Three: Music and Dance

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IntrotoHUMN-AnthropologistandethnographrFrancesDensmore.docx

rsspencyclopedia-20170119-127-154072.jpgAnthropologist and ethnographr Frances Densmore, known for her studies of Native American culture and music, with Blackfoot Chief, Mountain Chief, during a 1916 recording session at the Smithsonian Institution. By Harris & Ewing [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commonsrsspencyclopedia-20170119-127-154073.jpgAmerican folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, in the 1940s, was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Ethnomusicologists may have backgrounds in a wide range of fields. They may have training in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, dance, folklore, gender studies, music, performance studies, and race or ethnic studies, among others. They examine music in terms of its significance as a social practice, its place in the global arena, and its historical context, and may explore music through fieldwork, such as observing and performing the music. Ethnomusicologists may engage in research or teaching, and may help to preserve and promote the music of a culture. Ethnomusicology may be practiced as part of the work of cultural organizations and festivals, museums, recording labels, and other institutions and organizations.

Background

The combined study of music and culture dates to the later nineteenth century and primarily was practiced in Europe and the United States. It was driven in part by scholars' interest in determining the origin of music. Scholars set European music apart from all other music. At that time, many researchers saw European music, specifically orchestral music, as the highest form, and all other music as still evolving.

A number of individuals sought to document folk songs and their meaning. A primary figure, Komitas Vardapet, was an Armenian composer born in Turkey in 1869. A talented singer, he was enrolled at the Etchmiadzin seminary at twelve years of age. The teenage student frequently visited the countryside, where he captured folk songs sung in villages using notation he learned at seminary. Vardapet collected sometimes dozens of folk songs in a day. He went further and composed three-part arrangements, then recruited classmates to form a choir and perform the songs. When he was listening to a girl in a village singing to her dead mother, he had a realization: The song, which the girl was creating spontaneously, spoke to a specific experience in her life and village that would not resonate in the same way in another place and for another people.

Vardapet studied in Europe, where he again formed choirs to perform Armenian music. He journeyed to Turkey in 1913 to gather more musical history. He was caught up in the Turkish campaign to kill and deport Armenians in what many countries recognize as the Armenian genocide. He was imprisoned and beaten. Although he survived, he suffered from what today is regarded as post-traumatic stress disorder, and he spent the remaining twenty years of his life in a facility for the mentally challenged. Scholars believe that the stress of losing much of his life's work, which was to preserve the legacy and culture of his people, was too much for him to bear.

Other experts were also working to study and classify music during the 1880s. Alexander J. Ellis, a British phonetician and physicist, developed a system that divides the octave into 1,200 equal units. This system allows researchers to compare scales from various cultures and led Ellis to document differences between cultures. This affected how researchers approached musical analysis in various societies.

In 1885, Guido Adler defined musicology, which he described as two fields: historical and systematic musicology. Historical musicology focuses on music's place in a timeline. Systematic musicology includes comparative study of music of non-Western cultures, which evolved into ethnomusicology during the 1950s.

Jesse Walter Fewkes was the first to use recording equipment in ethnomusicology fieldwork. He used Thomas Edison's cylinder phonographmachine to record Native Americans beginning in 1890. Many researchers who followed did little or no fieldwork, instead relying on recordings provided by others. By the 1950s, however, ethnomusicologists were expected to travel and make their observations firsthand. This emphasis on fieldwork contributed to more in-depth analysis of music that took social factors into consideration. Growth in the field prompted anthropologists Alan P. Merriam and David McAllester, and musicologists Willard Rhodes and Charles Seeger, to found the US-based Society for Ethnomusicology in 1955.

In 1964, Merriam published The Anthropology of Music, which remained influential in the field for decades. He defined the field and explored methods used by ethnomusicologists. Merriam incorporated data from his own fieldwork in Montana with the Flathead people and the Basongye of the Congo as examples.

Some of the work of anthropologists has enabled ethnomusicologists to group societies into cultural areas. Bruno Nettl, for example, created a Native North American music styles map. Merriam created an African musical cultures map. Such work allowed the study of ethnomusicology to be based on geographical units.

Overview

Many cultures do not have a word or idea comparable to the English word music. Performance and experience are simply woven into the fabric of life. Scholars have approached ethnomusicology from many perspectives, including cultural anthropology and music theory. Modern study has focused largely on music's place in everyday life and its function as a means of expression.

Anthropologists have taken several approaches to music, including viewing it as data that can further understanding of a culture, and as a part of a society's social life that should be explored. Around the start of the twentieth century, researchers studied the German diffusionist school, the Kulturkreis. This school theorizes a circular plane of influence that spreads outward from a central spot, like rings on the surface of a lake. They analyzed the music for elements that could be measured, such as pitch. This enabled scholars to track the influence of other cultures and provide evidence of contact between the peoples. As the field of ethnomusicology developed and expanded throughout the latter twentieth century, in many cases the field of anthropology pulled away from music study. A culture's music was included in data collected in the field, but it was not often analyzed or its place in the culture interpreted.

Ethnomusicologists may study music and culture from a variety of perspectives. Research may examine ethnicity and race, gender identities and roles, nationalism, power structures, social class, and the effects of popular music on traditional music. These areas of research increased significantly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With it grew commercial interest in world music, sparked in part by the success of figures such as reggae artist Bob Marley.

Research into what part music plays in a society has allowed ethnomusicologists to examine the functionalism of music. For example, some music may be associated with family life, healing, or political concerns. Many Native American songs sung by women marked life events, such as the onset of menses, and were rarely documented because they were never sung in public. Some studies found that functionality and aesthetics were closely related. The Navajo, for example, classified music as beautiful or good if it succeeded at its function, such as healing.

Some ethnomusicologists immerse themselves in the music. This may include learning to play instruments to better understand them and their place in a culture's history and life. The study of instruments, and their history and evolution, is a subcategory of ethnomusicology known as organology. This field seeks to understand how instruments initially developed and how they changed over time. Much of early European research in organology was focused on African instruments; scholars believed African instruments were more primitive, and examining them could help researchers better understand how European instruments developed. Many of these nineteenth-century researchers viewed African instruments as objects stuck at an early, primitive stage of development, rather than as fully formed items. Modern scholars recognize that this approach treated African music and instruments unfairly. It justified the distinction made between the study of European music separate from all other music.

Ethnomusicological findings may generate controversy. The akonting, a stringed instrument played by the Jola ethnic group in West Africa's Senegambian region, is the closest known instrument in Africa to the banjo, which is an American instrument. In 2000, Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta, a Gambian musician and scholar, and a colleague presented their research and conclusion that the akonting and the banjo share a historical relationship. Jatta was subjected to accusations that the work was fake and he was even threatened. Some researchers said he had fabricated the akonting itself because instruments of the region had been studied extensively, yet no scholars had documented the akonting. Jatta, however, had learned to play the instrument at a young age.

Banjo history until then held that the gourd banjo's origins were in the West African hoddu, ngoni, and xalam, which are similar to lutes. The playing style of these other instruments differs from the downstroke technique used with the akonting and banjo. Jatta's findings changed the origin of the banjo, which had been regarded as an American invention influenced by West African instruments. The akonting comparison placed the banjo's origin firmly in West Africa. While in its modern form it has changed considerably from its gourd-based origin, it remains an instrument that tied together a number of cultures, including slaves in the Caribbean, the American South, and Northern cities, where it was popular in minstrel shows. The banjo influenced American folk music. Although its deep connection to slavery led many people to obscure and deny its origins, Jatta and others rediscovered its history and rightful place in music. In light of these discoveries, some American roots musicians began playing the akonting, and some even traveled to the Gambia to learn.

Other studies involve how trade influenced the arts of various cultures. Multiple trade routes crisscrossed Asia, connecting northwestern China to the Caspian Sea region. The Silk Routes, for example, connected China, India, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the African continent, Greece, Rome, and Britain. Researchers who study the various musical styles of cultures in central Asia have found evidence of the influence of travelers. Many peoples share similar song structures or styles of melody, yet their music also remains distinctive. Some groups in isolated mountain areas, on the other hand, have musical styles that are unlike others in the region, and many perform using instruments that are unique to their communities. Some communities on the Silk Routes, a series of ancient trade routes, developed a cosmopolitan classical style. Researchers believe this music can be traced back to frequent contact with China during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Scholars have also found that the instruments used thousands of years ago were frequently adopted by other cultures along the Persian Royal Road, a trade route that dates to about 500 BCE.

In North America, researchers have found evidence that Native American musical traditions were influenced by the Inca and Aztec people. Inca songs were often historical, retelling traditional stories and history. Aztecs carved symbols onto some instruments that indicated who was permitted to play them and how, when, and where they could be played. On the East Coast of North America, a tradition of large ceremonial gatherings ensured music and other arts were shared widely. This cultural sharing continued with the arrival of European explorers and, later, the slave trade. Native Americans were introduced to new types of instruments including drums from Africa, which further influenced their music. As many accepted Christianity during the early nineteenth century, they began writing their own hymns and publishing hymnals. After the introduction of the fiddle, O'odham musicians in Tucson, Arizona, developed waila dance music, which was popular at public dances. It is recognized as traditional music. With the twentieth-century creation of a new collective celebration, the powwow, cross-cultural influence has continued. Modern powwows have faced some challenges to tradition. For example, drumming was performed by men only, and women were sometimes prohibited from even touching a drum. In the twenty-first century, however, women are challenging this role. Many have formed their own drum circles and are teaching younger women the tradition they call sitting at the drum.

Ethnomusicology research also focuses on modern adaptations of music in cultures. For example, many global conflicts emerged during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Musicians have responded with both patriotic and antiwar music.

Social issues have also prompted new music. People in Chile wrote about torture and arrests under dictatorship. Ecological and social welfare issues have inspired many songs in the twenty-first century, such as Liberian music about unsafe water and sanitation and the disease that breeds in such conditions.

Bibliography

"Anthropology of Music – Comparative Musicology and Ethnomusicology." Net Industries, science.jrank.org/pages/10331/Music-Anthropology-Comparative-Musicology-Ethnomusicology.html. Accessed 18 May 2017.

Church, Michael. "Komitas Vardapet, Forgotten Folk Hero." Guardian, 21 Apr. 2011, www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/21/komitas-vardapet-folk-music-armenia. Accessed 18 May 2017.

Dubois, Laurent. The Banjo: America's African Instrument. Harvard UP, 2016.

"In Our Own Voice." Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, www.folkways.si.edu/in-our-own-voice-songs-american-indian-women/music/article/smithsonian. Accessed 18 May 2017.

Linford, Scott V. "Historical Narratives of the Akonting and Banjo." Ethnomusicology Review, 27 July 2014, ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/content/akonting-history. Accessed 18 May 2017.

Merriam, Alan P. The Anthropology of Music. Northwestern UP, 1964.

"Music and Social Justice Resources Project." Society for Ethnomusicology, ethnomusicology.site-ym.com/page/Resources‗Social. Accessed 18 May 2017.

Post, Jennifer. Ethnomusicology: A Research and Information Guide. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2011, pp. 1–2.

"What Is Ethnomusicology?" Society for Ethnomusicology, www.ethnomusicology.org/?page=whatisethnomusicol. Accessed 18 May 2017.