Music in World Culture

Thinking Like an Ethnomusicologist

August 28, 2002

Warm-up Question:

Soundscape

• What is a soundscape? Review how the author of your text, Kay Shelemay, defines the term and then write a precise definition in your own words.

Artii-Sayir “The Far Side of a Dry Riverbed”

• Culture: Tuva (Central Asia)

• Genre: Kargyraa Khoomi (Low voiced throat Singing)

• Performer: Vasili Chazir

Thinking Like an Ethnomusicologist

• How would you gain an understanding of the soundscape that gave birth to this music?

• What would you want to know about this example; i.e. What questions would you investigate?

• To what other soundscapes is this example now connected?

Related Points

• Collection and Documentation (c.f. Lomax, Fletcher)

• Ethnography (holistic explanatory description)

• Participant Observation

Merriam’s Model

• conceptualization about music

• behavior in relation to music

• musical sound itself

Alan Merriam. The Anthropology of Music,

p. 32

Merriam is on electronic reserve

May access directly through library or via POLIS link on main course website

Password for access is: worldmus

Sound Description

• Medium: male singer (any instruments?)

• Texture: one voice yet layers of sound

• Scale - set of pitch choices; fundamental plus overtones (harmonics), p. 6

• Transcription: musical notation of performance, p. 15

• Rhythm; metrical; duple (regular measure of pulse)

Behavior

• Physics of sound production (vibration, frequency, related partials)

• Sung while outdoors, originally in herding contexts, while traveling on horseback

• Tells a story

• Audience listens for familiar frame and innovative delivery

Bardic Singing of Central Asia

• Explored in the Silk Road Project

• Treasured tradition of nomadic peoples

• An ancient heritage

Conceptualization

• “radically representational” (Ted Levin)

• Style relates to specific moods, and descriptive intentions

• Rhythmic organization reflects the rhythms of nature

• Listeners agree on those relationships

Definitions of Music

Music is socially acceptable patterns of sounds. (Merriam, 27)

Agreement on what sounds are musical is culturally determined

Perspectives

• Folk Evaluation – Emic

• Analytic Evaluation – Etic

See Merriam, p. 31

Emic/Etic Perspective

• Terms are from linguistics:

• (native speaker) Insider view = Emic

• (observing analyst) Outsider view = Etic

“If I am familiar with your music, that’s the beginning of a conversation, and now more than ever, we cannot afford not to know what other people are thinking and feeling—particularly in the vast and strategic regions of Inner Asia linked to the Silk Road.”

~ Yo-Yo Ma, cellist