wom 49, 2007-3

Music and Politics on the Korean Peninsula



Editor: Max-Peter Baumann
Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Guest Editors: Nathan Hesselink

ISSN 0043-8774
ISBN-978-3-86135-813-8

CONTENTS

Max Peter Baumann From the Editor

Articles

Nathan Hesselink
Music and Politics on the Korean Peninsula (Introduction)

Robert C. Provine
Music, Measurements, Pitch Survivals, and Bell Shapes in Korea

Nam Sang-sook
The Debate over the Distortion of Chongmyo Cheryeak

Roald Maliangkay
Their Masters’ Voice: Korean Traditional Music SPs (Standard Play Records) under Japanese Colonial Rule

Nathan Hesselink
Taking Culture Seriously: Democratic Music and Its Transformative Potential in South Korea

Kwon Ohsung
The Re-formation of Traditional Folksongs in North Korea


Book Reviews (Helena Simonett, ed.)

Thomas Burkhalter
Ines Weinrich, Fayruz und die Brüder Rahbani: Musik, Moderne und Nation im Libanon

Chris Goertzen
Erynn Marshall, Music in the Air Somewhere: The Shifting Borders of West Virginia’s Fiddle and Song Traditions

Maria Williams
Michael Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music

Andrew G. Wood
Jocelyne Guilbault, Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Music

Jason Toynbee
Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music

Ciro Lo Muzi
Pia Srinivasan, Il raga che porta la pioggia

João Junqueira
Martha Ulhôa and Ana Maria Ochoa, Música Popular na América Latina: Pontos de Escuta



Recording Reviews (Dan Bendrups, ed.)

Jesse Samba Wheeler
In the Blood: Portrait of a Griot directed by Aleksi Oksanen and Jari Järvi, produced by Kaarna Productions, DVD

Nino Tsitsishvili
Funeral Chants from the Georgian Caucasus by Hugo Zemp, Collection Süpor Xao, DVD

Joseph S. Kaminski
An African Brass Band by Hugo Zemp, Collection Süpor Xao, DVD

Aleksi Oksanen
Siaka, an African Musician by Hugo Zemp, Collection Süpor Xao, DVD



Abstracts

Music and Politics on the Korean Peninsula
Nathan Hesselink
The collection of essays in this volume moves forward from the position that music and politics are always inextricably linked. The modern conceit of autonomous art fails to account for the historical and cultural embeddedness of music, that its creation and performance exist within overlapping spheres of economics, social status, political control, religious practice, and public reception. Music is also realized within specific spaces—each with their own semantically laden histories and uses—and that performances always have an audience, the act of listening itself contingent on appropriation, control, and the construction of meaning. Music as embodied, performative art is an essentially social entity, snared within webs of relationships between patrons, rulers, composers, performers, audiences, and technology. That the musical worlds of the East and West could be conceptualized as separate (but increasingly interacting) universes during much of the twentieth century belies their remarkably similar foundations. For both ancient Greek theorists and early Confucian scholar-officials, music was the arena in which the proper balance between mankind, the state, and the broader world was checked and regulated. A concern with numbers, ratios, cosmology, and ideas related to beauty were as much passions of the Pythagoreans as they were early Chinese ritual specialists. And while music and politics were comfortable bedfellows in both of these societies more than two millennia ago, in East Asia—here focusing on the Korean peninsula—such a heightened sensitivity to music’s social and spiritual properties and energies maintained an explanatory power much longer than it did in the West, at least on the official governmental level. What this collection of essays will illustrate in dramatic manner is the seriousness with which music was and continues to be taken within political contexts that is frankly quite surprising to those unfamiliar with the Korean experience.



Music, Measurements, Pitch Survivals, and Bell Shapes
in Korea
Robert C. Provine
The young Chosn dynasty court, in keeping with long-standing Chinese Confucian tradition, needed to establish in the early fifteenth century a new set of standardized measurements (length, weight, and volume) for use in the kingdom. The measurements were all proportionately related, so that if one were fixed, all the others were also thereby determined. Following Chinese precedent, the Koreans did considerable research into the establishing of a fundamental musical pitch from which the other twelve pitches in the musical system could be determined, and the length of the pitch pipe which produced this fundamental pitch in turn constituted a basic unit of length from which the other standard measurements could be calculated.


The Debate over the Distortion of Chongmyo Cheryeak
Nam Sang-sook
Chongmyo cheryeak as performed today is quite different from that shown in the musicbooks of the Chosyn dynasty. Varied note values, rhythmic cycles, pak cues marking text lines, and traditional Korean instruments, the gayago, the geomungeo, and the Korean bipa—none of these are to be found in today’s version. Pak cues in the middle of lines now obscure the meaning of the text that is the core of ceremonial music. Rhythmic patterns, or jangdan, that are the most important element in Korean traditional music have been rendered invalid by a one-tone-per-beat structure. The 3-2-3 arrangement of jeonggan (boxes of notation) as based upon the yin-yang principle has also disappeared. This article argues that these changes were made for the purposes of distortion during the Japanese colonial rule, and that claims of natural change are without foundation.


Their Masters’ Voice: Korean Traditional Music SPs (Standard Play Records) under Japanese Colonial Rule
Roald Maliangkay
Researchers in Korean studies looking into the popular entertainment industries during the colonial period have historically focused on cultural nationalism or economic prowess. Studies of music from this period that are not primarily concerned with aspects of resistance or censorship have come out only in the last few years, and so it is only recently that the popularity of the many new forms of entertainment among Koreans at the time has come to be recognized. In this article I describe the interaction of Koreans and Japanese in these industries from the time of their inception around the turn of the nineteenth century, and relate how politics on the one hand, and the influence of technology on the other, changed both the sound and concept of recorded Korean music until the late 1930s. In doing so, I focus on recordings of traditional music and refute the idea that the Japanese tried to indiscriminately manipulate them from the outset.


Taking Culture Seriously: Democratic Music and Its Transformative Potential in South Korea
Nathan Hesselink
This article outlines my personal search for a working theory of democratic music in the context of South Korean folk drumming and dance (p’ungmul). Motivated by the call of Korean political theorists and folklorists of the late twentieth century for the identification and investigation of democratic elements within traditional culture, I attempt to locate such ideals in the musical structure and performance practices of an indigenous drumming tradition. Through an extensive review of the pertinent literature, I was able to identify five general principles of musical democracy that are consistent with established democratic theory. My analysis hopes to highlight the ways in which we can move beyond discussions of performative art in purely aesthetic terms, revealing the socially transformative potential of the artistic realm.

Content Summary & Abstracts

 

wom 49, 2007-2

Music Archaeology: Mesoamerica




















Editor: Max-Peter Baumann
Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Guest Editors: Arnd Adje Both and Julia L. J. Sanchez

ISSN 0043-8774
ISBN-978-3-86135-812-1-


Articles

Arnd Adje Both and Julia L. J. Sanchez:
Preface

Dale A. Olsen:
The Complementarity and Interdisciplinarity of Archaeomusicology: An Introduction to the Field and this Volume

Matthias Stöckli:
Playing Music as a Domestic Activity? Interpretations of the Finds of Sound-producing Artifacts at Aguateca, El Petén, Guatemala

Julia L. J. Sanchez:
Procession and Performance: Recreating Ritual Soundscapes among the Ancient Maya

Susan Rawcliffe:
Eight West Mexican Flutes in the Fowler Museum

Gonzalo Sánchez Santiago:
An Introduction to the Music Cultures of Ancient Oaxaca: Sound Artifacts in the Archaeological Record

Ángel Agustín Pimentel Díaz:
Music Iconography of the Codex Nuttall

Arnd Adje Both:
Aztec Music Culture

Mark Howell:
Possible Prehispanic Music Survivals in the Rab’inal Achi


Book Reviews (Helena Simonett, ed.)

Michelle Bigenho:
Henry Stobart, Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes

Ketty Wong:
Ernesto Donas and Denise Milstein, Cantando la ciudad. Lenguajes, imaginarios y mediaciones en la canción popular montevideana (1962-99)

John Dougan:
John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study 1941-42, Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, eds.

Erika Eichholzer:
Anri Herbst, Meki Nzewi and Kofi Agawu (eds.), Musical Arts in Africa: Theory, Practice and Education

Jean Kidula:
Andreas Meyer, Überlieferung, Individualität und musikalische Interaktion: Neuere Formen der Ensemblemusik in Asante/Ghana

Theodore L. Konkouris:
Daniel B. Reed, Dan Ge Performance: Masks and Music in Contemporary Côte d’Ivoire

Donna A. Buchanan:
Rosemary Statelova, The Seven Sins of Chalga: Toward an Anthropology of Ethnopop Music

Edwin Seroussi:
Jane Mink Rossen and Uri Sharvit, A Fusion of Traditions: Liturgical Music in the Copenhagen Synagogue

Junko Oba:
Deborah Wong, Speak it Louder: Asian Americans Making Music

Tran Quan Hai:
Francois Picard, Lexique des musiques d’Asie orientale (Chine, Corée, Japon, Vietnam)


Recording Reviews (Dan Bendrups, ed.)

Oli Wilson:
Songs of the Volcano: Papua New Guinea Stringbands with Bob Brozman, recorded by Denis Crowdy, Tony Subam and Daniel Thomas, White Spats Music

Dan Bendrups:
White Rose: George “Toofie” Christian, produced by Denis Crowdy and annotated by Philip Hayward, Coral Music


Abstracts

Preface
Arnd Adje Both and Julia L. J. Sanchez
Five articles were first presented as papers at the meeting of the ICTM Music Archaeology Study Group (MASTG) at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, in April 2003 and revised and expanded for this issue. The conference was organized by Julia Sanchez, then chair of the study group. Two articles by researchers working on the prehispanic music cultures of Oaxaca were added for this topical issue.
Each contributor brings a novel perspective, based on training, area of research, and experience, creating illuminating discussion between ethnomusicologists, anthropological archaeologists, and musicians. Musical practices of the Classic Maya civilization (AD 250-900) are discussed in two papers. Matthias Stöckli, writing on the sound artifacts of Aguateca, a site of the lowland Maya region, Guatemala, takes archaeological and organological information into account, while Julia Sanchez discusses Maya processions on the basis of the iconography of preserved murals and vase depictions. Susan Rawcliffe’s paper is dedicated to the organology and acoustics of West Mexican flutes, dating from the Middle and Late Preclassic periods (1000 BC-AD 200). Examining recent finds made by archaeologists at different sites, Gonzalo Sánchez Santiago resumes the rich organological history of Oaxaca from the Preclassic times onwards. In another paper, Agustín Pimentel Díaz discusses the music iconography of the Codex Nuttall, a Mixtec picture manuscript dating from the fourteenth century. Arnd Adje Both reviews ethnohistorical accounts on the Aztec music culture, which flourished during the Late Postclassic period (AD 1325-1521). The issue concludes with Mark Howell’s discussion of a living tradition, the Rab’inal Achi performed by the contemporary Maya in highland Guatemala.

The Complementarity and Interdisciplinarity of Archaeomusicology: An Introduction to the Field and this Volume
Dale A. Olsen
Archaeomusicology, the study of music through archaeology, is a discipline which combines archaeology and musicology. It is the science (-ology) of music and music-related aspects of archaeological cultures. In other words, it is the study of music, musical instruments, and music making from archaeological sources. This introduction to the present volume explains how the discipline of archaeomusicology is based on the coming together of many approaches by scholars with diverse backgrounds and research strategies. In spite of this diversity, all the scholars who have contributed to this issue have at least one goal in common: to understand music and musical expressions of ancient civilizations.

Playing Music as a Domestic Activity? Interpretations of the Finds of Sound-producing Artifacts at Aguateca, El Petén, Guatemala
Matthias Stöckli
Recent excavations at Aguateca, a Maya Classic site in lowland Guatemala, not only unearthed a variety of sound-producing instruments but also revealed, thanks to the specific mode certain areas of the site were abandoned by their inhabitants, the distribution patterns of those artifacts. This in turn allowed drawing and substantiating conclusions about their original users and the contexts they were used in, particularily with regard to elite women’s music practices as part of their general household activities. Thus, the exceptional archaeological situation discovered at Aguateca broadens considerably our understanding of the uses and functions of this kind of artifacts which at most Mayan sites were found in circumstances rendering an analysis and interpretation which aim at more than the organological and acoustic facts, much more problematic.

Procession and Performance: Recreating Ritual Soundscapes among the Ancient Maya
Julia L. J. Sanchez
Processions among the ancient Maya included music, dance, costumes, and theatrical performances and took place in public spaces. This paper relates performance and space to examine public ceremonies, exploring the limits of archaeological interpretation of such ephemeral aesthetic experiences. Large public ceremonies also are used to illuminate similar practices that occurred on a smaller scale in more private contexts.

Eight West Mexican Flutes in the Fowler Museum
Susan Rawcliffe
The small selection of West Mexican flutes discussed in this article has a remarkable variety of body shape, scales, and distinctive timbres. Different types and timbres were surely associated with different uses. Although flute families usually share a characteristic timbre, potential playing techniques including the number of finger holes, and some interval similarities and pitch ranges, the actual details typically remain unique to each flute. With no fully standardized flute body shapes or mouthpieces, there can be no fully standardized scales. Possibly, with prehispanic flutes, exact pitch is a lesser value than expressiveness. Construction details enhance the capacities for pitch bending, for the manipulation of timbre through breath pressure, and perhaps for utilizing the eerie whistle tones that may emerge with very low air pressure. Expressivity may be the primary aesthetic value functioning here.

Sound Files (cf. article by S. Rawcliffe, page 56)

Soundfiles (.wma) of the Musical Examples are recorded by Scott Wilkinson at Fowler Museum, July 26, 2003. All flutes played by Susan Rawcliffe, assisted by Linda O’Brien and Fran Krystock:

Ex. #1, flute #1, X66-2854; 1:28
A.) free form
B.) 1:14-1:28, the partials of all holes closed

Ex. #2, flute #2, X66-2856; 1:28
A.) free form
B.) 1:13-1:28, top two holes open
note whistle tone afterwards

Ex. #3, flute #3, X72-24; 1:28
A.) free form; 00:50-1:01 played in the second partial
B.)1:12-1:28, top two holes open
note whistle tones before and afterwards

Ex. #4, flute #4, X69W-488; 1:05
A.) free form, exit hole closed & then opened
B.) 00:36-00:48, exit open; 00:48-1:05, exit hole closed, finger holes opened sequentially from distal to proximal end; note whistle tone afterwards

Ex. #5, flute #5, X68W-487A; 1:14
Note recording wind noise
A.) 00:00-00:27, all finger holes closed– exit hole closed using air pressure variations; exit hole open with air pressure variations
B.) 00:27-00:32, all finger holes open
C.) 00:34-1:00, four sounds– top 4 holes opened individually one by one, from the distal to proximal end; note similar pitch for all, but last position has multi-phonic
D.) 1:01-1:07, mid top two finger holes opened
E.) 1:08-1:14, top two finger holes opened

Ex. #6, flute #6, X68W-487B; 1:12
A.) begins with all finger holes closed and very low air pressure quiet sounds
B.) free form
C.) 1:03-1:12, all finger holes closed– strong air pressure and higher partials moving to quiet sounds of low air pressure

Ex. #7, flute #7, X66-2855; 1:23
A.) 00:00-00:28, long quiet breath tones; 00:28-00:43– light air pressure, slight perturbations in the tone
B.) free form
C.) 1:03-1:13, all finger holes open; note perturbations and presence of higher pitch

Ex. #8, flute #8, X69-1039; 2:00
A.) 00:00-00:30, all finger holes closed; note changing timbre & perturbations with air pressure variations
B.) free form
C.) 1:40-2:00, top two finger holes open; note multi-phonics

An Introduction to the Music Cultures of Ancient Oaxaca: Sound Artifacts in the Archaeological Record
Gonzalo Sánchez Santiago
This paper discusses the sound artefacts from archaeological excavations made in the present-day State of Oaxaca, Mexico. The finds reveal the rich diversity of ancient music cultures such as the Zapotec, Mixtec, and Mixe-Zoque. Based on the organological data, important aspects of the musical history of this cultural area can be reconstructed.

Music Iconography of the Codex Nuttall
Ángel Agustín Pimentel Díaz
Prehispanic picture manuscripts provide rich information on past music cultures, which otherwise may have not been preserved. To exemplify, the music iconography of the Codex Nuttall is reviewed, a manuscript belonging to the Mixtec culture, which flourished during the postclassic period of Mesoamerica, in the present-day State of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Aztec Music Culture
Arnd Adje Both
This paper reviews the ethnohistoric record of the Aztec music culture that flourished during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerica, AD 1325-1521. The written sources from the early colonial period suggest that among the Aztecs a differentiation was made between temple music practiced by specialized priests and court music practiced by professional musicians. Moreover, information is related on the religious concepts of sound, revealing important insights into the musical knowledge of Late Postclassic Mesoamerica. In this context, also archaeological and music iconographical data is considered.

Possible Prehispanic Music Survivals in the Rab’inal Achi
Mark Howell
The Rab’inal Achi is a K’iche’ Maya dance-play preserved in text that may have been first performed in highland Guatemala during the Postclassic era (AD 900-1524). It is still performed in Rabinal, Guatemala, and two valveless trumpets and a slit-drum produce the music used in its accompaniment. These instruments are known to be prehispanic and the music played on them for this dance-play may retain prehispanic elements. To examine this possibility, music for the Rab’inal Achi is compared to the music accompanying a dance-play introduced from Spain, the Baile de los Moros y Cristianos.

Soundfiles (cf. Mark Howell, p. 118ff.):

Musical Example 1:
Son 2 (“Son del K’iche”), from the Rab’inal Achi

Musical Example 2:
Alto, from the Rab’inal Achi

Musical Example 3
Son 7, from the “Baile de los Moros y Cristianos”

Content Summary & Abstracts

 

wom 49, 2007-1

Indigenous Peoples, Recording Techniques,
and the Recording Industry

Editor: Max-Peter Baumann

Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock

Guest Editor: Karl Neuenfeldt

Articles

Karl Neuenfeldt
Notes on the Engagement of Indigenous Peoples with Recording Technology and Techniques, the Recording Industry and Researchers

Beverly Diamond
“Allowing the Listener to Fly as They Want to”: Sámi Perspectives on Indigenous CD Production in Northern Europe

Åse Ottosson
“We’re Just Bush Mob”: Producing Aboriginal Music and Maleness in a Central Australian Recording Studio

Brian Diettrich
Across All Micronesia and Beyond: Innovation and Connections in Chuukese Popular Music and Contemporary Recordings

Karl Neuenfeldt
“Bring the Past to Present”: Recording and Reviving Rotuman Music via a Collaborative Rotuman / Fijian/Australian CD Project

Katelyn Barney
Sending a Message: How Indigenous Australian Women use Contemporary Music Recording Technologies to Provide a Space for Agency, Viewpoints and Agendas

Dan Bendrups
Easter Island Music and the Voice of Kiko Pate: A Biographical History of Sound Recording

Denis Crowdy
Studios at Home in the Solomon Islands: A Case Study of Homesound Studios, Honiara

James E. Cunningham
The Nammys Versus the Grammys: Celebrity, Technology, and the Creation of an Indigenous Music Recording Industry in North America

Jeniffer Cattermole
“Fiji Blues?”: Taveuni and Qamea Musicians’ Engagements with Recording Technologies


Book Reviews (Helena Simonett, ed.)

Meilu Ho
Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing

Wenwei Du
Jonathan P. J. Stock, Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai

Carole Pegg
Theodore Levin, Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond

Anthony Potoczniak
Timothy Cooley, Making Music in Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians

Eleanor T. Lipat
Dusadee Swangviboonpong, Thai Classical Singing: Its History, Musical Characteristics and Transmission

Melvin L. Butler
Karen E. Richman, Migration and Vodou

Rolf Groesbeck
Richard K. Wolf, The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India

Steven Knopoff
Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia


Recording Reviews (Dan Bendrups, ed.)

Barley Norton
A Review Essay on Recordings of Music from Vietnam

Robert G. H. Burns
Under the Leaves. Matlby, UK: Hallamshire Traditions


Abstracts

Notes on the Engagement of Indigenous Peoples with Recording Technology and Techniques, the Recording Industry and Researchers
Karl Neuenfeldt
The relationships between Indigenous peoples, recording technology and techniques, the recording industry and researchers have been evolving for over a century, as have concerns for key issues such as intellectual property, copyright, commercialisation and cultural protocols.1 As technology and techniques have changed so too has the nature of the relationships, although there are also continuities. This issue of the world of music focuses on some of those changes and continuities. The articles explore, describe and analyse examples of these current relationships as Indigenous peoples in Australia, Easter Island, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Northern Europe, North America and Solomon Islands engage with—and in some instances manipulate and subvert—recording technology and techniques and the recording industry. Also surveyed are the roles of researchers involved in collaborative projects.


“Allowing the Listener to Fly as They Want to”: Sámi Perspectives on Indigenous CD Production in Northern Europe
Beverly Diamond
Since the Saami cultural renaissance that began in the late 1970s, contemporary Saami recording artists have found ways to reflect traditional cultural values and practices in the recording studio. Many initially deny any relationship between live and studio work. Because the tradition of yoiking in a community setting is so reliant on audience feedback, the performance of a yoik without an audience is a particular challenge. In the studio, however, Saami musicians find ways to maintain the yoik’s ability to define relationships to people, places, and animals. They also exploit the studio to layer meanings, thus extending the yoik’s capacity for double entendre. This article reports on interviews with a number of producers and recording artists, including Ulla Pirtijarvi, Ursula Lansman, and Mari Boine. It focuses in particular on the studio work of Wimme Saari and Frode Fjellheim.


“We’re Just Bush Mob”: Producing Aboriginal Music and Maleness in a Central Australian Recording Studio
Åse Ottosson
Over the last sixty years, country, rock and reggae music have become important everyday expressive forms among Aboriginal people in Central Australia. In this particular socio-musical scene, these forms of music have emerged as an almost exclusively male activity. The recording studio of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association in Alice Springs likewise continues to constitute a socio-musical space dominated by Aboriginal men from diverse backgrounds. This paper explores the ways in which the musicians and studio workers assert and negotiate a diverse range of ancestral and more recent local and global forms of accumulating male respect and status as they work with each other in the professional and technological regimes of this studio. In the process they reproduce as well as rework their distinctive and shared sense of worth as Aboriginal music makers and men.

Across All Micronesia and Beyond: Innovation and Connections in Chuukese Popular Music and Contemporary Recordings
Brian Diettrich
Today in Chuuk State, part of the Federated States of Micronesia, due to increasing access to music and digital technology, the production of popular music flourishes. Formerly, in the 1980s, popular music consisted mostly of locally made tape recordings of performances. Since the 1990s, however, Islanders have increasingly made use of computers and compact disks to access and distribute the latest popular hits. The demand for popular CDs in Chuuk, usually of love songs and well-liked church songs, is not only propelled by access to technology in Chuuk, but is strongly influenced by large populations of Chuukese in Guam and Hawaii, as well as the U.S. mainland. Contemporary popular music performance for Chuukese serves as a means of connecting the experiences of transnational communities across the space of the Pacific and beyond.


“Bring the Past to Present”: Recording and Reviving Rotuman Music via a Collaborative Rotuman/Fijian/Australian CD Project
Karl Neuenfeldt
This paper explores a recording project that led to CDs documenting Rotuman musical performances and music practice in Suva, Fiji. The project was a collaboration between the Rotuman diasporic community, the Oceania Centre for the Arts and Culture at the University of the South Pacific and a music-based researcher from Australia. It uses description, analysis and ethnographies to explore the role of digital technologies; the role and evolution of music in diasporic communities in Australia and Fiji; the benefits and challenges of collaborative transnational musical research projects; and the role of music researchers as music producers.


Sending a Message: How Indigenous Australian Women use Contemporary Music Recording Technologies to Provide a Space for Agency, Viewpoints and Agendas
Katelyn Barney
Home studios, local small scale recording studios and the Internet provide an important space for many Indigenous Australian women performers to enact agency in deciding how their music will sound. They enjoy creative freedom and individual expression in producing recordings of their music. With reference to discourse on women and music technology, this article examines how recording practices provide the tools with which Indigenous Australian women performers raise awareness of political and social justice issues, which affect Indigenous Australians. Conclusions will be drawn regarding the ways recording technologies and the recording studio functions in this context as a space to create music that is sending a message of confidence, social power, control, and agency.


Easter Island Music and the Voice of Kiko Pate: A Biographical History of Sound Recording
Dan Bendrups
This article provides a history of sound recording on Easter Island (Rapanui) through the biography of Rapanui master musician Luis Avaka “Kiko” Pate. Albums of Rapanui music began to appear internationally in the 1970s in the form of field recordings produced by outsider ethnographers and commercial recordings by amateur enthusiasts. In the following decades, Rapanui musicians developed their own interests in sound recording, and many musicians are now fluent in music production processes. Throughout this history of production, Kiko Pate has played an unparalleled role in determining the ways in which perceived traditional music forms are remembered and recorded. The conceptualisation of tradition has become a defining feature of Rapanui culture in the twenty-first century, and the performances and recordings of new generations of musicians owe much of their success to the earlier revitalisation efforts of Kiko Pate. His role in this recording history is, however, not immediately apparent because all of the extant recordings featuring Kiko Pate’s distinctive voice are the result of outsider research and production emphasize exotic content over performer identity. Through the medium of biography, this article reveals Kiko Pate’s presence in Rapanui sound recording history and illuminates many of the factors contributing to the contemporary understanding of music and tradition on Rapanui.

Studios at Home in the Solomon Islands: A Case Study of Homesound Studios, Honiara
Denis Crowdy
The music industry of the Solomon Islands exists essentially outside the transnational Anglophone and European music industries. Piracy of overseas and local material is rampant, and artists are often at the mercy of companies in control of all parts of the recording and distribution process. This article presents a case study exploring the role of a “grassroots” home studio in a regionally insular yet vibrantly commercial scene. It also explores ways musicians manage their careers in this environment, the impact of Chinese mercantile interests and issues of copyright. The case study is ethnographic in nature, drawing upon musicians’ perspectives on the role of recording technology and the recording industry in their region.


The Nammys Versus the Grammys: Celebrity, Technology, and the Creation of an Indigenous Music Recording Industry in North America
Jamie Cunningham
The Native American Music Awards, N.A.M.A., was founded as a showcase for Native American “people and youth” from “the four directions.” Patterned after the annual Grammy Music Awards, the organization’s annual Nammy awards ceremony is a prime opportunity for contemporary Native American musicians to present themselves as a unified industry. Since its inception in 1998, approximately thirty awards have been presented annually to artists, songwriters, and producers in a wide variety of popular, traditional, and historical categories. The annual ceremonies also include the presentation of Lifetime Achievement, Humanitarian, and Hall of Fame Awards. Using the Eighth Annual Native American Music Awards, held June 8, 2006 at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida, as a locus for investigation, this article explores how the Nammys incorporate celebrity and technology as an important means for the establishment of an indigenized music recording industry.


“Fiji Blues?”: Taveuni and Qamea Musicians’ Engagements with Recording Technologies
Jennifer Cattermole
This article explores and discusses indigenous Fijian’s (i taukei) engagement with the recording industry and recording technologies more generally. It focuses specifically on bands from Taveuni and the neighboring island of Qamea. They are used as case studies to examine the role of recording technologies in small island cultures. There are no recording studios on either but in the past, the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation recorded bands on Taveuni using a mobile recording unit. Due to the prohibitive cost of journeying to recording studios, it is mainly the resort bands (funded by resort owners) who have been recorded, as well as some recordings made by visiting tourists and musicians. The Taveuni and Qamea musicians’ experiences of being recorded, the distribution of their recordings, the negotiation of commercial arrangements between themselves and resort management and tourists are analyzed, along with the recording relationships between musicians and a music researcher.

Content Summary & Abstracts

 

wom 48, 2006-3

Echos of Our Forgotten Ancestors II

Editor: Max-Peter Baumann
Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Guest Editor: Victor A. Grauer


ISSN 0043-8774
ISBN-978-3-86135-749-0

Articles

Jonathan P. J. Stock
Introduction

Victor A. Grauer:
Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors: Some Points of Clarification

Rachel Mundy:
Musical Evolution and the Making of Hierarchy

Matthew Rahaim:
What Else Do We Say When We Say “Music Evolves”?

Armand M. Leroi and Jonathan Swire:
The Recovery of the Past

Ian Cross:
Four Issues in the Study of Music in Evolution


Book Reviews (Helena Simonett, ed.)

Roger W. H. Savage:
Suzel Ana Reily, ed., The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking’s Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century

R. Anderson Sutton:
David D. Harnish, Bridges to the Ancestors: Music, Myth, and Cultural Politics at an Indonesian Festival

Kaley Mason:
Laurent Aubert, Les Feux de la Déesse: Rituels villageois du Kerala (Inde du Sud)

Tony Langlois:
Jane E. Goodman, Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video

Melanie Lowe:
Sheila Whiteley, Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Gender

Karen Rochelle Liu:
Kwasi Ampene, Female Song Tradition and the Akan of Ghana: The Creative Process in Nnwonkorכ

Adriana Fernandes:
Larry Crook, Brazilian Music: Northeastern Traditions and the Heartbeat of a Modern Nation

Daniel S. Sotelino:
Tamara Elena Livingston-Isenhour and Thomas George Caracas Garcia, Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music

Klaus-Peter Brenner:
Gerd Grupe, Die Kunst des Mbira-Spiels. The Art of Mbira Playing. Harmonische Struktur und Patternbildung in der Lamellophonmusik der Shona in Zimbabwe [Harmonic Structure and Patterning in the Lamellophone Music of the Shona in Zimbabwe]

Richard Jones:
Paul E. Bierley, The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa


Recording Reviews (Kevin Dawe, ed.)

Kathleen J. Van Buren:
Éthiopie/Ethiopia: Les Chants de Bagana/Bagana Songs. Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire

Benjamin Lapidus:
Jíbaro Hasta el Hueso: Mountain Music of Puerto Rico. Performed by Ecos de Borinquen. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Donna A. Buchanan:
Bulgarie: Musique de tradition pastorale/Bulgaria: Music of the Shepherd’s Tradition. Recordings and notes by Marie-Barbara Le Gonidec, VDE


Abstracts

Introduction
Jonathan P. J. Stock
As its title suggests, this issue appears as a follow-up to the preceding one, allowing further voices to be heard in an ongoing discussion of a multi-faceted, highly significant and essentially enormous field of music research. Collectively, the contributions make the point that the issues at stake are not new ones, concerning indeed such fundamental questions as what is music, whether it is actually possible to say that music evolves at all, how we might analyse and account for the global distribution of musical styles and style features, and to what political ends we put such analytical claims. New answers to these enduring questions are suggested, along with fresh ways of looking back at earlier answers, and Leroi and Swire make explicit an invitation which is implicit in the other articles too, namely that there is plenty of space for ethnomusicologists to join other researchers in pushing further at the boundaries of what we know about the emergence and long history of music worldwide. To do so, we will need to become more accustomed to thinking on the larger-scale but, in doing so, we can draw on the perspectives and techniques in a growing body of new research, much of it referenced in the articles below. Accustomed collaborators in fieldwork situations, ethnomusicologists may also find research in this field is a good place to engage in team-based study and analysis with input from more than one disciplinary perspective.
Subscribers will notice that this issue is somewhat shorter than usual, in part because response-type papers come in with less illustrative photographs, transcriptions or analyses than those opening up new subject materials. More than this, though, the world of music has had in recent years the practice of commissioning issues through guest editors who propose a topic and assemble a team of contributors who are experts in that subject area. This is a process that leads to a focused result, which might be seen as the journal’s particular strength as an outlet for research, but it necessarily takes time for issues to be planned, written, revised and produced. In this instance, journal editor Max Peter Baumann and I felt there was sufficient interest in the topic of music and evolution for us to follow the writings in the preceding issue directly with a further set of responses and developments. We issued a call for contributions, with very short deadlines for writing, review and production, all of which necessarily cut down on the number of articles that could be received, reviewed and accepted for inclusion in this issue. We had anticipated that there might be many, short reactions to the topic but finally received a smaller number of longer responses—it may be that ethnomusicologists are not yet used to call-and-response publications, although that does seem an attractive format for the debate of large-scale issues.

Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors: Some Points of Clarification
Victor Grauer
The author provides information on the emergence and the staffing of the Cantometrics project, and comments on the nature of scientific enquiry, proposing that criticisms of Cantometric coding and analysis miss the point that it is actually as scientific as it is possible to be in this field of study.

Musical Evolution and the Making of Hierarchy
Rachel Mundy

In the period between the two World Wars, evolutionism played a substantial role in a series of anti-Semitic trends that permeated the formation and reception of American modern music. The ordering principle of evolutionism, when applied to the association of racial difference with musical style, resulted in the creation of a social hierarchy of high and low art music that reinforced already extant racial hierarchies. Tracing the lineage of this tradition of musical evolutionism to the present day suggests the continued entanglement of music scholars, like myself, in evolutionary questions.

What Else Do We Say When We Say “Music Evolves?”
Matthew Rahaim
Whether speaking of musical “ancestors,” “development,” “adaptation,” or “survival,” music scholars implicitly draw connections between the change in biological and musical forms over time. These connections do not amount to rigorous applications of evolutionary theory. Instead, they function as metaphors used creatively to account for musical change. I see two broad systems of evolution metaphors, which I call “progressive” and “local” evolution. Progressive evolution (informed by metaphors of development and linear motion) sees musical forms gradually improving over time. Local evolution (informed by metaphors of fitting into place) sees musical forms adapting to dynamic local conditions. Each metaphorical system carries entailments about the future, value, and proper place of music. I argue that evolution metaphors, while sometimes useful, carry political implications that can easily be made explicit.

The Recovery of the Past
Armand M. Leroi and Jonathan Swire
Songs, like genes and languages, evolve. That means it should be possible to infer their history from their present geographical distributions. We outline one approach to doing so that we have developed based on the Cantometric song-style data collected by Alan Lomax between 1961 and 1994. We then discuss a recent claim that the migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa c. 70,000 years ago has left traces in the global distribution of song-style, and argue that it is founded on a misapplication of phylogenetic theory and practise. Finally, we discuss the prospects for a new, evolutionary, science of song.

Four Issues in the Study of Music in Evolution
Ian Cross
This paper responds to articles published in the world of music 48, no. 2 (2006) on the topic of music’s emergence and spread around the world, addressing four issues raised there. First, the notion that musical style has the capacity to be conserved and transmitted over very long time-scales is assessed. It is suggested that there is a little direct support for this in the archaeological record, but only from a cultural environment quite distinct from that inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Pygmies and Bushmen. Second, attention is given to the extent to which theories concerning the details of cultural process can be securely tied to the detailed scientific literature on human evolution. This is a quickly changing field, both in terms of genetic testing techniques and in terms of scientific interpretations: it may be premature to propose detailed interpretations of something as complex as musical practices at this stage. The notion that stasis appears as a norm in cultural process is the third issue examined, in the light of emerging research on cultural modelling in relation to evolution, which suggests that stasis is by no means automatic or inevitable. Finally, the response proposes that we understand “music” as a means of managing social uncertainty. If so, then the recurrence of musical features from one society to another may not show historical linkage but rather the persistence, or the continual re-emergence, of particular patterns in social interaction.

Content Summary & Abstracts

 

wom 48, 2006-2

Echos of Our Forgotten Ancestors




















Editor: Max-Peter Baumann
Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Guest Editor: Victor A. Grauer

ISSN 0043-8774
ISBN-978-3-86135-748-3

Articles

Victor A. Grauer
Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors

Bruno Nettl
Response to Victor Grauer: On the Concept of Evolution in the History of Ethnomusicology

Jonathan P. J. Stock
Clues from Our Present Peers?: A Response to Victor Grauer

Peter Cooke
Response to “Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors”

Victor A. Grauer
“Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors”—Author’s Reply

Miscellanea

Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph
Musical Symbiosis in Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Lifecycle and Martin Watt

Marin Marian-Bălaşa
Ghizela/Gisela Suliţeanu: An Indicative Bio-Bibliography

Book Reviews (Helena B. Simonett, ed.)

Karen A. Peters Donna A. Buchanan, Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition

Giovanni Giuriati
Deborah Wong, Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Performance

Carol Fisher Mathieson
Liz Garnett, The British Barbershopper: A Study in Socio-Musical Values

Kim Kattari
Cheryl L. Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness; Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop

Tess J. Popper
Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz, Palestinian Arab Music: A Maqām Tradition in Practice

William P. Malm
Henry Johnson, The Koto: A Traditional Instrument in Contemporary Japan

Mark Slobin
Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939

Mariano Muñoz-Hidalgo
Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricos from Lisbon to Newark

Recording Reviews (Kevin Dawe, ed.)

John Baily
Homayun Sakhi: The Art of the Afghan Rubâb, Smithsonian Folkways; Khaled Arman: Rubâb Raga, Arion, and Kabul Workshop Trigana, Tinder Records

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco
El ave de mi soñar: Los Camperos de Valles—Mexican Sones Huastecos, Smithsonian Folkways and Mexique/Mexico: Sones Huastecos—Los Caimanes de Tampico, Archives Internationales de Musique Populaire

ABTRACTS

Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors
Victor A. Grauer
Recent developments in the field of genetic anthropology suggest that our earliest fully “modern” ancestors originated in Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, and that a single band of their descendents migrated from that continent to Asia between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago, destined to populate the rest of the world. The so-called “Out-of-Africa,” paradigm has opened the door to all sorts of new possibilities regarding our understanding of human history and culture. Drawing on experience gained during my years of involvement, with Alan Lomax, on the Cantometrics project, supplemented by extensive independent research, I attempt to demonstrate how the new genetic findings could lead to a general re-evaluation of the history, development, and significance of mankind’s earliest music.

Response to Victor Grauer: On the Concept of Evolution in the History of Ethnomusicology
Bruno Nettl
This short essay responds to Grauer in the first instance by voicing agreement with his interest in reviving cantometrics and moving further along the lines sketched by Lomax. It reflects surprise at the relative neglect, by ethnomusicologists, of the issues raised by cantometrics after c. 1970, and goes on to associate cantometrics with its historical antecedents, the well-known work of Curt Sachs and of adherents of the American “culture area” approach to the interpretation of geographic distributions. Most of the essay is devoted to comments on a movement that has become known as “evolutionary musicology” which are directly or indirectly raised by Grauer. These involve the origins of music, the (sometimes incorrectly labeled) evolutionary approach to universal music history, and the interpretation of music as a biological adaptation. It is in evolutionary musicology that the influence of Lomax and cantometrics is most evident.

Clues from Our Present Peers?: A Response to Victor Grauer
Jonathan P. J. Stock
This response to Victor A. Grauer’s “Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors” draws on present-day musical data, including the singing of Pygmies from Gabon, women from the Solomon Islands, carollers from Sheffield and Pennsylvania, and the music-related interactions of mother-baby couples. Initially, I note that generalisation and comparison is prevalent as a context in contemporary ethnomusicology, and distinguish the kind of demands a general account places on its individual pieces of evidence as compared to a more ethnographically focused analysis. Four further conditions are then identified, all of which need to be met for Grauer’s account to be persuasive.
First, Grauer needs to make a fully convincing case for what he calls the “Pygmy-Bushman style”: I argue that he misses essential differences in musical practice between these peoples and misidentifies a single cluster of traits concomitant with hocketing as an unusual series of selections. Second, I suggest that Grauer has selected some examples to fit his theory, rather than vice versa, a problem that leads him to see signs of migration in what may rather be routine outcomes of the normative structure and performance practice of the panpipes. The third condition is concerned with the matter of musical change, which Grauer’s account essentially omits: examples are given of styles that changed radically in a short period, all of which show that the acoustic surface of the music appears to be its most changeable element, and that present-day recordings may not be a reliable guide to the musical style of prehistory. The fourth condition Grauer’s hypothesis demands is that hocketing was invented just once in human history; this requirement too is problematic, the same technique occurring in many mother-infant musical interactions. In sum, while the account of early human migrations presented by the “out-of-Africa” scientists may be plausible, evidence of musical transmission 70,000 years ago has yet to be located. The search for that evidence will need to look at performance practice, not just acoustics.

Response to “Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors”
Peter Cooke
From Victor Grauer’s introductory essay it is apparent that he is embarking on an interesting and challenging research task in musical history—or perhaps one might call it musical archaeology. Archaeologists are often forced to speculate (with very little hard evidence) and only later do chance discoveries or systematic excavations produce the necessary evidence that confounds or validates their speculations. The new evidence for Grauer exists already, in the form of the massive addition to the documentation of the world’s musical traditions that ethnomusicologists have contributed since he was working with Lomax on the Cantometrics project in the 1960s. There may now be few new “sites” to excavate—but there is now so much more social and cultural information on the many varied musical traditions of the world with which to help one validate the initial work of style analysis and comparison.

“Echoes of our Forgotten Ancestors”: Author’s Reply
Victor Grauer
This paper selects comments from the preceding three invited responses by Bruno Nettl, Peter Cooke, and Jonathan Stock and replies to them one by one. The first part proposes a workable definition of music and discusses the issue of origins. This leads to a further discussion of Cantometrics as a means of general hypothesis and thoughts on evolutionary musicology and universals. Generalization is also an issue in the second part of the paper, where it is followed with comments on “emics” and “etics” and on the role of context. Materials proposed by Stock as counter-examples to my initial essay are then discussed in more detail. Turning next to Cooke’s responses, I focus particularly on aspects related to the bagpipes and to what I called the “breathless” style of singing. Finally, the paper concludes by arguing that the “Out-of-Africa” theory provides the simplest explanation by far of the widespread distribution of music among virtually all peoples today.

MISCELLANEA

Musical Symbiosis in Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Lifecycle
Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph and Martin Watt
This article engages with the various modalities applied in the “juxtaposed” genre of written composition in a South African art music context. It explores the aesthetic and socio-cultural implications of music embodying an oral-written synergy. Examples are cited as precedents of musical “symbiosis” which seek to integrate and enrich music from diverse cultures. This study traces the germination and realisation of the intercultural work, Lifecycle, by Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, which grew out of an investigative field study into the indigenous music of the amaXhosa women, as performed by the Ngqoko singers. It outlines the challenges of the transcription process and scrutinises how the unique mode of “overtone” singing employed by the women was to inspire a new soundscape concept and a new symbiotic compositional vocabulary. The paper gives an overview of the original Xhosa songs and demonstrates how the composer of Lifecycle created a tapestry of interdependent musical genres within a fresh symbiotic whole.

Ghizela/Gisela Suliţeanu: An Indicative Bio-Bibliography
Marin Marian-Bălaşa
This is a brief introduction to the vast and complex ethnomusicological work of Ghizela/Gisela Suliţeanu. Extraordinary fieldworker, meticulous transcriber, pioneer in cognitive ethnomusicology, expert in several ethnic musics, Suliţeanu left behind an immense archive of tapes, transcriptions, manuscripts, and essays. She published primarily in Romanian and that work is accessible to Romanian researchers; the scale of her work in English, French, and German is less well recognized, and so this account listed these latter items to give a wider sense of her work as an ethnomusicologist.

Content Summary & Abstracts

 

wom 48, 2006-1

Music and Childhood:
Creativity, Socialization, and Representation





















Editor: Max-Peter Baumann
Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Guest Editor: Amanda Minks


ISSN 0043-8774
ISBN-13-86135-747-6



CONTENTS

Music and Childhood: Creativity, Socialization, and Representation


Articles

Kathryn Marsh
Cycles of Appropriation in Children’s Musical Play: Orality in the Age of Reproduction

Anthony Seeger and Kate Seeger
Beyond the Embers of the Campfire: The Ways of Music at a Residential Summer Children’s Camp

Marie Agatha Ozah
The Iwali Child Queen Dance of Ogoja, Nigeria

Rita de Cácia Oenning da Silva
Reversing the Rite: Music, Dance, and Rites of Passage among Street Children and Youth in Recife, Brazil

Yee Ming To
Shifting Identity and Disappearing Childhood in Hong Kong Children’s Songs

Roe-Min KokOf Kindergarten, Cultural Nationalism, and Schumann’s Album for the Young


Book Reviews (Helena B. Simonett, ed.)

Jay Keister
Dale A. Olsen, The Chrysanthemum and the Song: Music, Memory, and Identity in the South American Japanese Diaspora

Adriana Helbig
Taras Filenko and Tamara Bulat, The World of Mykola Lysenko: Ethnic Identity, Music, and Politics in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Ukraine

Ernesto Donas
Carlos Sandroni, Feitiço decente: Transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917-1933)

Bruno Deschênes
Xavier Vatin, Rites et musiques de possession à Bahia

Helena Simonett
Sergio Navarrete Pellicer, Maya Achi Marimba Music in Guatemala

Cheryl L. Keyes
Felicia M. Miyakawa, Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission


Recording Reviews (Kevin Dawe, ed.)

Sue Miller
Out of Cuba: Latin American Music takes Africa by Storm. Compilation and Text by Janet Topp Fargion; ¡Cubalive! Notes by Gene and Natasha Rosow

Parmis Mozafari
Iran—Khorassan. The Tale of Tâher and Zohre: Rowshan Golafruz, Singing and Dotâr. Notes by Ameneh Youssefzadeh

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco
¡Llegaron Los Camperos!— Concert Favorites of Nati Cano’s Mariachi Los Camperos; Aztec Dances—Xavier Quijas Yxayotl


ABSTRACTS

Introduction

Amanda Minks

Children’s expressive practices have been the object of extensive scholarly study in the disciplines of folklore, anthropology, and linguistics, but the study of children and childhood in ethnomusicology has been somewhat more sporadic (Minks 2002). In spite of a few seminal texts by prominent scholars, ethnomusicologists have largely avoided a topic that may not have seemed sufficiently “serious” in the process of institutionalizing a small and vulnerable discipline. In recent decades, music educators with expertise in ethnomusicological methods have almost single-handedly carried on the tasks of exploring children’s musical practices and experiences across cultural contexts. A new generation of scholars is emerging within ethnomusicology to build on this past work and push it in new directions, but some may still face challenges by advisors who dissuade them from research with children either because it is perceived as a less serious topic, or because of the necessity of obtaining approval from academic review boards—a process which can be tedious but has not caused scholars in psychology, sociology, or other fields to abandon research with children.



Cycles of Appropriation in Children’s Musical Play: Orality in the Age of Reproduction

Kathryn Marsh

Children’s musical play is a spontaneous form of expression encompassing a range of forms which vary according to age and locality. For school-aged children in primary school playgrounds, genres of musical play include those that are part of an oral tradition, such as singing games, the sung and chanted games that are owned, performed and orally transmitted by children. In the course of oral transmission, these games are varied, often intentionally, through processes of formulaic construction. Children appropriate formulae from the adult world, drawing in particular on mediated sources for their material, but manipulating the source material as a form of resistance to and subversion of the hegemonies of the adult world. In children’s dialogue with the media, cycles of appropriation emerge and similarities between the generative aesthetics of musical play and popular music can be identified. In particular, the intertextuality within these two linked performative traditions is explored. This exploration is based on a cross-cultural study of children’s musical play entailing extensive periods of ethnographic fieldwork in predominantly multiethnic schools in the UK, Norway, USA, South Korea and in urban and remote locations in Australia.



Beyond the Embers of the Campfire: The Ways of Music at a Residential Summer Children’s Camp

Anthony Seeger and Kate Seeger

Nearly 11 million children and adults attend over 12,000 summer camps in the United States each year. Singing and other forms of music making are an important part of the camp experience. Unlike schools, camps usually encourage music making in a variety of contexts. In spite of its significance, the music of summer camps has rarely received scholarly attention. The authors review music making at Camp Killooleet, their family’s residential summer camp for the past 56 years, and consider some 130 LP records made at other summer camps by Alma Mater records. We describe how children are exposed to music and how some aspects of their experience have changed while others have remained very much the same over the decades. We also describe methods we have used to create a vibrant musical experience for all campers. In order to understand and encourage the rich musical life of children, researchers must include consideration of how music is made and experienced at summer camps.



The Iwali Child Queen Dance of Ogoja, Nigeria

Marie Agatha Ozah

In the Bekwarra and Yala cultures, the figure of the iwali, otsichwi or ochuole represents aspects of religious as well as socio-political beliefs and activities. The child chosen to be an iwali is a symbolic representation of the embodiment of womanhood and also a custodian and transmitter of culture. The various attributes of the iwali find expression in dance, which is the principal obligation of her daily life. Through training and practice, the iwali gains full control over her instrument, her body and her art. This article focuses on the iwali, discussing how music and dance are integrated to form vital aspects of her life. This article in addition considers the inherent balancing of irreplaceable traditions with varying degrees of change brought about by modernity.



Reversing the Rite: Music, Dance, and Rites of Passage among Street Children and Youth in Recife, Brazil

Rita de Cácia Oenning da Silva

This article is based on fieldwork in marginalized neighborhoods of Recife and Olinda, Brazil, in 2004 and 2005. It analyzes children’s artistic performances as rites of passage, seeing them as spaces where children and adolescents can test and express their competence and creativity, while at the same time creating an identity far from the common association of poverty with drug-based criminality. Significantly, in these rites, children and adolescents do not only play the role of neophytes, but also that of educators, teaching each other, the local society, and regional and national actors about conditions in the impoverished communities of Brazil’s Northeast.



Shifting Identity and Disappearing Childhood in Hong Kong Children’s Songs (Yi Goh)

Yee-Ming To

In contemporary Hong Kong, the term yi goh is a genre label referring to mass-mediated children’s songs. Since it emerged in the 1970s, this genre has undergone a transformation from songs with children’s lyrics performed by children to songs performed by adolescents and adults with lyrics that are often inappropriate or incomprehensible to children. This article discusses the historical context of yi goh and its contemporary mass-mediated context. As a colonized city, Hong Kong is a place with strong ties to Britain and to China, and both cultures influence the self-image and ideology of people in Hong Kong in all aspects. Interviews with yi goh composers reveal some of the motivations and methods of production, and an analysis of the music industry reveals a merging of this formerly child-oriented genre with mass popular music. The result is a distortion and virtual disappearance of the concept of childhood from yi goh.



Of Kindergarten, Cultural Nationalism, and Schumann’s Album for the Young

Roe-Min Kok

As scholars of nationalism continue to unravel the complex interrelationships between creative intellectual labor and political preferences, and to plumb how national identities were and continue to be experienced in everyday contexts, children and the roles they play—or are assigned—in constructed national consciousness have come under close scrutiny. Since the French Revolution, for instance, children had been viewed as political capital whose education should be directed towards their future roles as citizens of the state, a concept that caught on across Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This essay places children’s music, specifically Schumann’s Album for the Young, within the context of the controversial kindergarten movement in Vormärz Germany. Friedrich Froebel, founder of the kindergarten, believed that a German national identity could be achieved through educating the young regardless of their social backgrounds. His ideas were greeted with much suspicion by Prussian authorities who imposed a ban on all kindergartens in 1851. Schumann, who leaned towards the political left, sent his daughters to a Froebelian kindergarten in Dresden between 1846 and 1848. Towards the end of their stay at the school, and in the midst of the continuing political upheavals of that revolutionary year, he composed the Album for the Young. I argue that the Album contains elements of cultural nationalism that drew upon contemporary pedagogical concepts.

Content Summary & Abstracts

 

wom 47, 2005-3

The Music of “Others” in the Western World





Editor: Max-Peter Baumann
Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Guest Editor: Bruno Deschênes


ISSN 0043-8774
ISBN 3-86135-745-3


Articles

Bruno Deschênes
The Interest of Westerners in Non-Western Music

Steven Casano
From Fuke Shuu to Uduboo: The Transnational Flow of the Shakuhachi to the West

Jay Keister
Seeking Authentic Experience: Spirituality in Western Appropriation of Asian Music

Anas Ghrab
Occident and Intervals in “Arabic Music,” from the Eighteenth Century to the Cairo Music Congress

Christopher J. Miller
Orchids (and Other Difficult Flowers) Revisited: A Reflection on Composing for Gamelan in North America

Christian Utz
Beyond Cultural Representation: Recent Works for the Asian Mouth Organs Shō and Sheng by Western Composers

Tanya Kalmanovitch
Jazz and Karnatic Music: Intercultural Collaboration in Pedagogical Perspective


Book Reviews (Helena B. Simonett, ed.)

Alejandro L. Madrid
Antonio García de León Griego. El mar de los deseos: El Caribe hispano musical: Historia y contrapunto

Rowan Pease
Stephen Jones. Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China

Peter Cooke
Peregrine Horden, ed., Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity

Peter Cooke
Penelope Gouk. ed., Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts

Ola Belo
Mai Palmberg and Annemette Kirkegaard, ed., Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa


Recording Reviews (David Dawe, ed.)

David Cooper
Máirtín Pheaits Ó Cualáin. Traditional Songs from Connemara

Trevor Wiggins
James Burns. Ewe Drumming from Ghana: The Soup Which is Sweet Draws the Chairs in Closer


Abstracts

The Interest of Westerners in Non-Western Music

Bruno Deschênes

With the current globalization of communications and connections between today’s societies, cultures are inevitably influencing each other although not to the same extent. All aspects of today’s Western technologies, thoughts, politics, economics, science, arts, music, etc., are permeating many, if not most aspects of all non-Western cultures. In many parts of the world, modernity is equated with Westernization, and many traditions are “trampled” to make way for this so-called Western modernity, which sometimes is equated with some kind of universality. The same phenomenon applies to music as well. In many places, traditional forms of music are now seen by natives as archaic and antiquated. Some are actually altered to conform to the Western paradigm. Over time, these alterations might slowly deprive them of their traditional heritage. Nowadays, even when new forms of music are created, they are basically moulded to the so-called modern, thus Western standards. Witnessing this trend, some scholars even believe that in some parts of the world, some traditional forms of music are nearly on the verge of being swept away by Westernization. The impression is that non-Western societies are being imposed a one-way form of acculturation.


From Fuke Shuu to Uduboo: The Transnational Flow of the Shakuhachi to the West

Steven Casano

Just as Japan has been economically and technologically influential worldwide, its artistic and cultural forms have also been influential on a global level. Over the past thirty years, the shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute, has steadily grown in popularity throughout the West. In Japan, the shakuhachi developed from an instrument utilized by the Zen Buddhist priests of the Fuke Shuu (Fuke sect) in a form of meditation known as suizen (blowing Zen) to an instrument, which is presently used internationally not only for meditation, but also in movie soundtracks, contemporary compositions by Western-trained composers, and even Jazz. Since the mid-to-late 1960s, the shakuhachi tradition has steadily grown in popularity in the Western world. This is evident with the growing number of non-Japanese recordings, Web pages, publications, compositions, local shakuhachi organizations, and e-mail groups.


Seeking Authentic Experience: Spirituality in Western Appropriation of Asian Music

Jay Keister

Spirituality is a highly problematic topic of study, yet it is crucial to understanding how Westerners appropriate and experience music cross-culturally. A discourse of spirituality in which Westerners construct notions of an authentic, exotic other is particularly common in the appropriation of Asian music. In their encounters with Asian music, Westerners sometimes take an approach that could be described as spiritual, but not religious, meaning that the spiritual power of music lies in the individual’s direct experience with the music unrestricted by the doctrines, texts and social practices that govern musical practice in an Asian context. Although many Westerners do participate in a master-disciple relationship typical of many Asian traditions, some take what can be described as a “seeker” approach to spirituality that rejects such traditional social organization as overly “religious” and antithetical to a spiritually authentic experience of music. Spiritual experiences of Japanese music are examined in this paper, particularly music of the shakuhachi flute in which ideas of spirituality are common and explicitly expressed.


Occident and Intervals in “Arabic Music,” from the Eighteenth Century to the Cairo Music Congress

Anas Ghrab

This article explores the history of the work done on music intervals in Arabic music by Westerners during the last three centuries. This analysis tries to unveil the theoretical precepts underlying their work and uncovers the assumptions it had on understanding the original literature on Arabic musical theory. Moreover, although the basic interests behind this exploration differed from one researcher to the others, some of the ideas put forward were extremely influential. They served to put forth strong clichés thought to be representative of the music of the Arab world. Finally, although this theoretical veil, we can discern a historical evolution which is closely linked to the historical rapport between the European and Arab cultures.


Orchids (and Other Difficult Flowers) Revisited: A Reflection on Composing for Gamelan in North America

Christopher J. Miller

The creative engagement of North American composers with Indonesian music has produced a great diversity of work. Focusing primarily on new music for Javanese gamelan, and drawing largely on my own experience as a composer with a significant involvement in the performance of traditional music, this article examines the variety of approaches taken by composers and ensembles and the different relationships to tradition they imply or embody. Arguing that creative activity cannot be understood apart from the broader presence of Indonesian music, I attempt a realistic assessment of gamelan’s existence in North America on both a philosophical and practical level. I relate the basis of my own interest in the music, and recount some of the history of the group in which I started, a group which managed to avoid the schism which generally persists between composition and traditional performance. In examining different compositional approaches, I point to the interconnectedness of instruments and musical ideas, the problems with simple imitation, and the importance of the situations in which work is created, determined largely by the musicians involved.


Beyond Cultural Representation: Recent Works for the Asian Mouth Organs Shō and Sheng by Western Composers

Christian Utz

One notable effect of musical globalisation is the increasing presence of Asian instruments in works by Western composers, a phenomenon that could only very rarely be observed in Western new music up to the 1980s. The international activities of Asian musicians, though sometimes triggered by Western initiative, have afforded opportunities for creative collaborations with composers looking for more precise, comprehensive and “emic” information on these instruments−as opposed to the secondary materials available to most Western composers in the past. This article focuses on the key question: how do these composers attempt to transform this information into new compositional concepts and how do they confront the cultural symbolism and the idiosyncrasies of the Asian instruments? Most prominently, the Japanese mouth organ shō and, more recently, its Chinese analogue, the sheng, have proved very attractive to Western composers of different generations and origin. Examples from works by Helmut Lachenmann, Chaya Czernowin, Klaus Huber, Gerhard Stäbler, Robert HP Platz, John Cage, Heinz Reber, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong and Wolfgang Suppan exemplify a plurality of perspectives on these two instruments and their "cultural" significance within a Western musical discourse. Finally, two compositions by the author are introduced to illustrate how a bi-cultural instrumentation can lead to complex structural stratification aimed at aesthetic and aural ambiguity and multi-perspectivity.


Jazz and Karnatic Music: Intercultural Collaboration in Pedagogical Perspective

Tanya Kalmanovitch

As a uniquely intercultural music, jazz has been shaped by its joint African and European patrimony, as well as a host of local and distant musical “others.” Among these, Indian classical musics play a special role: an awareness of Indian music is part of the contemporary jazz consciousness, and jazz musicians have frequently looked to Indian classical music as a source of both musical and extra-musical inspiration. Karnatic music – long marginalized in India and abroad – is emerging in the twentyfirst century as a site of specific aesthetic and pedagogical interest in jazz. This paper reports on an educational exchange project between the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program of the New School University (New York) and the Brhaddhvani Research and Training Centre for Musics of the World (Chennai), directed by the author in December 2003-January 2004, in collaboration with Dr. Karaikudi S. Subramanian (Brhaddhvani), Martin Mueller (New School) and Ronan Guilfoyle (Newpark Music Centre, Dublin).

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wom 47, 2005-2

Notation, Transcription, Visual Representation


Editor:Max-Peter Baumann
Co-Editor: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Guest Editor: Marin Marian-Bălaşa

ISSN 0043-8774


Articles:

Marin Marian-Bălaşa
Who Actually Needs Transcription? Notes on the Modern Rise of a Method and the Postmodern Fall of an Ideology

Rytis Ambrazevičius
The Perception and Transcription of the Scale Reconsidered: Several Lithuanian CasesTriinu Ojamaa

Triinu Ojamaa
Throat Rasping: Problems of Visualisation

Regine Allgayer-Kaufmann
From the Innocent to the Exploring Eye: Transcription on the Defensive

Gerd Grupe
Notating African Music: Issues and Concepts

Wim van der Meer
Visions of Hindustani Music

Nicolas Magriel
Visualising North Indian Music: Looking at Khyål Songs

Frank Kouvenhoven
Transcribing "Time" in Chinese Non-measured Songs


Book Reviews (Tina K. Ramnarine, ed.)

Daniel Avorgbedor
Charry, Eric. Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa

Tong Soon Lee
Matusky, Patricia and Tan Sooi Beng. The Music of Malaysia: The Classical, Folk and Syncretic Traditions

Jonathan McIntosh
Stige, Brynjulf. Culture-Centered Music Therapy.

Katherine Butler Brown
Ruckert, George E. Music in North India: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture—Viswanathan, T and Allen, Matthew Harp. Music in South India: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture.


Recording Reviews (Gregory Barz, ed.)

Geoffrey Whittall
Masters of the Balafon: (1) Friend, Well Come! ; (2) The Joy of Youth; (3) The Wood and the Calabash. Produced by Hugo Zemp. Sélénium Film


Abstracts:

Who Actually Needs Transcription? Notes on the Modern Rise of a Method and the Postmodern Fall of an Ideology

Marin Marian-Bălaşa

This article surveys samples of theoretical contributions to the discussion of problems and developments of the major and basic ethnomusicological pillar that is transcription. It also summarizes issues raised at a recent meeting of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. Ideas and practices that are pro- and anti- "faithful" or microscopic transcription are analysed, and the possible pluses and minuses offered by computer programs mentioned. Yet, the major concern here revolves around the ignored aspect of ideology, and so this paper puts forward a critique which revisits and questions our view of transcription from the perspective of both its first grounds and multidirectional ultimate meanings. In the light of a postmodern critique, what was traditionally conceived and performed as open method is now tackled and discussed as covert ideology. In the end, the issue of transcription is revealed as one of the gates musicology and musicologists set up to act, unwarily but efficiently, as makers of specific politics—the politics of ethnomusicology—which is similar to other ideological and political processes.


The Perception and Transcription of the Scale Reconsidered: Several Lithuanian Cases

Rytis Ambrazevičius

The adequate transcription of musical scale can be quite problematic because of the biased perception of the scale. This is demonstrated by a thorough examination of the tunings of skudučiai (Lithuanian multipipe whistles) and the scales of Lithuanian traditional singing. Original “emic” scales are reconstructed on the basis of acoustic measurements: they show essential differences from the scales encoded in the conventional Western staff transcriptions, i.e., not only do the scales differ in microtones, but also the pitch classifications are completely dissimilar. The use of Hornbostel’s paradigm and its alternatives to visualize the specific features of scale are discussed.


Throat Rasping: Problems of Visualization

Triinu Ojamaa

This article discusses a particular vocal technique of the North Siberian Nganasan, called throat rasping, in reference to the specific sounds made. Such rasping sounds are used to imitate a bird or an animal. The problems analysed are: 1) what kind of additional information does visualisation provide to that obtained by ear; and 2) what are the techniques used by the performer to produce an intended timbre. The research process included different methodologies: audio-visual analysis of a dance; interviews with indigenous performers and with a professional singer with Western music education; spectral analysis of rasping sounds (programme Multi-Speech Model 3700, Version 2.5); and an experiment where an outsider imitated an insider. Since throat rasping is a musical artefact encountered only in the circumpolar region, and because it does not concur with the European concept of music, some musicologists consider throat rasping to be just extra musical sound. Scholars of Siberian music have tried to analyse rasping, because the tradition carriers themselves perceive this phenomenon as music. Research in this field has continued for decades, but only through listening-based study. While admitting the limited capacities of human ear, more would be expected from a computer analysis, which can expose deeper structures of the phenomenon examined. The current study, however, results in a conclusion that spectral analysis cannot actually provide any essential information in addition—it may only prove or disprove the impression already obtained.


From the Innocent to the Exploring Eye: Transcription on the Defensive

Regine Allgayer-Kaufmann

From the very first moment on Carl Stumpf and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel started to transcribe the music they received from all over the world. They followed the example of musical scores in Western music. Hornbostel believed in the possibility of faithful transcriptions, yet the myth of the innocent eye was not yet exposed as such. Only in the 1950s transcription came under the crossfire of criticism when a new generation of ethnomusicologists challenged—from an anthropological point of view—the usefulness of transcriptions. They argued against ethnocentrism, which in their opinion had shown up here as sound centrism. Anyway, there are still transcribing ethnomusicologists today. In this article we scrutinize closely three examples. Obviously there are many different systems used today analogous to the contents that have become manifold. Aside from this it turns out that ethnomusicologists today do not at all use their transcriptions for exploring, i.e. they do not explore with their eyes, instead, they explore with their ears and their body. The purpose of transcriptions has turned out to be mainly to communicate knowledge that was obtained by these other means. It is finally communicated by transcriptions to those, who give credit to such pictures because they do not have a possibility to experience it otherwise.


Notating African Music: Issues and Concepts

Gerd Grupe

Some 100 years ago Carl Stumpf and Erich M. von Hornbostel promoted what they called the phonographic method as the central means for studies of foreign musics. Transcriptions have been regarded as an indispensable prerequisite for any scholarly analysis of orally and aurally transmitted music ever since. In the light of claims that the visual domain might be an unnecessary or even inappropriate way of approaching music, it may be necessary to reassess the issue of why we need to visualize the music we study. By looking at musics from sub-Saharan Africa it can be demonstrated that listening alone is not always effective and reliable in understanding music: in many cases, for instance, there is a difference between played parts and the aural impression. In order to reconstruct this relationship some sort of notation is needed. Another case in point is the exploration of the motional dimension in African music particularly in respect to ‘patterned movement’ (John Baily) in instrumental playing. If we, therefore, cannot do without the visual representation of sounds, which notation system is suited best to our ends? What has become of Mantle Hood’s three possible solutions to this question? Are there specific traits in African musics which require special kinds of notation or is there any universally applicable system? In presenting two case studies, it will be shown that different purposes may call for different ways of representation, that more specialized systems may be more appropriate than Western staff notation in certain cases, and that a combination of notation and tablature may be advisable in order to account for specific structural aspects of some African musical idioms.


Visions of Hindustani Music

Wim van der Meer

There are many visual reflections of Indian music; in dance, painting and sculpture but also through writing, transcribing, graphing and mental imaging. What is being represented remains as obscure as the question what music itself represents. Musicologists have long believed that transcriptions were a key to representing, analysing and understanding music, in particular “other” music. Over the past decades computer imaging of music has taken a leap forward, showing that transcription is a very complex process of translation that not only crosses cultural but also sensory borders.


Visualising North Indian Music: Looking at Khyål Songs

Nicolas Magriel

Short songs in dialects of Hindi are the basis for improvisation in khyål, the principal genre of contemporary North Indian classical vocal music. Khyål songs are not defined by written representations, but are transmitted orally, committed to memory and re-created through performance. During the twentieth century several collections of khyål songs were published for pedagogical and archival purposes. This development was largely catalysed by the Independence movement and the widespread perception of a need to reclaim and consolidate India’s cultural identity. Songs which had been the closely guarded property of hereditary musicians were brought into the public domain. The written word and graphic representation gave a stamp of alleged authenticity to song compositions, despite their often being carelessly transcribed, shifting the locus of musical authority. Literate Hindu musicians have largely replaced the hereditary, predominantly Muslim, musicians who were the custodians of Hindustani music for centuries. Together with the linguist and Hindi scholar Lalita du Perron, the author is currently working on an Arts and Humanities Research Board-funded project, transcribing and analysing some four-hundred khyål songs culled from classic gramophone recordings from the period 1903-75. The present paper looks at some of the cultural history of transcription in North India, and addresses some of the musical issues arising from this ongoing effort to accurately and accessibly transcribe khyål songs.


Transcribing “Time” in Chinese Non-measured Songs

Frank Kouvenhoven

Music transcriptions in ethnomusicology become more and more “conceptual”: we stress schemata, recurring patterns and overall similarities in musical structures, we reduce complexities in notation, and try to connect the remaining simplified forms meaningfully with native or Western musical concepts and theories. In doing so, we may dismiss many surface details that are perhaps equally (if not more) instructive. A related problem is that transcriptions are too often regarded as “end products”, not as mere snapshots of dynamic and multi-faceted processes. A different picture arises if surface contours of musical pieces are screened in more detail, and over longer periods of time. The present article argues these points with reference to analyses of time organization in Chinese non-measured songs.

Content Summary & Abstracts