Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Week 4: Turning Folk Expression into Art Music (Part II) AND Studying Folk in the Empire

Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Andrew Jones
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 1:06 PM
Status:
Published
It is my first time delving into Indian music and culture as well and so far I think it is interesting! Getting a piece "in our hands" is brought up in the tuba and/or brass world, but we say that we "just really liked the piece;" it aligned better with our strengths and weaknesses as players/musicians so it was easier to learn, interpret, and perform.
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 12:50 PM
Status:
Published
Yes precisely! But I think that is because we are used to the idea of a work. If we were not, I wonder if the awkwardness would go the other way.
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Thread:
Week 4 readings
Post:
RE: Week 4 readings
Author:
Andrew Jones
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 12:50 PM
Status:
Published
Taking an aspect from a different culture and reworking it to fit the aesthetics of another culture does happen a lot today! Take for instance how foods from different countries (Mexican, Chinese, etc.) are recreated and sold in America to fit the tastes of the general populace...Southwest egg rolls, cheeseburger enchiladas...authentic right? Ramanujan elaborates in the next paragraph on his folklore definition (or so it seems to me): the language ("Great Tradition") of the "prestigious" is only one part the picture; the dialects ("Little Tradition") of the "little people" are what provides the true folklore.
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Tyler Alessi
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 10:52 AM
Status:
Published
This is a great point. I never really thought of humor as a characteristic of culture, but it makes total sense.
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Thread:
Week 4
Post:
RE: Week 4
Author:
Tyler Alessi
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 10:49 AM
Status:
Published
Great comment! I think the idea of "high" and "low" depends on perspective. For instance the performing of the national anthem at the super bowl. Most "classical" musicians would note that the arrangement used was fairly accessible and simple and therefor view it as "low" art (although performed very well), but many non "classical" musicians may view it as "classical" music, and therefor "high" art (this is really an assumption, but it may be true).
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Thread:
Brianna Matzke Week Four
Post:
RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
Author:
Tyler Alessi
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 10:41 AM
Status:
Published
I agree with your statement 2b. However, is it possible that the colonizers in Woodfield's article were more interested in the entertainment aspect of these pieces? Woodfield discusses that the colonizers held a huge emphasis on performance practice rather than authentic transcription of the pieces, so I think it is possible. Sorry, I am not trying to start a discussion of art vs entertainment right now...
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Thread:
Brianna Matzke Week Four
Post:
RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
Author:
Tyler Alessi
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 10:30 AM
Status:
Published
I agree with your statement of providing a brief background as to why a term is used. I think that we need vocabulary in order to organize and therefor study certain concepts. It is interesting, I just saw a play called Tribes at Ensemble theater that dealt with the idea of language. One of the characters in it was writing a dissertation about how language is just a social construct that held no inherent meaning. While this idea is pretty bleak (and not really revolutionary) I still find it interesting that "we" try to find such literal definitions for ideas that are so broad.
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Tyler Alessi
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 10:16 AM
Status:
Published
As a singer, we often say we have to get a piece "into our voice" before we can perform it.
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Thread:
Week 4 readings
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RE: Week 4 readings
Author:
Tyler Alessi
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 10:08 AM
Status:
Published
Sorry I am so late responding...
I agree that there probably was no other way to perform a transcription, other than perhaps a violin which could deal with the chromaticism better than a harpsichord. Also since this article is presented from the perspective of the English it makes sense that these transcriptions were looked at as successful. I would be curious to see what the Indian musicians thought of them (maybe they liked them!)
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Thread:
John Hausmann
Post:
RE: John Hausmann
Author:
Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 8:27 AM
Status:
Published
Reading your sophisticated questions brought to mind a very unsophisticated analogy... high school cliques. Jocks, nerds, band geeks, popular kids, etc. Sub-groups within a larger cultural context... in that case, I think that one could gain equal insights by first learning about the individual clique and THEN the larger context, or by beginning with an understanding of the context and subsequently moving deeper. However, I think it would be easier to operate by the first model than by the second.
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Thread:
Douglas Easterling
Post:
RE: Douglas Easterling
Author:
Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 8:21 AM
Status:
Published
You know, humor and music would be an incredibly interesting topic to know more about! Other than a few stereotypical examples (characters in opera, Haydn's music, P.D.Q. Bach) it is hard to think of many examples of humor in classical music. I wonder if MORE humor could be found in folk music???
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 8:17 AM
Status:
Published
I think sometimes we feel awkward hearing pop songs performed DIFFERENTLY than we're used to hearing them. For example, I sometimes feel very uncomfortable hearing live versions of pop songs when I have the album version memorized.
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 8:16 AM
Status:
Published
Yes, for the most part, except that I think in pop music the artist whose version became the most well-known is often known as the definitive version of the song.
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
February 4, 2014 8:15 AM
Status:
Published
Yes, humor does tell us a lot about culture. I think also we learn about a person based on what they laugh at -- it's an easy way to tell who they are and where they came from. And if we laugh at the same thing as another person, we are more likely to get along.
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Thread:
John Hausmann
Post:
RE: John Hausmann
Author:
Andrew Jones
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 7:29 PM
Status:
Published
Put another way, can we understand the formation of smaller communities without understanding the overall cultural milieu in which they form?

Nice response and question! I think we can understand the functional or "on-the-surface" side of the culture, meaning the social norms, religion(s), customs, etc. without knowing how the how the community/culture formed out of the overall nation. However, we cannot understand how or why the community came into being or why they exist because we did live in it the culture, we don't know all the history of the culture, and we are not around it day in and day out.
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Thread:
John Hausmann
Post:
RE: John Hausmann
Author:
Stefan Fiol
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 4:16 PM
Status:
Published
Great questions, and I don't think there are easy answers here.
But it does seem that the idea of a dominant class, caste, or culture is a requirement for the formation of subaltern communities. In India this idea has most forcefully coalesced around Sanskritic Brahmanism (the so-called 'great tradition'), but there are other ideas about dominant cultures (e.g., neoliberal capitalists, patriarchical village oligarchies) that have contributed to the formation of subaltern communities as well. I think Michelle's point is important: we have to be careful to put our ideas into specific historical and geographic contexts in order to see how the parts fit together.
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Thread:
John Hausmann
Post:
RE: John Hausmann
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 8:59 AM
Status:
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That was my understanding as well, and I've also read that there is still quite a bit of disparity as a result. Whatever the case, I do think there is a lot of truth to your definition.
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 8:57 AM
Status:
Published
And I wonder how much Western ideas underlying "the work" are being transmitted to cultures where that concept is foreign through technology. I mean, a recording fixes a performance pretty permanently, so maybe the premise is spreading?
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Thread:
Douglas Easterling
Post:
RE: Douglas Easterling
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 12:55 AM
Status:
Published
I see what you did there! ;-)
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Thread:
John Hausmann
Post:
RE: John Hausmann
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 12:50 AM
Status:
Published
I wonder if we could call upper-castes a form of an "altern" community in India? As I understand it, castes are not as big of a thing any more, but at one time they were. Were they that way all across the subcontinent? If so, maybe that could be a way to define a "mainstream" or dominant culture the oppresses the many subaltern ones?
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 12:41 AM
Status:
Published
I wonder if we feel this sort of awkwardness because we are used to this idea of a musical "work." In other words, if we belonged to a society in which music was transmitted orally and we had never heard of "works" or composers or "authenticity," would hearing alternate versions bother us? Or would we just expect every time we hear a tune for it to be different? In that case, would we feel awkwardness at hearing a tune in the same way again? I think some pop artists even perform their songs the same way every performance (more or less). Would that lack of variation among different performances make us feel awkward? Or hearing a Beethoven sonata the second time...it will be very similar to the first time. Would that be awkward for us in that position?
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 12:37 AM
Status:
Published
I agree! But postmodernism is so difficult to really understand that I always doubt myself whenever I say anything about it...
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 12:35 AM
Status:
Published
That's a good point. Humor is actually very clever. I like that this article explained the humor of these jokes that we don't have the background to understand. So while none of us probably heartily guffawed upon reading about them, we could appreciate them for how original and clever they were.
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Thread:
Week 4 readings
Post:
RE: Week 4 readings
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 12:32 AM
Status:
Published
I think this hits the nail on the head. Since they are in an oral tradition, they have no problem with "re-fashioning and re-creating" their material. Or at the very least, they have less of a problem with it than, for instance, classical musicians would have performing standard rep in alternate tunings!
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Thread:
Week 4
Post:
RE: Week 4
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
February 3, 2014 12:30 AM
Status:
Published
I agree! However, I think that there is much less of a taboo around asserting superiority regarding "Classical" music over folk and pop music!
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 5:33 PM
Status:
Published
We typically think of jokes (and humor more generally) as being a "low" form of cultural transmission and formation, but think about all of the jokes you know, and then think about what they tell us about cultural norms (jokes about other ethnicities and genders, word play jokes, even "knock knock" jokes presuppose an understanding of the norm that's often subverted).
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 5:31 PM
Status:
Published
In my personal experiences learning from traditions that were originally oral, my learning was one-on-one, but there were also elements of written/preserving traditions mixed in. I know there's a book about how popular musicians learn, but I haven't read it yet.

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754632269
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Thread:
Douglas Easterling
Post:
RE: Douglas Easterling
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 5:28 PM
Status:
Published
I haven't. I know of an article re joke cycles (viola jokes), but nothing comes to mind musically. If anyone else knows of one, please let me know!!!
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Thread:
John Hausmann
Post:
RE: John Hausmann
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 5:25 PM
Status:
Published
Doug is absolutely right (and Kannik's analogy is very helpful!). Is it still safe to claim that there *is* a pre-dominant culture in India (formed by class, gender, caste, etc.)? Doesn't the existence of multiple competing subaltern communities assume the existence of one altern community? (Can you use "altern" as the opposite of "subaltern"?) If so, what happens (like in India) when there are many subaltern communities that might outnumber the altern ones (apartheid South Africa comes to mind)? Was my original presentation of a dominant culture in America flawed?
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Thread:
Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Post:
RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 5:20 PM
Status:
Published
I've used both Wikispaces and Blogger for classes in the past. Wikispaces might work better if we organized contributions thematically, and Blogger might work better if we organized contributions by individual, but both free us from the tyranny of Blackboard!
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Thread:
Brianna Matzke Week Four
Post:
RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
Author:
Erik Paffett
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 11:17 AM
Status:
Published
On dead classical music. It reminds me of a quote from Edward Strickland's Minimalism: Origins: The death of Minimalism is announced periodically, which may be the surest testimonial to its staying power.
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Thread:
Douglas Easterling
Post:
RE: Douglas Easterling
Author:
Erik Paffett
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 11:09 AM
Status:
Published
Ramanujan talking about oral transmission is so interesting to me. It agree it's essentially impossible to prove that oral texts were transmitted verbatim. We'll just have to take his word for it ;) ....But also, the idea of tracing the origins of an oral tradition is so full of mystery. I guess it lends itself to speculation and all sorts of debates.
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Erik Paffett
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 11:02 AM
Status:
Published
I really appreciated the joke perspective. When scholars are able to pull in periphery types of sources like that, it really makes their argument much more poignant.
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Thread:
Week 4 readings
Post:
RE: Week 4 readings
Author:
Erik Paffett
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 10:58 AM
Status:
Published
It's funny how 'Westernized' those transcriptions were. I really enjoyed those too. It's impossible to keep a harpsichord in tune, even when you have modern technology at your fingertips. I can just imagine how bad those harpsichords would have sounded, while they tried to sing these anglicized versions of these folk songs. I kept picturing it while I was reading. I think he did a really good of describing the situation. It really helped set me there.
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Thread:
John Hausmann
Post:
RE: John Hausmann
Author:
Erik Paffett
Posted Date:
February 1, 2014 10:51 AM
Status:
Published
"One might argue that any understanding of subalternity presupposes an understanding of the dominant culture."

I would probably agree with this....just like defining folk art assumes a 'high art,' defining subaltern community assumes that there is an oppressive class/caste.  I sort of like how Doug problematized your post, though. Does India have a dominant culture? I remember from Kannik's class, he said you have to consider India more like Europe rather than the United States, more like a continent than a singular nation. So many languages, different traditions. On the other hand, regardless of language and tradition, there is always a wealthy/ruling class. I tend to think of it as a universal thing. So, I'm in between on this.
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Thread:
Week 4 readings
Post:
RE: Week 4 readings
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 7:06 PM
Status:
Published
They didn't have to worry about the 'ur-' source or authenticity, you see... ;) I think artists existing in an oral tradition are much more flexible than those from a 'written' one.... Same goes for religion. Islam VS Hinduism.
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Thread:
Week 4
Post:
RE: Week 4
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 7:02 PM
Status:
Published
I think in our times the West has become very self-conscious about any sort of value judgement involving high/low, classical/pop, etc. The fact is that for the majority of our civilisation this is exactly the sort of dualistic world in which we lived in. It may help to see the relativity of such concepts, but I think there is some truth in assigning value judgements to these distinctions, although it's a huge taboo now to claim that Western music is superior to non-western traditions and so on.
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Thread:
Douglas Easterling
Post:
RE: Douglas Easterling
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 6:58 PM
Status:
Published
Interestingly Richard Dawkins's 'memes' also popped up in my mind when I was reading these articles, although I always thought that the word 'meme' was just another way of calling concepts.
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 6:55 PM
Status:
Published
Yes we certainly say 'It's in our fingers'....
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Thread:
Brianna Matzke Week Four
Post:
RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 6:51 PM
Status:
Published
Great question! I think Wittgenstein's idea of 'family resemblance' that we read about a while ago is useful in this context. We can accord a concept some sort of definition while accepting that it may be reflected in gradually subsiding hues...
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 6:49 PM
Status:
Published
Your question is interesting, although I think even that sort of oral tradition is dying out. Take piano for instance, very little of the Russian, German and French schools exist now. It's a melange of many diverse influences...
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 6:46 PM
Status:
Published
In this sense the fluidity and changeability are exactly the same as folk music!
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 6:45 PM
Status:
Published
I think there's a connection between post-postmodernism rejecting absolute truth and the rejection of an 'ur-' source... It's all about deconstructing and relativising... I think.
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Thread:
Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Post:
RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
Stefan Fiol
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 4:49 PM
Status:
Published
ok by me--do you have any specific site in mind?
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Thread:
Douglas Easterling
Post:
RE: Douglas Easterling
Author:
Michelle Lawton
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 12:43 PM
Status:
Published
Have you seen any joke cycles set to music? I'm thinking maybe political spoofs of songs or something like that?
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Michelle Lawton
Posted Date:
January 31, 2014 12:35 PM
Status:
Published
I think the issue with pop music is not that it's neither oral nor written, but can be a blend of either, or, and both. I agree with the thread; even when songs may originally be written out, subsequent covers and remixes can cloud the idea of a fixed tradition (especially when produced by the original singer!).
But I also feel that, even though modern Western classical tradition may value fixity, when used functionally (in churches, etc.), the ability to improvise in a variety of styles is usually encouraged and even sometimes taught. Improvising a la Bach, provided that's what a performer was playing when the priest spills wine down his robes, the power goes out, etc., is seen as a good thing. While it's generally not considered good form in a Classical concert, I've also seen performers who got lost or distracted improvise in that tradition as well. It's not usually done, but perhaps outside of the conservatory training system fluidity isn't so very removed from our sensibilities.
Question: Can the one-on-one training common to most musicians be seen as a type of oral tradition? (I think this also got brought up in a different thread.)There's certainly different schools, teachers and students who trace their pedagogical lineage, etc. Just because learning music is now aided by a written score doesn't seem to completely preclude the oral tradition aspect...  
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Thread:
Douglas Easterling
Post:
RE: Douglas Easterling
Author:
Eunyoung Chung
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 8:06 PM
Status:
Published
i also want to know the ancient wisdom which is one part of folk and hope to have an example...
as you said folk had been orally transmitted and included many nonverbal genres...
i think folk could be an extreme abstract idea...
maybe poeple could transcript folk but they may not understand its abstract explanation...the author may point out this happening during the processing of transmission...
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Eunyoung Chung
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 7:49 PM
Status:
Published
have you ever imagined...you are living in the oral transmitting culture or society...
I could hardly imagine that becuase i already became subordinated in the descriptive culture.
today i listened the same song "turn turn turn" sung by pete seeger and the Byrds...
it was the first time i heard the 'pete seeger' version and i felt awkward...i was used to listen that song in the movie...however, oppositely,,people who like folk music,,,may feel awkward to popular band version of song...
even in the genre of pop music...people would be responced differntly about the fixity and fluidity...
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Thread:
eunyoung Chung
Post:
RE: eunyoung Chung
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 7:28 PM
Status:
Published
Hi Eunyoung,
I liked your comment about Indian attitudes towards "star" musicians. It made me think of other parallels between Indian and Western European music: serious listening to professional musicians, different high and low traditions, instrumental music based on vocal models, etc. I wasn't sure what you meant when you said "post colonial period and recent scholars need to be backward to their own original places." Did you mean that they need to move back to understanding and studying the tribes to find more "pure" or "authentic" folk music?
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Thread:
Brianna Matzke Week Four
Post:
RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 7:21 PM
Status:
Published
I've actually been turning this over all day, since I've been frustrated that "folk music" isn't a great term, but that I have nothing else to replace it with. I agree with Andrew that a more accessible writing style would help introduce the concepts to a larger group, and I imagine that will have to be good enough.
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Thread:
Michelle Lawton - week 4
Post:
RE: Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Eunyoung Chung
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 7:17 PM
Status:
Published
i like to read your writing...maybe it would be out of topic. but,,, i think the concept of "highway" and "local" has its own meaning in music. maybe the music which can be educated is good for keeping and spreading the music in certain period time...but..." local" music could be mastered by people with various ways... being mastered is a great meaning because soometimes people need to devote their whole life for master someting...perhaps we also master one little song through our whole life and may sing to very small number of people...however, the academical music could be explain in couple of minutes...like on the highway...
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Thread:
Week 4 readings
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RE: Week 4 readings
Author:
Eunyoung Chung
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 7:06 PM
Status:
Published
i also thought about the insider's perspective during reading...the playing piano for making transcripts of indian melody was really interesting to me too. it could be seen as the positive attitude on outsider's eyes,reversely,on the insider's perspective, every attempt need to be more coutious in order to keeping its originality.
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Thread:
Week 4
Post:
RE: Week 4
Author:
Eunyoung Chung
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 6:47 PM
Status:
Published
i do believe ther were many virtuosic Tuba players in the past time...I think the literal transmission is very important condition not only for music itself but also for changing people' notion about the certain instrument.
recently,,,many instruments are ready to be examined their possiblities of being solo instrument...i assume... when the genius coming and systemizing its theory and making people understand their performance methods such as technique and concepts...those instrumental musics are luckily become the academical music.
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Thread:
Week 4 readings
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RE: Week 4 readings
Author:
Michelle Lawton
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 12:28 PM
Status:
Published
I agree about transcribing with a harpsichord - but to take a devil's advocate position, how else? The women in particular were attempting to make a recognizable version of the music they heard that could be reproduced at English parties. Harpsichords were the fashionably correct English instrument, and what they had, so they worked with it. From the accounts, it seems they were largely successful, so perhaps some amount of pride is justifiable. Perhaps it shouldn't be so shocking that they did use harpsichords, or surprising that after all the simplication and returning Indian airs ended up sounding rather similar to Scottish or Venetian...
As a side note, the Indian musicians seem to have been more or less willing to humor them and retune their instruments (of course if I was getting paid well enough, I'd find a way to sing Twinkle Twinkle or Happy Birthday in any scale suggested with a grin on my face... ).
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Thread:
Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Post:
RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
Michelle Lawton
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 12:11 PM
Status:
Published
Babiracki might have thought that staying in the culture for decades was a colonial era phenomenon - but it's interesting that when actual musical transcription is mentioned, it's clear that it was at least sometimes a short-term project. On p. 81-82, Babiracki discusses Kaufmann's brief trip to transcribe drum patterns and says that despite the value the two other researchers/missionaries mentioned placed on knowing the culture, the melodies and drum patterns were collected separate from texts and contexts (problematic) and by people with limited exposure to the tribes.

I wonder how that particular example is too terribly different from the post colonial methods described later on p. 83 - short term trips with a group of researchers, and quite possibly not all of them having the benefit of long-term exposure? Is Babiracki coming across as nostalgic for a bit of a mythical past in regards to music collection, or were longer-term projects actively undertaken by music researchers in the 1800s?
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Thread:
Henry Chow
Post:
RE: Henry Chow
Author:
Andrew Jones
Posted Date:
January 28, 2014 11:25 AM
Status:
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Is pop music a form that is neither oral nor written? I understand that there's no 'score' as such for a pop song, but rather a track on a record. But then it's fluid in the sense that the same singer (or another one) can choose to 'remix' it quite freely. Fluidity in continuity again?

I would say yes, pop music is neither oral nor written for the most part. For example, there are many lead sheets that have been created for different pop songs, some of them were written before and some after the songs were recorded. How do we know if that was the original intent for the interpretation of the song for those that had a lead sheet made for them after the recording process?
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Brianna Matzke Week Four
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RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
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Andrew Jones
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January 28, 2014 10:40 AM
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Very nice question...I think the best way to go about assigning vocabulary to ethnographic concepts would be to "dumb down" the material, meaning to make it accessible and understandable to all people. This is one instance (I think?) where simplicity is golden; avoiding overly complicated terms, syntax, and/or definitions will allow one to better relate his or her ideas to the larger group. With this in mind, it could also be beneficial to give a brief background as to why a certain term/idea is being used to describe the ethnographic concept at hand.
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Week 4
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Week 4
Author:
Andrew Jones
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 9:21 PM
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The Coomaraswamy article gives a very interesting and in-depth presentation on the differences between “Marga” art and “Desi” art, that is the difference between the higher, more academic (Marga) and the lower, more “worldly” art (Desi). The difference between the two (according to Coomaraswamy) does not involve a distinction between the “aristocratic and cultivated from the folk and primitive art, but (one) of sacred and traditional from the profane and sentimental art (79).” So, art that is considered folk-like in nature has a more Marga quality to it because it represents the people as a whole. Those that consider folk art to be more associated with the Desi are being inhibited by their “university education,” “i.e., whether we are concerned with the interpretation of folklore or with that of the transmitted text (82).”
Generally, I agree with Coomaraswamy on her ideas present in the article. The best illustration that I can create as to why I agree with her can be found in the tuba. Before the 1950’s, the tuba was generally thought of as a non-virtuosic, more Desi-like instrument by most in the musical community and in culture in general, e.g. there were hardly any original solo works written for the instrument, no university had a full-time tuba professor, sousaphones were still considered somewhat acceptable in a concert ensemble setting, etc. It wasn’t until Bill Bell and Harvey Phillips (both tuba professors at IU at one point) were able to give the general public and musical community a glimpse of how virtuosic the tuba can be that the tuba’s Desi-like image began to disappear. In other words, the tuba was thought to be a joke of an instrument, one that had an inferior stigma (Desi) attached to it by the majority of culture and the musically elite (Marga). People were not wholly familiar with it, so they were relying on empirical evidence and long standing traditions (i.e. folklore) to make their judgments.
How would one go about changing long standing notions about something considered Desi into something Marga?
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Douglas Easterling
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RE: Douglas Easterling
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Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 7:33 PM
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I think your question is insightful! Yes definitely the term "Indian folklore" is a product of political ways of thinking about a group of people, rather than identifying people by their culture. It's easy to picture this in terms of "American" folklore... we have Paul Bunyan from northern folkore, Johnny Appleseed from the Appalachian and midwestern folklore, Pecos Bill from Southwest folklore... as far as I know, these are regional tales, particular to cultures within America that are not universally American.
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Henry Chow
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RE: Henry Chow
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Brianna Matzke
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January 27, 2014 7:27 PM
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Henry, what do you think about the relationship between post-modernism and the idea that there is no such thing as an "ur-source"?
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Brianna Matzke Week Four
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RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
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Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 7:24 PM
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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
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Henry Chow
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RE: Henry Chow
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John Hausmann
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 7:22 PM
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Your question is an interesting one! I know that a lot of rock scholars consider the recording (album, EP, single, etc.) to be "the work," which exists in a fairly stable/fixed form. But, you're also right regarding remixing, since that destabilizes this concept, and it's one reason (I feel) that people have been slow to study such genres/songs.
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Douglas Easterling
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RE: Douglas Easterling
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John Hausmann
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January 27, 2014 7:20 PM
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I latched onto this too. A lot of joke cycles are addressed in the humor studies literature as essentially contemporary folklore, but from what I've read/seen, most "folk" don't necessarily consider it folklore. The word has definitely become associated with "older" things, and we forget that we're really *making* it every day. I wish I could live long enough to see people study our memes...
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Brianna Matzke Week Four
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RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
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John Hausmann
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 7:15 PM
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I really like your question, and it seems to underlie a lot of what we've been reading. I don't know if there's a good way to combat it; if nothing else, I console myself with recognizing that naming something changes it. I think as long as we make our students and listeners aware of the problems behind the terms, that might do more good in the long run.
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John Hausmann
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RE: John Hausmann
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John Hausmann
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January 27, 2014 7:10 PM
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That's a really good point- I was blurring "nation" as a geopolitical entity and "nation" as a larger series of communities. Thank you!
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
John Hausmann
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 7:08 PM
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To contribute to the discussion board portion of this, I agree that BB is ugly and counter-intuitive. What if we used a blog (Dr. Fiol)?
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John Hausmann
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RE: John Hausmann
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Michelle Lawton
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January 27, 2014 3:55 PM
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Argh. Blackboard ate my first attempt at posting...
Coomaraswamy's idea of one shared culture (regardless of literacy or social position) was very effectively challenged, I agree - I had no idea that India had so many different languages and tribes until reading some of the later more nuanced articles.
I've wondered about the idea of a smaller group vs. the dominant group; I think it may depend on the context and especially the time frame being considered. For instance, the Chumash Indians in California formed communities long before other dominant cultures arrived (Spanish, Mexican, and American, etc.), although all of those groups had a tremendous impact later. (And that's an understatement...) Although the Chumash probably count as marginalized now, if I were to study cave paintings from before colonial times, the current dominant culture wouldn't need to be much of a consideration. However many modern nations, such as France, formed not just out of definitions of what they were but also what they were not (contrasting their culture vs. Germany or Italy, concepts of French citizenship, etc.), and certainly many small communities since then have emerged and changed in a dialogue with another group, dominant or otherwise. (My thinking is it is usually easier to define by what something is not rather than what it is...) So as to needing to understand "the overall cultural milieu" - I think you're right.
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
Erik Paffett
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 3:18 PM
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That's a great point about the styles coming into play as a result of the keyboard transcription process. I did not consider that!
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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Erik Paffett
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 3:16 PM
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Great point. His examples were so effective.
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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Michelle Lawton
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 3:13 PM
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I caught a feeling of nostalgia in Babiracki's article as well; I thought it may have had to do more with the fact that colonial collectors spent so much more time in the field, on average, than their modern-day counterparts. I didn't think of many of the reasons (university funding, political climate, etc.) as to why that might be... thanks for pointing that out. 
I was wondering if the comparisons to different national styles by Margaret Fowke and others in the Woodfield article related back to an understanding of a sort of past universal ur-folk (as discussed by Gelbart). It could have been simply the musical similarity between arranging material for harpsichord and voice that brought Scottish or Venetian songs to mind, but perhaps the collectors were also aware of that sort of evolutionary, progressive idea of before-civilization universal state and wanted to see similarities between Scottish and Indian songs? 
And yes, I'm in complete sympathy - the online board to facilitate discussion, etc. might be great - Blackboard, however, can be awkward...I'm experimenting with different strategies this week too.
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Week 4 readings
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Week 4 readings
Author:
Tyler Alessi
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 2:55 PM
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I enjoyed how the Woodfield article came showed the influence of Hindustani airs on the British. While I feel that it makes more sense to look at the topic of British influence on Indian music from the perspective of the insider, it was a nice change of pace to have an outsider point of view. I found Woodfield’s section on transcription to be particularly fascinating. I could not believe that they attempted to transcribe the Hindustani airs using a harpsichord or a pianoforte. What also struck me was the amount of pride that the British took in their transcription even though they failed to authentically represent the music. I wonder if this is what Babaracki meant when he said that the British were not skilled in musical analysis. Narayan touches on the British influence as well, but from an insider perspective. Narayan states that the British collectors edited many Indian folk stories to fit their aesthetic.  I wonder if we see this in today’s culture at all. Or is it so easy to find “authentic” performances on the internet that this editing is unable to occur?
Having not studied Indian music in too much detail (I took a course in Indian Classical music last semester) I found Coomaraswamy’s definitions to be helpful. I also found it interesting that defined marga and desi as highway and local which correlates to the Gelbart’s “high” and “low”.
I am curious about Ramanujan’s definition of folklore. On page 4 Ramanujan states “language is a dialect that has acquired an army, but all these myriad dialects carry oral literature, which is what I call folklore.” I took this to mean oral tradition = folklore. This makes sense to me, but I feel that this cannot be completely true. Is oral Ramanujan over simplifying this term?
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Douglas Easterling
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RE: Douglas Easterling
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Michelle Lawton
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 2:50 PM
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I was also very interested in the idea of a distinction between contemporary folklore and, perhaps, studying folklore from a historical perspective. Narayan brought up joke chains as an example, and I think your idea of memes is right on the money. Not being familiar with a lot of bona fide chain jokes myself, what came to my mind were jump rope rhymes and the rewording of well-known songs (this week's addition to my repertoire was courtesy of an engineering major: Twinkle twinkle little star, Power = I squared R...)
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Michelle Lawton - week 4
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Michelle Lawton - week 4
Author:
Michelle Lawton
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 2:38 PM
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First, I feel I really have to preface this with the statement that this is really my first time studying Indian music...
I found Commaraswamy's article to be interesting; I'd never run into the descriptions of "highway" vs. "byway" or local cultures. I thought it was interesting how he presented them as being able to be pursued at one and the same time and in one and the same environment, as they weren't (supposedly) categories that distinguished between social classes as aim/function.
How does that realistically play out when certain segments of the populartion would have to work and not think of higher things? (And how does that correspond to Coomaraswamy's somewhat slighting - and maybe occasionally deservedly so - views of higher ed?)
Woodfield's article was a very well documented look into the collection and performance of "Indian airs" during the colonial period, especially by women - a fact that Babaracki in her article on tribal music seemed to ignore. Since I'm really quite ignorant and desperately trying to catch up on this - although the "Indian airs" being collected during the colonial era were not "tribal" music (the focus of Babaracki's article) or perhaps even "classical music," I think Woodfield's article provides ample proof against Babaracki's statement on p. 77 that "these men were not skilled in musical analysis and were unfamiliar with and uninterested in India's classical music." There was quite a lot of Babaracki's article that I found a little strange; it was written in the early 1990s yet much of the scholarship cited came from the 1970s, and it had a curiously nostalgic and occassionally rather teed-off air, especially when talking about the differences (or non-differences) between modern and colonial studies of tribal Indian music.
Narayan: I had never thought of jokes as being part of folklore, yet it makes perfect sense.
I enjoyed Ramanujan's stress on the problems of categories and especially how an oral tradition have aspects of both fluidity and fixity. The part where he discussed learned men as having texts in their throats reminded me of how pianists have sometimes talked of having pieces in our hands; we haven't just seen or heard them, but have played them. Has anybody else run into that terminology for their instruments? (Just curious...)
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eunyoung Chung
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eunyoung Chung
Author:
Eunyoung Chung
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 12:57 PM
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Ian woodfield- i could recognize western people kept their way of music apprecitation in Indian society.
Rlatively,of course it was early of time which they reached to Indian culture and due to lack of westernized musician they would be willing to accep the Indian music into their society and studied.However, interestingly, the attitude toward the Indian music people showed the same way which they played and listened as the court music in western society.'star singer' made me remind the italian opera star in eitgteenth century europe. then, how could I think those people tried to collect the authetic Indian cultural heritages even they didn't change their actions toward totally different music.
babiracki- the mateiral of folk could be from the general notions and specofic sources. when people too focus on great notion of folk, the specific evidences which is crucial base of individual culture, would be ignored. Indina culture is an important example people should reexamine thei true originalities under the processing of generalizing. ultimately, the generalized concepts could become a 'classic' of its soceity, however how could we explain aboutin the small concepts which is unrevealed due to lack of understanding of its primitive notion.
Narayan, coomaraswamy, and Ramanujan- these three readings seem like say about the language. the indian folkrole would be the first example the oral folk transmitted and written into English. the colonial period and post colonial period has differnt thinking about the reaserch of indian folk. post colonial period and recent scholars need to be backward to their own original places such as each of folk's spoken language or find the small tribes and society to get real authetic folk sources which is blurred by transmission into English or being westernized.
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 12:36 AM
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I like the font size! I think it's more readable.
And I also agree that Blackboard's discussion board is maddening. I want to be able to return to the main thread more easily. 
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John Hausmann
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RE: John Hausmann
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Douglas Easterling
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January 27, 2014 12:32 AM
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I definitely agree with your final questions, at least in relation to America. To understand atheists in America, one would certainly have to understand the bible as interpreted by mainstream protestants and mega-churches. However, I think the question is different for India. (I have a limited understanding of India, so....this could all be wrong). As I understand it, India is SO pluralistic, that it is difficult to speak of the "dominant culture" of India, at least historically. Or I think that may be how Barbaracki and Narayan see it. I wonder if the idea of a national culture persists simply because we think of places geographically as parts of nations. It is so ingrained in our thoughts that we sometimes forget that the nations that we have today are relatively new in many cases (take Italy for example). So perhaps people try to make a national culture where there isn't one. Don't get me wrong: I think there is certainly a national culture in India now, even if it is much more fragmented than, say, the culture in the United States. But certain "tribal" folklores in India might be considered outside of that national culture. This may be way wrong, but it is how I interpreted what those later authors meant. 
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Henry Chow
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Henry Chow
Author:
Tat Fun Chow
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 12:30 AM
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Change VS permanence seems to be at the heart of the readings this week... No wonder it's such a central issue in philosophy and religion!

The biggest idea that I got out of the readings this week is the notion that oral and written traditions aren't fixed entites, but share a fluidity that often escapes our attention. This is particularly interesting in the case of India, which relies heavily on oral traditions. The relative lack of historical records in India compared to other great ancient civilisations like China and the Greco-Roman world was largely due to their reliance on oral traditions rather than 'writing things down' (or so I heard in my Indian philosophy class a few years back). This is also reflected in their more fluid conception of the basis of Hinduism, which is not a religion of 'the Book', to borrow an Islamic term. As this week's readings point out, the Vedas were handed down orally for almost 1000 years before they were set in a written form. This is probably true for a work like the Iliad which supposedly also arose out of an oral tradition. Nevertheless the world (which is undeniably driven by Western civilisation) is so used to the fixity and primacy of the written form that such a reliance on oral traditions seems very removed from our sensibilities.

This reliance on the written text is manifest in the modern Western classical tradition, where there is basically no oral tradition and as a result we are only taught to play from a sheet of music, while improvisation to the scale of a Beethoven or a Bach is definitely beyond the reach of most of us. Oral traditions seem to embody a liveliness and current-ness of culture that is certainly lacking in today's classical music world. The idea that there is no such thing as the 'ur-source' is also a timely reminder of our 20th performance mindset of faithfully rendering 'the score'.
The discussion on the greater versus the smaller traditions in India was also interesting. I feel that the same must have been the case in Europe as far as music is concerned. I suspect that the rise of the musical canon effectively wiped out lesser composers/traditions by the end of the 19th century...

Question: Is pop music a form that is neither oral nor written? I understand that there's no 'score' as such for a pop song, but rather a track on a record. But then it's fluid in the sense that the same singer (or another one) can choose to 'remix' it quite freely. Fluidity in continuity again?
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Brianna Matzke Week Four
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RE: Brianna Matzke Week Four
Author:
Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 12:23 AM
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I agree about your assessments of the Slate articles and regarding outsiders imposing a false fixedness! That's a very astute example. I also was reminded of memes and wrote about it a lot in my response.
Regarding your final question: much of my research has been centered around self-reference. Your question reminds me of the concept of metalanguage. If you want to talk about language (or any system or symbols), you have to remove yourself from that system to really avoid contradictions/complications. So you have to create a metalanguage to talk about language, and a meta-metalanguage to talk about metalanguage, etc. We create this language to talk about folklore, but it is certainly constructed
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Douglas Easterling
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Douglas Easterling
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Douglas Easterling
Posted Date:
January 27, 2014 12:10 AM
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I find it interesting that India has its own division of art (and folklore, etc.) into something similar to “high” and “low.” And unless I am misunderstanding this, this division did not come from the West. Most of our readings mentioned this divide: samskrta and marga meaning “high” and desi meaning “low.” 

I had the most trouble with the Coomaraswamy reading. He seems so anti everything: education, science, society, modernism, etc. He says on p. 81 that we've lost some kind of ancient wisdom by losing real fairytales, etc., but he doesn't give an example. It's just something that sounds traditional and moral and upright, but he doesn't back it up. What is an example of the wisdom we have lost? I am not trying to be anti-folklore or too one-sided (Western-centric, scientific, etc.) in my approach, but this just seems like he is just saying meaningless words to me. Moreover, since folk beliefs have at some point in the past been misunderstood (according to him), did HE even understand them? I would argue that perhaps he could not understand them as they were meant to be understood any better than any other Indian familiar with the beliefs. And if that is the case, how can he say that what they are “superior” (whatever that means) to science and “realistic art”? I understand that he is a metaphysic himself, but I am very skeptical about everything he says. It just seems like he is trying to preserve the old ways because they are old, traditional, etc. I have nothing against tradition or old things, in fact a lot of the things I love most in life are very old (I’m a music historian…), but I’m just not convinced. I suppose this would be better talked about in class on Tuesday though, so I will stop here with this rant.

On page 9, Ramanujan says that oral texts were preserved verbatim. I wonder if this can really be confirmed. I found it interesting that Ramujan talked about nonverbal things as folklore (“dances, games, floor/wall designs, objects of all sorts from toys to outdoor giant clay houses,” p. 2). I had never considered things to be folklore, but as we are reading about folklore in general, I think this makes sense, especially in light of what Ramanujan stated on p. 6 that folklore items are autotelic, meaning that they travel on their own. This type of transmission is fascinating, because it is so hard to trace, but it clearly happens everywhere and at all times whenever there is anything that can be called “the folk,” using Alan Dundes’ broad definition meaning “any group whatsoever that shares at least one common factor,” (quoted on p. 178 of the Narayan reading).

Narayan does a great job of talking about contemporary folklore. This also fascinates me, because I so easily fall into the trap she describes of thinking of folklore as something that originated in the past and has been preserved by people untouched by the corrupting influence of modernism, capitalism, etc. Narayan demonstrates that this is clearly not the case. I think a good example of folklore in our own cyber, modern lives can be seen in memes. Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 as a unit of cultural inheritance in contrast to genes, units of genetic inheritance. Since then, the term has really taken a life of its own (as memes do, so I suppose the term “meme” itself is a meme), and now the term usually brings to mind small pictures on the internet with text over them that get reproduced and remixed frequently. Memes are particularly interesting to me since I think in memes we have an example of a type of folklore whose autotelic traveling we can actually trace. The website knowyourmeme.com has researched the origins and evolution of internet memes. For the history of the doge meme, see http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge . This certainly isn’t the most scholarly of histories, but it is interesting nonetheless. I imagine (but have not confirmed), that more reputable studies of this nature abound in the social sciences nowadays.

Narayan also talks about how “Indian Folklore” is really too broad of a category to be very useful. It seems like there is a tendency now to project “nations” onto bodies of work (folklore) that were not conceived in those nations and have little to do with our modern idea of nations in general. Is this because Nationalism spurred on the investigation and serious study of folklore and folk music, as we saw in our Gelbart reading? Is this tendency a remnant of those types of thinking?

Sorry it’s so long….there were so many things to discuss!
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Brianna Matzke Week Four
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Brianna Matzke Week Four
Author:
Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
January 26, 2014 8:29 PM
Edited Date:
January 26, 2014 8:38 PM
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I have too much to say, so I'm going for list form.

1) In the Woodfield, I appreciated the attention to the differing roles that men and women played in the act of collecting texts and melodies. I also found it interesting that the dates of Woodfield's source materials seemed to be much earlier than in the other things we read (late 18th century rather than 19th century).

2a) I found the terminology in Babiracki's essay to be the most problematic of the six things we read. She first explains the difficulties of the various terms (folk music, tribal music, classical music, etc.) and that their nuanced definitions are difficult to pin down... BUT then it seems to me she immediately buys into the terminology and all the associated black-and-whiteness, rather than allowing these terms to flow freely. However, I did appreciate this text for addressing the fact that categorizations applied to Indian texts cannot necessarily transfer over to various types of Indian music. I agree that the music must be addressed on its own terms. Sidenote: One thing that has always fascinated me about music in India, especially, is that the relationship of music to text to context can be very different from what we are accustomed to in Western culture.

2b) I also noticed that Babiracki's claim that "colonizers were not interested in music as art" seems to conflict with the content of Woodfield's article.

2c) Babiracki mentions, too, that the ethnographers working to "preserve" materials may have at the same time been hastening a cultural shift -- that their preconceptions were actually altering the content they were trying to objectively observe. She points out that was has validity for an insider might not for an outsider, and vice versa. It makes me think of how I feel in this class. I am an "outsider" to the world of ethnomusicology. I wonder, as I go through this class and I learn various "insider" terms and practices, whether my perception of the materials will be altered by the frames set up by those terms and practices. I'm sure my perception WILL be altered. Perhaps it is worthwhile to question whether or not that is a 100% positive shift.

3) The Pande was in fact written by somebody who has an "insider" perspective on India and its folklore. He makes it clear that finding a synonym for "folklore" in Indian language is a difficult task, for two reasons:
- the deeply intricate history of the various cultures that have risen and fallen and coexisted on the Indian subcontinent
- the problematically complex linguistic associations with each possible synonym, again related to the much longer and larger and deeper sense of history embedded in Indian culture as compared to Western culture
I appreciated this text for the contextual window it provided.

4) In general, I have noticed with all these texts that it is very important to notice tone. Each of the authors will sometimes point to the definition of a particular term as problematic and then turn around and USE that term in the very next sentence! In certain cases, this is actually contradictory writing, wherein the author has tried to escape one misconception only to fall prey to another, while in others I think it is a way for the author to demonstrate common usage of the term and its inherent complexities.

5) My favorite part about the Narayan article was the mention of joke cycles. This immediately called to mind the digital age phenomenon of memes! If I had a do-over, maybe I'd go back and become a meme scholar. A meme-ologist?

6) Narayan also poses the question: Does fixity necessarily lead to extinction? Narayan is referencing "tradition" in this case with regard to folklore, but I immediately drew the parallel to classical music. Did everyone see the Slate.com article this week declaring the death of classical music? (I'll link to it here.) Compare that to this rebuttal (link here.) The Slate article declares the death of classical music based on the decline of the structures and traditions that have persisted from the late 19th century onward. Thankfully (!!!) the rebuttal notes that classical music is NOT dead, but rather the traditions have shifted. The Slate article is written by an "outsider," the rebuttal by an "insider." I could be stretching here, but the Slate article appears to me to be an outsider imposing fixity on a living tradition (classical music), whereas the rebuttal is written by someone living within the tradition, experiencing classical music as a living, non-fixed art form.

7) Finally, the Ramanujan. This read more like a sermon than a scholarly discourse, but I mean that in a good way -- as I mentioned in another comment on the discussion board, he manages better than anyone else to shore up each of his points with a perfect example (or two), peppering the commentary with humor, wisdom, and enlightening anecdotes. He uses examples from folklore to help us understand how to study folklore, which is so exactly and perfectly his point to begin with -- that folklore contains a symbolic language that loses a bit of its significance the very minute we begin to attempt to pin it down.

My question: Assigning terminology to a particular concept (much like trying to dictate or write down an oral tradition) can be problematic. However, without terminology it would be impossible for us to engage in any type of discourse with the materials or with each other. What are some ways to combat the inherent problems in assigning a vocabulary to ethnographic concepts? 
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
Brianna Matzke
Posted Date:
January 26, 2014 7:21 PM
Edited Date:
January 26, 2014 7:23 PM
Status:
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I agree, I hate the way Blackboard has set up these boxes... they are old fashioned and non-intuitive, sort of like trying to use an e-mail editor circa 2001. 
And yes, Ramanujan was great. I think the reason he was able to communicate complex meanings so effectively is because he had a specific example that perfectly illustrated every point he made. He used folk texts to help us understand folk texts. :)
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John Hausmann
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John Hausmann
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John Hausmann
Posted Date:
January 25, 2014 4:27 PM
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For Coomaraswamy, the essential character of folk art is high, not low. Folklore expresses profound truths about the lived experience of "peasants," who seem to be the only ones who can understand it (he is very hard on those with university educations!). He states that "all traditional art is a folk art in the sense that it is the art of a unanimous people,” presenting (via Childs) the idea of a nation as one community with one shared culture (80). I related to this idea from two areas of interest. As someone who studies “American music,” I have read extensively about the ways that different ideas and ideals regarding American-ness have been transmitted (for those interested, the best recent source is Charles Garrett’s Struggling to Define a Nation). As someone with an interest in “Indian music,” I have approached that classical tradition as an outsider, which presents insurmountable obstacles for an emic understanding of culture. In both of these examples, national formations are still powerful ways I (and maybe we) categorize, understand, and listen to music, and these formations typically present the view of the dominant class.

Coomaraswamy’s idea was challenged by each later author, who complicated the idea of one shared culture (especially in a nation-state with so many regional, language, class, etc. divisions). While these other authors interrogate the idea of “one shared culture” that represents a nation-state and its people, the idea still has remarkable persistence (whether one is moving from an emit or etic perspective). I believe Babiracki and Narayan presented the most nuanced arguments for challenging the cultural and colonial hegemony that maintained a high/low (art/folk) division of culture. However, I wondered why the idea of a national culture persists. One might argue that any understanding of subalternity presupposes an understanding of the dominant culture. For example, while not everyone in the United States reads the Bible, that text remains important (foundational?) for someone attempting to understand American cultural life and thought, since it permeates social mores, civic discourse, public morality, shared metaphors, etc. To extend this, understanding the marginalized condition of any smaller group would presuppose understanding their reluctance to accept or embed the values of the dominant group. Right? Narayan obviously shows the value of broadening the range of cultural production one studies, but does that more nuanced approach presuppose that one deeply understands the dominant culture? Put another way, can we understand the formation of smaller communities without understanding the overall cultural milieu in which they form?
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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RE: Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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Erik Paffett
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January 25, 2014 1:22 PM
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 I don't understand what happened to the spacing between paragraphs. They all had the same formatting when I submitted it?
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
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Erik Paffett - Week 4 reflection
Author:
Erik Paffett
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January 25, 2014 1:20 PM
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 In the Woodfield reading, I found the source letters very interesting. Something that he did not really go into great depth about, probably because it was not particularly relevant to what he was talking about, was the awareness of national styles. A letter from Margaret Benn mentions Italian, German and Swiss styles (pg. 151). Later on, Margaret Fowke compared Hindustannie airs to Venetian ballads (pg. 177). This really brought me back to the early Gelbart chapters that talked about nationalism as a catalyst for categorizing folk modalities.
  When comparing the colonial-era fieldwork to modern-day fieldwork, the idea that the long, immersive field studies where researchers stayed for decades learning the culture really caught my eye. Babiracki almost seemed to have a nostalgic tone when she talked about this, calling it a “phenomenon of the colonial era.” My first thought was that this is probably a reflection of the current fiscal state of the university systems (a whole other tangential tirade perhaps deserving its own discussion thread). But could it also be a preference for modern day scholars as well?

 I thought the Narayan article had a unique perspective on the idea of separating the self and other. How can we ignore the colonial influences of the eighteenth century and the globalized influences of the modern world where the internet acts as an instantaneous cultural transmitter when studying Indian folklore? I could see how some might consider this approach arrogant, but the overwhelming amount of folklore that bears the Western influence cannot easily be ignored, especially the portion of folklore that has viewed the class mobility offered by Westernized economic systems in a positive light (pg. 191 “All social change mentioned in folklore is not, however, phrased in such negative terms.”)

 Trying to keep this brief and comment on most of the readings is a balancing act. I just want to mention that I loved Ramanjuan’s perspectives. I think it is probably the clearest explanation we’ve dealt with in trying to sort through the murkiness of these terms, folk, classical, high-brow, low-brow. I wonder if anyone had a similar or opposite reaction to this approach?
p.s. I just discovered that you can change the font and font size on your posts (no comments please, I know it's week 4). I'm trying Times size 4. I think the blackboard discussion setup is a little cumbersome, at least for me. Let me know if you think font is too small/large.
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