Chapter 3
FIELD WORK
Having indicated something of the nature and scope of ethnomusicology
in Chapter 1, and having surveyed the most important of its published products
in Chapter 2, we are now ready to discuss the various activities of the
ethnomusicologist. Our order of procedure is that which the scholar himself
must normally pursue – from gathering the raw material through the work of
transcription and analysis to description of musical style and the study of
music in culture. Thus we begin with the most basic and logically the first of
these activities, field work.
Curt Sachs (1962:16) divides ethnomusicological research into two kinds
of work, field work and desk work. Field work denotes the gathering of
recordings and the first-hand experience of musical life in a particular human
culture, while desk work includes transcription, analysis, and the drawing of
conclusions. The distinction between these two kinds of work is shrinking.
Perhaps it should not be made in the first place, for as we shall see, a great
deal of the field work done by ethnomusicologists does actually require the use
of a writing table and of the kind of seclusion implied by the term desk work,
while the desk work is increasingly done as part of a field trip. Possibly the
distinction came about at a time when the ethnomusicologist himself rarely went
into the "field," leaving this to be done by a professional
anthropologist who brought home material for the music specialist to work with at
his desk.
Evidently it was once thought that field work is simply the gathering
of raw material, done with a recording machine by a person who need know little
more than how to switch on a recorder. It was an essential but hardly dignified
portion of the ethnomusicological operation. But increasingly it has been
recognized that much can be gained if the ethnomusicologist himself goes into
the field, and failing that, if the ethnological field worker can learn what he
needs to do in order to provide the music specialist with really useful material.
Just what is this “field” which the ethnomusicologist is to visit? In
the days of idealized tribal life, we may presume that the field worker found
out, by reading and here say, the location of a tribe, and that he went there
by whatever means of transportation was available and then found his tribe,
neatly clustered in its group of villages, untouched by any contact with the
evil West and its conventional music; he made friends, asked them to sing and
play, and turned on his recording machine. After his friends had assured him
that they had sung all they knew, he folded up his materials and went home
again, his field trip completed.
Unfortunately, it rarely works this way. The ethnomusicologist's
“field” is a complicated situation, with more evidence of mixture with other
cultures than of an ancient, undisturbed cultural lineage. It may consist of
individuals unwilling or unable to sing, of inhibition, ignorance, and
technical difficulty, and deception by commercialism. On the other hand, if the
ethnomusicologist considers himself the student of music in all cultures, his
“field” may also be his own environment, and he is part of it. Thus the concept
“field work” includes more than just a rather standardized visit to a primitive
village.
Because the world's cultures are complicated and because musical life
in the world consists of many different kinds of phenomena, the student's
approach to field work must be careful and circumspect. He must prepare
himself, and he must have some ideas of what he will do, even if on arrival he
may change these ideas. With the amount of emphasis placed by recent scholars
on the quality of field work (see Merriam 1960:110-11), one would think that a
great deal of literature regarding the methods to be followed and the pitfalls
to be avoided would have appeared. Actually there are few such guides, perhaps because
ethnomusicological field work, in addition to being a scientific type of
activity, is also an art. It involves the establishment of personal
relationships between the investigator and the people whose music he wishes to
record and whose thoughts about music he wishes to uncover, and such
relationships cannot be built by resorting to written instructions. It might seem
advisable, therefore, to urge students to go into the field and to do the best
they can, without further outuning their behavior for them. But this would
probably yield, for most students, rather poor results. Let us instead outline
the kinds of field work which have been and can be done in ethnomusicology, the
kinds of things which should be observed and gathered, and let us indicate some
tools – technical and intellectual – which may be of help.
These directions should be taken as hints; no outline or how-to-do-it
guide can be given for this most personalized aspect of ethnomusicological
research.
The usual assumption is that the ethnomusicological field worker will
bring back from a trip some physical material recordings, and perhaps notes. In
one type of field work, however, the most important product of the work will
not be a physical record but the field worker's ability and knowledge in the
musical culture which he is visiting. This kind of product is envisioned in the
type of ethnomusicological work which has the development of bimusicality as
its immediate goal. The individual who wishes to learn to be a competent musician
in another culture must ordinarily approach his field work in a way quite
different from that of the anthropological field worker who wants to develop a
high degree of insight without going native. And it is the work of the latter
type of field investigator which we shall discuss on the following pages.
Some components of field work are the same in every type of culture,
but in practice there have been great differences in the approaches taken
toward folk cultures, non-literate cultures, and Asian high cultures – to say
nothing of the approaches to field work in the realm of Western cultivated
music. It would seem that the ideal of a field worker is to learn all (or as much
as possible) about all musical aspects (or as many aspects as possible) of a
culture.
This ideal is clearly beyond our reach, and thus it is necessary to
limit the projected work. It is probably easier to come close to the ideal in a
tribal community than in a folk or a high culture. Thus the ethnomusicologist
who spends one or two years with an Indian tribe stands a better chance of
learning something about all phases of musical culture than the student of, say,
Japanese music or Spanish folk music.
It may be proper to say that limitation of field work in a tribal
culture is mainly geographical and demographic; the area to be investigated is
small, and so is the population.
Even so, only the luckiest of field workers can say, after spending a
year with a small tribal community, that he has recorded samples of all types
of music, has made observations on all types of musical behavior, and, in a
word, has completed the musical research which can be done on that tribe at
that time. In a Western folk culture the chances of accomplishing such exhaustive
coverage are much smaller, because the culture usually contains more communities,
individuals, and contacts with other cultures. Only in a few cases, then, would
field projects without some kind of prepared limitation seem advisable. There
are proponents of a school of thought according to which the best approach is
simply to turn on the tape recorder and bring home whatever sounds occur; but
the chance of providing good cultural background information with such an
approach is not great, nor is that of providing a meaningful collection of
recordings which represents some phase of culture. On the other hand, it is not
especially advisable to come into the field with preconceived ideas of what
kind of recordings one will make, and what kinds of songs will be available.
Thus, the student of old British ballads who tries to collect such material in
Newfoundland would find some appropriate songs, but he would perhaps be
disappointed; and if he were determined to record only old English ballads he
would be missing a vast treasure house of sea shanties and Irish songs. Thus, while
a collector should have some kind of program for his work, he should not allow
it to blind him to unexpected kinds of material with which he could also
concern himself.
Types of Field Trips
The most common kind of field trip is that which has as its goal the
making of a general sampling of a community’s musical culture. Usually – in
tribal cultures – this can be extended beyond a single community, possibly to
the entire area inhabited by the tribe. The general sampling approach is
manifested in the publications of Frances Densmore, who followed it in her work
with some twenty tribes. Thus, Densmore’s study of Teton Dakota music (1918) includes,
according to her table of contents, songs of ceremonies, old ceremonial songs, songs
collected with dreams or visions, songs belonging to societies, modern war
songs, council and chief songs, dance songs, game songs, children's songs, love
songs, and honoring songs. Of course, some categories of music are not included
(no Ghost Dance, Peyote, or flute songs), but the majority seem to be
represented. To some extent, Densmore also collected material involving the
role of music in the culture, but this was done in a manner more incidental to
the recording than as an object in itself.
An overview of the role of music in culture is given in McAllester's
study of the Navaho Enemy Way ceremony (1954). Here, although the musical
examples given are taken from only one Navaho ceremony, a considerable portion
of the monograph is devoted to a study of Navaho cultural values as expressed
in music, indicating that the latter aspect was stressed in McAllester's field
work. We can imagine field trips in which a general treatment of one of several
phases of musical life is sought – the musical material itself, the role of
music in the culture, or musical instruments.
But except for investigations in which only recordings are sought, such
sectional overviews seem to be rare, judging from the extant literature. It is
more common to find investigators trying to limit their activities by the type
of music or informant they work with.
The opposite of the cultural overview approach is one in which the
entire musical repertory, or perhaps the entire musical experience, of one
individual is collected. Many field workers who attempted to collect a sampling
from an entire tribe or an entire folk community found that their mainstay was
a single informant – a player or a singer. But few have consciously gone into
the field with the purpose of using one informant as their unit of work, without
concerning themselves with other members of the culture except to find out more
about the one main informant. In anthropology, the idea of learning about a
culture from detailed autobiographical data of individuals has long been valued
(see Lowie 1937:135); capturing the musical biography of an individual through
his reminiscences as well as through recording his musical content, as it were,
has been followed occasionally Schijisrring (1956) provides an example of such
an approach, though it did not (and perhaps no such study can) result from only
a single field trip. Parenthetically, recording the musical biographies of ordinary
individuals in Western culture would seem to be one way in which
ethnomusicology methods could be applied to Western civilization to find
information which conventional musicology has not made available.
Sachs (1962) – and everyone writing about the subject – stresses the
importance of prolonged contact with members of another culture. To say that
the purposes of ethnomusicology cannot be accomplished by tourist-like visits
is unexceptionable. But there are types of field work for which short visits,
particularly series of short visits, are very useful. For example, in studying
the material of one informant, it would seem useful, after a prolonged visit,
to visit the individual repeatedly, first in order to collect material which
may have slipped his memory on the first occasion, and second, in order to
observe the changes which may, over the years, have been imposed on this repertory
and style of performance. There have been cases in which the informants of deceased
or retired field workers were revisited by younger scholars, with most
interesting results.
Concentration on special aspects of a musical culture is characteristic
of relatively short field trips, of investigations in the music of high
cultures, and of trips following an initial, general investigation. For
example, one might undertake a trip simply to record the songs of children or
of women; or to investigate a specific instrument and the people who play it
(this has been done, for instance, for the Guatemalan marimba and its
marimberos). Or one might investigate the music of one ceremony, as was done by
McAllester for the Peyote songs of the Comanche.
While a great many field trips have been undertaken for the study of
one branch of a culture's music, and while this kind of limitation seems to be
advisable, we should mention another type of selective collecting which, while
on the surface it may be similar to the kind of trip just described, is really
of a different nature and may result in the defeat of the field worker. This is
the kind of investigation in which one type of material is selected from among others,
but the difference between it and the culture's other material is evident only
to the collector, not to the members of the community which provides the
informants.
An example is the search for "old" material. While most
non-literate cultures have been, in recent years, influenced by either the
Western or another high civilization, and while the process known as
acculturation is very much in evidence in most areas of the world, some collectors
have tried to segregate the material which existed in a tribe before
acculturation took place. Some cultures recognize the distinction between this
"old" material and the new, which was created under the influence of
other cultures, but others ignore it. To ask informants for old material may
not provide results, and to disparage the new material, which to an informant
may seem much superior compared to the old, may cause problems in the
investigator's personal relations with his informants. Moreover, a field worker
may, contrary to his own beliefs, not be in a position to identify the old
material, and certainly in imposing his own distinction – pre-acculturated
versus acculturated – he may be doing violence to or ignoring the distinctions
which exist in the culture itself.
The kind of selective field work not based on the informant's own
criteria of distinction has been practiced in great quantity by collectors of
the folk music of Western cultures. Many collectors, who have been termed the
"purists" of the profession, have urged their informants to avold
giving them songs whose composers are known, or songs which were brought from urban
sources, etc. In British-American collecting, the search for ballads in
contrast to other song types has led to a curious confusion (see Wilgus
1959:167-73). Informants cannot define ballads, and even scholars cannot do
this easily. Thus, within the ballad "canon," particularly that of
James Francis Child, are some songs which can only by a stretch of the imagination
be considered ballads, while similar ballad-like songs languish outside the
select circle. Going about the countryside collecting only the Child ballads
and searching for informants of whom it is said that they know versions of
"Lord Randall" or the much soughtafter "Edward" is
exciting, but does not tell us much about the folk music culture of the rural United
States, nor about the musical idiolect of individual informants. Thus, while
vast numbers of Child ballad versions have been recorded and published, we know
very little about the other songs in these singers' repertories, or about their
thoughts on music and folk song.
There are two types of collecting which are done under circumstances
different from the conventional "field trip." One involves the ethnomusicological
investigation of the scholar's own surroundings, either the folk culture which
exists in the country-side neighboring his academic institution or the ethnic
groups which populate his city. Such work – in which the scholar lives, as it
were, right next to his field – can produce excellent results, although it has
not been carried out in large volume. Some European scholars whose academies
are located in small towns have maintained constant contact with informants
over a period of years. Others make regular vacation visits to the villages and
are accepted by their informants as a part of life. A folklore project (which
included folk song) carried out at Indiana University in 1960 involved a series
of short trips to informants in Brown County, twenty miles from the campus.
Work of this sort is especially recommended to students before undertaking more
extensive field trips.
Field work in which the field is part of the workers regular and more
or less constant environment is involved in a study of the investigator’s own
culture. Little has been done in this newest branch of ethnomusicology, and
many would surely deny that investigation of one’s own culture is
ethnomusicology at all, since the idea of comparing other cultures and styles
with one’s own, and the principle that one can be more objective about other
cultures than about one’s own, are important fundamentals of our field. But
native students of nonWestern music have been accepted as ethnomusicologists
for some time by their Western colleagues and their work has frequently been of
great value.
Even in the nineteenth century, Franz Boas (Lowie 1937: 135)
experimented with American Indians, whom he trained in anthropological method
and theory, and who gave important and objective accounts of their native
cultures. Accepting the descriptions of Japanese scholars, such as Shigeo
Kishibe, of Japanese music, or the studies of West African tribal music by
African scholars, such as J. H. Kwabena Nketia, has become perfectly acceptable
to Western ethnomusicologists. Indeed, Nketia (1962) seems to believe that the outsider,
i.e., Westerner, does not have as good a chance of bringing out the essentials
of a musical culture as a trained, native, insider. If this is the case there
certainly does not seem to be any reason why a Western ethnomusicologist should
not make a field investigation of his own surroundings. In doing this he must,
of course, maintain the same standards and safeguards which he would have to
accept if he were working in another culture. He must be critical of his own
observations, make complete records of his findings, and preserve (in his own
thinking) the distinction between himself as investigator and his neighbors as
informants.
A second way of collecting which does not involve field trips is
collecting by mail. This practice has limited value in a group of folk
cultures, and probably has no value at all unless reinforced by real field
work. But some important collections have been made partly through the mail, so
that this approach is worth a brief commentary.
Folklore societies and academic institutions have from time to time
sponsored collecting projects by mail. Individual scholars who are widely known
to the general public are also in a position to do such collecting. The
procedure is simply to publicize the fact that material of a certain nature is
desired – folk songs in general, ballads, etc. Individuals who have such material
frequently respond with great enthusiasm. Of course it is difficult to find out
whether the material thus collected is in oral tradition, whether, in some
cases, it is not copied directly from published sources, or whether it was
written down by a relative of the correspondent but is known to the
correspondent only in writing, etc. The famous American collector Vance Randolph
received some material in this fashion, as did Frank C. Brown, who amassed a
vast quantity of North Carolina material. Collecting only by mail is probably
not advisable. In the case of music, few of those who write in giving material
are competent transcribers, and while they may write in the appropriate words,
the melody may be taken from a book.
Informants by mail may get local musicians, music teachers, etc., to
transcribe tunes from their singing, but such musicians may not be competent to
transcribe for ethnomusicological research. Collecting by mail may, however,
serve as an approach to informants who might otherwise be hard to locate in a
community of thousands. Visiting the informants after they have indicated by
letter that they know material would seem the wisest solution, and the collector
who is interested in finding versions of one particular song, say of the ballad
"Edward," or of certain types of instrumental music, may find that
the initial approach by mail or through radio or television may be the most
comprehensive. On the other hand, published collections which contain a great
deal of material sent by mail are probably useful mainly insofar as they indicate
the types of songs available rather than in the accuracy with which the
versions are reproduced.
A combination of laboratory and field conditions exists when informants
are brought from their homes to the ethnomusicologist's recording laboratory.
Under such circumstances, it is often possible to get more of an informant's
time and attention for recording, and there is greater opportunity for
re-recording, eliciting of special kinds of information and music, discussion
of musical terms and ideas, possibly with the use of other informants'
recordings, etc. On the other hand, bringing an informant to the laboratory has
the disadvantages of making him perform under unaccustomed conditions, of
failing to have available the kinds of instruments required and the correct
kinds and numbers of performers, and of making him perform materials which he
might, at home, not normally sing or play. Again, it would seem that
investigation of this sort is most effective when combined with actual field
work; it might, for example, be useful to bring to the laboratory some of the
best informants a year or two after their community had been visited by a
collector. Some of the most important archives, however, have been built to a
substantial degree with materials collected in the laboratory; this is true
mostly of folk music archives, and includes the Archive of Folk Song in the
Library of Congress.
As we have seen, there is great variety in the approaches to field work
and in the types of field investigations which can be carried out in
ethnomusicology. We should mention briefly also the approach which takes a
single village as its unit, with all of the complexities that the musical life
of a community can present; an example is the work of Brailoiu (1960). We should
also mention the general ethnographic field trips of anthropologists who gather
information on musical culture and instruments without recording any music on tape.
Some Suggestions for Field Work
Our next paragraphs attempt to discuss some of the essential
information which nonmusicological anthropologists can bring home about music, and
what kinds of recordings can best serve the desk-working ethnomusicologist.
Needless to say, it is impossible to guide the field work of any individual
without knowing in detail the culture which he will study. The following
paragraphs, then, give the kinds of information which, under ideal conditions,
would be desired for thorough ethnomusicological research.
1. General material on a musical culture.
Among the questions on music which could be answered by both a specialist and a
general ethnographer are the ones listed below; their general nature and their
place in this outline does not indicate, however, that their answers should be
sought first; on the contrary, it may be necessary to do more detailed work on
individual kinds of music, and the recording work itself, before the broader questions
can be broached.
(a) What is music?
Is there a word which encompasses all music? What is the purpose of music?
(b) What kinds of
music are there? What is singing used for?
(c) How is music
evaluated? Is there good and bad music? Is it possible to distinguish between
the quality of a song and the quality of the performance? What makes a good song?
And what makes a good singer or instrumentalist?
(d) Do all people
know songs? Who performs most of the music?
(e) Where did the
people's music come from? Does anyone make up songs? How are they made up?
(f) How are
individual compositions identified? Is the composer of a song remembered? Is there
a distinction between the words and music of a song? Do people know how the words
and the music separately came about? Do different people sing in different
ways?
(g) Does anyone own
a song? Who is allowed to learn songs? Are there certain songs which may be
sung only by certain individuals? Can one inherit or buy songs?
(h) How do people
learn songs? Do they rehearse? What happens when people make mistakes in
singing songs?
(i) Is there a way
of telling the old from the new music? Which is better?
(j) Does the
community have contact with the music of neighboring tribes or communities? Or
with Western popular or classical music? What do they think of it? Do they ever
learn songs from neighboring tribes? Can they tell the difference between these
kinds of music? How do they distinguish them? How do they react to songs sung
to them by the investigator, or played on a tape?
(k) Does anyone get
paid for making music? What are the names of the best singers and performers?
What are the names of the people who know the most songs?
(Many other
questions can emerge from these, of course. This section is not intended as a
questionnaire for informants, but rather for the investigator himself. Besides
these general kinds of questions about musical culture, the following more
specific aspects should be considered).
2. About each kind of music or the music in
each native category, the following information should be made available:
(a) Use and purpose
of the type of music. When may it be performed?
(b) Amount of
material; is there a set number of songs? Are all of the pieces of the group performed
on each occasion?
(c) Who may and who
may not perform this music?
(d) Does the culture
have a way of describing the style of this music and of distinguishing it from
its other styles?
(e) What individual
or individuals are the best performers of this music?
(f) In what other
ways is this music distinguished from the other kinds of music which are used
in this culture?
(g) Some of the
questions given in the above section, on the musical culture as a whole, should
also be used here.
3. About each informant, the following
information should be included:
(a) Name, age, sex.
Some general observations about personality and some biographical information.
(b) What kinds of
music or songs does he know? What kinds does he like best?
(c) What
instruments does he play?
(d) Does he make up
music? How does he go about it?
(e) Where does he
learn songs? Does he learn any from anyone outside his community? Does he ever
"dream" songs?
(f) How does he
remember songs? What does he use to help him? When he learns songs, does he
practice them? Does he change songs after he learns them? Can he sing songs in
a particular way as sung by other persons?
(g) The questions
under no.1 above, which apply to the culture at large, should in several cases
also be applied to individual informants. Indeed, the answers to those
questions are largely dependent on the answers to the questions about the
individual informants.
4. About each informant, but from persons
other than himself.
(a) Is he a good
musician? What makes him so?
(b) Does he do
anything different from other singers or players?
5. About each song or piece.
(a) Native
designation; and observer's designation, if different.
(b) Time and place
of recording. Speed of recording machine.
(c) Was music
performed especially for recording, or was recording made during an ordinary
performance?
(d) Name(s) of
performer(s). Number of performers per part, or numbers of instruments of each
type used.
(e) Was any special
eliciting technique used?
(f) Where was the
piece learned?
(g) Refer to other
recordings of the same composition made by the same or other investigator, if
known.
(h) If a song, what
are the words? These should be dictated in a spoken version to the investigator,
or recorded on tape, with translation. Can the informant tell anything about
the difference between the words as spoken and as sung?
(i) If the
instruments used have fixed pitch (such as xylophones, panpipes, wind instruments
with finger holes, etc.), indicate all possible pitches by having the informants
– if this is possible – play all of the notes of each instrument, in scale
form, on a recording.
(j) What does the
song mean to the informants? To the listeners? Is it a good song? Does one ever
perform it differently? Is the performance which was recorded a good one?
(k) What kind of
activity accompanied the performance? If a dance, detailed information is necessary,
and a sound film is ideal. Otherwise a description including notes on the steps,
gestures, costumes, etc., should be provided. Some knowledge of dance notation is
of great value to the ethnomusicologist as well as to the general ethnographer;
material on this subject is provided by Kurath (1960).
6. Musical instruments. (Detailed
information about instruments, whether they are used in recordings made by the
investigator or not, is highly essential.)
(a) What kinds of
instruments are there? Does the culture have a classification of them? Is there
any symbolism in the terminology?
(b) The linguistic
aspects of instruments' names should be investigated. Questions cannot be
listed here, but we refer the readers to studies in which the structure,
etymology, and cultural background of Haussa instruments are investigated. (See
Hause 1948).
(c) Name, general
description by ethnographer of each instrument.
(d) Photographs from
various sides of the instrument, with a ruler placed next to the instrument in
the picture, so that size can be easily ascertained.
(e) The tuning of
the instrument should be recorded.
(f) Do neighboring
cultures have similar instruments? What are their names for the instrument?
Where did the people being investigated learn to make it?
(g) How is the
instrument made? Here, if the investigator can watch the entire process of making
an instrument he may come upon valuable information. Otherwise, a detailed description
by an informant must suffice. Are there any special rituals involved? Why may
make such an instrument? To whom does it belong? How long will it last?
(h) Who may play the
instrument? Why? Who may hear it?
(i) How is it
played? Are there various styles of playing it? What makes for a good performance?
Who are the good performers on the instrument?
(j) Can it be
played with other instruments? With others of its kind? With singing?
(k) Who makes up
music for the instrument? Is it possible to improvise? Is there a set repertory?
Can one play on it any compositions which can also be sung, or played on other
instruments?
It is evident that a tremendous amount of information must be gathered
in order for a clear and detailed picture of even a simple musical culture to
emerge. Many aspects of a musical culture might escape scrutiny if this
questionnaire were the only means used for acquiring information; it is
intended only as a guide to the field worker, and as an indication to the
student of the kinds of material which are needed. Other information will also
be found, and many of the questions given here will probably not be answered in
any individual community. We have omitted completely the kinds of theoretical
questions one might ask of an informant in a high culture who is a trained musician.
The questions are most applicable, perhaps, to non-literate and folk cultures;
to an extent, however, they can also be applied to art music, especially if
directed toward informants who are not professional musicians. If an informant
is a professional musician, the investigator is perhaps better off in the role
of a pupil than of a questioner.
A very useful questionnaire which is directed to the informant, unlike
the one above, which is directed to the collector, was devised by David
McAllester (1954:91-92) for work with the Navaho. The use of a questionnaire
with informants certainly seems wise insofar as it allows the investigator to
control the questions and their order with each informant. If he is in a
culture whose members are not disturbed by this technique, or if he is not
dependent entirely on random conversation, such a questionnaire may be useful.
McAllester evidently found the questionnaire valuable even though "the
questionnaire itself broke down as far as any strict control over the interview
went.
Often several questions yet to come were answered in response to an
earlier question" (1954:91). But if a questionnaire is devised, it should
probably be formulated only after some contact with the culture has been
established. McAllester had indeed had previous field experience with the
Navaho, and directed the questionnaire specifically to them, so that the questions
would be relevant to their particular musical culture. Since few such questionnaires
have been published, it seems relevant to reproduce McAllester's.
QUESTIONNAIRE
FIRST LEVEL OF SPECIFICITY
1. Do you like to
sing? Why?
2. Some people
beat a drum when they sing; what other things are used like that?
3. What body
parts are used in singing?
SECOND LEVEL OF
SPECIFICITY
1. When and where
is a drum (rattle, etc. – whatever the informant has listed) used?
2. In what ways
may a drum (rattle, etc.) be beaten (sounded)?
3. How do you
feel when you hear a drum (rattle, etc.)?
4. How old are
children when they learn to use a drum (rattle, etc. )?
5. Is the drum
(rattle, etc.) beaten the same way now as in the old days?
6. What makes you
feel like singing? At what times?
7. Is there any
time when you are not supposed to sing? (When you do not feel like singing?)
8. How many
different kinds of songs are there?
9. Do these kinds
sound different from each other?
10. How do the
different kinds of songs make you feel when you hear them?
11. Are some kinds
of songs hard to learn and others easy?
12. How old were
you when you learned to sing? (How old were you when you could sing well?)
13. What did people
say when you learned to sing?
14. Do you know
some old songs that most people have forgotten?
15. Are there new
kinds of songs being sung today? (What do you think of them?)Bruno Nettl -
Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology 50
16. Are songs
changing now? (Why?)
17. What do you
think of American (Mexican) songs? (Why?)
18. Do you know any
of either? (Do you wish you did?)
19. Are there other
Navahos who do? (Are there any who did not go to school who do?)
20. Why do you
think they (nobody) learned them?
21. Are there
different ways of making the voice sound when we sing?
22. When do you use
these different ways? (If any were described)
23. Do people make
their voices sound in new ways nowadays? (What?)
24. What do you
think of the way American voices sound?
25. Are there any
Navahos who make their voices sound that way when they sing?
THIRD LEVEL OF
SPECIFICITY
1. Is there a
kind of singing besides ceremonial singing? (What is it?) Suggest: lullabies, gambling
songs, work songs, etc.
2. Is there a
difference between the way ceremonial songs and other songs sound?
3. Are there
ceremonial songs that can be used outside the ceremony?
4. Would you hear
the show-off way the young men sing in a ceremonial?
5. Do you have a
different feeling when you hear ceremonial songs and when you hear songs that
are not ceremonial?
6. Do you feel
differently about it when you hear a song in a ceremony and the same song outside
the ceremony?
7. Are there
special songs for working? Are there special songs for riding along? Are there special
songs that go with games?
8. Are there
songs people sing just to be funny?
9. Are there
dirty songs the Navahos sing? (What do you thing of them?)
10. Are there
special songs for good luck?
11. Are there songs
to make people stop what they are doing and behave better? (Songs for teasing
people?)
12. Are there songs
that make you feel happy?
13. Are there songs
that make you feel angry?
14. Did you ever
make up a song? (Was it a happy song? Sad? Angry?)
15. Here an
experiment in mood and music was introduced. I sang, without words, and with as
nearly identical facial and vocal expression as possible, two songs, "The
Happy Farmer,.. and "Pore Judd is Daid... Of course, the former is fast in
tempo and the latter is slow. Informants were asked to identify which was
supposed to be the happy song and which the sad one. They were then asked to
give their reasons).
16. Do you know any
songs about love?
17. What do you
think of American songs about this?
18. Are there songs
that are especially pretty?
19. What is it
about a song that makes it sound pretty?Bruno Nettl - Theory and Method in
Ethnomusicology 51
20. Are there songs
you think sound ugly? (Why?)
21. Can you say a
song is pretty the way you say a girl or a good rug or a bracelet is pretty?
22. What kind of
singing do you like better: (illustrate with narrow; and wide vibrato, plain and
nasal tone).
23. What kind of
melody do you like better: (illustrate with a chant like melody and a more varied
melody).
24. Are there songs
you like just because of the melody? (What is it about the melody that you
like?)
25. Are there songs
you like just because of the words? About the words that you like?)
26. Are there songs
for children only?
27. Are there songs
for men only?
28. Are there songs
for women only?
29. Are there songs
for old people only?
30. Is it a good
thing for you to know songs? (Why?)
31. Do you teach
songs to your children?
32. How do you
teach them?
33. Do you give
them something for learning songs?
34. Do you scold
them if they do not learn songs?
35. Did your
parents act like that with you?
36. How old are
children when they learn to sing?
37. Why do you want
children to learn to sing?
38. Do the children
around here sing? (What do they sing?)
Eliciting
The field worker who records music as it is performed in a ceremony, at
a dance, or otherwise in its normal cultural setting, has no problem in
eliciting music from his informants.
He needs only to switch on his recorder and let it absorb the music.
But the acoustic results are not often satisfactory in this procedure, and
while the field worker is urged to make recordings of the music as it is
actually performed in its context, it seems advisable also to make recordings
in which laboratory conditions of a sort are approximated in the field. After all,
the conditions for certain ceremonies may not be present at the time the
collector is in the field, but he may wish to record this material
nevertheless. Or a certain chant may be performed while the performers walk or
dance over a large amount of space, and the collector may not be able to follow
them with his microphone. Laboratory conditions can be approximated in a small
hut or house, and individual informants as well as groups can be recorded. This
kind of field work, however, requires the use of elicitation, and the degree of
refinement with which the collector elicits may have great bearing on the
substance of his collection. It behooves us, therefore, to discuss the problem
of eliciting.
The collector who is faced by an informant who is said to be able to
perform songs may be in the position of the adult who is asking his child to
sing for grandpa. The child knows the song, but he may be unwilling to sing it,
and even when he does finally sing, it is in a manner quite different from that
of his usual rendition. Thus it is necessary to make the informant feel at
ease, to give him confidence, to allow him to sing in his normal way, and to
recognize when he is not doing so. The collector may find, for example, that
the informant does not know how to begin. It may be necessary to jog his memory
or to stimulate it by mentioning types of songs. It may be necessary for the
collector to sing songs from his own culture for the informant, and to begin
swapping songs, as it were, so that the informant feels at ease. In some
cultures, financial reward for singing is very acceptable to informants; in
others it is a dishonor. Its use should be understood by collector and
informant.
A pitfall in eliciting is engendered by the collector's desire for a
certain type of material or for a certain song. Thus an informant may begin
singing, instead of Indian songs which show no influence of Western music, some
of the recent songs which have English words; or, instead of Child ballads,
versions of music hall songs. To show displeasure to an informant may mean to
seal a good source of material. Informants may frequently begin by singing recent
material even though they know older songs; and only gradually do they realize
that the collector is more interested in those older ones which otherwise stand
in disrepute with the informant's fellows. So, while a collector is probably
better off by limiting his project and thus searching for certain types of
material, he must be patient with his informants and accept whatever they have
to offer, guiding them without pressure, never arguing even when he knows that
an informant is misinformed. Anthropologists have long believed in the adage, "the
informant is always right”.
Some important information about musical cultures can be obtained by
re-recording material previously recorded. For example, the collector may wish
to record songs collected previously from other informants. In a typical
European or American folk culture, he can elicit such songs simply by referring
to their titles or first lines, or by giving the subject matter of the text. In
some cultures, however, there seems to be no specific way of referring to a musical
composition. Indeed, there may not be such a concept as a "piece" of
music, which is the basic unit in Western musical culture. In such cases,
eliciting songs may be problematic one solution is to play for the informant
some recordings of the same song as it was previously collected, or to sing
bits of the song for him, and then ask the informant to sing his own version of
the song. The results thus obtained are sometimes baffiing, for what the
informant considers variants of the same song may not at all be what the
collector expects; and informants may refer to two evidently similar songs as different
entities, while insisting that two obviously different tunes are really
versions of the same song. Nevertheless, eliciting with the use of recordings
or with singing may influence the informant unfavorably; he may believe that
versions of songs especially similar to those played are desired by the
collector, and he may omit others which exhibit greater degrees of variation.
A good way of eliciting is to bring together two or more informants and
to stimulate them to sing for each other, giving different versions of the same
song; this brings about renditions in which the informant sings for his
fellows, not for the collector. Re-recording and finding various versions of
one musical item makes possible studies of the degree of standardization in
musical performance, in the concept of musical units, of musical memory, of
communal re-creation, and of many other aspects of musical culture.
Eliciting can also be used to explore the difference between
significant and meaningless distinctions in a musical style, and the points at
which legitimate variation becomes unacceptable error. In matters of
intonation, for example, each culture presumably has a range within which
variation is tolerated. Even in Western civilization, in which exactitude of melodic
and harmonic intervals is stressed and an ideal of correct intonation exists in
theory, a great deal of variation in pitch is acceptable, but intervals outside
this range are said to be out of tune. This sort of distinction presumably also
exists in non-literate cultures, although the amount of permissible variation
may be greater.
Possibly the amount of pitch variation allowed correlates with the size
of the intervals, more exactness being required where the intervals are
smaller. At any rate, the study of such distinctions where a theoretical system
is absent can be approached behaviorally by ascertaining the actual pitches
used and the degree of variation present in the actual recordings. It may also
be studied (but with great difficulty and with a need for great care) by
inviting the informant's criticism of the collector's renditions of songs. One
can perhaps train the informant to be the collector's teacher. The collector
will sing back to the informant the songs which the latter has recorded, but
with mistakes intentionally inserted at controlled points. This may enable the
informant to state which mistakes, that is, which deviations from his own version
are acceptable to him. The technique is difficult to use, for it requires an
informant who is willing to be honest in evaluating the collector's
performance, and it requires a collector who is able to control his performance
adequately so that he can make mistakes only where and to the extent to which
he wishes to. This kind of technique has been used in linguistics, but only
rarely in ethnomusicology.
Special problems in eliciting appear when the musical structure is
complex, especially if a performance is by several singers, instruments, etc.
The collector may wish to clarify the structure for purposes of analysis and
transcription by allowing his recording machine to do some of the preliminary
analysis or breaking down of the complexities into their components.
For example, it is almost impossible to transcribe a record on which
several xylophones of equal size are playing together if one does not know the
number of xylophones. Even when the number and size of the instruments is
known, it is extremely difficult to notate what each individual one is playing.
It may be possible to reproduce the over-all acoustic impression, but this may
be misleading. Thus it is possible that the melodic line is performed not by
one of the instruments – with the others accompanying – but by all of them,
alternately, in hocket technique, that is, each performing only one tone and
playing only when it is time for that tone to be heard. The collector can try
to move his microphone near each of the players in repeated renditions, or in a
piece which consists of many repetitions of a short bit of music.
This is likely to produce recorded material which has at least a good
chance of being authentic, i.e., performed as it would be were the collector
not present. The acoustic results may not be as satisfactory for the
transcriber, because there will still be the background of the other instruments,
which are not being featured in the recording at hand, to confuse him.
Moreover, in some cultures it might be difficult to record three renditions
of a piece of music, each with the microphone near a different performer, which
are close enough to identical to be used as individual parts of a single
composition. An acoustically better rendition, but one more difficult to obtain
and less reliable in terms of authenticity, can be produced by asking each
performer separately to perform his own part. Many singers and instrumentalists
in non Western and folk cultures cannot do this because they are so accustomed
to performing only as participants. Even if they can perform their own parts
individually, they may not be able to do so in a way which is close to
identical with the way they would perform in ensemble. But either of these ways
of eliciting parts is desirable in a collection, if recordings of the entire ensemble
performing the same music are also made. Besides being a help to the
transcriber, they may provide clues to the culture's musical thinking.
Finally, in the area of eliciting, we should mention the practice of
recording without the informant's knowledge or consent. This is not
recommended. In some cultures, for example, it is believed that a song taught
to another person represents loss or harm to the song owner's soul; recording
seems to be viewed similarly in such cultures. In a more rationalistic setting,
members of a community may wish to discuss with a chief or elder the
advisability of recording for a field worker, and these wishes should be
respected. Throughout, dealings with informants must be honest, and what they
do not understand must be patiently explained.
Communities and prize informants have been rendered silent by the
improper or unfair treatment accorded them by certain field workers.
Simple Collecting versus Comprehensive Field Work In ethnomusicological
thinking there seem to be two main approaches to field work.
One stresses the concept of collecting, the other that of experience
with a whole musical culture. Collecting, as such, implies an emphasis on the
musical works which are collected and brought back to the laboratory. The kind
of thinking which engenders the “collecting” concept may also be concerned with
the informants as members of a culture, and with the role of music in culture,
but it need not be. The basic notion of a collector is to find music previously
not found and to hold on to it. His attitude implies the existence, in the
world, of a limited corpus of tribes and communities, or, more frequently, of
songs and pieces, and his job is to collect as many of them as possible. He is
interested in organizing his work so that it will contain as large a proportion
of the limited corpus as possible, and he feels strongly the preservative role
of the field worker. He is most interested in older material, and he realizes that
many musical items will either disappear or change greatly almost before his
eyes if he does not make recordings of them. This type of field worker is
mainly found in the area of folk music, although the Asian high cultures and
the non-literate cultures also provide a field for him.
The other approach emphasizes music as behavior. The field worker still
collects songs and is aware of his importance as a preserver. But he also
believes that the world's musical corpus is not limited, that music is
constantly being created, and that the chances of making exhaustive collections
is small. He is more interested in observing all of the musical phenomena in a
given environment.
In these two approaches we can find embodied the two main purposes of
field work: the preservation of a cultural heritage before it changes, and the
observation of cultural forces whether they remain constant or change. The
second of these approaches is much more recent and has not produced a great
volume of collectanea. Techniques for studying musical culture are not well
developed, and at any rate they are bound to be more complex than those which
involve merely collecting. The preservative approach to field work, on the
other hand, has yielded vast collections of folk song, as well as of the music
of certain non-literate cultures such as the North American Indians and some of
the tribes of southern Africa. Theory and method for this approach is to a
great extent dependent on the discipline of folklore, which has always
emphasized the collecting aspect of field work, and which – in contrast to
ethnomusicology – has a body of literature on collecting. Among the most interesting
readings about the collecting of folklore is the first of Four Symposia on
Folklore (Thompson 1953). Here the problems of European, American, and some
Asian collectors are frankly and informally discussed, and the special devices
which some of them have developed for dealing with informants, eliciting, and
assuring even and exhaustive coverage, are stated and criticized. Most evident
in this symposium is the emphasis on collecting, on finding the artifacts
rather than on observing a culture and one of its aspects in action. The idea
of mapping a geographical area to be covered, of collecting systematically from
all informants, village by village or block by block, is extensively discussed
as a desideratum; again, such coverage has been given only in the field of
European folk music, and there only in a few isolated areas. During the last
decade, collectors in Hungary, Romania, and some other East European areas have
been collecting in teams in order to cover their nations quickly and comprehensively,
largely with the idea of preserving the materials rather than studying them in
their settings. In some of these nations, ethnomusicological field work has
become a government concern. Where this is not the case, the organization of
field work and systematic collecting has not usually been possible. On the
other hand, the entry of government agencies into the collecting activity may
tend to be detrimental to the product which is collected and to the attitude of
the informants, especially if the government is interested for reasons other
than scholarly ones.
Equipment for Collecting
The recording equipment which ethnomusicologists have used has usually
lagged, by a few years, behind the products developed for commercial recording
firms. For example, in the 1920's, when cylinders were no longer used
commercially, some folk music collectors were still using them; in the early
1950's, when wire recording was no longer generally used, collectors were still
depositing wire recordings in ethnomusicological archives. But on the whole,
the history of field recording devices follows that of recording in general.
Recommending equipment to the collector is difficult at a time when new
products are constantly being placed on the market. At the time of writing, and
for some years no doubt, tape recording will be the most efficient. Recording
on disks is cumbersome and both fidelity and durability are lower. Some
scholars still prefer transcribing from disk to using tape, and a good
ethnomusicological laboratory should have equipment for cutting disks; but for
most transcribers, tape has proved to be a great boon because of the ease of
locating spots by means of the measuring device on most recorders, and because
repeated playing does not harm the fidelity.
Wire recordings have advantages over disks, but they have lower
fidelity than either disks or tapes and are most useful for conversation. The
advantage of wire over disk is the greater length of recording time available
for recording before changing the supply of the medium. While it is difficult
to list specific tape recorder brands which are most useful, partly because
such a list would be outdated very quickly, it seems desirable to list some of
the requirements which an ethnomusicological field worker would place on his
equipment; knowledge of these requirements will make selection of equipment
easy. A detailed discussion of such requirements appears in Merriam 1954; and
while this discussion is a decade old, it is still almost completely relevant.
The speed at which the recorder feeds the tape is important. There are
recorders which feed tape as slowly as 1 7/8 inches per second, but this speed
is usually not satisfactory, so far as the fidelity of the reproduction is
concerned, for music recording. For speech and perhaps for monophonic music 3 ¾
inches per second is satisfactory, but not for more complex material. Probably
the most satisfactory service is given by tape running at 7 ½ inches per
second. Large tape recorders, used in professional recording laboratories, are sometimes
geared to 15 inches per second, but this speed usually consumes the tape too quickly
for economy. Two-speed recorders are common, and it seems advisable to use a machine
which feeds tape at 3 ¾ and 7 ½ inches per second.
Merriam (1954:6) emphasizes the importance in field work of getting a
recorder whichBruno Nettl - Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology 56 is simple
to operate and to set up. Frequently it is necessary to prepare for recording
very quickly, and the simpler a machine is, the more likely it can be repaired
by the field worker himself. Simpler machines also tend to be more durable in
the field. Before going into the field, the investigator should become
thoroughly acquainted with his recording equipment, so that he can repair minor
damage; field trips have been ruined because equipment broke down and could not
be repaired by the field worker himself.
Many recorders have apparatus for recording on two edges of the tape,
known as dualtrack recording. While the use of such a recorder is not itself
harmful, it is not advisable to use both tracks in recording unless absolutely
necessary. The possibility of the sound from one track being audible, in the
form of "ghosts," is still considerable, and having to splice the tape
at a point where the breakage is hardly noticeable on one track may create a
grave transcription problem on the other track. Other points of importance in a
recorder are the presence of high-speed rewind and forward mechanisms (most
models have these) and a good erasing mechanism. The latter enables tape to be
used many times; if it is inadequate, sounds from one recording may still be
audible when the next recording is made on the same spot. Some poor machines
make it possible for the recordist to turn on the erasing mechanism by mistake;
this sort of error would obviously be a calamity to a field worker, so he
should protect himself against it by using a machine on which a special effort must
be made to turn on the erasing mechanism. Microphones are usually included in
tape recorders, but the lower priced models are frequently furnished with
inferior microphones, so that the purchase of a better microphone (with the
tape recorder's own one available for emergencies) seems advisable. Long
extension cords – a minimum of 50 feet of cable – are also very useful, since
the source of power and the strategic placement of the recorder or the microphone
may be some distance apart.
A source of power may not be available in the field, so it is advisable
for the collector to bring his own. Even when power is available, a converter
may be needed to apply American machinery to foreign outlets. An electric
generator is usually bulky and noisy, so that it must be placed a good distance
from the microphone. It does, however, provide a degree of steadiness not quite
as easily found in car batteries, which are/ the second alternative. If a regular
car battery is used, it must be fitted to a converter which changes the 6 or 12
volts to the 110 normal in American recorders. The battery must, of course, be
recharged periodically; this can be done with an automobile generator, if a car
is available, or by a service station with a charger, if this is not too distant.
In most cases, the battery with convertor seems more convenient than the
generator.
Recently, battery-operated tape recorders have come into use. The
battery supplies power for the magnetic recording head, but the reels are
operated by a spring which is wound manually. These recorders are excellent for
work in which a small or moderate amount of recording is done. They do have
some disadvantages – fidelity is not so high, speed is not quite as constant -
but their mobility makes them excellent traveling companions. The tiny,
transistor-powered recorders do not seem adequate for ethnomusicological use as
yet. But their development promises to broaden the variety of equipment
available and to make a wider selection of types for the special needs of the
field worker.
Among the kinds of tape available, plastic-backed is to be preferred to
paper-backed (which is no longer available in most places) because of its
greater fidelity and durability.
Various kinds of tape of even greater strength have been made available
within the last few years. The field worker must balance quality against cost;
he may not be able to afford the best kinds of tape, which are consumed mainly
by radio stations and record companies; but he should guard against accepting
the least expensive brands since these, because of their lack of fidelity and
their tendency to tear, make both preservation and transcription problematic.
Techniques of recording with tape are not difficult to master. The
amateur has a tendency to hold the microphone too close to a singer's mouth; it
should be no less than twelve inches away, much more if an instrument or a
group of singers is involved. Tapes should be numbered, and items on each tape
numbered as well: a number arrangement for the tapes combined with a letter
arrangement for individual items will yield notations such as 3d, 6f. If
dual-track tape is used, it is necessary to specify, for each item, on which
track it is recorded. It is advisable to note such matters in good order as
soon as recordings are made, and to keep written records collated with the
recordings. Field workers may be tempted to leave such details until later, but
they are risking the frailty of memory. Each item on a tape should be recorded
on paper and an announcement giving its number should appear before it on the
tape. Information about an item can be spoken onto the tape as easily as
written. The collector should keep careful track of the speed of the tape for
each reeI, and he may find it useful to record some standard for pitch measurement-with
a tuning whistle or fork-before each recording, for control of the speed, which
may be subject to variation depending on the power supply. In order to perfect
his recording technique the collector should practice recording his own voice
before approaching informants, and he should be thoroughly acquainted with the various
controls on his machine so that he need not be embarrassed by failures when the
time for actual recording is at hand.
Archiving and Storage Many field workers will wish to keep their
collected recordings in their own homes or offices, and to study, transcribe,
and analyze them. Those who are not specialists in ethnomusicology, or whose
collections are too extensive for one person to transcribe and analyze, and
those who for some reason wish to make their recordings available to others, may
wish to place them in one of the various archives established for the purpose have
been mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2. Smaller archives are present in many
institutions which have an interest in ethnomusicology, and indeed, an archive
of some sort is almost indispensable to an institution which teaches advanced
courses and accepts graduate work in our field. Thus the field of
ethnomusicology has had to develop certain techniques which are loosely termed
as "archiving," and which have gradually developed so as to have a
small degree of standardization. In some ways these are akin to the techniques
of librarianship; in others they are unique.
The basic unit of an archive is usually the collection, which is
normally the product of a single field investigation by one collector in one
culture, recorded on one medium. It is subdivided, of course, into a number of
items, such as songs or pieces. The simplest procedure, beyond making a listing
of the collection itself and depositing it as a unit in the storage space available,
is simply to accept the collector's own numbering and arrangement. An archive
of this sort would, ultimately, consist of a number of collections, each with
its own system of numbering the songs. Beyond keeping the collection as a unit,
there is a great variety in the number of things which can be done in an
ethnomusicological archive; those with means may find it best to leave the
materials as cataloged by the collector himself, making only a simple catalog
listing collectors, tribes, and languages, and keeping whatever notes the
collector furnishes with his recordings. Archives with more elaborate
facilities will wish to do a great many more things. The following procedures
may be interpreted to be in order of priority: the things mentioned first
should be done by all archives, those given later by those which find it
possible after fulfilling the first obligations.
1. Materials
should be stored in a cool, dry place. Plastic-backed tapes develop stickiness
in warm temperatures, and eventually the adjacent portions of tape begin to
stick together. Storage in a steel cabinet should protect tape or wire from the
accidental rearrangement of the magnetized particles which is occasionally (but
– rarely) caused by an electric storm.
2. Notes,
transcriptions of texts, and other written material based on a collection
should be kept with the collection or in a filing cabinet, but labeled so that
their relationship to the recordings is clear.
3. All material
should be clearly numbered and labeled.
4. Catalogs –
usually on filing cards – should be kept according to the following entries: collector,
language or tribe, and shelf, i.e., according to location.
5. Specific
agreements with the collectors, stating what rights the archive has and what rights
the collector reserves for himself, must be made. Failure to do this has caused
institutions considerable embarrassment and even legal difficulties. Some
collectors are prepared to give their material to an archive outright; others
make an indefinite loan or lend the material for a specified period. In either
case, the collector should have the right to use the material himself for
research, and to have prior rights of publication. Some archives request
depositors of material to fill out a form on which they indicate whether their
recordings are available only for listening – this is of great value to
students-and for classroom use, whether they may be used by students to
practice transcription, and whether such transcriptions may be published. It
should be specified, also, whether the materials may be duplicated (some
collectors insist that they be duplicated if any intensive listening or
transcription is to be done), whether copies may be given to other institutions
in exchange, and to whom the material reverts if the archive should be
disbanded. In the absence of copyright laws for recordings and for materials in
the public domain, it is necessary to protect the ethnomusicological field
worker so that he may have maximum control of the products of his work even
while he makes them available to others. Protection of informants' rights is an
even more complicated question; usually it is a contractual matter between the
collector and his informant, and it is up to the collector to see that the
informants' moral and legal rights are not abused.
6. If an archive
is able to go beyond the basic steps given above, it may wish to make a duplicate
recording of its entire collection; the duplicate collection would be used for listening,
transcribing, and all other operations, so that the originals would remain untouched
as much as possible, and would be available for return to the collector if this
were necessary. Duplication of a collection whose originals are on disk,
cylinder, and wire, onto tape is likely to cause problems in labeling and
cataloging. Once the entire collection is duplicated on tape, it becomes
possible to standardize the cataloging to a greater degree than when the
collection exists on various media.
7. The archive
may wish to go beyond the cataloging supplied by the collectors, unifying the entries
and making separate entries for each of the individual musical items included. Then
it becomes possible to have a catalog of types of songs and music, such as war songs,
love songs, etc., another for instruments, a third for stylistic categories
such as polyphony, and even one for first lines or titles of songs – especially
in collections featuring Western folk culture.
8. In order to
make the archives' holdings even more useful to researchers and teachers, it might
be advisable to analyze songs briefly so that a catalog of specific stylistic
features – especially unusual or unexpected ones, such as peculiar scales and
rhythmic patterns – could be set up. Such analysis has not, to my knowledge
been carried out at any archive. Only a collection containing a large variety
of material could provide the basis for the comparative work needed to
establish such a catalog. With it, the archive could single out recordings with
specific musical traits for demonstration and for the comparative work of specialists
in various areas of ethnomusicology, much as a library, through its subject headings,
can identify publications according to their content and character.
9. Finally, of
course, an archive could make available part of its content in published recordings.
Again, archives are in a unique position to make the selection of appropriate items
because they have at their disposal large amounts of raw material from which to
choose the most characteristic or the most attractive. Archiving is, then, a
middle ground between field work and desk work. As we have seen, much desk work
is done in the field, and much field work is done close to the desk. Some archives,
besides being middle ground, engage in field work themselves. Analysis of the
type indicated in numbers 7 and 8 above is obviously already in the category of
post-collecting research. The archive which does this is performing some of the
work normally carried on by the individual researcher, but it can often do this
better than the individual if it has a competent staff. Many archives also
engage in collecting on their own, and, indeed, some consist largely of
collections made by their own staffs (this is true of the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv
in Freiburg) or under its own instigation (Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song).
The steps outlined above are intended for an archive which contains all sorts
of ethnomusicological materials. But of course many archives specialize,
accepting only materials in a given area (again, the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv,
which contains German folk song and little else) or seeking certain types of
material while accepting others as well (the Archive of Folk Song, which seeks
American materials but accepts others if they are offered). Such archives would
certainly use procedures which specifically fit the kind of material which they
include. Some archives contain, in addition to recordings, manuscript
transcriptions of music; cataloging these and integrating them with recordings
poses special problems. So does the inclusion of commercial recordings along
with field recordings, although commercial records may contain material of
great use. The field of archiving in ethnomusicology and in folklore at large
is a relatively new one. The student interested in learning about the contents
and arrangements of various archives is advised to read the issues of The
Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, a small periodical, published since 1958 by the
Research Center for Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics of Indiana
University, which describes a separate archive in each issue. For further
readings we suggest Thompson's Four Symposia (1953) and the descriptive
brochure issued by the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv in 1956.
Bibliography
Brailoiu, Constantin (1960). Vie musical d'un village. Paris:
Institut universitaire roumain Charles ler.
Densmore, Frances (1918). Teton Sioux Music. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution. Bulletin 61 of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Das deutsche Volksliedarchiv (1956). Brochure describing the
archive. Freiburg.
Hause, Helen E. (1948). "Terms for musical instruments
in Sudanic languages," Supplement 7 to the Joumal of the American Oriental
Society 68, no.1, January-March 1948.
Kurath, Gertrude P. (1960). "Panorama of dance
ethnology", Current Anthropology 1:233-254.
Lowie, Robert H. (1937). The History of Ethnological Theory.
New York. Rinehart.
McAllester, David P. (1954). Enemy Way Music. Cambridge:
Peabody Museum Papers, vol. 41, no.3.
Merriam, Alan P. (1954). "The selection of recording
equipment for field use," Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers no.10.
Berkeley, Calif.
______ (1960). "Ethnomusicology; discussion and
definition of the field," Ethnomusicology 4:107-114.
Nketia, J. H. Kwabena (1962). "The problem of meaning in
African music," Ethnomusicology 6: 1-7.
Schirring, Nils ( 1956), Selma Nielsens vicer. Copenhagen:
Munksgaard.
Slotkin, J. S. (1952). Menomini Peyotism. Philadelphia:
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , new series, vol. 42, part
4.
Sachs, Curt (1962). The Wellsprings of Music. The Hague: M.
Nijhoff. Recommended reading, pp. 16-20.
Thompson, Stith (1953). Four Symposia on Folklore.
Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, Folklore series, No.8.
Recommended reading, pp. 1-88.
Wilgus, D. K. (1959). Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship
Since 1898. New Brunswick, N.
J.: Rutgers University Press. Recommended reading, pp.
123-239.Bruno Nettl - Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology 61
~0~
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar