Ethnomusicology, baby formula, and the perfume of language

The things you notice when you're both a parent and an ethnomusicologist. I was giving my daughter a bottle and idly reading the label of the can of formula when I scratched my head over the trademark Natural Cultures. To anyone who knows the histories and meanings of these terms, this phrase is a direct contradiction. It makes no more sense than if a state park were called Developed Wilderness. Yet marketing language is more often based on the perfume words emit rather than the denotative meanings of those words.

The 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described the "state of nature" as "nasty, brutish, and short." In Christian theology, the "natural man" is the human in an unredeemed state, prior to the reception of the gospel. In neither school of thought is it a compliment to label something as natural. The idea that the natural is something desirable, even a prelapsarian state of grace, developed in the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantics of the 19th century. In a sense, we Americans are all Romantics now, since this idea of the natural is so pervasive among us as to be unquestioned. And since the Food and Drug Administration does not define the term natural, almost anything can be sprayed with the perfume of the word. If euthanasia becomes legal, I imagine that someone will market an all-natural euthanasia aid made from USDA organic lima beans.

Culture, on the other hand, has had a host of definitions over time, but all of them have in common the idea of human agency. One use of the word describes the act of growing biological material under controlled conditions: a throat culture is removing bacteria from the throat and growing them in a petri dish, while agriculture is growing plants in a systematic way in a field or greenhouse. Precisely because of the human agency involved, throat cultures and agriculture are not natural.

I can imagine the dilemma of those marketing infant formula: they need to come up with a euphemism for the bacteria in their product. People like the idea of nature in the abstract, but few realize that the nature of the human digestive system is to rely on symbiotic bacteria to do some of the work of digestion. Moreover, one of the current crazes in parenting is the use of antibacterial products (which, perversely, may do more harm than good.) The marketers could have chosen the term probiotic, which some yogurt manufacturers use for the bacteria in their products. The term sounds unthreatening and positive, but it's also abstract and scientific. It lacks the stinky perfume of "bacteria" but does not substitute a more alluring one.

Not so with the term culture. The term culture does have this alluring perfume, though I don't think this is because of the use of the term in biology as described above. In his recent book Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Timothy Taylor describes an experience that I have had on a number of occasions. People often tell me that they are interested in learning more about "cultural music," and they think it is admirable that I am able to teach on such subjects for a living. What do they mean by "cultural music"? Is there such a thing as noncultural music? Generally, it turns out that by cultural they mean foreign or exotic.

The use of culture in this sense is a popularization of the concept of culture promulgated in anthropology and related disciplines beginning in the late 19th century. In these contexts, culture describes the customs, beliefs, and practices that a group of people uses to make sense of the world. Of course, in this period of time, anthropologists were primarily interested in what they then called "primitive cultures," and they often decried the "loss of culture" that occurred as these societies came into contact with modernizing influences. Anthropology today has distanced itself somewhat from this model of what culture is, but the popularization continues to have force. And I think it is a pernicious popularization if it reinforces the idea that one's own way of looking at the world is default, unmarked—in short, "not cultural"—while other people's ways of looking at the world are deviations from this norm. In this way a subtle form of ethnocentrism can creep into our thought via the language of multiculturalism.

The disappearing composer at the Obama Inauguration

The performance of Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait at the Obama Inaugural Celebration (We Are One) in January of this year has created plenty of buzz on the web and elsewhere. Much of the conversation has centered on the symbolic links between Obama, Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln to which this performance has contributed. Depending on your politics, you may or may not find this symbolism convincing: the more cynical side of me says that it covers over the possibility that Obama may actually govern to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon.

But I'd like to focus attention on something not explicitly political. I didn't get to see the HBO feed of the Obama Inaugural Celebration on the Sunday before the inauguration, but the AMS-L listserv later carried a discussion provoked by this concert. While those of us who grew up within the Western art music tradition find it second nature to talk about the composer as the central figure of musical creativity, the culture at large prefers to talk about performers. One can trace this tendency back to 1960s-era popular musicians (the Beatles, Bob Dylan), who established the ideal that popular musicians should be both performers and composers (singer-songwriters), or further back to the beginnings of recorded jazz in the 1910s and 1920s, where the recorded performance and the composition are often one and the same. In short, over time the very act of composition has become hard to talk about in isolation from other activities.

(One can make a contrast with film, where filmmakers and film historians usually speak of the director as the source of creativity, while fans may be more likely to care about the contribution of the actors. Yet while actor-directors do exist, film seems to have resisted the merging of these roles; film is still made within a highly specialized division of labor more reminiscent of Tin Pan Alley than of post-Beatles pop music.)

Consider, then, the Obama Inaugural Celebration. Among the numerous songs by rock performers (Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, U2), folk (Pete Seeger), country (Garth Brooks), and soul/R&B (Stevie Wonder, Usher, Beyoncé), appeared two selections composed by Aaron Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man and A Lincoln Portrait. Here is a clip of the performance of the latter, featuring Tom Hanks as narrator:



Now view this clip on YouTube's site. Notice that the blurb reads, "Tom Hanks honored Abraham Lincoln in his speech at the We Are One Inaugural Concert" and that the supplied list of keywords does not mention Aaron Copland at all. If you actually watch the video, Copland is identified as the composer of the work in the graphics, but you will not find this video by putting "Aaron Copland" in the search box at YouTube. The composer has disappeared. Apparently the uploader of this video was under the impression that Tom Hanks had written a speech to recite over background music. It never occurred to him or her that Hanks was performing an existing musical composition with a part for a narrator.

Admittedly, this work is somewhat of a special case in the repertory of orchestral music, and a musical novice could be forgiven for not imagining that there are works out there for narrator and orchestra. Also, there is a long tradition of performances of A Lincoln Portrait with celebrity narrators (including Obama himself in this 2005 performance in Chicago) and such celebrities will inevitably steal the spotlight from a dead composer. Still, the fact that no recognition at all is given to the composer, even one as acclaimed as Aaron Copland, demonstrates well that the cultural presuppositions of many Americans are different from those of the so-called "classical music" world.

The perils of cloud computing

Last semester I began experimenting with Google Docs as a way of serving documents used in my courses. Previously I had used my account with .Mac (now MobileMe) to accomplish this.

• But this membership is a bit pricey (about $109 a year, I think), and I hoped to be able to save a bit of money by migrating to a free service.
• Also, I have had trouble with uploading documents from my laptop to .Mac from certain campuses, since they have the service blocked. Google Docs, as a standard web application, would not be subject to these problems.
• Finally, I hoped that a simpler web processor would avoid some of the maddening problems that Microsoft Word is subject to (such as something I'm dealing with now: a document that is single spaced on my screen but resolutely double-spaced when uploaded to .Mac, no matter how many ways I change the spacing).

Google Docs turned out to be no better, and sometimes worse. Using the table tool is particularly maddening. But still, it's free and it's accessible through any web browser, which came in particularly handy when I had to make an extended trip to Colombia last fall and was dependent on public internet terminals.

Then, on January 1st, I logged onto Google Docs to find the message "Sorry! We are experiencing technical difficulties and cannot show all of your documents." I didn't think much of it at first, because it was New Years' Day, and perhaps they had to bring the site down for a few minutes for some maintenance. But as hours and days passed with still no access to my documents, I began to worry. It turns out that I'm not the only one to whom this happened. This was a very strange failure, because the documents were clearly still on the server. In most cases I have linked to these documents from one of my blogs, and if you follow those links, the documents are still available. But from the Google Docs console, nothing.

What is particularly scary about this experience is that there really isn't any way to contact Google to find out what is going on, other than to post on one of the support forums. Since it's a free service, Google has no direct incentive to make sure that it works correctly. When it finally did work, no one contacted me to explain what went wrong and how they had corrected the problem.

For this reason, I switched back to using .Mac to synchronize documents between my laptop and the network. Perhaps a paid service will be more reliable—though Apple has had their own problems with .Mac and MobileMe.

What gives me pause is how seductive these free "cloud computing" schemes are, and how difficult it is to disentangle oneself from them.

• Blogger (another Google product) seems to be robust and reliable, but who knows? Now it doesn't seem like such a good idea to use a private blog to organize material for my current research projects.
  
• I thought I might use Google Calendar for all of my scheduling, but I now feel compelled to write down the most important events in an old-fashioned paper calendar. (Thus the network creates more work, because now I have to write things down twice.)
• What of all of the playlists I have stored on Rhapsody? There's no way to back them up to my own machine, other than writing down the names of the songs and laboriously finding them one at a time if Rhapsody crashes or goes out of business. But Rhapsody is such an improvement over finding music on CDs, the risk is worth it.
• How about Facebook? Same problem.
  
• What of my off-site backups to .Mac? To be really safe, should I be burning my work to discs and putting them in my safe deposit box at the bank? (I actually did do this when I was writing my dissertation, but now I can't imagine when I would find the time.)

Exploring the music of Colombia

An excellent online resource if you are interested in the music of Colombia is "A Short Trip Through Colombian Music" by Andrés Muñoz Jaramillo, a graduate student in physics at the University of Montana. There's an amazing variety of musics, some very Afro-Caribbean in style, others more like the Spanish-indigenous mixes found farther south in Peru and Bolivia.

YouTube has a wealth of videos. Here is a (very fast!) performance of the pasillo "Vino tinto" ("Red wine"). It seems to be in 3 at first, but the more you listen to it, the more a secondary meter in 4 becomes apparent. (In other words, it could be notated in measures of 12/8, variously subdivided as 3x4 or 4x3.)

Review of Joyful Noise: Psalms in Community

My review of the film Joyful Noise: Psalms in Community, produced by Margot E. Fassler and Jane Huber, has been published in the Fall 2008 issue of Ethnomusicology (52: 515-517).

Review of Kiri Miller, Traveling Home

Kiri Miller of Brown University has recently published a book on Sacred Harp singing entitled Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (University of Illinois Press, 2007). My review of this book has just been published online in Journal of Folklore Research Reviews.

Robert Shaw on musical form

Robert Shaw (1916-1999) was one of the 20th century's most important conductors of choral music, especially in his work with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and chorus. He also was an inveterate writer and speaker. This poem is included in his address "The Conservative Arts," given at Memorial Church, Harvard University, November 9, 1981.

Matters of proportion—
the relations of tone, timbre and texture
of line, rhythm and tempo
of expectation, continuation
recurrence and closure
are not grandmother's eboned and
polished clothing tree
dunce-capped and slack-coated
tall in the hall
while love is made in the parlour—
They are root, trunk, branch and leaf—
seed, sap and substance of Art's meaning.

(From Robert Blocker, ed., The Robert Shaw Reader, Yale University Press, 2004.)