I was very impressed with Feldman’s recovery work with black Peruvian musics (imagine the research nightmare when finding out one of your key sources performed in blackface, and that no one saw fit to mention this fact!). I found it interesting that these ensembles typically performed for tourists. I’m not a world traveler, but I would want to “experience” local cultures wherever I went, and I can see myself being taken in by a highly mediated but purportedly “authentic” performances, especially if they aligned with my preexisting ideas about a nation’s cultural output. One of my largest take-aways from this article was to be more critical in evaluating national cultural production: whose nation is being presented, how, to whom, for what purpose, etc.
The Turino article was a bit of a jaw-breaker, but presented many interesting ideas. He presented the complex interactions between states, discourses (like modernity and capitalism), and the people that make up the nation. His reminder to consider concepts like nation, nationalism, etc. both contextually and historically is a helpful one (I tend to filter everything through my understanding of nationalism in the US, which is obviously quite different from nationalism in the rest of the Americas). It seemed this his definition of “nation” (174) was a little circular, but this also seemed to be the point. From my understanding, nationhood often results from people collectively holding ideas of national belonging, which often times are linked with the idea of nationhood (in other words, my sense of belonging to America is predicated on an idea of America widely held by others with similar beliefs). Right?
His discussion of national music in fledgling states was interesting, since many states use indexical relations to other national musics in order to create their own. This strikes me as a common way musical communities are formed; people listen to music that has indexical (or other) links with musicians and styles they already like, leading to the formation of “new” listening preferences. Like Turino shows, these groups and practices can be both inclusionary or exclusionary. Sometimes (references to) European musics were used to mark elites as separate from the rest of the populace, and other times these musics were used to mark a nation as separate from its regional neighbors.
I wonder how Livingston’s idea of a revival aligns with music from populist movements in Latin America, which often seemed to be imposed from a new state formation that had supplanted an older one. Do these populist expressions constitute a revival, stemming as they are from a state apparatus and not the “middle-class”? Feldman’s examples constitute a revival, but what about an example like the “samba schools” from Brazil? Also, I’d love to discuss contemporary musical nationalism, like CanCon in Canada (you can learn everything I know here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content). Why does it still matter that music, t.v., etc. contain so much Canadian content? Are these ideas antiquated in the time of globalization, or are they necessary to protect other countries from the US mass media hegemony? What might happen if Bollywood becomes popular in America? Might we limit or restrict the amount of “foreign” content on American airwaves?
I was wondering about contemporary musical nationalism as well. The Austerlitz article last week mentioned how the group Varttina is accepted as something of a Finnish group, yet the leader feels that it is "world music" they are presenting since it blends "other traditions with a re-assessment of her own culture." One of the questions of that article was how locality figures into a globalized and deterritorialized world. (If you think that it is, in fact, deterritorialized.).
And with the internet, etc., how plausible would it be to restrict foreign content? From what I've heard, even countries like China have a difficult time locking down the Web sufficiently.
I would say the populist movements are/were a revival since the governments geared their propaganda towards middle class citizens (if one was to look at it in those terms). I think we do already limit the amount of foreign content (advertising, film, certain goods, etc) that come into the U.S. For instance, one can hardly find any high quality foreign goods such as candies, olive oil, etc. because it may take away business from the economy of the American food industry or it would diminish the perception of the quality of those goods made here in America?
It sure is amazing how much music there is out there. I will never even know all of the Western “classical” music that’s out there, and in this seminar I’m learning about so many other factions of music, and they’re all so interesting musically and socially/politically. I’ve always known that a lot of other types of music exist, of course. It’s just crazy to actually learn about it. Ethnomusicology man. Blowing my mind.
Anyway, I found the two chapters from the book on Black music in Peru interesting. The discussion of the revival of many black folklore traditions based on the Pancho company reminded me of lasts week’s discussion of revivals in general. Page 32 discussed the tension between the stated aims of authenticity in the performance of the Pancho company and the reality of added showy effects. I agree that these added effects certainly weren't present in the original contexts that these songs and dances performed in, but I feel that by taking this tradition into the theater for (I assume) a paying audience, you have already made impossible a truly "authentic" performance. In these types of revivals, I think these added dramatics are probably commercially necessary, and probably not a bad thing. No matter what, you will not get the audience to experience these folk songs and dances the way they were originally experienced. These additions may attract bigger audiences and make this otherwise genre stageable, even though it wasn't originally intended for this type of performance. And from how I understand it, this music wasn’t even originally rehearsed really, since it was a communal tradition where everyone participated. Or maybe that’s not right. What do you think? Are these additions good/bad, inevitable, do they take away from the “authenticity” of the performance, etc.?
I also wonder about the offensiveness of blackface in other countries. The performances by Criado in blackface were certainly at a different time, so maybe Peruvians would now take offense at blackface nowadays, but I wonder if in the US we are more sensitive to these types of things because of our particular history.
Regarding the chapter on Peru Negro, I just think it’s fascinating to see the history of race in another country. Like learning a foreign language, I think reading foreign histories can teach us so much about our own history.
It struck me that the Turino article talked about the differences between nations and states and that Dr. Fiol discussed that this past week. This is something I had never considered before (I fell victim to the elision of the two terms), and I wonder if there are a lot of other assumptions that I make based on the equating of these terms.
This is already kind of long so I will just say regarding the Hutchinson that it is nice that other people recognize this struggle with terminology and classification. I’m sure we will have a lot to say in the discussion about this one!
I got the feeling that Turino had a bit of an ax to grind with politics, nation/state differences every once in awhile. I was wondering how Turino's definition of "nation" on p. 174 would work with other uses of the term I've heard, esp. re Native American groups - the Navajo Nation, the Chumash Nation, etc. Can we characterize membership in those nations as resting solely - or even mostly - on a conception and feeling of belonging, of national sentiment?
Are these additions good/bad, inevitable, do they take away from the “authenticity” of the performance, etc.?
Good question. I think it's hard to qualify it as good or bad. It's definitely important to know that it's not exactly the same, but aren't revivals evolving/adapting, ie not fixed? I can't think of the word we used last week. Someone help me out.
From the Hutchinson... "Other theorists see the tradition/modernity binary as itself depoliticising, since it is frequently accompanied by a social evolutionary scale where modernity is equated with the West (Frank, Webster and Said in Tomlinson 1999, p. 64). Tomlinson suggests this view be corrected by dismantling the binary and opening the possibility for the existence of multiple modernities (p. 65). However, it is unclear where this leaves the traditional – can we also conceive of multiple traditionalities?"
YES! I have been waiting for someone to bring up this point! Like Doug, I so appreciated the Hutchinson for grappling with the terminology. In fact, all of the readings this week seemed to allow for much more flexibility in terminology than those in previous weeks -- Latin American scholars, it seems, very readily acknowledge the pervasive cross-pollination of cultural influences. I know next to nothing about the cultures we read about this week, but I do wonder why I got the impression that these authors were so much more open to shifting terminologies. I realize that this is perhaps beyond the scope of this class, but also I wonder how recently this idea of "multiple modernities" has entered the ethnomusicological conversation. It seems to be a very post-modernistic way of addressing ethnomusicological issues...
Which brings me to my larger question. If we are spending a large part of this class deconstructing [finding fault with] classification systems that emerged out of the era of modernization/Modernism and that are associated with "constructed" identification schemes, is it possible that there are also problems associated with our current, inherently post-modernistic/post-structuralistic approach?
Other tidbits associated with the other readings...
The amount of qualification of terminology (historical background, etc.) found in the Turino article was so incredibly helpful, and in my opinion, really bolstered his arguments in a way we have seen from few other authors up to this point. I was especially grateful for the distinction between nationalism and national sentiment, so that we may better understand the term "musical nationalism" as it relates to both.
I had issues with the following statement:
"I suggest that the styles that work successfully as national emblems must also be attractive in general to cosmopolitans in trans-state contexts, and as stated earlier, popularity abroad is often key to the selection of national musical emblems at home-for example, jazz for the United States, mbira for Zimbabwe, calypso and steelband for Trinidad, merengefo r the Dominican Republic, gamelan for Indonesia, the tango for Argentina."
This was one idea that I felt was poorly set up and supported -- just sort of an idea that was dropped in the middle of the article.
Regarding the Feldman, I will simply say that I was grateful again for the nuanced approach to terminology. I would love to see a side-by-side comparison of the history he described and the histories of jazz, gospel, and blues in the US.
I would imagine there are undoubtably problems with our classification systems: they are often constructed or reinforced by companies (not musicians, fans, etc.), and they make little conceptual space for artists who fall between genres (what could we term the DMB? Gillian Welch? Bon Iver?). I don't know how many of these problems are inherent in *our* postmodern approach, and it is an interesting thought to parse out the distinction between problems with categorization in general and problems stemming from postmodernity in particular.
This week's readings examine the relationship of nationalism to the folk music of Latin America, as well as question the appropriateness of applying tripartite division of art, folk and popular music into other non-European musical cultures. In Hutchinson's article, he argues that 'tipico' is a concept that does not have an exact parallel in English. He notes that 'voluntary affiliation, and membership in this community of musicians and listeners requires constant reaffirmation by playing old songs and thus acknowledging the music's history, by satisfying audience requests and thus acknowledging its social relations, by singing about the Cibao and thus acknowledging its geography.' The distinction between Tipico and folk music is an interesting one, although from the article I have the impression that Tipico is more of a way in which folk music is understood and practised in that region of the world, rather than a totally new category altogether. On the other hand, the author's remark that the schemata of musical genres used in the academic doens't always correspond to their usage in the real world is thought-provocative. Thus pop music covers more styles to the musicologist than to the layman. I had a similar experience talking to a student of mine. I regarded any non-classical contemporary music as 'pop', but he pointed out that the genre he enjoys is off the mainstream, and hence not 'pop' even though it is current. On the other hand, the revival of many black folklore traditions based on the Pancho company as cited in the Feldman article reminds us of the trouble of defining 'authenticity' in folk expression. Perhaps it's more useful to think of the folk as the ever-changing-present, rather than a fixed entity from the past?
Are we alright with the tripartite division of pop, folk and classical? Can these labels be reasonably applied to non-Western traditions?
I think that even "classical" music has problems with it. You talked about how we view pop music in a broader way than non-classical musicians might. I think there are similar problems with "classical." Are we talking about the Classical period (Mozart, Haydn, etc.) or the larger genre, including Bach and Wagner? And in the larger genre, are we including Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier?
Regarding the tripartite division, I think we are all at the point where we can no longer use those terms with much intellectual honesty without adding some qualifiers. But at the same time, there are times when I need to use those words in a "you know what I mean" kind of way.
I also found the Tipico term a little confusing, mostly because there was not a great English equivalent. I think with a lot of these types of concepts it would really be necessary to live in societies that use them to really get a great sense of them.
"Perhaps it's more useful to think of the folk as the ever-changing-present, rather than a fixed entity from the past?" Neat idea! One might also say that the past could be used as a sort of mirror for the present, older ideals just disguised as modern concepts.
The two excerpts from Feldman’s book were very readable and brought up some interesting points regarding the change generally more “emic” music undergoes when transferred to a larger stage and a paying audience. I think that was a sort of theme of this week’s reading, actually – when money, government influence, and public consumption become involved in a music tradition that was relatively free from those influences before, does it make it “popular?” “Nationalistic?” What sort of changes happen and are they seen as beneficial, either by insiders of the tradition or outsiders?
Regarding whether they are seen as beneficial changes, well, that question is fraught by peril. For some reason, though, such value judgments (did this change make something better?) always come to mind, anyway.
Turino’s article was a dense walkthrough of the ties between nationalism and music in Latin America. Once again, similar to last week’s articles, I was struck by just how much and how deliberately states were involved in the support and creation of national styles of music. Maybe I’m just naïve, but has the US gov’t been that active in creating national music? I haven’t heard of required hours of jazz, Appalachian, or country-western music on the radio, for instance. In today’s satellite radio, internet, and digital format world, is the radio still even an effective tool in the US or most European countries?
Hutchinson’s article delved into the difference in the use of certain terms between different groups, especially scholars and active musicians. The different meanings of “tipico” and “merengue” were fascinating to track. Unfortunately for me, the styles he was talking about weren’t familiar (and I can’t help but feel that a good deal of the readership of Popular Music might have been in a similar situation). Musical examples would have helped. As great as it is to define terms by how they actual users apply them, at some point the research has to be expressed in terms readers can understand. It helps if at least a general description and definition is offered at the beginning, even if the point of the article is to problematize terms and then offer other viewpoints. I felt like I was reading a mystery novel most of the time. Can anyone help me out with a more rudimentary definition of “tipico?” On the bottom of p. 250 it seems like “tipicisation” is a sort of neutering process, taking something that is regional and making it a part of the bigger state/nation. Making “typical.” But on the next page it it seems to be a style, something that ties it to the past, and a regional term….I know that the ambiguousness of this term is one of the points of the article, but I never got a clear idea of how the term is normally used by academics to contrast against the actual musicians’ use of the term.
I agree with your point about Hutchinson. I found myself googling youtube videos to clarify a few of the terms, including tipico. From what I got out of the article, the word tipico has not been used by academics at all, so there is no way to contrast with usage by musicians. I will be interested to learn more about this in class.
"When típico listeners and musicians simultaneously continue to assert their rural Cibaeño roots, they are trying to create a face-to-face community within a larger transnational one. ‘Tipico’ is not necessarily reductive. To summarise, Dominican musicians tend to categorise styles according to their relationship to place and collective memory."
I think you are right that the US government has not been very instrumental in creating a national music for the US. I think that in recent years the Smithsonian has started making field recordings of "folk" music, but that's more of a preservation effort than any attempt at formation or construction. Also, I think the government has tended to support classical musicians more than anything that could be called American. There are not, for instance, Army Appalachian Ensembles, while there are Army bands, choirs, and orchestras. There is a military jazz band, however, and some people say that jazz is "America's Classical Music." However, I still doubt that this really amounts to the construction of a national music.
I also greatly appreciated the discussion of terminology in this week’s readings. I enjoyed Turnio’s breakdown of definitions and how historical context can drastically change a terms meaning. I also like the idea of Cultural Nationalism that Turino presents early on. I feel that this could go along with Hutchinson’s idea of tipico recentering around place, community and sentiment rather than production, national politics and folklorism. This makes me think of the transnational point that Brianna was making. It seems to me that looking at nationalism though the lens of place, community and sentiment is more practical since there are so many national identities present in one “state”. So my question is this, does it make sense to rework our definition of nationalism to represent the transnational populations that are present in our modern states? Not sure if this makes sense… I really enjoyed the Hutchinson Article. I am not really a good judge of scholarly writing, but I appreciated how clearly she organized her thoughts and presented her arguments. Again I am finding how problematic applying terminology to these ideas actually is. I found it interesting that the term that tipico was mostly used by musicians, but ignored by scholars. I also enjoyed Hutchinson’s idea of folk genres being representative of a countries essence. I think this could be something that we could include to our ever changing definition of folk. Although, I guess you would have to clarify what the term “essence” means. I also found the idea of folkloric musicians “highlighting their ties to tradition and claiming some of the respect a folkloric musician deserves”. This idea makes sense to me, but I wonder if it actually happens in our country. Often, amongst classical musicians (at least vocalists), traditional music is simple and looked at as technically easy and therefore not a something that demands a lot of respect from other musicians. Thoughts?
Hutchinson's acknowledgement that musicians often use terms much more freely than scholars was so great... it's such an obvious thing to say, but an important thing nonetheless!
I agree that conservatory culture has a history of demeaning other traditions. I think this is gradually changing with the growing esteem of ethnomusicology though.
Are you asking if "nationalism" can refer to multi-state/nation formations? Like, if I moved to Canada, could I still have nationalist feelings for America? If that's what you're getting at, I think the idea of nationalism has been getting more flexible, but also wonder if this is one time the distinction between "nation" and "state" is helpful.
And I'd agree that traditional musics are typically not well regarded by "trained" musicians. That being said, it's funny watching these same musicians try to parse out parts by ear, improvise, and all the other things the "classical" tradition doesn't currently value.
The Hutchinson article provided a lot of items to consider and re-consider, notably about how music is mainly classified into “art, popular and traditional musics (246).” Because of this, as Hutchinson also stated, certain musical styles “fall between the cracks” and go into obscurity because we do not know where to properly categorize them. There are a great deal of musical styles that I can think of which have classification issues. For instance, the waltzes of J. Strauss; would the definitive classification be in the realm of classical/art music or 19th century popular music? What are some ideas/tips related to how one could go about solving this classification dilemma in terms of how/where “ambiguous” musics should be classified? Turino’s articles provided a great new insight (as a majority of the ideas presented within the articles did for me) about how the rise of national in the music of Latin American countries was initially grounded in Criollo “cosmopolitan” ideals instead of native ones. The nations were trying to make themselves look more sophisticated and established in the eyes of the rest of the world. This made me wonder (especially after relating this idea to some of the readings from last week, namely the article on Pirin Folk) if countries today are still attempting to make themselves look more cosmopolitan and established by adopting and/or encouraging the usage of a more streamlined and worldly kind of music?
As an Asian...i have always wondered what the meaning of nationalism in Latin America is... I have learned and assumed their nationality is different with US and other countries when I saw the revolution of Cuba which was fulfilled by foreign people. Hutchinson's article seems to explain the different notion about the tradition between westernized countries and Latin America. He mentions the meaning of popular could be accepted as the tradition in the Spain. So, people need to see and understand tipico with different perspective. He would say tipico shows the coexistence past and present in certain place rather than demonstrates one particular period, social class, races, etc. For example, when i think about the origin of tango, I could easily understand what the author wants to say... tango shows a mixture of cultural aspects which happened in Latin America in 19th through 20th century... it contains at least three types of dance which are from different continents. if we try to see this dance with our Classical(European) perspective, there would be many problems to accept tango as one tipico of Latin America. Hutchinson explains well about new combination of culture in Latin America. " Capitalist, modernization does not always destroy traditional culture, it transforms and resignifies it, producing a heterogeneous blend of new and old cultural, social, economic configurations." Personally, I would think the cultural background of Latin America had been instable than others'(Politic and economic as well). So, people were hard to determine the authentic source of tradition at that time...so, they would need to focus on the result of cultural blending.
From the comments above, it seems like there will be plenty of issues to discuss tomorrow. Some of the usual suspects have returned: authenticity, nationalism, revivals.
Sorry for the late posting.
Hutchinson: This emic/etic debate must occur often in anthropology. And I believe there are probably benefits to both approaches. The problem I had with the approach in this article was that the terms were not clear to me from the onset, in either context.
At least it seemed to me that popular and tradicional mean popular in our sense of the word, while folklorico has nationalist connotations and musica tipica literally means traditional but is "more tied to a place," so it is really just nationalist too?? So what is art music then, tradicional? From the other articles, especially the Turino, there is obviously a Western art music component of Latin American music, ie the Italian-opera national anthems.
This got me thinking about how we use terminology in music history. What is the purpose for using it? This is the primary question. Even in historical musicology, we often deal with this emic/etic debate. However, it's more of a chronological distancing rather than a geographical one, or both. So should we use the terms and names of genres that those composers used at that time or create our own to facilitate a better understanding? Why? Why not? How are we using these terms? What is their function to us?
I recently had to explain to an undergraduate that an early baroque sacred concerto is completely different than what comes to mind when they think of concerto, ie Brahms violin, Rachmaninoff, etc. I told the student that these early baroque concertos are actually just motets with instruments, but that the composers called them concertos, so that’s why the book calls them that. Each textbook we've used the past two years uses a different term, one sacred concerto, the other concerted motet. The first to me represents an emic approach, while the second is etic. In this particular example, the etic really clarifies what the genre is for the student in this case. The overlap of the term concerto, stemming from two opposite-meaning roots, one Latin and one Italian, causes the confusion. For me, knowing both approaches in this case is really beneficial.
Someone, (Henry, I think) mentioned the problems that result from overlapping terms such as popular, ie. all pop music vs. hip hop, mainstream, etc. This all goes back to Gelbart. What use is deconstructing all these terms if we can't come up with something that has at least some marginal level of utility? I think we need to try and clarify all these terms, which may often involve combining different emic/etic approaches. But Hutchinson says: “The term or classification has to fit the values of the musical community in question.” But why? Why not? What problems might arise?
Feldman: Authenticity.
Turino: Nationalism. Also, endodiscursively is not a word.
I was very impressed with Feldman’s recovery work with black Peruvian musics (imagine the research nightmare when finding out one of your key sources performed in blackface, and that no one saw fit to mention this fact!). I found it interesting that these ensembles typically performed for tourists. I’m not a world traveler, but I would want to “experience” local cultures wherever I went, and I can see myself being taken in by a highly mediated but purportedly “authentic” performances, especially if they aligned with my preexisting ideas about a nation’s cultural output. One of my largest take-aways from this article was to be more critical in evaluating national cultural production: whose nation is being presented, how, to whom, for what purpose, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe Turino article was a bit of a jaw-breaker, but presented many interesting ideas. He presented the complex interactions between states, discourses (like modernity and capitalism), and the people that make up the nation. His reminder to consider concepts like nation, nationalism, etc. both contextually and historically is a helpful one (I tend to filter everything through my understanding of nationalism in the US, which is obviously quite different from nationalism in the rest of the Americas). It seemed this his definition of “nation” (174) was a little circular, but this also seemed to be the point. From my understanding, nationhood often results from people collectively holding ideas of national belonging, which often times are linked with the idea of nationhood (in other words, my sense of belonging to America is predicated on an idea of America widely held by others with similar beliefs). Right?
His discussion of national music in fledgling states was interesting, since many states use indexical relations to other national musics in order to create their own. This strikes me as a common way musical communities are formed; people listen to music that has indexical (or other) links with musicians and styles they already like, leading to the formation of “new” listening preferences. Like Turino shows, these groups and practices can be both inclusionary or exclusionary. Sometimes (references to) European musics were used to mark elites as separate from the rest of the populace, and other times these musics were used to mark a nation as separate from its regional neighbors.
I wonder how Livingston’s idea of a revival aligns with music from populist movements in Latin America, which often seemed to be imposed from a new state formation that had supplanted an older one. Do these populist expressions constitute a revival, stemming as they are from a state apparatus and not the “middle-class”? Feldman’s examples constitute a revival, but what about an example like the “samba schools” from Brazil? Also, I’d love to discuss contemporary musical nationalism, like CanCon in Canada (you can learn everything I know here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content). Why does it still matter that music, t.v., etc. contain so much Canadian content? Are these ideas antiquated in the time of globalization, or are they necessary to protect other countries from the US mass media hegemony? What might happen if Bollywood becomes popular in America? Might we limit or restrict the amount of “foreign” content on American airwaves?
I was wondering about contemporary musical nationalism as well. The Austerlitz article last week mentioned how the group Varttina is accepted as something of a Finnish group, yet the leader feels that it is "world music" they are presenting since it blends "other traditions with a re-assessment of her own culture." One of the questions of that article was how locality figures into a globalized and deterritorialized world. (If you think that it is, in fact, deterritorialized.).
DeleteAnd with the internet, etc., how plausible would it be to restrict foreign content? From what I've heard, even countries like China have a difficult time locking down the Web sufficiently.
I would say the populist movements are/were a revival since the governments geared their propaganda towards middle class citizens (if one was to look at it in those terms). I think we do already limit the amount of foreign content (advertising, film, certain goods, etc) that come into the U.S. For instance, one can hardly find any high quality foreign goods such as candies, olive oil, etc. because it may take away business from the economy of the American food industry or it would diminish the perception of the quality of those goods made here in America?
DeleteIt sure is amazing how much music there is out there. I will never even know all of the Western “classical” music that’s out there, and in this seminar I’m learning about so many other factions of music, and they’re all so interesting musically and socially/politically. I’ve always known that a lot of other types of music exist, of course. It’s just crazy to actually learn about it. Ethnomusicology man. Blowing my mind.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I found the two chapters from the book on Black music in Peru interesting. The discussion of the revival of many black folklore traditions based on the Pancho company reminded me of lasts week’s discussion of revivals in general. Page 32 discussed the tension between the stated aims of authenticity in the performance of the Pancho company and the reality of added showy effects. I agree that these added effects certainly weren't present in the original contexts that these songs and dances performed in, but I feel that by taking this tradition into the theater for (I assume) a paying audience, you have already made impossible a truly "authentic" performance. In these types of revivals, I think these added dramatics are probably commercially necessary, and probably not a bad thing. No matter what, you will not get the audience to experience these folk songs and dances the way they were originally experienced. These additions may attract bigger audiences and make this otherwise genre stageable, even though it wasn't originally intended for this type of performance. And from how I understand it, this music wasn’t even originally rehearsed really, since it was a communal tradition where everyone participated. Or maybe that’s not right. What do you think? Are these additions good/bad, inevitable, do they take away from the “authenticity” of the performance, etc.?
I also wonder about the offensiveness of blackface in other countries. The performances by Criado in blackface were certainly at a different time, so maybe Peruvians would now take offense at blackface nowadays, but I wonder if in the US we are more sensitive to these types of things because of our particular history.
Regarding the chapter on Peru Negro, I just think it’s fascinating to see the history of race in another country. Like learning a foreign language, I think reading foreign histories can teach us so much about our own history.
It struck me that the Turino article talked about the differences between nations and states and that Dr. Fiol discussed that this past week. This is something I had never considered before (I fell victim to the elision of the two terms), and I wonder if there are a lot of other assumptions that I make based on the equating of these terms.
This is already kind of long so I will just say regarding the Hutchinson that it is nice that other people recognize this struggle with terminology and classification. I’m sure we will have a lot to say in the discussion about this one!
I got the feeling that Turino had a bit of an ax to grind with politics, nation/state differences every once in awhile. I was wondering how Turino's definition of "nation" on p. 174 would work with other uses of the term I've heard, esp. re Native American groups - the Navajo Nation, the Chumash Nation, etc. Can we characterize membership in those nations as resting solely - or even mostly - on a conception and feeling of belonging, of national sentiment?
DeleteAre these additions good/bad, inevitable, do they take away from the “authenticity” of the performance, etc.?
DeleteGood question. I think it's hard to qualify it as good or bad. It's definitely important to know that it's not exactly the same, but aren't revivals evolving/adapting, ie not fixed? I can't think of the word we used last week. Someone help me out.
From the Hutchinson...
ReplyDelete"Other theorists see the tradition/modernity binary as itself depoliticising, since it is frequently accompanied by a social evolutionary scale where modernity is equated with the West (Frank, Webster and Said in Tomlinson 1999, p. 64). Tomlinson suggests this view be corrected by dismantling the binary and opening the possibility for the existence of multiple modernities (p. 65). However, it is unclear where this leaves the traditional – can we also conceive of multiple traditionalities?"
YES! I have been waiting for someone to bring up this point! Like Doug, I so appreciated the Hutchinson for grappling with the terminology. In fact, all of the readings this week seemed to allow for much more flexibility in terminology than those in previous weeks -- Latin American scholars, it seems, very readily acknowledge the pervasive cross-pollination of cultural influences. I know next to nothing about the cultures we read about this week, but I do wonder why I got the impression that these authors were so much more open to shifting terminologies. I realize that this is perhaps beyond the scope of this class, but also I wonder how recently this idea of "multiple modernities" has entered the ethnomusicological conversation. It seems to be a very post-modernistic way of addressing ethnomusicological issues...
Which brings me to my larger question. If we are spending a large part of this class deconstructing [finding fault with] classification systems that emerged out of the era of modernization/Modernism and that are associated with "constructed" identification schemes, is it possible that there are also problems associated with our current, inherently post-modernistic/post-structuralistic approach?
Other tidbits associated with the other readings...
The amount of qualification of terminology (historical background, etc.) found in the Turino article was so incredibly helpful, and in my opinion, really bolstered his arguments in a way we have seen from few other authors up to this point. I was especially grateful for the distinction between nationalism and national sentiment, so that we may better understand the term "musical nationalism" as it relates to both.
I had issues with the following statement:
"I suggest that the styles that work successfully as national emblems must also be attractive in general to cosmopolitans in trans-state contexts, and as stated earlier, popularity abroad is often key to the selection of national musical emblems at home-for example, jazz for the United States, mbira for Zimbabwe, calypso and steelband for Trinidad, merengefo r the Dominican Republic, gamelan for Indonesia, the tango for Argentina."
This was one idea that I felt was poorly set up and supported -- just sort of an idea that was dropped in the middle of the article.
Regarding the Feldman, I will simply say that I was grateful again for the nuanced approach to terminology. I would love to see a side-by-side comparison of the history he described and the histories of jazz, gospel, and blues in the US.
I would imagine there are undoubtably problems with our classification systems: they are often constructed or reinforced by companies (not musicians, fans, etc.), and they make little conceptual space for artists who fall between genres (what could we term the DMB? Gillian Welch? Bon Iver?). I don't know how many of these problems are inherent in *our* postmodern approach, and it is an interesting thought to parse out the distinction between problems with categorization in general and problems stemming from postmodernity in particular.
DeleteThis week's readings examine the relationship of nationalism to the folk music of Latin America, as well as question the appropriateness of applying tripartite division of art, folk and popular music into other non-European musical cultures. In Hutchinson's article, he argues that 'tipico' is a concept that does not have an exact parallel in English. He notes that 'voluntary affiliation, and membership in this community of musicians and listeners requires constant reaffirmation by playing old songs and thus acknowledging the music's history, by satisfying audience requests and thus acknowledging its social relations, by singing about the Cibao and thus acknowledging its geography.'
ReplyDeleteThe distinction between Tipico and folk music is an interesting one, although from the article I have the impression that Tipico is more of a way in which folk music is understood and practised in that region of the world, rather than a totally new category altogether.
On the other hand, the author's remark that the schemata of musical genres used in the academic doens't always correspond to their usage in the real world is thought-provocative. Thus pop music covers more styles to the musicologist than to the layman. I had a similar experience talking to a student of mine. I regarded any non-classical contemporary music as 'pop', but he pointed out that the genre he enjoys is off the mainstream, and hence not 'pop' even though it is current.
On the other hand, the revival of many black folklore traditions based on the Pancho company as cited in the Feldman article reminds us of the trouble of defining 'authenticity' in folk expression. Perhaps it's more useful to think of the folk as the ever-changing-present, rather than a fixed entity from the past?
Are we alright with the tripartite division of pop, folk and classical? Can these labels be reasonably applied to non-Western traditions?
I think that even "classical" music has problems with it. You talked about how we view pop music in a broader way than non-classical musicians might. I think there are similar problems with "classical." Are we talking about the Classical period (Mozart, Haydn, etc.) or the larger genre, including Bach and Wagner? And in the larger genre, are we including Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier?
DeleteRegarding the tripartite division, I think we are all at the point where we can no longer use those terms with much intellectual honesty without adding some qualifiers. But at the same time, there are times when I need to use those words in a "you know what I mean" kind of way.
I also found the Tipico term a little confusing, mostly because there was not a great English equivalent. I think with a lot of these types of concepts it would really be necessary to live in societies that use them to really get a great sense of them.
"Perhaps it's more useful to think of the folk as the ever-changing-present, rather than a fixed entity from the past?" Neat idea! One might also say that the past could be used as a sort of mirror for the present, older ideals just disguised as modern concepts.
DeleteThe two excerpts from Feldman’s book were very readable and brought up some interesting points regarding the change generally more “emic” music undergoes when transferred to a larger stage and a paying audience. I think that was a sort of theme of this week’s reading, actually – when money, government influence, and public consumption become involved in a music tradition that was relatively free from those influences before, does it make it “popular?” “Nationalistic?” What sort of changes happen and are they seen as beneficial, either by insiders of the tradition or outsiders?
ReplyDeleteRegarding whether they are seen as beneficial changes, well, that question is fraught by peril. For some reason, though, such value judgments (did this change make something better?) always come to mind, anyway.
Turino’s article was a dense walkthrough of the ties between nationalism and music in Latin America. Once again, similar to last week’s articles, I was struck by just how much and how deliberately states were involved in the support and creation of national styles of music. Maybe I’m just naïve, but has the US gov’t been that active in creating national music? I haven’t heard of required hours of jazz, Appalachian, or country-western music on the radio, for instance. In today’s satellite radio, internet, and digital format world, is the radio still even an effective tool in the US or most European countries?
Hutchinson’s article delved into the difference in the use of certain terms between different groups, especially scholars and active musicians. The different meanings of “tipico” and “merengue” were fascinating to track. Unfortunately for me, the styles he was talking about weren’t familiar (and I can’t help but feel that a good deal of the readership of Popular Music might have been in a similar situation). Musical examples would have helped. As great as it is to define terms by how they actual users apply them, at some point the research has to be expressed in terms readers can understand. It helps if at least a general description and definition is offered at the beginning, even if the point of the article is to problematize terms and then offer other viewpoints. I felt like I was reading a mystery novel most of the time. Can anyone help me out with a more rudimentary definition of “tipico?” On the bottom of p. 250 it seems like “tipicisation” is a sort of neutering process, taking something that is regional and making it a part of the bigger state/nation. Making “typical.” But on the next page it it seems to be a style, something that ties it to the past, and a regional term….I know that the ambiguousness of this term is one of the points of the article, but I never got a clear idea of how the term is normally used by academics to contrast against the actual musicians’ use of the term.
I agree with your point about Hutchinson. I found myself googling youtube videos to clarify a few of the terms, including tipico. From what I got out of the article, the word tipico has not been used by academics at all, so there is no way to contrast with usage by musicians. I will be interested to learn more about this in class.
Delete"When típico listeners and musicians simultaneously continue to assert their rural Cibaeño roots, they are trying to create a face-to-face community within a larger transnational one. ‘Tipico’ is not necessarily reductive. To summarise, Dominican musicians tend to categorise styles according to their relationship to place and collective memory."
DeleteI think you are right that the US government has not been very instrumental in creating a national music for the US. I think that in recent years the Smithsonian has started making field recordings of "folk" music, but that's more of a preservation effort than any attempt at formation or construction. Also, I think the government has tended to support classical musicians more than anything that could be called American. There are not, for instance, Army Appalachian Ensembles, while there are Army bands, choirs, and orchestras. There is a military jazz band, however, and some people say that jazz is "America's Classical Music." However, I still doubt that this really amounts to the construction of a national music.
DeleteAnd we should absolutely unpack the linguistic and conceptual abomination that is that framing of jazz and of classical music. What a catastrophe.
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ReplyDeleteI also greatly appreciated the discussion of terminology in this week’s readings.
I enjoyed Turnio’s breakdown of definitions and how historical context can drastically change a terms meaning. I also like the idea of Cultural Nationalism that Turino presents early on. I feel that this could go along with Hutchinson’s idea of tipico recentering around place, community and sentiment rather than production, national politics and folklorism. This makes me think of the transnational point that Brianna was making. It seems to me that looking at nationalism though the lens of place, community and sentiment is more practical since there are so many national identities present in one “state”. So my question is this, does it make sense to rework our definition of nationalism to represent the transnational populations that are present in our modern states? Not sure if this makes sense…
I really enjoyed the Hutchinson Article. I am not really a good judge of scholarly writing, but I appreciated how clearly she organized her thoughts and presented her arguments. Again I am finding how problematic applying terminology to these ideas actually is. I found it interesting that the term that tipico was mostly used by musicians, but ignored by scholars. I also enjoyed Hutchinson’s idea of folk genres being representative of a countries essence. I think this could be something that we could include to our ever changing definition of folk. Although, I guess you would have to clarify what the term “essence” means.
I also found the idea of folkloric musicians “highlighting their ties to tradition and claiming some of the respect a folkloric musician deserves”. This idea makes sense to me, but I wonder if it actually happens in our country. Often, amongst classical musicians (at least vocalists), traditional music is simple and looked at as technically easy and therefore not a something that demands a lot of respect from other musicians. Thoughts?
Hutchinson's acknowledgement that musicians often use terms much more freely than scholars was so great... it's such an obvious thing to say, but an important thing nonetheless!
DeleteI agree that conservatory culture has a history of demeaning other traditions. I think this is gradually changing with the growing esteem of ethnomusicology though.
DeleteAre you asking if "nationalism" can refer to multi-state/nation formations? Like, if I moved to Canada, could I still have nationalist feelings for America? If that's what you're getting at, I think the idea of nationalism has been getting more flexible, but also wonder if this is one time the distinction between "nation" and "state" is helpful.
DeleteAnd I'd agree that traditional musics are typically not well regarded by "trained" musicians. That being said, it's funny watching these same musicians try to parse out parts by ear, improvise, and all the other things the "classical" tradition doesn't currently value.
The Hutchinson article provided a lot of items to consider and re-consider, notably about how music is mainly classified into “art, popular and traditional musics (246).” Because of this, as Hutchinson also stated, certain musical styles “fall between the cracks” and go into obscurity because we do not know where to properly categorize them. There are a great deal of musical styles that I can think of which have classification issues. For instance, the waltzes of J. Strauss; would the definitive classification be in the realm of classical/art music or 19th century popular music? What are some ideas/tips related to how one could go about solving this classification dilemma in terms of how/where “ambiguous” musics should be classified?
ReplyDeleteTurino’s articles provided a great new insight (as a majority of the ideas presented within the articles did for me) about how the rise of national in the music of Latin American countries was initially grounded in Criollo “cosmopolitan” ideals instead of native ones. The nations were trying to make themselves look more sophisticated and established in the eyes of the rest of the world. This made me wonder (especially after relating this idea to some of the readings from last week, namely the article on Pirin Folk) if countries today are still attempting to make themselves look more cosmopolitan and established by adopting and/or encouraging the usage of a more streamlined and worldly kind of music?
As an Asian...i have always wondered what the meaning of nationalism in Latin America is... I have learned and assumed their nationality is different with US and other countries when I saw the revolution of Cuba which was fulfilled by foreign people.
ReplyDeleteHutchinson's article seems to explain the different notion about the tradition between westernized countries and Latin America.
He mentions the meaning of popular could be accepted as the tradition in the Spain. So, people need to see and understand tipico with different perspective.
He would say tipico shows the coexistence past and present in certain place rather than demonstrates one particular period, social class, races, etc.
For example, when i think about the origin of tango, I could easily understand what the author wants to say... tango shows a mixture of cultural aspects which happened in Latin America in 19th through 20th century... it contains at least three types of dance which are from different continents. if we try to see this dance with our Classical(European) perspective, there would be many problems to accept tango as one tipico of Latin America.
Hutchinson explains well about new combination of culture in Latin America.
" Capitalist, modernization does not always destroy traditional culture, it transforms and resignifies it, producing a heterogeneous blend of new and old cultural, social, economic configurations."
Personally, I would think the cultural background of Latin America had been instable than others'(Politic and economic as well). So, people were hard to determine the authentic source of tradition at that time...so, they would need to focus on the result of cultural blending.
From the comments above, it seems like there will be plenty of issues to discuss tomorrow. Some of the usual suspects have returned: authenticity, nationalism, revivals.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the late posting.
Hutchinson: This emic/etic debate must occur often in anthropology. And I believe there are probably benefits to both approaches. The problem I had with the approach in this article was that the terms were not clear to me from the onset, in either context.
At least it seemed to me that popular and tradicional mean popular in our sense of the word, while folklorico has nationalist connotations and musica tipica literally means traditional but is "more tied to a place," so it is really just nationalist too?? So what is art music then, tradicional? From the other articles, especially the Turino, there is obviously a Western art music component of Latin American music, ie the Italian-opera national anthems.
This got me thinking about how we use terminology in music history. What is the purpose for using it? This is the primary question. Even in historical musicology, we often deal with this emic/etic debate. However, it's more of a chronological distancing rather than a geographical one, or both. So should we use the terms and names of genres that those composers used at that time or create our own to facilitate a better understanding? Why? Why not? How are we using these terms? What is their function to us?
I recently had to explain to an undergraduate that an early baroque sacred concerto is completely different than what comes to mind when they think of concerto, ie Brahms violin, Rachmaninoff, etc. I told the student that these early baroque concertos are actually just motets with instruments, but that the composers called them concertos, so that’s why the book calls them that. Each textbook we've used the past two years uses a different term, one sacred concerto, the other concerted motet. The first to me represents an emic approach, while the second is etic. In this particular example, the etic really clarifies what the genre is for the student in this case. The overlap of the term concerto, stemming from two opposite-meaning roots, one Latin and one Italian, causes the confusion. For me, knowing both approaches in this case is really beneficial.
Someone, (Henry, I think) mentioned the problems that result from overlapping terms such as popular, ie. all pop music vs. hip hop, mainstream, etc. This all goes back to Gelbart. What use is deconstructing all these terms if we can't come up with something that has at least some marginal level of utility? I think we need to try and clarify all these terms, which may often involve combining different emic/etic approaches. But Hutchinson says: “The term or classification has to fit the values of the musical community in question.” But why? Why not? What problems might arise?
Feldman: Authenticity.
Turino: Nationalism. Also, endodiscursively is not a word.
I don't have an answer, but I love your final question.
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