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Ethnomusicology
SOME QUESTIONS THAT CONCERN ETHNOMUSICOLOGISTS
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New-York
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USA
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The terms with which performers refer to options they have chosen to avoid are often general terms that distinguish one manner of performance from another, without spelling out its specific features. Example 1 compares two singers’ performances of one line of Persian verse, from a fable by the poet Sa‘di. Both singers were active in the late 1960s in the city of Meshed, where they recited episodes from Ferdowsi’s Shah-name, the national epic of Persia, in tea-houses. The second singer criticized what he saw as the first singer’s inability to present Ferdowsi’s lines in an appropriate manner – by employing a warlike tune and an “honorific” or elevated style. He himself used such tunes, not only in reciting the Shah-name but also in singing this fable by Sa‘di, which has nothing warlike about it. The fundamental difference between the two performances of these verses, in my view, lies in each singer’s attitude toward potential listeners. The first clearly enjoys making the fable and its meanings accessible. The second singer, by placing longer and less predictable time-intervals between the sung syllables and by ornamenting some syllables, maintains a sense of distance that emphasizes the importance he attaches to the text and that encourages listeners to pay close attention. He adopts a much slower pulse, and finds various ways of ornamenting the ninth syllable in each half-line of eleven syllables. In this instance, and I presume more generally as well, an honorific style is recognized by features that are avoided — features that listeners are likely or even certain to associate with other styles.
My third example is Anthony Seeger’s summary of the accounts of vocal production given to him by Suyá Indians, who live in the Amazon region of Brazil. Suyá singers say that the throat (so kre) “begins just behind the teeth and lips and extends down to the collar bone.” They distinguish two positions in the throat — base (kradi) and top (sindaw) — and the very different sensations of producing a song at these locations — with a ‘big throat’ or with a ‘small throat,’ respectively (A. Seeger 1987 : 100). Each position and corresponding feeling is associated with one genre of performance: respectively, the unison song (ngére) in which voices must blend, and the shout song (akia) in which voices must not blend. The terms for ‘base’ and ‘top’ also describe numerous other polarities (the first and second halves of a song, the lower and upper parts of a palm trunk, the beginning and end of the sky in the east and west, moieties of the east and west sides of the men’s house [ibid.: 19]). For this reason, the relationships that are potentially associated with the two throat positions are both extensive and intensive, far more so that can be indicated in this brief synopsis.
The Suyá terms for “base” and “top” are analogous to the pairs of terms for “grave” and “acute” sounds in ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and modern European languages; and to the various African terms for “big” and “small” sounds (see Kubik 1983: 49). Where they exist, the terms that designate relationships among qualities of sounds and the associated motions, positions, locations, directions, intentions, etc. are important to musicologists as points of entry into the poetic and musical imagination (Friedrich 1986) that is shared by those who use the terms. Many speech acts of musicians involve “a social articulation of systematic knowledge organized in such a way that it is applicable to a wide variety of circumstances” (Feld 1981: 23, with reference to the music theory of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea).
Anthony Seeger’s description of two ways of using the voice, and of two performance genres that are distinguished by singing style, may serve us as a concise description of a musical system. It would not be possible to relate all that happens in the musical life of the Suyá to this system, which is not an exhaustive inventory of Suyá musical resources.
Anthony Seeger describes his book Why Suyá Sing as “a musical anthropology” rather than as “anthropology of music,” because he wishes to show how forms of social interaction and social organization result from musical activity, rather than the opposite. (It was common for writers on “anthropology of music” to treat music as dependent on social organization2.) For my part, I do not think we need to worry about which term – anthropology of music or musical anthropology – is to be preferred, so long as we are willing to consider various types of reciprocal relations between music-making and other aspects of social organization.
A statement made by the late John Blacking in 1971 is helpful in this regard: “Analyses of music are essentially descriptions of sequences of different kinds of creative act.” The key terms in this statement are sequence and act. The fact that a sequence may comprise several different kinds of action endows the adjective creative with a wide range of potential meanings. Some of these pertain to the creation, reproduction, and adaptation of compositions; others involve joint participation in performance genres that establish or maintain desirable social relationships without focusing attention on familiar or newly created compositions.
Blacking was most interested in the various kinds of collaboration among performers which produce different sequences of creative acts. He wished to understand musical sounds and motions as “signs and symbols of the interaction of human beings” (ibid.: 108). Inasmuch as people interact by exchanging signs and symbols, an analytic interest in collaboration and interaction is best pursued, not by treating production and reception as separate dimensions of the performance process, but by investigating the modes of receptivity on which production depends. In many performance genres each “sequence of different kinds of creative act” is produced by performers who know how to evaluate what is happening at each moment, and how to make appropriate responses.
Each musical act – for example, one stroke of a bow or one sung syllable – calls for one or more responses from the musician who has produced it and/or from those who have perceived it and, in many cases, will respond as musicians. To know how to sing, play, or dance is to be capable of making at least some of the responses that are required or desired in one or more sets of circumstances. Whether such knowledge extends beyond a single performance genre, style, idiom, or practice depends on the complexity of the sets of circumstances, but it is never unlimited: no singer, instrumentalist, dancer, or listener could learn how to respond appropriately in all existing sets of circumstances.
2 Klaus Wachsmann, speaking of the early years of the Society for Ethnomusicology, observes that “it became progressively clearer that eventually interest would focus on the hypothesis that the structure of all music depends on social organization” (Wachsmann 1980: 693).
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