Critical Review 6

In Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism, Kiri Miller traces the development of Sacred Harp singing and portrays its current manifestations.  Before the Revolutionary war, the singing school movement was briefly successful in New England but came under attack by the “better music movement.”  As shape-note singing was driven from the North, it was simultaneously spreading and flourishing in the South.  Its acceptance there was partly due to the prevalence of Baptist sects, some of which didn’t allow for instruments in church.  This early regional divide laid the foundation for shape-note singing as a distinctly Southern tradition which remains a key differentiator among members of the now national community of singers.  

The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844, was one of many shape-note books.  It eventually became the most popular, establishing itself in more and more conventions and churches in the South.  While such music was criticized in the early 1800s for “technical crudity and impiety,” scholars a century later praised the music, drawing on its “qualities of independence, individualism, egalitarianism, and primitive power.”  The practice took on many layers of significance which sustain its vitality to the present day.  It contributes to notions of regional identity, national pride, Protestant spirituality, and even democracy and rejection of conformism.  Today, Sacred Harp communities form in conventions held throughout the country.  Its members identify with the music through multiple modalities: historical, ethnic, philosophical, American, regional, musical, and spiritual, to name a few.

Can a white Sacred Harp singer embrace and identify with this music as a white tradition without being considered racist in a now fervently egalitarian community?

Challenge Questions

Discuss ways in which ethnomusicology is identified with Western music and Western music scholarship.  Do these connections fundamentally subvert attempts to understand other music cultures?  On the other hand, do they complicate attempts to look inward at Western music from a sociological perspective?

What non-music disciplines have contributed to the development of modern-day ethnomusicology?  Would there be any advantages to placing the study of ethnomusicology in a non-music university department?

Interview Transcript with Lex Rofes

A: Let’s talk about how the music and the service relates to the community and what some of the features of the music are where it comes from.

L: This is really good ‘cause for a lot of people there music is the service.  They don’t care about God, a lot of people just go to sing.  I can’t say it’s unique to Judaism, and really it’s not unique to Judaism, it’s unique to this specific type of Judaism.  Other Jewish services have chanting but there’s not that many people who go for that.

…

So you caught an interesting one.  So music in Havurah is so core, so central.  When we describe what makes Havurah Havurah compared to the other services, it’s the fact that we sing, it’s the fact that there’s harmony, it’s the fact that there’s drumming.  Music is everything.  One thing that’s interesting is that the music, while it’s the central component for everybody, it can be divisive because the problem is you’ve got these different ideologies in the room—you’ve got the people who want to have familiar songs, so they’d rather have the same songs, the same melodies every week—I shouldn’t say songs, they’re prayers—so that it’s consistent, so they know what they’re coming into and I think that’s valid.  And that’s a few people.  You’ve got a few people who desperately want to switch it up and feel that if you stagnate with a melody, it loses its spirituality and you sort of autopilot.  I’m one of those.   You saw me, I threw in some English readings and some of the melodies I did were very much not the ones we usually do.

A: I noticed the computer science doctoral candidate put in a new melody and it seemed like nobody knew it, so he ended up singing it by himself.

L: Yeah, every once in a while that happens.  One thing that’s important to remember, because people are there for the music, sometimes people forget—Ben wasn’t one of them, Ben was the computer science guy—sometimes people forget that people want this to be a service.  If you know a melody really well and you’re a great singer, in a lot of communities or situations, you just singing that would be good.  But because Havurah is all about participation and communal singing, when that happens, the vibe in the room goes down.  You saw some highs and some lows and there are some weeks when it’s just perfect.  Ben was lucky in that Ben was leading the second part of the service which, for whatever reason, we don’t make as musical as the first half.  We could, but—

A: Is the second half after everyone goes around the circle and introduces themselves?

L:  Yeah, so the second half is Maariv, but—nobody ever decided this, but the community culture is that you do it more straight laced, more how a typical conservative synagogue would do it.  And a lot of people there leave before Maariv.  Which reflects why people are there in the first place.  I don’t really care whether people come, go, whatever, because it’s all about people connecting to Judaism in whatever way works for them.  But the fact that you have six, seven people leave after Kabbalat Shabbat which is the sing songy one—those were the people that were there to sing!  Maariv is traditionally “the service” and Kabbalat Shabbat is like the warm-up.

A:  So they’re skipping the core of the actual service because they see the core of it as being the musical part.

L:  Exactly!  Which to me is beautiful; it’s a reflection of Brown.

Critical Review 5

In “Representing African Music”, Kofi Agawu critiques attempts at postcolonial representation of African music.  He warns that “the [greatest] danger lies in denying that politics plays a role in the construction of knowledge about African music.”  Ethnographies tend to homogenize this music as though it is a single, coherent entity.  Studies also tend to treat the music as incomprehensible, mysterious, and requiring new methods of annotation.  This research has always focused on rhythm, exalting the African rhythmic sensibility and its connection to the dancing and traditions of the “primitive native.”  In doing so, scholars such as Koetting are forced to “undercomplicate” Western rhythm.   And by treating African music-cultures as foreign treasures to be uncovered, ethnographers rob the music of any claim to universality or commonality with Western music and do the music a disservice by considering it unworthy of critique.  Furthermore, they fail to empower Africans to consider their own music from a critical and ethnomusicological perspective.

Agawu writes “A postcolonial transcription, then, is not one that imprisons itself in an ostensibly ‘African’ field of discourse but one that insists on playing in the premier league, on the master’s ground, and in the North.”  Is it only possible to pay African musics their due respect by bringing them into the Western conversation?  Or is it better to let them exist separately and attempt to understand them on their own terms?

Critical Review 4

In Heartland Excursions, Bruno Nettl’s asks his readers to consider Western classical music and the culture surrounding it from the etic perspective of a visiting extraterrestrial.  Nettl does a superb job portraying our familiar Orwig culture as a curious, foreign entity replete with religious symbolism, conformity, dualistic notions, and deification of musical figures.  In particular, the chapter brings attention to our treatment of the great composers as if they were still alive.  These figures are the sources of our sacred texts and are viewed much like Greco-Roman gods, both in their divinely inspired genius and in their immortalized personalities which we view as representative of their art.  Continuing the religious analogy, Nettle notes how we sanctify spaces, designate uniforms and power structures, interpret our holy texts, and exalt our class of priests (performers and musicologists) who interpret and “authentically” transmit the canon in services with consistent programmatic elements.

Notation is central to the Western music tradition, seeming to lift music out of the domain of ordinary folk tunes into the realm of “art music.” 

~ What has contributed to the decline of classical improvisation since the 19^th century and how can the Western music tradition and culture reclaim it?

~ What place can classical improvisation have in a tradition that is so focused on an established, notated repertoire?

~ Does the recording of music from improvisational music traditions help even the playing field and legitimize music that is transmitted aurally or through less comprehensive notational methods?