spinning wheel, children crying, the “singing of the kettle, the hissing of the urn”: This was the soundscape of a farm in 1850, quite familiar to Thoreau’s readers. (We might stop to notice which of these sounds have disappeared from the soundscape altogether, for who today hears a butter churn or spinning wheel?) What Thoreau heard instead in his wilderness soundscape were “squirrels on the roof and under the floor; a whippoorwill on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming in the yard, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a catowl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon in the pond, a fox to bark in the night”; but no rooster “to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard—no yard!” In Thoreau’s America you could tell, blindfolded, just by hearing, whether you were in the wilderness, on a farm, or in a town or city. How have those soundscapes changed since 1850? What might Thoreau have written about automobiles in the countryside, tractors on the farms, trucks on the interstate highways, and jet planes everywhere? In Thoreau’s “wild soundscape” at Walden in 1850 each living thing that made a sound had its own niche in what we might think of as an acoustic ecology or what the aural environmentalist Bernie Krause calls a biophony, the combined voices of living things. Krause points out that “non-industrial cultures,” particularly those that live in the more-remote regions of the planet, like the BaAka of central Africa we will learn about in Chapter 3, “depend on the integrity of undisturbed natural sound for a sense of place,” of where they are as well as who they are (Krause 2002:25). Every nonhuman species has its own acoustic niche in the soundscape, whether it is a bird singing or an insect making noise by rubbing its legs together. Dolphins, whales, and bats navigate largely by means of sound. But as we have learned, humans make their own acoustic niches and interact sonically with nonhuman sounds in whatever soundscape they encounter, whatever place they happen to be. Listen now to CD 1, Track 1. The soundscape is a post office, but it is unlike any post office you will likely encounter in North America. You are hearing men canceling stamps at the University of Accra, in Ghana, Africa. Two of the men whistle a tune while three make percussive sounds. A stamp gets canceled several times for the sake of the rhythm. You will learn more about this example shortly. For now, think of it as yet another example of a soundscape: the acoustic environment where sounds, including music, occur. The Music-Culture Every human society has music. Although music is universal, its meaning is not. For example, a famous musician from Asia attended a European symphony concert approximately 150 years ago. He had never heard Western music THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC before. The story goes that after the concert, his hosts asked him how he had liked it. “Very well,” he replied. Not satisfied with this answer, his hosts asked (through an interpreter) what part he liked best. “The first part,” he said. “Oh, you enjoyed the first movement?” “No, before that.” To the stranger, the best part of the performance was the tuning-up period. His hosts had a different opinion. Who was right? They both were. Music is not a universal language in the sense that everyone understands what music means. People in different cultures give music different meanings. Recall from the Preface that culture means the way of life of a people, learned and transmitted from one generation to the next. The word learned is stressed to differentiate a people’s cultural inheritance from what is passed along biologically in their genes: nurture, rather than nature. From birth, people all over the world absorb the cultural inheritance of family, community, schoolmates, and other larger social institutions such as the mass media—books, newspapers, video games, movies, television, and computers. This cultural inheritance tells people how to understand the situations they are in (what the situations mean) and how they might behave in those situations. It works so automatically that they are aware of it only when it breaks down, as it does on occasion when people misunderstand a particular situation. Like the people who carry them, cultures do not function perfectly all the time. Musical situations and the very concept of music mean different things and involve different activities around the globe. Because music and all the beliefs and activities associated with it are a part of culture, we use the term music-culture to mean a group’s total involvement with music: ideas, actions, institutions, material objects—everything that has to do with music. A music-culture can be as small as a single human’s personal music-culture, or as large as one carried by a transnational group. We can speak of the music-culture of a family, a community, a region, a nation. We can identify music-cultures with musical genres: there is a hip-hop music-culture, a classical music-culture, a jazz music-culture. We can identify subcultures within music-cultures: Atlanta hip-hop, for example, within the hip-hop music culture, or early music within classical music, or progressive bluegrass within bluegrass. In our example of concert music, the European American music-culture dictates that the sound made by symphony musicians tuning up is not music. But to the listener from Asia, it was music. That we can say so shows our ability to understand (and empathize with) each music-culture context from the inside, and then to move to an intellectual position outside of them. We can then compare them and arrive at the conclusion that, considered from their points of view, both the stranger and his hosts were correct. Contrasting the music of one culture with the music of another after stepping outside of both is a good way to learn about how music is made and what music is thought to be and do. People may be perplexed by music outside their own music-culture. They may grant that it is music but find it difficult to hear and enjoy. In Victorian England, for example, people said they had a hard time listening to the strange music of the native peoples within the British Colonial Empire. The expansive and exciting improvisations of India’s classical music were ridiculed because the music was not written down “as proper music should be.” The subtle tuning of Indian raga scales was considered “indicative of a bad ear” because it did not match the tuning of a piano (see Chapter 6). What the British were really saying was that they did not know how to understand Indian music on its own cultural terms. Any 3 4 CHAPTER 1 music sounds “out of tune” when its tuning system is judged by the standards of another. A person who had grown up listening only to Armenian music in his family and community wrote about hearing European classical music for the first time: I found that most European music sounds either like “mush” or “foamy,” without a solid base. The classical music seemed to make the least sense, with a kind of schizophrenic melody—one moment it’s calm, then the next moment it’s crazy. Of course there always seemed to be “mush” (harmony) which made all the songs seem kind of similar. (posted to SEM-L public listserver July 9, 1998) Because this listener had learned what makes a good melody in the Armenian music-culture, he found European classical melodies lacking because they changed mood too quickly. Unused to harmony in his own music, the listener responded negatively to it in Western classical music. Further, popular music in the United States lacked interesting rhythms and melodies: The rock and other pop styles then and now sound like music produced by machinery, and rarely have I heard a melody worth repeating. The same with “country” and “folk” and other more traditional styles. These musics, while making more sense with their melody (of the most undeveloped type), have killed off any sense of gracefulness with their monotonous droning and machine-like sense of rhythm. (Ibid.) You might find these remarks offensive or amusing—or you might agree with them. Like the other examples, they illustrate that listeners throughout the world have prejudices based on the music they know and like. Listening to music all over the planet, though, fosters an open ear and an open mind. Learning to hear a strange music from the viewpoint of the people who make that music enlarges our understanding and increases our pleasure. What Is Music? Sound is anything that can be heard, but what is music? In the Preface I emphasized that music isn’t something found in the natural world, like air or sand; rather, music is something that people make. And they make it in two ways: They make or produce the sounds they call music, and they also make music into a cultural domain, forming the ideas and activities they consider music. As we have seen, not all music-cultures have the same idea of music; some music-cultures have no word for it, while others have a word that roughly translates into English as “music-dance” because to them music is inconceivable without movement. Writing about Rosa, the Macedonian village she lived in, Nahoma Sachs points out that “traditional Rosans have no general equivalent to the English ‘music.’ They divide the range of sound which might be termed music into two categories: pesni, songs, and muzika, instrumental music” (Sachs 1975:27). Of course, this distinction between songs and music is found in many parts of the world. Anne Rasmussen, when chatting with her taxi driver on the way to a conference at the Opera House in Cairo, Egypt, was told by her taxi driver that he liked “both kinds of music: 5 THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC Jeff Todd Titon singing ( ghina) and music with instruments (musiqa).” We also find it in North America. Old-time Baptists in the southern Appalachian Mountains (see Figure 1.1) sometimes say, “We don’t have music in our service,” meaning they do not have instrumental music accompanying their singing. Nor do they want it. Some music-cultures have words for song types (lullaby, epic, historical song, and so on) but no overall word for music. Nor do they have words or concepts that directly correspond to what Euro-Americans consider the elements of musical structure: melody, rhythm, harmony, and so forth. Many of the readers of this book (and all of its authors) have grown up within the cultures of Europe and North America. In Chapter 5, the sections “Europe: An Overview” and “The Sounds of European Music” consider specific qualities of European and, by association, North American musical practices that Euro-Americans consider “normal.” Consciously and unconsciously, our approaches and viewpoints reflect this background. But no matter what our musical backgrounds are, we must try to “get out of our cultural skins” as much as possible in order to view music through cultural windows other than our own. We may even learn to view our own music-culture from a new perspective. Today, because of the global distribution of music on radio, television, film, digital video, sound recordings, and the Internet, people in just about every music-culture are likely to have heard some of the same music. Although the local is emphasized throughout this book, music-cultures should not be understood as isolated, now or even in the past. In particular, thinking about the interaction between the local and the global can help us appreciate musiccultures, including our own. If we want to understand the different musics of the world, then, we need first to understand them on their own terms—that is, as the various music-cultures themselves do. But beyond understanding each on its own terms, we want to be able to compare and contrast the various musics of the world. To do that we need a way to think about music as a whole. To begin to discover what all musics might have in common, so that we may think about music as a general human phenomenon, we ask about how people perceive differences between music and nonmusic. The answer does not involve simple disagreements over whether something people call “music” is truly music. For example, some people say that rap is not music, but what they mean is that they think rap is not good or meaningful music. Rather, there are difficult cases FIGURE 1.1 Russell Jacobs leading the singing at the Left Beaver Old Regular Baptist Church in eastern Kentucky, 1979. 6 CHAPTER 1 CD 1:2 Songs of hermit thrushes (0:44). Field recording by Jeff Todd Titon. Little Deer Isle, Maine, 1999. that test the boundaries of what differentiates sound from music, such as the songs of birds or dolphins or whales—are these music? Consider bird songs. Everyone has heard birds sing, but not everyone has paid attention to them. Try it for a moment: Listen to the songs of a hermit thrush at dusk in a spruce forest (CD 1, Track 2). At Walden Pond, Thoreau heard hermit thrushes that sounded like these. Many think that the hermit thrush has the most beautiful song of all the birds native to North America. Most bird songs consist of a single phrase, repeated, but the hermit thrush’s melody is more complicated. You hear a vocalization (phrase) and then a pause, then another vocalization and pause, and so on. Some people hear them in pairs, the second a response to the first. Do you hear them that way, or as separate vocalizations? Each vocalization has a similar rhythm and is composed of five to eight tones. The phrase is a little higher or lower each time. If you listen closely, you also hear that the thrush can produce more than one tone at once, a kind of two-tone harmony. This is the result of the way his syrinx (voice box) is constructed. Is bird song music? The thrush’s song has some of the characteristics of music. It has rhythm, melody, repetition, and variation. It also has a function: Scientists believe that birds sing to announce their presence in a particular territory to other birds of the same kind, and that they sing to attract a mate. In some species one bird’s song can tell another bird which bird is singing and how that bird is feeling. Bird song has inspired Western classical music composers. Some composers have taken down bird songs in musical notation, and some have incorporated, imitated, or transformed bird song phrases in their compositions. Bird song is also found in Chinese classical music. In Chinese compositions such as “The Court of the Phoenix,” for suona (oboe) and ensemble, extended passages are a virtual catalog of bird calls and songs imitated by instruments. Yet people in the Euro-American music-culture hesitate to call bird songs music. Because each bird in a species sings the same song over and over, bird songs appear to lack the creativity of human expression. Euro-American culture regards music as a human expression, and bird songs do not seem to belong to the human world. By contrast, people in some other music-cultures think bird songs do have human meaning. For the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, bird songs are the voices of their human ancestors who have died and changed into birds. These songs cause humans grief, which expresses itself in weeping (Feld 1990). The Kaluli give a different meaning to bird songs than Euro-Americans do. Does this mean it is impossible to find a single idea of what music is? Not really. Euro-Americans may disagree with the Kaluli over whether bird songs have human meaning, but they both agree that music has human meaning. Our thought experiment with bird song and its meanings in different music-cultures suggests that music has something to do with the human world. We can go further and say that music is sound that is humanly patterned or organized (Blacking 1973). For another example of a sound that tests the boundary between music and nonmusic, listen again to CD 1, Track 1. Throughout the life of Worlds of Music, listeners have found the Ghanaian postal workers’ sounds especially intriguing. Not long ago we learned a little more about the circumstances of the recording. THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC Henrietta Mckee Carter (personal communication to Jeff Todd Titon, July 2000) wrote as follows: Sometime in 1975, Bill Carter and I were sitting in Jim and Ernestina Koetting’s quarters at the University of Ghana chatting with Ernestina, while awaiting dinner. Jim came in excitedly, picked up his recording equipment and disappeared, saying on his way out that he had just heard something he wanted to record. He came back a while later and described the scene. These postal workers hand-canceling stamps at the post office of the University of Ghana are making drumming sounds, and two are whistling; but there are no drums, and the workers are just passing the time. How, exactly? Koetting (Titon 1992:98–99) wrote as follows: Twice a day the letters that must be canceled are laid out in two files, one on either side of a divided table. Two men sit across from one another at the table, and each has a hand-canceling machine (like the price markers you may have seen in supermarkets), an ink pad, and a stack of letters. The work part of the process is simple: a letter is slipped from the stack with the left hand, and the right hand inks the marker and stamps the letter: : : . This is what you are hearing: the two men seated at the table slap a letter rhythmically several times to bring it from the file to the position on the table where it is to be canceled. (This act makes a light-sounding thud.) The marker is inked one or more times (the lowest, most resonant sound you hear) and then stamped on the letter (the high-pitched mechanized sound you hear): : : . The rhythm produced is not a simple one-two-three (bring forward the letter—ink the marker—stamp the letter). Rather, musical sensitivities take over. Several slaps on the letter to bring it down, repeated thuds of the marker in the ink pad and multiple cancellations of single letters are done for rhythmic interest. Such repetition slows down the work, but also makes it much more interesting. The other sounds you hear have nothing to do with the work itself. A third man has a pair of scissors that he clicks—not cutting anything, but adding to the rhythm. The scissors go “click, click, click, rest,” a basic rhythm used in [Ghanaian] popular dance music. The fourth worker simply whistles along. He and any of the other three workers who care to join him whistle popular tunes or church music that fits the rhythm. Work song, found in music-cultures all over the world, is a kind of music whose function ranges from coordinating complex tasks to making boring and repetitive work more interesting. In this instance the workers have turned life into art. Writing further about the postal workers’ recording, Koetting says, It sounds like music and, of course it is; but the men performing it do not quite think of it that way. These men are working, not putting on a musical show; people pass by the workplace paying little attention to the “music.” (Titon 1992:98) Even though the postal workers do not think of this activity as a musical performance, Koetting is willing to say, “It sounds like music and, of course it is.” He can say so because he connects it with other music-cultures’ work-song activities (see for example, the work songs in Chapter 4). He has found a common pattern in their musical performance that transcends the specificity of any single music-culture, in the sense that he hears people whistling a melody and accompanying it with interesting percussive rhythms: The music affected him, and not only did he feel himself moved, he was moved to record it. At the same time he respects the postal workers’ idea that, in their way of thinking, it is “not quite” 7 8 CHAPTER 1 music. In other words, the workers are doing this as a part of their work, to pass the time; it is their way of being in the world as workers canceling stamps, not as singers and musicians intent on a musical performance. People in music-cultures organize sounds into musical patterns. Although the patterns vary across cultures, all music-cultures pattern sounds into something we call music. How can we think comparatively about the kinds of musical organization that we find throughout the world? Koetting understood the postal workers’ activities as music in comparison with other musics he knew. He recognized a familiar pattern of melody and harmony that he heard, as you probably did too. Although this hymntune was composed by a Ghanaian, the melody is European, a legacy of Christian missionary music in Ghana. As a student of Ghanaian drumming, he recognized the cross-rhythms of the percussion as native Ghanaian. He thought in terms of melody, harmony, meter, and rhythm. Indeed, the European American music-culture recognizes these four characteristics and talks about them in ordinary language. The ideas themselves are already familiar to many readers of this book. These terms describe patterns or structure (form) in sound. It will be interesting to see what happens to these Western (but not exclusively Western) ideas when, for better or worse, they are applied to every music-culture throughout this book. In the next section, on musical structure, we briefly review these ideas. Then in the following section we turn our attention to a music-culture model and show how music becomes meaningful in performance. In the next section we consider the four components of a music culture, which in music textbooks are not usually considered rudiments but are no less a part of humanly organized sound: ideas, activities, repertories, and the material culture of music. In the last section of this chapter, we return to the idea of acoustic ecology with which we began. We do this not only in terms of the interactions of sounds in a soundscape but also in terms of the interconnections of music cultures throughout human history on planet Earth, as well as the sustainability of music in the future. Structure in Music RHYTHM AND METER In ordinary language we say rhythm when we refer to the patterned recurrence of events, as in “the rhythm of the seasons,” or “the rhythm of the raindrops.” As Hewitt Pantaleoni writes, “Rhythm concerns time felt as a succession of events rather than as a single span” (1985:211). In music, we hear rhythm when we hear a time-relation between sounds. In a classroom you might hear a pen drop from a desk and a little later a student coughing. You do not hear any rhythm, because you hear no relation between the sounds. But when you hear a person walking in the hall outside, or when you hear a heartbeat, you hear rhythm. If we measure the time-relations between the sounds and find a pattern of regular recurrence, we have metrical rhythm. Think of the soldiers’ marching rhythm: HUP-two-three-four, HUP-two-three-four. This is a metered, regularly recurring sound pattern. The recurring accents fall on HUP. Most popular, classical, and folk music heard in North America today has metered rhythm. Of course, most of those rhythms are more complex than the march rhythm. If you are familiar with Gregorian chant, of the Roman Catholic Church, you know 9 THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC Courtesy T. Viswanathan. musical rhythm without meter. Although not music, ordinary speech provides an example of nonmetrical rhythm, whereas poetic verse is metrical (unless it is free verse). Think of the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare’s plays, for example. Most of the musical examples in this book, including the postal workers’ canceling stamps (CD 1, Track 1), are examples of metrical rhythm. In a metrical rhythm you feel the beat and move to it. The song of the hermit thrush is both metrically rhythmic and not (CD 1, Track 2). You can find a beat while the thrush sings a phrase, but after he stops you cannot predict exactly when the bird will start again. “Sister, Hold Your Chastity,” the Bosnian ganga song (CD 2, Track 9), lacks any sense of a beat. You can’t tap your foot to it. Although we hear rhythm in the relationship between successive sounds, this rhythm is highly flexible. Yet it is not arbitrary. The singers, who have spent years performing this music together, know how to coordinate the melody and harmony by signals other than a pulse. But the lack of a beat makes it difficult for someone to learn ganga (see Chapter 5). Try singing along with the recording and see for yourself. Similarly, the rhythm in the Chinese weeding song (CD 3, Track 12) flows in a flexible way as the singer aims to produce a musical effect by lengthening the duration of certain syllables. On the other hand, the rhythm of karnataka sangeeta (CD 3, Track 10) is intricate in another way. The opening alapana section has a flexible, nonmetered rhythm, but the following sections are metrically organized. This classical music of South India divides a metrical rhythm into long, complex, improvised accent patterns based on various combinations of rhythmic figures. The mridangam drummer’s art (see Figure 1.2) is based on fifteen or more distinct types of finger and hand strokes on different parts of the drumheads. Each stroke has its own sollukattu, or spoken syllable that imitates the sound of the drum stroke. Spoken one after another, they duplicate the rhythmic patterns and are used in learning and practice. Although most North Americans and Europeans may not be aware of it, the popular music they listen to usually has more than one rhythm. The singer’s melody falls into one pattern, the guitarist’s into another; the drummer usually plays more than one pattern at once. Even though these rhythms usually relate to the same overall accent pattern, the way they interact with each other sets our bodies in motion as we move to the beat. Still, to the native Armenian who grew up on a diet of more-intricate rhythms, this monometer is dull. Rhythm in the postal workers’ canceling stamps (CD 1, Track 1) emphasizes the tugs of different rhythmic patterns. (For a detailed analysis, see Chapter 3.) This simultaneous occurrence of several rhythms with what we can perceive as a shifting downbeat is called polyrhythm. Polyrhythm is characteristic of the music of Africa and wherever Africans have carried their music. In Arab music, nonmetrical music—that is, singing and instrumental improvisation in free rhythm—is juxtaposed with metered music and sometimes, as we will hear in Chapter 10, metrical and nonmetrical FIGURE 1.2 T. Viswanathan, flute, Ramnad V. Raghavan, mridangam. 10 CHAPTER 1 playing are combined in the same moment. In Chapter 3 you will learn to feel yet a further layer of complexity—polymeter, or the simultaneous presence of two different metrical systems—as you “construct musical reality in two ways at once” while playing an Ewe (pronounced eh-way) bell pattern in Agbekor (see Chapter 3). MELODY In ordinary language we say melody when we want to refer to the tune—the part of a piece of music that goes up and down, the part that most people hear and sing along with. It is hard to argue that melody and rhythm are truly different qualities of music, but it helps our understanding if we consider them separately. When we say that someone has either a shrill or a deep voice, we are calling attention to a musical quality called pitch, which refers to how high or low a sound is. When a sound is made, it sets the air in motion, vibrating at so many cycles per second. This vibrating air strikes the eardrum, and we hear how high or low pitched it is depending on the speed of the vibrations. You can experience this yourself if you sing a tone that is comfortable for your voice and then slide the tone down gradually as low as you can go. As your voice goes down to a growl, you can feel the vibrations slow down in your throat. Pitch, then, depends on the frequency of these sound vibrations. The faster the vibrations, the higher the pitch. Another important aspect of melody is timbre, or tone quality. Timbre is caused by the characteristic ways different voices and musical instruments vibrate. Timbre tells us why a violin sounds different from a trumpet when they are playing a tone of the same pitch. We take the timbre of our musical instrument palette for granted, but when we encounter an instrument with a timbre that we may never have heard before, such as the Australian didgeridoo, we sit up and take notice. Some music-cultures, like the European, favor timbres that we may describe as smooth or liquid; others, like the African, favor timbres that are buzzy; others, like the Asian, favor timbres that we might describe as focused in sound. The construction of instruments in various cultures often reflects the preference for various timbres or a combination of them, as we see with the Moroccan bendir in Chapter 10, an instrument that reflects both Arab and African techniques of construction and aesthetic preferences with regard to timbre. Other important aspects of melody, besides pitch and timbre, include volume—that is, how melodies increase and decrease in loudness. The Navajo Yeibichai song (CD 1, Track 6) begins at the loudest possible volume, while the solo for the Chinese qin (pronounced “chin”) (CD 4, Track 3) is performed softly. Another critical aspect of melody to pay attention to in world music is emphasis: for example, the way the major tones of the melody are approached (by sliding up or down to them in pitch, as some singers do; by playing them dead on, as a piano does; by “bending” the pitch, as a blues guitarist (Figure 1.3) does when pushing the string to the side and back (CD 2, Tracks 4 and 5). Figure 6.7 contrasts notes and melodies on the piano with their counterparts in Indian music. Yet another way to emphasize a point in a melody is to add decorative tones or what in classical music are called ornaments. These, too, occur in many of the musics of the world. See if you can find them as you listen to the CD set. Concentrate on the way the singers and musicians do not simply sing or play tones, but play with tones. 11 THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC Finding how different musiccultures organize sounds into melodies is one of the most fascinating pursuits for the student of music. If we sing the melody of the Christmas carol “Joy to the World,” we hear how Westerners like to organize a melody. Try it: Joy to the world, the Lord has come! (do ti la so, fa mi re do!) Jeff Todd Titon This is the familiar do-re-mi (solfe?ge) scale, in descending order. Try singing “Joy to the World” backwards, going up the do-re-mi scale and using the syllables in this order: “come has Lord the world the to joy.” You might find it difficult! But if you first sing the do-re-mi scale using the solfe?ge syllables, and then replace do-re-me with “come has Lord,” and so forth, you will be able to do it more easily. The white keys of the piano show how most melodies in European and EuroAmerican music have been organized since the eighteenth century. Do-re-mi (and so forth) represent a major scale. Notice that these pitches are not equally spaced. Try singing “Joy to the World” starting on “re” instead of “do.” You will see that it throws off the melody. If you are near a keyboard, try playing it by going down the white keys, one at a time. Only one starting key (C) gives the correct melody. This indicates that the intervals, or distances between pitches, are not the same. The Euro-American culture prefers the major scale. As such, Euro-Americans set up many instruments, such as the piano or the flute, so that they can easily produce the pitch intervals of this scale. Timothy Cooley writes more fully about Euro-American scales and melodic organization in Chapter 5, using the same “Joy to the World” tune. But other music-cultures set up their instruments and their scales differently. For example, Javanese musical gongs organize the octave (the solfe?ge interval between one “do” and another) into five nearly equidistant intervals in their sle?ndro (slayn-dro) scale. The Javanese have a second scale, pe?log (pay-log), which divides the octave into seven tones, but the intervals are not the same as those in any Western scales (see Transcription 7.1). The sounds of their gamelan, or percussion ensemble, reflect these different tunings (for example, CD 2, Track 22, is in the pe?log scale). In the classical music of South India, known as Carnatic music, each melody conforms to a set of organizing principles called a raga. Although each raga has its own scale (based on one of seventy-two basic scale patterns), it also has its own characteristic melodic phrases, intonation patterns, and ornaments as well as a mood or feeling. A raga is an organized melodic matrix inside of which the South Indian singer or musician improvises melodically in performance (see Chapter 6). The modal system of Arab music, maqam, is like the Indian raga, in that characteristic phrases and ornamental patterns are as much a part of the composition of a musical mode as are the notes FIGURE 1.3 Blues guitarists Johnny Winter (left) and Luther Allison, Ann Arbor (Michigan) Blues Festival, August 1970. 12 Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. CHAPTER 1 FIGURE 1.4 Teenagers harmonizing gospel music. Bristow, Oklahoma, 1938. of its scale, which, in Arab music, can incorporate nontempered “quarter tones” (see Chapter 10). HARMONY Most readers of this book use the word harmony to describe something that can happen to a melody: It can be harmonized. You sing a melody and someone else sings a harmony, a part different from the melody, at the same time (see Figure 1.4). You hear the intervals between the tones not only in a sequence, as in a melody, but also simultaneously. These simultaneously sounding tones are called chords. Although Western music theory is not always useful in describing music outside the Euro-American traditions, in this case texture, a word taken by analogy from the world of textiles to describe the interweaving of fibers, helps describe how melody and harmony interact in various musics throughout the world. Just as threads weave together to make cloth, so melodies can intertwine to make a multimelodic musical whole. Texture refers to the nature of these melodic interrelationships. When the musical texture consists of a single melody only—for example, when you sing by yourself, or when several people sing the same melody in unison—we call the texture monophonic (“mono” meaning “single,” “phono” meaning “voice”). If you add one or more voices doing different things, the melodic texture changes, and we describe the way the voices relate. The classical music of India commonly includes a drone, an unchanging tone or group of tones sounding continuously, against which the melody moves (see Chapter 6). European bagpipes also include drones. When two or more voices elaborate the same melody in different ways at roughly the same time, the texture is heterophonic. Heterophony may be heard in the voices of the African American congregation singing lined-out hymnody (CD 1, Track 22) and among the musicians performing “Iluma?n tiyu” (CD 4, Track 11). Heterophony is the desired texture in much ensemble playing in Arab music, in which each musician performs the same melody, but with their own additions and omissions, nuances and ornaments, as we hear in several of the musical examples from Chapter 10. When two or more distinct melodies are combined, the texture is polyphonic. Polyphony can also be heard in New Orleans–style jazz from the first few decades of the twentieth century: Louis Armstrong’s earliest recordings offer good examples in which several melodic lines interweave. Javanese gamelan and other ensemble music of Southeast Asia (Chapter 7) consist of many layers of melodic activity that some scholars have described as polyphony. Polyphony is characteristic of European classical music in the Renaissance period (roughly 1450 to 1600) and the late Baroque (Bach was a master of polyphony). When two or more voices are combined in a such way that one dominates and any others seem to be accompanying the dominant voice—or what most 13 THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC people mean when they say they hear a harmony (accompaniment)—the texture is homophonic. Homophony is typical of folk and popular music throughout the world (Figure 1.5). A homophonic texture characterizes country music in the United States, such as the Fenders’ Navajo rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues” (CD 1, Track 7) and Efra??n’s performance of the Quichua sanjua?n “Muyu muyari warmigu” on the harp, which is an example of an instrument that can play a melody and an accompaniment simultaneously (CD 4, Track 10). Piano playing in jazz, rock, and other popular music is homophonic. The pianist usually gives the melody to the right hand and an accompaniment to the left. Sometimes the pianist plays only accompaniment, as when “comping” behind a jazz soloist. Blues guitarists such as Blind Blake and Mississippi John Hurt developed a homophonic style in the 1920s in which the fingers of the right hand played melody on the treble strings while the right-hand thumb simultaneously played an accompaniment on the bass strings. FORM The word form has many meanings. From your writing assignments you know what an outline is. You might say that you are putting your ideas in “outline form.” By using the word form here, you call attention to the way the structure of your thoughts is arranged. Similarly, in music, painting, architecture, and the other arts, form means structural arrangement. To understand form in music, we look for patterns of organization in rhythm, melody, and harmony. Patterns of musical organization involve, among other things, the arrangement of small- to medium-sized musical units of rhythm, melody, and/or harmony that show repetition or variation. Just as a sentence (a complete thought) is made up of smaller units such as phrases, which in turn are made up of individual words, so a musical thought is made up of phrases that result from combinations of sounds. Form can also refer to the arrangement of the instruments, as in the order of solos in a jazz or bluegrass performance, or the way a symphonic piece is orchestrated. Form refers to the structure of a musical performance: the principles by which it is put together and how it works. Consider the pattern of blues texts (lyrics). The form often consists of threeline stanzas: A line is sung (“Woke up this morning, blues all around my bed”), the line is repeated, and then the stanza closes with a different line (“Went to eat my breakfast and the blues were in my bread”). Blues melodies also have a particular form, as do the chord changes (harmony) in blues (see Chapter 4). In the Jiangnan sizhu music of China (Chapter 8), the same music may be played twice as fast in a second section. The form of traditional Native American melodies (Chapter 2) involves the creative use of small units and variation. This FIGURE 1.5 Ladies’ String Band, c. 1910. Family photos can be a useful source of musical history, even when identifying information is unknown. Photographer unknown. 14 CHAPTER 1 form is not apparent to someone listening to the music for the first time or even the second, which is one of the reasons we pay careful attention to it. Structural arrangement is an important aspect of the way music is organized. It operates on many levels, and it is key to understanding not only how musiccultures organize music but also how various cultures and subcultures think about time and space in general. For these reasons musical form is an important consideration in all the chapters that follow. Our understanding of rhythm, meter, melody, and harmony is greatly enriched when we consider how music-cultures throughout the world practice these organizing principles of human sound. But there is more to music than the structure of sounds. When people make music, they do not merely produce sounds—they also involve themselves in various social activities and express their ideas about music. To ethnomusicologists considering music as a human phenomenon, these activities and ideas are just as important as the music’s structure. In fact, the activities and ideas are also part of the human organization of the sound. In other words, ethnomusicologists strive for a way to talk about all the aspects of music, not just its sound. Where, for example, is there room to talk about whether musicians are true to an ideal or whether they have “sold out” to commercial opportunity? This book presents music in relation to individual experience, to history, to the economy and the music industry, and to each musicculture’s view of the world, which includes ideas about how human beings ought to behave. To help think about music in those ways, we next consider music as it exists in performance. A Music-Culture Performance Model Even when we are curious about the music of the world’s peoples and want to understand more about it, confronting a new music can be daunting. When watching a live performance, for example, our first impulse might be simply to listen to it, to absorb it, to see whether we like it or whether it moves us. Our next impulse may be to let our bodies respond by moving to the music. But soon we will ask questions about it: What is that instrument that sounds so lovely? How does one play it? Why are the people dancing? (Or are they dancing?) Why is someone crying? Why are the musicians in costume? What do the words mean? What kind of a life does the head musician lead? To formulate and begin to answer these questions in a comprehensive way, we need some kind of systematic outline, or model, of any music-culture or subculture that tells us how it might work and what its components might be. In this book we propose a music-culture model that is grounded in music as it is performed (Titon 1988:7–10). To see how this model works, think back to a musical event that has moved you. At the center of the event is your experience of the music, sung and played by performers (perhaps you are one of them). The performers are surrounded by their audience (in some instances, performers and audience are one and the same), and the whole event takes place in its setting in time and space. We can represent this by a diagram of concentric circles (Figure 1.6). 15 THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC FIGURE 1.6 Elements of a musical performance. Music Performers Audience Time and Space Now we transpose this diagram into four circles representing a music-culture model (Figure 1.7). FIGURE 1.7 A music-culture model (after Titon 1988:11). Affective Experience Performance Community Memory/History At the center of the music (as you experience it) is its radiating power, its emotional impact—whatever makes you give assent, smile, nod your head, sway your shoulders, dance. We call that music’s affect, its power to move, and place affective experience at the center of the model. Performance brings music’s power to move into being, and so we move from performers in Figure 1.6 to performance in Figure 1.7. Performance involves many things. First, people mark performances, musical or otherwise, as separate from the flow of ordinary life: “Have you heard the story about: : :” or “Now we’re going to do a new song that one of the members of the band wrote while thinking about: : : .” When performance takes place, people recognize it as performance. Sammy Davis, Jr., told an interviewer, “Once I get outside my house in the morning, I’m on.” We often mark endings of performances with applause. Second, performance has purpose. The performers intend to move (or not move) the audience, to sing and play well (or not well), to make money, to have fun, to learn, to advance a certain rite or ceremony. The performance is evaluated partly on how well those intentions have been fulfilled. Third, a performance is interpreted, as it goes along, by the audience, who may cry out, applaud, or hiss, and by the performers, who may smile when things are going well or wince when they make a mistake. 16 CHAPTER 1 The most important thing to understand about performance is that it moves along on the basis of agreed-on rules and procedures. These rules enable the musicians to play together and make sense to each other and to the audience. The performers usually do not discuss most of the rules; they have absorbed them and agreed to them. Starting at the same time, playing in the same key, playing in the same rhythmic framework, repeating the melody at the proper point—these are a few of the many rules that govern most of the musical performances that Westerners experience. Even improvisation is governed by rules. In a rock concert, for example, guitarists improvise melodic “breaks,” but they usually do not use all twelve tones of the chromatic scale; instead they almost always choose from the smaller number of tones represented by the blues scale (see Chapter 4). Instrumental improvisation in Arab music, or taqasim, is also governed by rules, in that a performer is expected to know how to combine the characteristic riffs and phrases of a particular maqam, while at the same time making his of her improvisation sound fresh and original. Audiences, too, often respond to improvisations with shouts of approval and encouragement for the musician, during pauses and after closing phrases called qafla (see Chapter 10). In Chapter 5 we will see how rules govern improvisation in music and dance in Poland. Rules or accepted procedures govern the audience, too. In some situations shouting is not only permitted but expected. What to wear, what to say—these, too, are determined by spoken or unspoken rules at any musical performance. Sometimes musicians try to break these rules or expectations, as in a ritual destruction of their instruments at the close of the concert, which in turn can become an expectation. The music-culture model presented here defines music in performance as meaningfully organized sound that proceeds by rules. (Does bird song conform to this model? How and why?) Finding out those rules or principles becomes the task of analysis. These rules include (but are not limited to) what is usually covered under musical analysis: breaking music down into its component parts of mode, motif, melody, rhythm, meter, section, and so forth, and determining how the parts operate together to make the whole. Beyond that, the task in exploring music-cultures is to discover the rules covering ideas about music and behavior in relation to music, as well as the links between these rules or principles and the sound that a group of people calls “music.” You may resist the notion that music, which you think should be free to express emotion, is best thought of as rule-governed behavior. But rules govern all meaningful human cultural behavior in just this way. The point is not that musical performance is predetermined by rules, but that it proceeds according to them. In this view, music is like a game or a conversation: Without rules we could not have a game, and without agreement about what words are, what they mean, and how they are used, we could not hold a meaningful conversation. Nonetheless, just as meaningful conversations can express emotion, so meaningful music can express it as well, though not, of course, in exactly the same way. Further, if a listener does not understand the rules, he or she can understand neither the intention of the composer or musician nor the music’s structure. The circle corresponding to audience in Figure 1.6 becomes community in the music-culture model (Figure 1.7). The community is the group (including the performers) that carries on the traditions and norms, the social processes and activities, and the ideas of performance. By community we do not always mean a THE MUSIC-CULTURE AS A WORLD OF MUSIC group of people living close to one another. For our purposes, a community in a music-culture forms when they participate in a performance in some way—as performer, audience, composer, and so forth. We call these communities where people come together over common interests affinity groups. People in an affinity group may not know each other very well and may not even be in each other’s physical presence, as for example in an Internet community. Today some websites allow a person to lay down a bass line, and later someone else from a different part of the world can lay down a guitar track on top of that, while another person can insert a drum track, and another provide a vocal, and yet another add vocal harmony, and so on, until eventually all of it adds up to a song that can be played from the website or downloaded. These “musicians” may never meet in person, yet they form a community. Performance, then, is situated in community and is part of a people’s musicculture. The community pays for and supports the music, whether directly with money or indirectly by allowing the performers to live as musicians. Community support usually influences the future direction of a particular kind of music. In a complex society such as the United States, various communities support different kinds of music—classical, rock, jazz, gospel—and they do so in different ways. When music becomes a mass-media commodity for sale, then packaging, marketing, and advertising are as crucial to the success of musicians as they are to the popularity of a brand of perfume. How the community relates to the music makers also has a profound effect on the music. Among the folk music-cultures of nonindustrial village societies, the performers are drawn from the community; everyone knows them well, and communication takes place face-to-face. At the other end of the spectrum is the postindustrial music-culture celebrity who guards his or her private life, performs from a raised platform, offers a disembodied voice coming through a machine, and remains enigmatic to the audience. How the community relates to itself is another important aspect of performance. This is the place to consider music in relation to age, gender, identity, region, and class. For example, do men, women, old people, and young people experience music differently? We will consider this issue later in this chapter. Time and space, the fourth circle in Figure 1.6, become memory and history in our music-culture model (Figure 1.7). The community is situated in history and borne by memory, official and unofficial, whether remembered or recorded or written down. Musical experiences, performances, and communities change over time and space; they have a history, and that history reflects changes in the rules governing music as well as the effect of music on human relationships. For example, the development of radio, recordings, and television meant that music did not need to be heard in the performer’s presence. This took the performer out of the community’s face-to-face relationships and allowed people to listen to music without making it themselves. Today music is an almost constant background to many people’s lives, with the musicians largely absent. Music critics and historians also alter the effect of music by influencing the stock of ideas about music. The critic who writes for newspapers, magazines, or the Internet helps listeners and music makers understand the impact of performances. When white America became interested in blues music in the 1960s and began presenting blues concerts and festivals (see Chapter 4), magazine and newspaper writers began asking blues singers questions about their music 17 18 CHAPTER 1 and its history. Knowing they would be asked these questions, blues singers prepared their answers, sometimes reading and then repeating what writers had already said about blues, sometimes having fun with their questioners and deliberately misleading them, and sometimes answering truthfully based on their experiences. This pattern is repeating itself today with hip-hop. Many times the subject of music is history itself. The Homeric poets sang about Odysseus; Serbian guslars sang about the deeds of their heroes; European ballads tell stories of nobles and commoners; African griots sing tribal genealogies and history, and the Arab sha’ir, or poet-singers, recount the travels and definitive battles of their tribal ancestors.