Ethnomusicology - Fieldwork & Systematized

 

Fieldwork

Bruno Nettl, Emeritus Professor of Musicology at Illinois University, defines fieldwork as "direct inspection at the source", and states that "It is in the importance of fieldwork that anthropology and ethnomusicology are closest: It is a 'hallmark' of both fields, something like a union card". However, he mentions that ethnomusicological fieldwork differs from anthropological fieldwork because the former requires more “practical” information about “recording, filming, video-taping,  special problems of text-gathering.”

The experience of an ethnomusicologist in the field is his/her data; experience, texts (e.g. tales, myths, proverbs), structures (e.g. social organization), and "imponderabilia of everyday life" all contribute to an ethnomusicologist's study. He also notes how ethnomusicological fieldwork “principally involves interaction with other humans” and is primarily about “day-to-day personal relationships,” and this shows the more “personal” side of the discipline. The importance of fieldwork in the field of ethnomusicology has required the development of effective methods to pursue fieldwork.

History of Fieldwork

In the 19th century until the mid-20th century, European scholars (folklorists, ethnographers, and some early ethnomusicologists) who were motivated to preserve disappearing music cultures (from both in and outside of Europe), collected transcriptions or audio recordings on wax cylinders. Many such recordings were then stored at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv at the Berlin school of comparative musicology, which was founded by Carl Stumpf, his student Erich M. von Hornbostel, and medical doctor Otto Abraham. Stumpf and Hornbostel studied and preserved these recordings in the Berlin Archiv, setting the foundation for contemporary ethnomusicology. But, the "armchair analysis" methods of Stumpf and Hornbostel required very little participation in fieldwork themselves, instead using the fieldwork of other scholars. This differentiates Stumpf and Hornbostel from their present-day contemporaries, who now use their fieldwork experience as a main component in their research.

Ethnomusicology's transition from "armchair analysis" to fieldwork reflected ethnomusicologists trying to distance themselves from the field of comparative musicology in the period following World War II.[citation needed] Fieldwork emphasized face-to-face interaction to gather the most accurate impression and meaning of music from the creators of the music, in contrast with "armchair analysis" that disconnected the ethnomusicologist from the individual or group of performers.

Stumpf and Hornbostel were not the only scholars to use "armchair" analysis. Other scholars analyzed recordings and transcriptions that they did not make. For instance, in his work Hungarian Folk Music, Béla Bartók analyzes various traits of Hungarian folk songs. While drawing from recordings made by himself, Bartók also relies on transcriptions by other musicians; among them are Vikar Béla [Béla Vikar; Vikar Béla], Zoltán Kodály, and Lászo Lajtha. These transcriptions came in recorded and printed format, and form the majority of Bartók's source material.

In 1935, the journal American Anthropologist published an article titled "Plains Ghost Dance and Great Basin Music," authored by George Herzog. Herzog was an assistant to Hornbostel and Stumpf. Herzog draws from material "available to [him]" and "in the literature," including transcriptions by James Mooney for the Bureau of American Ethnology; Natalie Curtis, and Alice C. Fletcher. Herzog analyzes structure and melodic contour of Ghost Dance songs. He notes that Ghost Dance music's "paired patterns" occur in many Native American tribes' music, and they may have migrated from tribe to tribe.

Writing later in the 1950s, Jaap Kunst wrote about fieldwork for the purpose of recording and transcribing sound. Kunst lists various "phonogram-archives," collections of recorded sound. They include the archives founded by Stumpf.

Among other developments, the 1950s and 1960s saw the expansion of fieldwork, as opposed to "armchair" analysis. In 1950, David McAllester conducted a study of Navajo music, particularly the music of the Enemy Way ceremony. The work was published as Enemy Way Music: A Study of Social and Esthetic Values As Seen in Navaho Music. In it, McAllester details the procedures of the Enemy Way ceremony, as well as the music itself.

Aside from Enemy Way music, McAllester sought Navajo cultural values based on analysis of attitudes toward music. To his interviewees, McAllester gave a questionnaire, which includes these items :

• Some people beat a drum when they sing; what other things are used like that?
• What did people say when you learned how to sing?
• Are there different ways of making the voice sound when we sing?
• Are there songs that sound especially pretty?
• What kind of melody do you like better: (illustrate with a chant-like melody and a more varied one).
• Are there songs for men only?

The ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam reviewed McAllester's work, calling it "strange to speak of a work published in 1954 as 'pioneering,' but this is precisely the case." He described McAllester's work as " music to culture and culture to music in terms of the value system of the Navaho." As of 1956, the time that Merriam published his review, the idea of such work "occurred to ethnomusicologists with surprising infrequency."

In his work The Anthropology of Music, published in 1964, Merriam wrote that "ethnomusicology has suffered from the amateur field collector whose knowledge of its aims has been severely restricted. Such collectors operate under the assumption that the important point is simply to gather music sound, and that this sound-often taken without discrimination and without thought, for example, to problems of sampling-can then simply be turned over to the laboratory worker to do something about it."

In the same work, Merriam states that "what the ethnomusicologist does in the field is determined by his own formulation of method, taken in its broadest sense." Fieldwork can have multiple areas of inquiry, and Merriam lists six of these :

1. Musical material culture: classification of instruments, cultural perception of musical instruments.
2. Song texts.
3. Categories of music: "envisaged by the people themselves as various separable types of songs."
4. The musician: "the training of musicians and the means of becoming a musician"; perceptions of musicians."
5. The uses and functions of music in relation to other aspects of culture.
6. Music as a creative cultural activity: "what are the sources from which music is drawn?"

Bruno Nettl describes early 20th-century fieldwork as extraction of music, which is analyzed elsewhere. Between 1920 and 1960, however, fieldworkers wished to map entire musical systems, and resided longer in the field. After the 1950s, some not only observed, but also participated in musical cultures.

Mantle Hood wrote about this practice as well. Hood had learned from musicians in Indonesia about the intervals of sléndro scales, as well as how to play the rebab. He was interested in the characteristics of Indonesian music, as well as "social and economic valuations" of music.

By the 1980s, participant-observer methodology became the norm, at least in the North American tradition of ethnomusicology.

Aside from this history of fieldwork, Nettl writes about informants: the people whom fieldworkers research and interview. Informants do not contain the entirety of a musical culture, and need not represent the ideal of the culture. According to Nettl, there is a bell-shaped curve of musical ability. In a community, the majority are "simply good" at their music. They are of greatest interest. However, it is also worth seeing who a community recommends as informants. People may direct a fieldworker to the best musicians, or they may suggest many "simply good" musicians. This attitude is reflective of the culture's values.

As technology advanced, researchers graduated from depending on wax cylinders and the phonograph to digital recordings and video cameras, allowing recordings to become more accurate representations of music studied. These technological advances have helped ethnomusicologists be more mobile in the field, but have also let some ethnomusicologists shift back to the "armchair analysis" of Stumpf and Hornbostel. Since video recordings are now considered cultural texts, ethnomusicologists can conduct fieldwork by recording music performances and creating documentaries of the people behind the music, which can be accurately studied outside of the field. Additionally, the invention of the internet and forms of online communication could allow ethnomusicologists to develop new methods of fieldwork within a virtual community.

Heightened awareness of the need to approach fieldwork in an ethical manner arose in the 1970s in response to a similar movement within the field of anthropology. Mark Slobin writes in detail about the application of ethics to fieldwork.[48] Several potential ethical problems that arise during fieldwork relate to the rights of the music performers. To respect the rights of performers, fieldwork often includes attaining complete permission from the group or individual who is performing the music, as well as being sensitive to the rights and obligations related to the music in the context of the host society.

Another ethical dilemma of ethnomusicological fieldwork is the inherent ethnocentrism (more commonly, eurocentrism) of ethnomusicology. Anthony Seeger has done seminal work on the notion of ethics within fieldwork, emphasizing the need to avoid ethnocentric remarks during or after the field work process. Emblematic of his ethical theories is a 1983 piece that describes the fundamental complexities of fieldwork through his relationship with the Suyá Indians of Brazil. To avoid ethnocentrism in his research, Seeger does not explore how singing has come to exist within Suyá culture, instead explaining how singing creates culture presently, and how aspects of Suyá social life can be seen through both a musical and performative lens. Seeger's analysis exemplifies the inherent complexity of ethical practices in ethnomusicological fieldwork, implicating the importance for the continual development of effective fieldwork in the study of ethnomusicology.

Systematized 

In his 2005 paper "Come Back and See Me Next Tuesday," Nettl asks whether ethnomusicologists can, or even should practice a unified field methodology as opposed to each scholar developing their own individual approach. Nettl considers several factors when sampling music from different cultures. The first thing is that in order to discover the best representation of any culture, it is important to be able to “discern between ordinary experience and ideal,” all while considering the fact that “the ‘ideal’ musician may also know and do things completely outside the ken of the rest.” Another factor is the process of selecting teachers, which depends on what the fieldworker wishes to accomplish. Regardless of whatever method a fieldworker decides to use to conduct research, fieldworkers are expected to “show respect for their material and for the people with whom they work.” As Nettl explains, ethnomusicology is a field heavily relies on both the collection of data and the development of strong personal relationships, which often cannot be quantified by statistical data. He summarizes Bronisław Malinowski's classification of anthropological data (or, as Nettl applies it, ethnomusicological data) by outlining it as three types of information: 1) texts, 2) structures, and 3) the non-ponderable aspects of everyday life. The third type of information, Nettl claims is the most important because it captures the ambiguity of experience that cannot be captured well through writing. He cites another attempt made by Morris Friedrich, an anthropologist, to classify field data into fourteen different categories in order to demonstrate the complexity that information gathered through fieldwork contains. There are a myriad of factors, many of which exist beyond the researcher's comprehension, that prevent a precise and accurate representation of what one has experienced in the field. As Nettl notices, there is a current trend in ethnomusicology to no longer even attempt to capture a whole system or culture, but to focus on a very specific niche and try to explain it thoroughly. Nettl's question, however, still remains: should there be a uniform method for going about this type of fieldwork?

Alan Merriam addresses issues that he found with ethnomusicological fieldwork in the third chapter of his 1964 book, The Anthropology of Music. One of his most pressing concerns is that, as of 1964 when he was writing, there had been insufficient discussion among ethnomusicologists about how to conduct proper fieldwork. That aside, Merriam proceeds to characterize the nature of ethnomusicological fieldwork as being primarily concerned with the collection of facts. He describes ethnomusicology as both a field and a laboratory discipline. In these accounts of the nature of ethnomusicology, it seems to be closely related to a science. Because of that, one might argue that a standardized, agreed-upon field method would be beneficial to ethnomusicologists. Despite that apparent viewpoint, Merriam conclusively claims that there should be a combination of a standardized, scientific approach and a more free-form analytical approach because the most fruitful work he has done has come from combining those two rather than separating them, as was the trend among his contemporaries.

Even Merriam's once progressive notion of a balanced approach came into question as time passed. Specifically, the idea that ethnomusicology is or can be at all factual. In a 1994 book, May it Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music, Timothy Rice uses enlightenment philosophy to substantiate his opinion that fieldwork cannot be used as fact. The philosophy he works with involves theorizing over the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. In order to ground those debates in ethnomusicology, he equates musicology to objectivity and musical experience to subjectivity. Rice uses the philosophical attitudes that Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur take towards objectivity and subjectivity to state that human perception of the world is inherently subjective because the only way in which humans can interpret what goes on around them is through symbols. Human preconceptions of those symbols will always influence the ways in which an individual might process the world around them. Applying that theory to music and ethnomusicology, Rice brings back the terms of musicology and musical experience. Because one's experience of music is simply an interpretation of preconceived symbols, one cannot claim musical experience as factual. Thus, systematizing fieldwork like one would a scientific field is a futile endeavor. Instead, Rice asserts that any attempt to engage with someone else's musical experience, which cannot be truly understood by anyone except that person, must be confined to individual analysis. Characterizing the musical experience of a whole culture, according to Rice's logic, is not possible.

Another argument against the objectivity and standardization of fieldwork comes from Gregory Barz and Tim Cooley in the second chapter of their book, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. In this chapter, entitled "Confronting the Field(Note): In and Out of the Field," they claim that a researcher's field work will always be personal because a field researcher in ethnomusicology, unlike a field researcher in a hard science, is inherently a participant in the group they are researching just by being there. To illustrate the disparity between those subjective, participatory experiences that ethnomusicological fieldworkers have and what typically gets published as ethnomusicological literature, Barz and Cooley point out the difference between field research and field notes. While field research attempts to find the reality, field notes document a reality. The issue, according to Barz and Cooley, is that field notes, which capture the personal experience of the researcher, are often omitted from whatever final writing that researcher publishes.