Chapter 9
MUSIC IN CUL TURE – CONTEXT AND
COMMUNICATION
The role of music in culture itself, that is, in the lives of
individuals and groups as it can be observed directly, has been approached by
ethnomusicologists in various ways. To classify these does not seem possible at
present, nor can we extract from them much in the way of theory, for they have
involved essentially the simple description of musical types, uses, values, and
activities. Most of the work done in this area of ethnomusicology so far
remains in the notes of field investigators; relatively little of it has been
published. And the reader is urged to regard much of the material in our
Chapter 3 as particularly relevant to our present concern, for in most ways the
method of studying music in the culture of individual peoples is field work.
It certainly seems best for an ethnomusicologist to be equally
interested in music as a part of culture and in the structure of music. In
practice it has not always been possible to maintain this combination of
interests, for much information on musical life comes from nonmusical
anthropologists. Ethnomusicologists have always encouraged anthropologists to pay
heed to music and to note data of musical interest even if nothing could be said
about the music itself. Certainly the desire of the ethnomusicologist to say to
the cultural anthropologist,.. Never mind, even if you are tone – deaf you can
still find out about the meaning of music in the lives of your
informants," has produced important field research.
But the structure of music may also shed light on the role it plays in
the culture. For example, the fact that Plains Indian women sing along with the
men in most songs but usually do not begin until the men have sung the first
phrase may be a significant clue to the relationship between the sexes. For
example, perhaps information on the musical thought of Plains Indian culture
can be gained from the fact that the Arapaho Indians evidently recognize the
difference in structure between Peyote and older songs, but not between Ghost Dance
and older songs, even though the three groups of music would seem quite
different from each other. Thus the structure of the music should not be
completely neglected in a study of music as a part of culture.
We can perhaps divide the material in this chapter into three areas:
music as something to be understood through culture and cultural values; music
as an aid to understanding culture and cultural values; and music in its
relationship to other communicatory phenomena in culture, such as dance,
language, and poetry.
Music and Its Cultural Context
Ethnomusicologists are certainly not the first to argue that music can
best be understood through a knowledge of its cultural context. Historians of
European Baroque music have long spoken of the analogy of symmetrical musical
forms and symmetrical stage sets and gardens, and of the similarity between
heavily and artificially ornamented paintings and architecture on the one hand
and embellished music on the other (Bukofzer 1947 :2 – 3).In ethnomusicology
this idea was also felt early, for the notion that race, type of economy, and
type of descent determine musical style is certainly a result of the feeling
that music is closely related to other aspects of culture. The methods of
studying culture and cultural values as they bear upon music are, on the other
hand, poorly developed. Directions to and exhortations of field workers abound,
but there seems to be no clear – cut pattern to follow.
The most generally useful type of study on cultural context of music
would seem to be the presentation of a total picture of one culture, tribe, or
community. There ate no such studies available, and of course the presentation
of a group's musical life literally in toto would seem impossible of
attainment. But there are some examples in which a broad view of the musical
culture of one tribe or culture is given.
Perhaps the closest to an ideal is reached in some of the early
publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian
Institution. Shortly after 1900, the Bureau was in a position to publish
several extremely detailed accounts of North American Indian tribes, their
cultures and ceremonies, which fortunately included descriptions of singing and
musical life as well as transcriptions of melodies. One of these, by Fletcher
and LaFlesche (1911), describes the Omaha tribe in a monograph of some 650
pages. Included are accounts of ceremonies in exact detail, with transcriptions
of the songs at the points at which they were sung. The transcriptions are
perhaps not of high quality, and some of them are needlessly furnished with
piano accompaniments by the composer J. C. Fillmore. Analysis and interpretation
of musical life is also absent, and techniques of eliciting information about music
which would normally not be verbalized were not used. But the kind of step – by
– step description used by Fletcher and LaFlesche (who was himself a member of
the Omaha tribe) is extremely useful as primary source material and gives a reasonably
reliable overview of music in the life of one tribe. Even more detail of
description is found in another publication by Fletcher (1904), an account of
the Hako, a Pawnee ceremony, in which dozens of songs, transcribed by Edwin S.
Tracy, are included. Here the entire song texts are transcribed and translated,
and the choreography is approximately indicated. An "analytical
recapitulation" is included. Unfortunately this type of detailed description
is only too rare in ethnomusicological publication. Few institutions have had
the resources and the inclination to publish such exact accounts as has the
Bureau of American Ethnology, and no doubt many descriptions of ceremonies and
of musical culture at large are lying unpublished in the drawers of ethnomusicological
field workers.
Old – fashioned in a musicological sense and naive – sounding as the
works of Allce Fletcher may be, they are monuments of research. And the fact
that they failed to place the raw material in theoretical perspective makes
them, today, more rather than less valuable compared to the many publications
of the same period which abound in stimulating but unprovable speculation. In
more recent years, the Bureau of American Ethnology has attempted some less
detailed but more theoretical monographs on Indian ceremonies which are similar
in spirit and value to the old Annual Report8. Fenton (1953) gives a
description of the Iroquois Eagle Dance with transcriptions and analysis of the
dances and songs by Gertrude P. Kurath. Again, this kind of description gives a
step-by-step account of the role of music in one segment of Iroquois life.
Less detailed but more inclusive accounts of musical culture. – are
rare. The studies discussed above approach their subject from the broad
cultural view, and include music only as it is a part of the whole culture.
Occasionally we find accounts of musical culture which are approached from the
musicologist's sphere of interest. Burrows, in a study of Uvea and Futuna music
(1945), begins with a large section on "songs in native life,"
discussing the various uses to which music is put and the types of songs.
Transcriptions of songs are included, but analysis of the music is reserved for
a special section of the book.
There are some descriptions of musical life as it involves one phase of
culture. For example, Waterman (1956) describes music of the natives of
Yirkalla, Australia, emphasizing the musical life of children. In addition to
enumerating the uses of music I and describing musical activities, Waterman is
able to synthesize his findings in a way which has rarely been possible for
most investigators, for he indicates just what single main purpose is
accomplished by music. Thus he says that "music functions at Yirkalla as
an enculturative mechanism, a means of learning Yirkalla culture. Throughout his
life, the aboriginal is surrounded by musical events that instruct him about
his natural environment and its utilization by man, that teach him his world –
view and shape his system of values" (Waterman 1956:41).
Merriam (1962) also devotes himself to one aspect of music in a
culture; in this case, it is the activity surrounding the epudian ocarina of
the Basongye of the Republic of the Congo. This instrument is used as a signal
for hunting, and Merriam considers it important for an understanding of the
instrument to know something about the habits and techniques of Basongye
hunting. In this study, Merriam describes also the structure of the instrument,
the role it plays in native classification of sounds, and the style of music
produced.
It is one thing to describe the uses and functions of music in their
cultural context, and another to abstract from these a system of musical values
or aesthetics. Herzog (1938) gives a short survey of the role which music plays
in the thinking of various North American Indian tribes. Attempting
generallzations of the kind made by Waterman, above, it gives us a rather cursory
glance at a field which was later studied in more detail (with one tribe, the
Navaho) by McAllester (1954) ; but it points the way toward one of the most
interesting areas of ethnomusicology.
Finally, we should mention a type of description of musical culture
which covers an area broader than the tribe or community. Brandel (1962)
discusses, for all of Central Africa, the various kinds of music used by all or
most of the tribes in the area: ceremonies, work songs, entertainment,
litigation, dance, and signaling. Although all of these publications – from Fletcher's
(1904) to Brande1's (1962) – presume to present the cultural context of music
on the assumption that we wi1l understand culture better through inclusion of
music, and music better in its cultural context, there is obviously a great
difference between the rather plodding, step – by – step account of Fletcher
and the sweeping general statements of Brandel. Both types of publication are
needed.
The musical values or aesthetics of a culture are also an important
area for studying music through its cultural role and context. The members of
most non–Western cultures, especially the non-literate and folk societies, have
difficulty in verbalizing about music.
Asking them what good or bad music may be, or what constitutes good or
bad singing, and the reasons for the answers, may not produce results. Studying
the aesthetic values of a tribe involves more than simple questioning of
informants, although this is also a possible avenue of approach. Correlating
answers with actually observed musical behavior is a way of getting at the
answers, as is the analysis of music and of statements about music appearing in
ordinary conversation or in folklore texts. Few studies have been made, and as
so frequently is the case, the North American Indians provide material of a
pioneering nature.
McAllester (1954), whose study through a questionnaire of Navaho values
and of musical thinking has been discussed in Chapter 3, provides a model.
Although much of what he discovers about Navaho musical values and their
relationship to their culture is hardly surprising, his work at least attempts
to formulate a method. Herzog (1938) gives samples of various Indian
informants' statements about music and backs these with analyses of folkloristic
texts, but a tribal aesthetic does not emerge. Again, we are only on the
threshold of a broad area yet to be discovered.
A further approach to music as a cultural phenomenon is the concept of
musical performance as an event. Although few readers will be surprised to hear
that a musical performance involves attitudes on the part of composer,
performer, and listener, and that the relationship between listener and
performer is an important one, the study of this particular relationship and of
the events leading up to and following a performance – and of course their effect
on the performance – has not been widely pursued.
Lomax (1959) is particularly concerned with the
"music-as-behavior" approach to ethnomusicology. He believes that
performer’s gestures, the cooperation among performers and between them and the
audience, the presence or absence of an audience, and related matters must be
understood before what he considers the purely formal elements of music – scale,
rhythm, structure – should be approached. His basic tenet is that certain
aspects of culture (and not others) determine musical style to a great extent.
Here Lomax is comparable to those scholars who consider the form of economic
life (Schneider), or the type of descent (Sachs), or even the racial
characteristics as the determinants of musical style. Lomax (1959:950) says
that "sexual code, positions of women, and treatment of children seem to
be the social patterns most clearly identified with musical style." For
example, he believes that "high – pitched, strident singing" is
"a symbol of the burning pain of sexual starvation." Like all
theories which ascribe musical style to a single variable in culture, the sex
theory of Lomax is difficult to prove, and even in the convincing cases which
Lomax cites (i.e., the tense singing of the Puritanical whites of the Eastern
United States versus the relaxed singing of the sexually more relaxed southern
Negroes), other causes should also be considered. But the interest of Lomax's
view for this chapter is the fact that in his approach to musical style classification,
he considers the non–formal elements, i.e., the vocal mannerisms, the singing style,
and the conditions surrounding the musical event, as more germane than the
scale, rhythm, and form. Musicologists before Lomax have considered these
elements important, but usually subsidiary to the scales and rhythms. Lomax's
classification of styles according to vocal technique is an important step
toward developing a methodology for studying music as an event in human life,
rather than simply as an independent work of art.
It is evident, then, that ethnomusicologists have done three kinds of
things in relating music to its cultural environment. They have furnished a few
descriptions of musical life without interpretation of the findings; they have
occasionally approached the cultural values and musical aesthetics of a culture;
and they have classified musical styles in accordance with and as related to
specific types of culture, basing their cultural classification on economy,
type of descent, and sexual attitudes.
Classification of Music as an Indicator Relatively little work has been
done in the area of native classification of music.
Although it is definitely a part of the aesthetics of a group and
although it is perhaps one of the easier aspects of music for members of
non-literate cultures to verbalize about, this area has barely been approached,
in spite of occasional exhortations (Merriam 1960:ll0) to include it in
research. Native classifications of music may furnish material for the study of
cultural values through music. It may even be possible to shed light on the
cultural values of Western civilization by analyzing the various ways in which
music is classified by urban Americans, and the student wishing to apply
ethnomusicological method to Western musical culture may find here an area for
making a start.
It is typical, of course, of our civilization that individuals do not
agree on the types and kinds of music which exist. There is at least a chance
that members of non-literate tribes would agree on the kinds of music which
their tribes use, i.e., that you would get roughly the same answer to the
question "What kinds of music are there, or what kinds of songs do you have?"
from most members of a tribe. The more complex the culture, the less likely we
are to find such unanimity. In approaching about sixty informants who were
college students (in the course of a survey conducted in Detroit in 1962), we
found many different answers to such a simple question as "What kinds of
music are there?" The most common answer reflects the educated American's
preoccupation with the time of origin of a work of art, for classifications such
as medieval, baroque, classical, romantic abounded. Geographic classifications
were also found; a number of students classified music as “Western”, “foreign”,
and “folk”, or as classical, popular, and folk. A number of individuals who
distinguished between classical and popular music added jazz as a separate
category. Quite possibly, the social level of performer and audience plays a
role in the classifications of music by Westerners. A few of the students who
were questioned distinguished between good and bad music, but they were not
asked to define these terms. Surprisingly few, however, based their answers on
criteria of musical style. For example, distinctions such as polyphonic and
monophonic, or instrumental and vocal, did not appear. No one classed music as
solo, chamber, or symphonic. Only one distinguished between contemporary and
older music, which might indicate a classification on the basis of musical
styles. The uses of music also seemed to play a small role in the classifications
presented by conege students. Thus, no one classified music as consisting of concert,
dance, church, marching music, etc.
This small sample and the preliminary kind of method used could hardly
provide statistical validity, and no attempt to draw definite conclusions can
be made. The project was carried out only to see in what directions further
work could be done.
If we used the results for drawing conclusions, we could possibly say
that these students stressed the historical criterion and indicated the
importance of time and place of origin in our thinking about works of art. They
also indicated an influence on the part of ethnomusicological thinking when
they gave classical, folk, and non – Western as categories, thinking which may
have been influenced by the current interest in under–developed nations.
Their neglect of classes based on musical style may reflect the current
tendency to accept an musical styles, to be relativistic, and as such to have
or exhibit no strong preferences or feelings; and their neglect of classes
based on the uses of music may indicate the relatively small role which any
musical activity other than listening plays in our culture, and the resulting
tendency to consider music as having a strictly passive value in our society.
There is also the possibility of examining written or traditional
statements made by members of a culture regarding musical content, and of
interpreting these statements in the light of – and for shedding light on –
cultural values. Among the materials of this sort in non literate societies is
folklore. Tales, legends, myths frequently mention music, and there are myths
deallng with the origin of song, with the way songs are taught and learned by
culture heroes, with the role that songs play in the mythological development
of a tribe. In cultures with written traditions, writings on music, especially
those of a theoretical and critical nature, are excellent material for the sort
of study we have in mind. Much of what we have found out about the history of
music in Oriental nations comes from the theoretical writings of the past.
Of course the relevance of theoretical writings to actual musical
practice cannot be taken completely for granted, and statements made by the
writers must be checked, wherever possible, against known musical facts. But it
would also be useful to examine the writings on music by themselves, for their
own sake, in order to see whether any information about cultural and aesthetic
values emerges from them. It would be useful, for example, to examine Western
music criticism in newspapers in order to see what the criteria of judgment are,
and what the musical values of the critics – and presumably to some extent of
the readers – turns out to be; and also, to what extent these values are
actually reflected in musical trends. There are many approaches to musical
culture besides the direct one to the informant. For example, the way in which
American libraries treat and classify music in their catalogs may give us
insight into the value structure of our culture.
The fact that musical compositions are first classed and referred to
according to composer – something we take for granted, but to which there are
actually several alternatives – indicates the importance to us of the person
who created a work of art, and perhaps also of the time and place of its
origin. The historical orientation of the Western – educated public is a
special feature in our value structure; this was also shown in the typical
classification of music among college students.
The intensely personal nature of compositions is also stressed in our
library classification. Then, libraries distinguish between cultivated music,
which they consider the best and most important music, and which is called, in
the subject headings, simply «music," on the one hand, and other types:
folk music, popular music, and jazz, omitting now the consideration of
non–Western music. The large category of just plain "music," i.e.,
cultivated music, is, in the subject classification, subdivided according to
time of origin, into two broad classes separated by the year 1800. For example,
there is a subject heading "Symphonies" and another, "Symphonies
– To 18()()." Could this reflect our basic assumption that the origin (the
composer) and the time of origin of a composition are among the most important things
about it? Normally, libraries do not classify according to nation of the
composer, according to the first performer, the sex of the composer, etc., but
according to time of composition. The choice of the year 1800 might also be
significant, though it may not reflect classifications used by musicians who
have no contact with libraries. There seems to be no more justification for
using 1800 as a cut–off point than 1750, 1775, 1600, or 1900. These other dates
would probably reflect more exactly some fundamental differences in musical style.
Although certain eighteenth–century composers are assuredly very dear to the
hearts of many music lovers, library classifiers and users, on the whole,
presumably consider music written after 1800 as "ours," considering
the music of the nineteenth century as reflecting their own culture as much as
does music written after 1900, while music before 1800 – Haydn, Mozart, and
earlier – is in a separate class. The imperfection of using such indices to our
own culture as library classification is evident; yet a study of the various
seemingly arbitrary ways of classifying music in our lives may give us some
information about our value systems as reflected in music. In the case of
American libraries, these would be the importance of origin, of the composer,
and the desire to divide things into two groups – based on the "ours – not
ours" criterion which has built into it an overtone of "good – less
good." No doubt the conclusions here tentatively stated could be argued.
The important things to be noted, however, are the possibility of using methods
derived from ethnomusicology for learning something about the aesthetic biases
and values of a complex culture such as ours, and the utility of using
classification systems – traditional ones as well as published ones, such as
those of libraries – to provide an approach to these values.
Music and other Systems of
Communication
Music is, among other things, a way of communicating, and it bears
close relationships to other such systems, especially dance and language. Music
as a system of communication is the subject of many writings, among which those
of Seeger (1962), provide theoretical underpinnings and terminology which,
however, have not been widely adopted. The relationship between music and dance
has not been studied as widely as one might suppose, considering the fact that
in many cultures much of the music is accompanied by dancing. The two scholars who
have contributed most to this field are Curt Sachs and Gertrude P. Kurath. Sachs,
the author of the most widely accepted history of the dance (Sachs 1938),
traces the genesis of musical and dance behavior to the same roots of rational
and emotional expression, and tries to show that certain cultures have similar
characteristics in their dances and their songs. Thus he indicates (1937:188 –
89) that the size of intervals and of dance steps is correlated, and cites
specific examples some of which, it must be said, seem to be based more on
Sachs' own interpretation than on provable facts. Thus, his statement that there
is something "soft, yielding, swinging about the Semang (Malacca) melody –
just as the dance of the Semang is soft and swinging" (1937: 190) remains
to be repeated in more descriptive terms. But since no accepted terminology or
measuring device for correlation between dance and music is available, we must
accept Sachs' statements as at least possibly correct, and as signposts for
future work.
Gertrude Kurath has worked in more specific and less broadly
theoretical problems than Sachs, having described the music and dance of
specific ceremonies and shown the interaction of musical and choreographic
form. Fenton (1953) includes an essay illustrating Kurath's approach, and her
own survey (Kurath 1960) shows what has been accomplished in this area. The
relationship between language and music has been studied to a considerably greater
extent than that between music and dance, and we should like here to present a fairly
detailed discussion of this area as a sample for developing research in the
relationship of other types of communication to music. Among the surveys of
this field, that published by Bright (1963) is most to be recommended because
it presents a linguist's view of an area usually reserved for the musicologist.
Interest in language–music interrelations ranges from the very detailed
and specific relationship between the words and the music of a song to
philosophical speculation about the symbolic significance of musical elements
and the primordial connection between music and language at large. In the field
of traditional music these connections are especially close because a great
deal of the music is vocal, and because to members of simpler cultures the tunes
and texts are sometimes inseparable concepts. This makes the comparison of the structures
of words and music in folk song an essential aspect of folklore research. Thus,
study of the specific interrelationships as found in one song is especially
proper to ethnomusicology. But other phases of the music – language
relationship can also profitably be studied with the use of folk and non –
literate material. Cultures with tone languages offer interesting problems.
Songs with meaningless syllable texts may show something about the perception
and interpretation of musical structure in other cultures. Occasional examples
of the musical representation of extra–musical concepts or ideas are
fascinating. The homogeneity of functionally similar songs in some cultures
could be traced to the structure of the texts. Indeed, a chapter such as this,
which attempts to give a brief survey of a broad field, has as its first task
the establishment of some system of organization of the various kinds of
problems which can be encountered and studied. Thus the following
classification.
First, it is possible to divide types of language–music relationships
into two classes: I) that in which the relationship is of a general nature and
is not necessarily found in specificitems of music, and II) specific
relationships between the words and the music of individual compositions or
bodies of music. Class II can be divided into two areas, A) relationship between
music and the meaning of the words, and B) structural relationships between
music and text. Area B can be divided Into two groups, 1) the relationship
between music and linguistic features such as lines, rhyme, stanza which are
present only In poetry, and 2) relationship between music and linguistic
features found in language at large, such as stress, length, tone, Intonation.
The purpose of the next paragraphs is to discuss some of these relationships
with the use of examples, and to indicate some ways in which they could be studied.
Our purpose is not, however, to present conclusions on the frequency and geographic
distribution of these relationships, or concerning the relative strength or importance
of music and language in any individual body of music, or similar questions of
a general nature.
I. General
Relationships between Language and Music. We are first confronted by the fact
that language and music have much In common. Primary among these common
features are movement in time (rhythm) and pitch (melody).It is this basic
similarity which hascaused some scholars (e.g., Nadel 1930) to assume that
music and language had a common origin, and in some cases, that music arose out
of speech. But whereas this kind of speculation can lead to no concrete
conclusion, it is of great interest to study similarities in the organization
of pitch, stress, and length in specific languages and their accompanying
musical styles. For instance, it is noteworthy that in the Czech language
strong accents appear at the beginning of all words of more than one syllable.
In the folk music we find a corresponding development: musical phrases or
sections usually begin on stressed notes, and the stresses are vigorous. This
occurs not only in songs, where this phenomenon could be the direct result of
melodies with appropriate stresses being assigned to poems, but also in
instrumental music, where there is no such direct relationship. Thus it could
be the result of a deeply – rooted tendency common to both music and speech. A
similar type of relationship is found between the English language and much of English
folk music. In both, the melodic contour tends to descend at the end of a
section, phrase, sentence, or song. Other examples can be found throughout the
world, but their cause has not been agreed upon. It may be argued that similar
tendencies in the language and music of a culture are based on deep – seated
aesthetic preferences, and that they may even be inherent or racially
determined. On the other hand, it could also be assumed that structural
relationships between a given language and its musical style are due simply to
the fact that one was modeled after the other. This relationship and the
exceptions to it are among the most intriguing aspects of ethnomusicology.
II. Specific Relations between the Text and Music of
Individual Compositions. This type of study has been carried forward in many
publications (see the chapter bibliography), but only rarely have studies been
made which indicate all of the many relationships between a tune and its words.
Various aspects of this problem are outlined below.
A. Relationships
Involving the Meaning of the Words. This type of relationship poses problems
faced also by the student of representative or "program" music in
Western culture. It must be assumed that nonmusical material is portrayed in
some way in a great deal of music. This is done by the composer either consciously
or unconsciously, and he may or may not indicate what the music is intended to portray
or what the listener is supposed to feel or think. The identification of the
existence of such nonmusical material is difficult even in Western music
(historians have for decades argued about the existence of "programs"
in Beethoven's major works) ; but it is even more difficult to trace in
traditional music, in which the composer's word is rarely available. Informants
are not usually articulate on such matters, and there is a great temptation for
the student to superimpose his own ideas of what the music may represent, ideas
which often have no place in the culture he is studying. One kind of
representative music which is usually recognized by informants is the use of animal
cries in songs. For example, these appear in many American Indian songs, and
are treated in two distinct ways: as realistic animal cries before, during, or
after a song; and as part of the musical structure in rhythm and melody, in
which case they are less realistic. The latter treatment could be classified as
true representative music. It is found in Fig. 14, in which the last three
notes ("tak–tak–tak") are said to represent the call of the turkey,
but still fit into the musical structure. In the music of some non-literate and
folk cultures, songs which serve a particular function tend to exhibit musical
similarities. Although this could sometimes be interpreted as musical
representation, it is rarely recognized as such by informants, judging from the
reports in the literature. This stylistic unity may be due to a number of
cultural and musical factors, and it may have something to do with the nature
of the function. The fact that in European folk music, marching songs are
vigorous, children's songs are simple, and dance songs correspond to the tempo
and rhythm of the dance cannot be considered evidence of "program
music." But it is that to a small degree nevertheless, for the association
of a particular kind of music with an activity or idea in the culture is a kind
of musical representation, and perhaps this kind of association is at the basis
of the Western tradition of program music.
B: Structural
Relationships. These form the largest body of problems studied in ethnomusicological
literature, and they are perhaps easiest to approach. Again, we subdivide into
two main areas.
1. Text–Music
Relations in the Over–All Form of a Composition. This can be studied by dividing
both music and text into shorter elements such as phrases, lines, measures, and
feet, and comparing them. In European folk song, according to Herzog (1950),
there tends to be a close tie between musical and textual lines; they usually
coincide. Thus, in Fig. 15, we can superimpose analyses of the two structures,
plus the rhyme scheme, with the following results :
Text content: ABa Ca
D
Rhyme scheme: A B C B
Music: A Bl A B2
This song reveals
considerable contrast between musical and textual structure, even
though the main units
coincide in length.
Fig. 16 stresses
repetitive elements:
286Bruno Nettl -
Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology 165
Text content: A A B B
Rhyme scheme: A A A A
Music: Al A2 A3 Al
In Fig. 16,
contrastive to Fig. 15, the musical and textual elements show similar tendencies
in the interrelationships of their lines. In some cultures, poetry is not
organized in terms of lines, nor is the music. For example, among the North
American Plains Indians we find songs whose structure is in two sections, the
second one a variation of the first. The first section is accompanied entirely
by meaningless syllables. The second section, which is usually shorter and at a
lower average pitch, contains some meaningless syllables but also the
meaningful text, which has a prose – like structure. Fig. 17 illustrates this
kind of form. The meaningful text is underlined, and only the text of the
second section is given. This kind of interaction of text and tune evidently has
dramatic value; the first section, with its meaningless text, serves to prepare
the listener for the climax, which arrives with the meaningful text and the
repetition (with variations) of the melody. The examples offered here
illustrate only a handful of the many kinds of over – all formal relationship
between music and text in traditional song. However, they should show the value
of this kind of study and the relative ease with which it can be attacked. This
kind of study should lead, aside from immediate conclusions, to a better
understanding of aesthetic values in non-literate and folk cultures.
2. Relationship
Between Phonetic Features in Language and Their Musical Analogues. Music and
language have in common at least three important features at the phonetic
level: stress, length, and pitch. In music, individual tones tend to be
stressed, long, or high compared to their neighbors, just as in language
individual syllables may be significantly differentiated by these features. It
is useful to study the interaction of these features in song, in order to
determine the fate of words when they are set to music and the extent to which musical
structure accommodates the text. No general conclusions are available, although
a number of studies of this problem have been made; we are sure, however, that
no single principle is universally observed, and that very complex
relationships, subject to all sorts of rules and exceptions, are sometimes
found. The following examples show some of the things which can happen. In most
Western European poetry the division of the line into feet coincides with the division
of music into measures, defined as repeated stress patterns. There is a strong tendency
for the stressed syllable in a foot of poetry to coincide with a stressed beat
in the measure. In Fig. 15 all of the stressed syllables coincide with the
stressed tones, as indicated by the markings in the text. But singers and
listeners in English–speaking folk cultures are sometimes willing to accept
gross violations of this principle. In some Eastern European folk music, the
poetic line is not subdivided into feet. The number of stressed syllables is
not constant, as it is in Western European poetry, but the total number of
syllables per line is. Thus in many songs one would expect little correlation
between musical and linguistic stress. The music does operate with metric
principles, but the text does not. In spite of this, there may be considerable
correlation between the two kinds of stress in Czech folk songs. Fig. 18 (with
stressed syllables underlined) has ten out of fourteen stressed syllables
occurring on stressed notes. In the same song, an examination of the
correlation between long syllables (marked with accents) and long notes
(quarter and half notes) shows that out of twelve long syllables, sIx occur on
long tones. This is significant since only eight out of 28 tones are long ones.
Such a study must take into consideration the question of the significance of
stress and length in the language involved. Thus, in a language such as Czech,
in which stress is mechanically placed on the first syllable of each word, it
is less important than in some other languages, such as English, where the
misplacement of stress could occasionally even change the meaning of a word. FIGURE
18. Czech folk song, "Cerné oci idéte spát." Correlation of linguistic
and musical pitch patterns is of great interest in the so – called tone
languages – those languages in which the intonation pattern of a word is
significant so far as the meaning is concerned, and in which a change in pitch
pattern could actually change the meaning. These languages, spoken in Africa,
the Americas, the Orient, and elsewhere, actually differ greatly in their
treatment of the pitch element. But in all of them it could be assumed that the
pitch movement of the music must be the same as that of the text when it is
spoken; otherwise words would be misunderstood. Actually this assumption is
unfounded, for several students of African cultures (Schneider 1943 – 44, Jones
1959, King 1961) have found a very complex interaction between musical and
linguistic tone. Words may be understood from their context even when their
pitch pattern is violated. Special rules govern the setting of words to music –
and so on. Fig. 19 shows what may happen in a very simple song in the Owerri
dialect of the Ibo of Nigeria, a people whose language has two main tones, high
and low. The tone of each syllable as it would be spoken is indicated above
that syllable (acute accent indicates the high speech tone). Examination of the
relationship between the pitch movement of the text and that of the music
reveals that in this song, although the. Musical pitch movement does not always
reflect that of the language, it is never the opposite. In other words, in this
song, a change from low to high in the text can be accompanied by upward
movement in the music, or by leveI movement, but not by downward movement; and
the converse applies to downward movement in pitch. FIGURE 1.9 lbo war song. Much
more detailed studies of the interaction between speech tones and musical pitch
are now available. Schneider (1943–44) presents a detailed study for the West
African Ewe, while Jones (1959) gives a general theory which is presumed to
apply to many African tribes and languages. King (1961:38–42) explores the
relationship among the Yoruba, while Herzog (1934) gives tentative conclusions
for the Jabo of Liberia and for the Navaho Indians – the latter a rare case of
attention given to a non–African tone language. Nettl (1954) explores the
function of tone, stress, and length in Arapaho. Some additional problems in
music – Language relations which fall outside the outline used above should be
indicated in closing. In some cultures there is a difference between the ways
of speaking and singing various words and sounds. In Pima (Arizona), the sound
"t" in the spoken language is (according to Dr. Herzog) sung as
"n." In French songs, the final "e," silent in speech,
often is sung as a separate syllable and occupies a musical tone. A different kind
of problem is that studied by Bartók (1951), Bronson (1944, 1952), and others;
it concerns the degree to which a tune and a song – text form a unit
historically, and to what degree they tend to be interchanged. This problem has
been approached in European folk repertories but hardly at all in non-literate
cultures. Furthermore, the influence of language on instrumental music is
important. For example, Herzog (1945) has shown the use of language pitch
patterns in African drum and hom signalling, and he has indicated that much of
the xylophone music of the Jabo in Liberia is based on the tone patterns of
spoken utterances and is recognized as such. Of interest also, in the area of
music–language relations, are certain forms of communication which cannot
easily be classed as either speech or music, but which seem to occupy a sort of
middle ground, containing elements of both. List (1963) provides a classification
of this phenomenon, which in the past would probably have been called simply wailing,
shouting, and grunting, according to the degree of stability in pitch, the
degree to which intonation is relevant, and to which scalar structure of
intonation is used. As we move from speech, which has indefinite intonation in
the sense of using fixed pitches and intervals, in the direction of fixed
intonation, we arrive, by way of the so – called "Sprechstimme," a sort of
artificial speech form in which the direction of pitch is important and even
exaggerated, at true song. In another direction, if speech, which usually has
considerable variety of pitch, moves away from this variety, we arrive at
monotonic expression, which has a fixed pitch, by virt:ue of its negation of
pitch variety. This fixed pitch provides the first tone of a fixed – pitch
scale, which is the essence of song. Thus the area which is at the boundary of
speech and song extends from the monotonic chant to the "Sprechstimme,"
and List (1963:9) provides a diagram for classification. The best way for
students to begin work in the music–language area is to study individual songs,
in reliable transcription, somewhat in the manner in which the examples in the
above paragraphs were treated. There are, so far, too few studies of individual
songs, and too many broad statements not sufficiently documented. List (1957)
is a detailed study of the broad interactions of words and music in the
variants of a single British ballad, and it could be used as a model for
certain kinds of projects.
Conclusion
If we have succeeded in demonstrating anything in this volume, it
should be that ethnomusicology is a field that has only begun to scratch the
surfaces of its possibilities.
From an adjunct of historical musicology, a science deallng with a
distinctly Western phenomenon, it has emerged as an area of importance in its
own right. It has developed a great deal of theory which exists, somewhat
unorganized, under a still too small body of documentation. The scholars in our
field have not rallied to a single battle cry or dogma (which is good), and
they frequently have been unable to communicate with each other because of the
divergence in their backgrounds (which is bad).Yet their achievements are impressive.
More than in the other arts, in music it has been taken for granted that
strange and seemingly irrational forms exist, and that these can be understood
through analysis of their structure and of their cultural context. The educated
public and, to a degree, the public at large in America and Europe have become
aware of the aesthetic values of non–Western musics. The historian of Western music
takes for granted that some knowledge of non – Western music is essential to
him – something not as frequently recognized by historians of Western art and
literature. And ethnomusicology has begun to show that music the world over is
more than artifact, but that it is – even in the simplest cultures – an
essential part of human life.
Bibliography
Bartók, Béla, and Albert P. Lord (1951). Serbo–Croatian Folk
Songs. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brandel, Rose (1962). The Music of Central Africa. The Hague:
M. Nijhoff.
Bright, William (1963)."Language and music: areas for
cooperation," Ethnomusicology 7: 26-32.
Bronson, Bertrand H. (1944)."The interdependence of
ballad tunes and texts," Western Folklore 3:185 – 207.
(1952)."On the union of words and music in the Child
ballads," Western Folklore 11:233-249.
Bukofzer, Manfred (1947).Music in the Baroque Era. New York:
Norton.
Burrows, Edwin G. (1945).Songs of Uvea and Futuna. Honolulu:
Bernice P. Bishop Museum. Fenton, William N. (1953).The Iroquois Eagle Dance,
with analysis of the Iroquois Eagle Dance and songs by Gertrude Prokosch Kurath.
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Fletcher, Alice C. (1904). The Hako; a Pawnee Ceremony. Washington:
Twenty – second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 2.
Fletcher, Allce C. and Francis LaFlesche (1911). The Omaha
tribe. Washington: Twenty – seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology.
Herzog, George (1934)."Speech – melody and primitive
music”, Musical Quarterly 20:452 – 466.
(1938)."Music in the thinking of the American
Indian," Peabody Bulletin, May 1938, pp. 1 – 5.
(1945). "Drum signaling in a West African tribe,"
Word 1:217 – 238.
(1950). "Song," in Funk and Wagnall's Standard
Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and
Legend, vol. 2. New York: Funk and Wagnall. Suggested
reading, pp. 1038 – 1041.
Jones, A. M. (1959). Studies in African Music. London: Oxford
University Press.
King, Anthony (1961). Yoruba Sacred Music from Ekiti. Ibadan,
Nigeria: Ibadan University Press.
Kurath, Gertrude P. (1960). "Panorama of dance
ethnology," Current Anthropology 1:233-241.
List, George (1957)." An ideal marriage of ballad text
and tune," Midwest Folklore 7:95-107. (1963)."The boundaries of
speech and song," Ethnomusicology 7:1-16.
Lomax, Alan (1959)."Folk song style," American
Anthropologist 61;927-954.
(1962)."Song structure and social structure,"
Ethnology 1:425 – 451.
McAllester, David P. (1954). Enemy Way Music. Cambridge:
Peabody Museum Papers, vol. 41, no.3.
Merriam, Alan P. (1960). "Ethnomusicology, discussion
and definition of the field," Ethnomusicology 4:107-114.
(1962)."The epudia Basongye ocarina,"
Ethnomusicology 6:175 – 180.
Nadel, Siegfried S. (1930)."The origins of music,"
Musical Quarterly 16:531 – 546.
Nettl, Bruno (1954)."Text – music relations in Arapaho
songs, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 10:192-199.
Sachs, Curt (1938). World History of the Dance. New York:
Norton.
Schneider, Marius (1943-44)."Phonetische und metrische
Korrelationen bei gesprochenen und gesungenen Ewe – Texten," Archiv fur
vergleichende Phonetik 7: 1-6.
Seeger, Charles (1962)."Music as a tradition of
communication, discipline, and play, Part I," Ethnomusicology 6:156-163.
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aboriginal culture – some sociological and psychological implications,"
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171
Appendix
SOME PRELIMINARY AND PREPARATORY EXERCISES AND PROBLEMS
The following list of assignments may be helpful to the
student who is interested in
preparing himself for research in ethnomusicology. On the
whole the assignments can be
carried out in an American or European city in an
institutional environment. They could serve
as projects for class work. Most of them are not
ethnomusicological per se; but they are
intended to help the student to see more clearly some of the
problems of ethnomusicological
field, laboratory, and desk work, to give him practice in
some of the techniques of the field,
and to illustrate some of the points in the body of this
book. Suggested techniques for the
researcher are given in several of the chapters (particularly
Chapters 3 – 7). The assignments
given here will require, in some cases, the use of those
techniques.
Chapter 3
(a) Practice
recording the singing and playing of acquaintances with a tape recorder. Try various
kinds of microphone placement in a room, outdoors, for different combinations
of voices and instruments. Also practice taking photographs of performers,
performing groups, and instruments; if possible, make a motion picture of a
performer or a group, or of dancing.
(b) Make a
collection of songs which a friend or relative remembers and can sing. Make recordings
and write down relevant background information.
(c) Make tape
recordings (with permission, of course) of the performance of a group of musicians
at a folk festival or the picnic of an ethnic group.
(d) Find a person
with whom you can spend a good deal of time, and ask him to describe his entire
musical life – what songs he knows, what his musical values are, what music he
listens to, etc., and write a report of it.
(e) Find a piece of
music (classical or popular) of which two different recordings are available,
and study the differences. Try to describe these objectively.
(f) Leam to play a
simple folk or non – Western instrument, possibly from a member of a foreign
culture who is visiting your community.
Chapter 4
(a) Listen to some
of the simple songs of a non – literate culture (Australian, North American
Indian, or Oceanian may be good ones to start with) on a reliable recording (Folkways,
Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music are good
possibilities).Practice thinking through the melodies or singing them after
listening.
(b) Transcribe some
of these songs according to the methods outlined in this chapter. Transcription can also be a group exercise;
one person can transcribe at a blackboard while others offer constructive
criticism.
(c) Record some of
your own singing, or that of a friend, and make transcriptions.
(d) Several days
apart, make separate transcriptions of one piece and compare the results.
(e) Make a hand –
graph from the notation of a simple song.
(f) Using a Kunst
monochord (or another stretched string), practice identifying intervals plucked
at random in terms of quarter – tones or smaller units.
Chapters 5 and 6
(a) Read some
descriptions of musical styles in recent issues of periodicals such as Ethnomusicology,
African Music, and Journal of the International Folk Music Council, and classify
them according to their approach; also, make a critical analysis of such a
description.
(b) Make individual
analyses of songs and pieces in some standard collections which do not contain
these already. The following are possibilities: Cecil Sharp, English Folk Songs
from the Southern Appalachians (1932; reprint 1952) ; Marius Schneider,
"Primitive Music" in New Oxford History of Music, vol. 1 (1957);
Harriet Pawlowska, Merrily We Sing, 105 Polish Folk – songs (1961) ; Rose
Brandel, The Music of Central Africa (1962). Use the methods given in Chapter
5.
(c) Listen to
recordings of music from various cultures and classify them according to the
cantometrics system of Alan Lomax (see Lomax, "Song Structure and Social
Structure", Ethnology 1:425 – 51, 1962, for details of the method).
(d) Convert the
tempo markings of some short classical, popular, or folk music pieces to the
Kolinsky method of expressing tempo.
(e) Take a small
collection of folk music (for example, all of the tunes for one song in Sharp's
English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, or a similar folk song
collection) and make counts of the intervals, note values, and other features;
prepare a brief description of the style of these few tunes as an exercise
preparatory to making descriptions of larger and more valld samplings.
(f) Read a
description of a musical style, then go through the transcriptions on which it is
based and try to find exceptions to the author's statements.
Chapter 7
(a) Visit one (or
more) museums of musical instruments, or which contain instrument collections.
Try to classify some of the instruments according to the Sachs – Hornbostel classification.
(Take along a copy of Galpin Society Journal 14, 1961, which contains the classification
system.)
(b) Without
consulting published sources, make as complete as possible a description of a
relatively simple instrument which you have available – guitar, violin,
recorder, etc. Pretend that you are describing an instrument not known before.
Include a description of the technique used in playing.
(c) Take a series
of photographs of an instrument which could be used to show someone who has
never seen it before just what it is like.
Chapter8 8 and 9
(a) Using standard
library techniques (card catalog, periodical indexes, etc.), go through the
ethnographic literature of a tribe and note the references to music and musical
activities. Make a list of these and try to write a picture of the musical
culture of that tribe.
(b) Ask a person
from another culture who is visiting your community or someone with a village
background to describe his native musical culture.
(c) Go through the
most important items in ethnomusicological literature mentioned in Chapter 8
and make a list of musical maps; write a critique of the methods used in
compiling the information and in presenting it on a map.
(d) On the basis of
some standard books on the history of Western music, try to find out what
approaches to musical change are usually taken, and what theories are used to explain
musical change.
(e) Make a study of
the relationship between the words and music of one folk song, using the
methods in Chapter 9 and Appendix 299 a standard collection of transcriptions made
from field recordings.
(f) As you see
motion pictures (commercial and educational), make a list of the examples of
non- Western and folk dancing which are shown. Criticize them from the viewpoint
of their usefulness for research.
(g) Try to find and
list traditional and published classifications of music in your own cultural
environment.
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