Duncan Vinson

Shape-note singing and complementary medicine, part 2

2012-01-26T21:20:00.000-05:00

(Part 2 of a series. See part 1.)

Other ways in which shape-note singing is an "alternative choral music":

Independence of parts. In most pieces within the shape-note tradition, the three or four voice parts are independent melodies. Each line is interesting by itself, and it may not be constrained by the other lines. For example, it's possible to have a a piece where each vocal part simultaneously reaches the top of its tessitura, or one where the parts cross freely. The resulting polyphonic texture has a constant fluctuation of intensity, even if the piece is sung at the same volume throughout.

In Supply Belcher's 1794 composition An Anthem of Praise (not originally a shape-note publication, but now found in the modern shape-note collection The Norumbega Harmony) there is a passage where the treble and tenor parts sing the same melody as a canon at the unison. It is marked "duetto" in Belcher's original score, and it may have been intended for two soloists.

This independence of lines is characteristic of European choral music of the 16th and 17th centuries. By the 19th century it was old-fashioned, which was why the European-trained American musicians of the era disdained it so much. But from the standpoint of today, there is much to disdain in 19th century choral music, which often sacrifices the integrity of the line to create rich vertical harmonies. While these harmonies can sound ravishing to the passive audience, it is alienating to the individual singer to become merely a speck of paint on a large canvas. And the only way to make such chordal writing interesting is for a conductor to impose changes in volume, much like an organist pumping the swell pedal (or, worse, the crescendo pedal) back and forth. This is very easy to overdo. Shape-note singing introduces us to a different aesthetic, at once more participatory and less sentimental.

The early American and shape-note repertories have their own delights, but they also can be a good stepping stone to the works of Tallis, Byrd, and Palestrina, for church choirs accustomed to singing chordal SATB music. Getting inside this repertory requires first unlearning a chordal, homophonic, expressive approach to part-writing, and then learning a linear, polyphonic, architectural approach.

Doubling of parts. In shape-note singing as practiced today, men and women sing both the tenor and treble parts, doubling the part at the octave as needed. In the Belcher example above, for example, a modern shape-note singing class would (ideally) have equally matched sections on each part, with each section containing both men and women. This is another practice that goes against common-practice European music because of its fundamental rule against parallel octaves.

But looked at another way, is it much different when an organist selects both 8' and 4' stops to accompany a hymn? The hymn melody is heard both at concert pitch and an octave higher, but the ear does not hear two different parts in parallel. Rather, the ear hears a single melody with more intensity and richness. Likewise, a vocal part doubled at the octave in a polyphonic texture can achieve this quality.

And from a practical standpoint, the ability to change octaves when necessary is a boon to the singer with a limited vocal range, who otherwise would not be able to participate in choral music.

Shape-note singing and complementary medicine (part 1)

2012-01-16T21:42:00.000-05:00

Since September of 2011, I have been serving in my first permanent position as a church music director for the First Congregational Church of Melrose, Massachusetts. This is a new chapter in my career, but it draws upon my earlier experiences.

In my earlier studies as an ethnomusicologist, I did field research with shape-note singers, then with choral singers. The former, partly because of their outsider status rooted in rural Southern culture, are a more typical subject matter for ethnomusicologists and folklorists than the latter.

Now I find myself employed at a small suburban church within a historically liberal denomination most associated with New England and the Midwest. In this setting, do I look toward the outsiders, the shape-note singers, for models? Or do I look toward the choral singing that is favored at university schools of music?

I look toward both, and I am finding that I am not the only one to do so.

Sometimes I think of shape-note singing as an "alternative choral music," in the same way that chiropractic care is an "alternative medicine." And just as some physicians are becoming more open to so-called "alternative" care (thereby redefining what the "mainstream" is), likewise many church musicians have been influenced by shape-note singers. The shape-note singing community, like chiropractic, keeps alive memories of past persecution by the establishment. But the reality today is more nuanced than these histories would indicate. Just as some now refer to alternative therapies as "complementary medicine," enriching but not replacing allopathic medicine, likewise I value shape-note singing as "complementary choral singing" that forces us to confront many fundamental questions about how to make music.

How are the singers arranged? Choral directors disagree on where singers of each part should be placed (or even if the parts should be scrambled throughout the group). Shape-note singing offers a radical alternative: seat each part together, but facing inward in a square toward the center. In the center of the square, all four parts are heard with equal intensity. This strategy is not possible in most churches, which have a designated space in the front or the back for the choir to sit. But if your singers are well rehearsed, why not try scattering some of them around the perimeter of the space? Someday I may try this in the hexagonal sanctuary at First Congregational.

(Photo: A rare overhead view of a Sacred Harp singing convention, taken at the New England Sacred Harp Convention in Byfield, Massachusetts, in 2009.)

Who is the leader? Mainstream choral singing, like other ensemble work in the Western art music tradition, assumes that one person is the leader and the others are followers. Shape-note singing has leaders, too, but the position of leader rotates among as many people who are willing to take the role. (In the above photo, there are actually two leaders in the center of the square, an unusual occurrence.)

(Part 1 of a series to be continued.)

In memoriam Christopher Small

2011-09-19T11:33:00.005-04:00

The musicologist Christopher Small has died at the age of 84. His three books republished by Wesleyan University Press, Music, Society, Education (1977), Music of the Common Tongue (1987), and Musicking (1998) were a formative influence on me as I studied ethnomusicology at Brown University. (Small also published a monograph on Arnold Schoenberg, not mentioned in the Times obituary.)

Not only did I find his ideas provocative, but I also was fascinated with him as an individual.

Like me, he began with an early interest in the natural sciences (in his case, zoology), before turning to music.
Also like me, he grew up away from major musical centers (in his case, New Zealand) before moving to the metropolis.
Also like me, he had made some attempts at composition but had become discouraged with the task, and this discouragement led to an ethnomusicological point of view.

If I were to pick out one book that convinced me of the necessity of a global discipline for studying music, it would be Musicking. Small starts with a radically simple idea: rather than think of music as a thing that we can buy, sell, and study, think of it as an activity that takes place among a certain group of people in a certain time. In other words, turn the word music in a verb.

(If you reflect on how we talk about dance, this approach is not as utopian as it seems. Dance can be a noun, but more often it is a verb that describes an activity. And if we do speak of "a dance," we usually mean a genre classification such as waltz, samba, and so forth. There is no such thing as a "dance store" that sells recorded or notated versions of dances, for the simple reason that at least until the 20th century, it was impossible to record or notate dance. Today there are notation systems for choreography, such as Laban movement notation, but these are only used by specialists and are not sold to a mass public like musical scores.)

One of the advantages of thinking of music as an event rather than a thing is that it makes it easier for us to develop a musical discipline that is not biased toward a specific time or place. In music studies we have a strange disciplinary situation that our colleagues in visual art and linguistics must find puzzling: there are some disciplines (historical musicology, music theory) that primarily study notated compositions of Western art music, and other disciplines (ethnomusicology, folklore) that primarily study non-Western or non-notated music. (Mass-mediated popular music is a political football kicked between the two camps.) To the first camp, the object of study is a musical score, while to the other camp, it is a field recording or transcription. The two camps have different institutional and intellectual histories, and it can be hard for them to talk to each other.

But each side leaves out an important part of the story of musicking.

To a composer in the Western art music tradition, musical material and its meanings partly come from the unwritten music that exists in the composer's world but does not reach the page. Historical musicologists and theorists have sometimes forgotten this, focusing exclusively on the biography, psychology, or technique of a genius composer.
Conversely, unwritten musical traditions may have concepts of authorship and a persistent musical work, even in the absence of prescriptive notation. Ethnomusicologists and folklorists have sometimes forgotten this, ascribing unwritten music to groups of people rather than to individuals.

To me, Small's work offered a possible way out of the horns of this dilemma. In effect, he is advocating that we take the same point of view toward written compositions that linguists take toward written language. To the linguist, spoken language is always the primary phenomenon and writing secondary. Description of a language must be grounded in observations of speaking, not in the prescriptions of the guardians of written language.

The idea that music is fundamentally an act of performance is, of course, not original to Small, and he could be faulted for failing to acknowledge the progenitors of his ideas (for example, John Dewey's Art as Experience.) But as an evangelist for a bracingly contrarian point of view, Small was without peer.

One passage from Musicking stands out as a direct impetus for my own research with choral singers. As part of his criticism of Western art music concerts performed by a few star professionals for a passive and uncomprehending audience, he poses a thought experiment:

"If we imagine a performance in which the members of the orchestra sold the tickets themselves, arranged their own seating and moved the piano around and where everyone, audience as well as conductor, soloist and orchestra members, stayed afterward to clean up, there would be brought into existence another set of human relationships, another kind of society. It would not necessarily be a better society, but we may be sure that those taking part would not remain strangers to one another for very long.” (Musicking, pp. 35-36)

If you have any experience with an amateur or volunteer chorus, you know that what Small describes is no utopian fantasy. It is the everyday reality of making a choral concert happen. I took it as a challenge to do fieldwork among choral singers to demonstrate empirically what Small had surmised.

Reflections on fieldwork, ten years later

2011-09-03T14:42:00.011-04:00

It's hard to believe that it has been over ten years since I began the fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in ethnomusicology, which I received from Brown University in 2004. Looking back now as a busy parent and professional, the time I spent living in Pawcatuck, Connecticut (across the river from Westerly, Rhode Island) and studying the culture of choral singing in that area seems an unimaginable luxury. (Photo from 2004: The Blue Mitten Thrift Shop, "The Store That Helps Westerly Sing")

Moreover, my professional and personal lives have taken a different course than I imagined they would. Trying to accomplish one thing, I wound up setting myself on a path that I could not have envisioned in 2001. And perhaps my assessment of this path in 2011 will seem just as subject to revision in another ten years. My work as a musician remains a work in progress.

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, I am again reminded of how different the world is now. As I was planning my dissertation research, the long-predicted deflation of the tech bubble had begun, and the nation had gone through the trauma of the 2000 presidential election, but in so many ways the future of the United States and of the world seemed brighter. On later reflection, my decision to do ethnomusicological fieldwork close to home, rather than abroad, was a product of this era of relative international calm and domestic prosperity. My ideas about "American culture" have surely changed during a decade that has seen terrorist attack, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the abandonment of New Orleans, erosion of civil liberties, attempts to legalize torture, and a prolonged economic malaise.

When Americans talk about history, they often talk about changes in technology. Sometimes these technological changes are mere surface detail, more visible but less momentous than intangible changes in behavior. But I do think there have been some truly transformative changes when I compare 2001 and 2011. Here are some vignettes:

I decided to sell an old computer. The way to do this, I assumed, was to place a classified ad in the local newspaper, the Westerly Sun. I walked over the worn threshold into the Sun's office in downtown Westerly, paid a considerable sum of money for a small ad, and waited at home for the phone to ring. It never did. I forget what happened to that computer, but I didn't sell it to anyone via classified ad. Of course, since 2001 Craigslist (here for southern Rhode Island, here for eastern Connecticut) and similar services have decimated this mainstay of a newspaper's income stream, and it's hard to be nostalgic for the old way. Today I would be able to sell the computer, and without having to pay for a placement, either.
One of the concerts during my tenure with The Chorus of Westerly featured Debussy's infrequently performed cantata for women's voices, La damoiselle élue. At the first rehearsal, not enough copies of the vocal score were available, and in fact, Kalmus had to print more to meet the demand. Today, the website IMSLP has a reproduction of a public domain edition of the work, available for the cost of printer paper and an Internet connection.
In 2001, the Chorus of Westerly had a website, but online ticket sales were still not possible. One had to call the office during business hours from Monday to Friday and give a credit card number over the phone.

It's also hard not to ignore the rise of social networking software like Facebook since 2001. Today the Chorus of Westerly, like many arts organizations, uses Facebook to stay in touch with its stakeholders. Its manager, Ryan Saunders, frequently posts updates of the chorus's activities, complete with pictures. Facebook is a boon for someone like me who no longer lives in Westerly and cannot be actively involved with musical life there, but who wants a stronger connection than a monthly mass mailing.

Surely some of my research would have taken a different course if tools like Facebook had existed. Part of my task was to map out a social network (actually, a nexus of several overlapping but distinct social networks). At one point, I actually had a map of southern Rhode Island tacked to poster board, with push pins representing different actors in the social network. With a tool like Facebook, such a task becomes much less laborious. Imagine, for example, that 20 members of chorus A are "friends" with the director of chorus B, but only 2 members of chorus B are "friends" with the director of A. At a glance you learn something important about the social world, something that might emerge only gradually through patient interviewing when doing fieldwork pre-Facebook.

Another thing I noticed when Facebook came online was a social distinction between the Westerly social world and the other singing subculture I have studied, New England area shape-note singers. I find that the shape-note singers are more intense users of Facebook than the Westerly singers. I could venture several reasons: shape-note singers tend to be younger, tend to have a professional background (especially in the sciences), and in general tend to come from the demographic of early adopters of technology. But also, I would say that that shape-note community is self-consciously a scattered community: in Kiri Miller's term, a diaspora. Shape-note singing may look to the rural South as its ancestral home, but it is also a movement that can take root anywhere. On the other hand, the Westerly singing subculture is more closely tied to one place on the map (though this place also has a summer satellite, Camp Ogontz in New Hampshire). But perhaps the use of Facebook may give the Chorus of Westerly more of the aspect of a dispersed movement, as stakeholders outside of its geographic reach become incorporated into the organism that is an online social network.

Why do nonbelievers enjoy choral music from the Christian liturgies?

2011-08-23T21:03:00.000-04:00

By chance I encountered a book of essays, The Woods Hole Cantata: Essays on Science and Society (1985) by the medical doctor Gerald Weissmann. The book is a contribution to medical humanities, and it contains a fascinating account of the role that choral music plays in the community of scientists that gathers to study at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in the summer.

This essay makes explicit something that I have often noticed among choral singers: quite a few singers make their careers in the natural sciences. Yet the compositions chosen by the ensemble at Woods Hole, like those programmed by most choral societies, originate not from the context of science, but rather from Christian liturgies. Weissmann sets the scene of a performance of Vivaldi's well-known Gloria:

The "Gloria" is Catholic liturgy, the church Episcopalian. The composer was a priest, the majority of performers are probably freethinkers. Vivaldi is Art, the audience lives Science. Under the roof of one church sit Moslem [sic] with Jew, Indian with Pakistani, Harvard with Yale: a truce is obtained, the conditions for which seem to have eluded a good bit of mankind.

Weissmann continues,

Nowhere have I seen it recorded ... that late August evenings in the Hamptons, in Big Sur, or Woodstock are devoted to responsive readings from Darwin's Origin of the Species or Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene. Nor, to return to clerical considerations, have I heard that religious enthusiasts have sat in rapt attention as, in joyous phalanx, they chant sections of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, H. L. Mencken's essays, or Jacques Loeb's The Mechanistic Conception of Life.

The last name, Jacques Loeb, is not a famous one today, but at the turn of the 20th century he was a well-known popularizer of the idea that, in Weissmann's words, "the sum of all life phenomena can be unequivocally explained in physico-chemical terms." As Weissmann reminds the reader, Loeb is actually buried in the very Woods Hole churchyard where a future generation of scientists is singing and listening to Vivaldi.

Ethnomusicologists often use the term "homology" to describe a fit between music and life: a situation where musical structure and cultural structure complement each other.

To take a well-known example, John Miller Chernoff's African Rhythm and African Sensibility discusses West African musical traditions as not merely a collection of styles and techniques, but a fundamental way of experiencing the world, inseparable from dance and from community life.
Or, to take an example closer to my own experience, participants in shape-note singing conventions often describe the performance ritual (the inward-facing square of singers, with singers taking turns leading songs from the center) as homologous with an idealized America of participatory democracy and small-town virtue.

The performance of choral music at Woods Hole resists such interpretation as homology. On first glance, the musical performance seems to be discordant with its cultural setting. But perhaps the cultural purpose of music is sometimes not to affirm its cultural setting. Perhaps music sometimes serves to compensate for the shortcomings of a culture, rather than to reinforce its strengths. In the same way that a summer on Cape Cod compensates for the limitations of a life in a large East Coast city, perhaps Vivaldi's Gloria compensates for the limitations of the scientific career.

Weissmann offers commentary along these lines, making reference to the fact/value distinction that is so central to humanists' conceptions of themselves:

While mechanistic philosophy may describe adequately how science works, it does not offer consolation for the world it produces: Vivaldi may be more appropriate for that task. Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, all experimental scientists are mechanists now. Ravished by Art in this church tonight, we will wake in the morning to work in the mills of Fact, the construction of which we owe to the mechanistic conception of life.

Reading this saddens me a bit. It is a shame that a scientist must learn to compartmentalize his career and to only assign value to mechanistic explanations. And yet, the very fact that Weissmann took the time to write The Woods Hole Cantata suggests that this separation of what he (tendentiously, in my view) calls Art and Fact can never quite be achieved.

A summer teaching Chinese students at Northeastern

2011-08-08T19:52:00.008-04:00

I spent the summer of 2011 teaching a course on American music for students in the US-Sino Pathway Program at Northeastern University. This is a special transition program for Chinese students entering American universities. The students complete a year of English-language instruction in China, then the summer program in the US, and then move on to one of several universities in the US to continue their educations. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article on this educational model (subscription required).

As someone with an educational background in ethnomusicology, I found this teaching assignment an interesting application of my training in cross-cultural music studies. Superficially, it would appear that I was an American introducing American culture to a group of foreign students. But in reality, it's not possible to make such a neat division between "us" and "them." Like many international students, these Chinese students have arrived with a deep appreciation of American popular culture. Michael Jackson was a particular favorite. When we watched Michael Jackson videos, many of the students knew all the words to the songs and heartily sang along.

The students also introduced me to Chinese interpretations of American music. One favorite of mine is the Taiwanese country singer, Jay Chou:

I had some surprising moments when I tried to draw connections between American and Chinese culture. The American composer John Cage, for example, is known for developing methods of composing music by chance. One of his methods involves his idiosyncratic use of the ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching. Some of the students had never heard of it. Others knew about it but did not attach much importance to it. It goes to show that we must be wary of defining cultures in term of some eternal essence with ancient roots.

The conclusion of the course was a concert performed by the students. Here is a group of students doing a dance to Scott Joplin's ragtime composition, "The Entertainer." I am accompanying at the piano.

Thanks to my students and to my fellow instructors, Hubert Ho (Northeastern), Jeremy Van Buskirk (Longy School of Music), and Dominic Ferrara (Berklee School of Music) for a memorable summer.

Tim Eriksen reviews The Makers of the Sacred Harp

2011-06-29T11:54:00.003-04:00

Singer and ethnomusicologist Tim Eriksen has published a review of The Makers of the Sacred Harp, the much-awaited volume by David Warren Steel and Richard Hulan. This volume greatly augments the published record on this essential American music practice.

Nancy Newman on the Germania Musical Society

2011-06-08T12:17:00.004-04:00

My former Brown classmate Nancy Newman, now a professor at SUNY Albany, has just published Good Music for a Free People, a much-awaited book on the Germania Musical Society, a mid-19th century orchestra of German-American musicians who played a key role in shaping the nascent art music culture of the United States. Nancy discusses her research in more depth at the excellent blog, "From Beyond the Stave."

In praise of POTS (plain old telephone service)

2011-05-25T09:38:00.006-04:00

Our family was touched by the tornado outbreak that struck Alabama on April 27, 2011. Though none of our family members suffered a direct hit from a tornado, straight line winds caused severe damage away from the tornado's path. In Jasper, the storm felled a massive tree that had been standing since at least the 1940s at the farm where my 92 year old grandmother lives.

As a consequence of the storm, much of northern Alabama lost power for an extended period. In my grandmother's case, there was no power from Wednesday until Sunday. However, the phone still worked, because it was "plain old telephone service" (POTS). For a 92 year old person who needs assistance to live at home, the phone is a lifeline. Had the phone failed, she would have been in a difficult position, because she would not be able to drive or walk for help.

Sometimes the older way is better. Cell phones, Skype, and voice over IP are wonderful inventions, and I could not imagine life without them. It's tempting to get rid of the landline phone so that there's one less bill to pay. But natural disasters and massive power failures do happen, and these newer technologies require electricity. And even what passes for a landline phone today may not be as robust as my grandmother's. I get my landline service (and internet and cable) from Verizon FiOS, which uses a converter box plugged into the wall to transmit data over the phone lines. There is a battery backup, but it lasts only about 8 hours.

(Photo: Volunteer workers from the Southern Baptist Convention clear the downed tree.)

The Robert Shaw Chorale and the Shape-note Heritage, 1948-1967

2011-02-24T11:20:00.003-05:00

I presented a paper entitled "The Robert Shaw Chorale and the Shape-note Heritage, 1948-1967" at a conference, Teaching the Harp of Voices: Discovering America's Choral Roots ... Today, at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York. I have been researching the efforts of Robert Shaw and Alice Parker to popularize songs from shape-note tunebooks, both in performances by the Robert Shaw Chorale and through publication of the arrangements the Chorale employed in its performances.

Many thanks to Tom Malone, professor of music education at Molloy, for his efforts in organizing this conference.

Íngrid Betancourt on hearing Led Zeppelin in her captivity

2010-12-08T21:33:00.005-05:00

Íngrid Betancourt, a presidential candidate in Colombia in 2002, was kidnapped by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and held captive until her rescue by the Colombian army in the summer of 2008. In her recent book Even Silence Has an End, she describes how a battery-operated radio was her lifeline to the world. What she heard might surprise you:

It was December 8, the feast of the Virgin, and an urgent need to listen to music from the outside world grabbed me. I had a thirst for life again. By chance I heard a countdown of Led Zeppelin's best songs, and I wept in gratitude. "Stairway to Heaven" was my hymn to life. Hearing it reminded me that I was born for happiness. I had collected all their records, and they were my treasure back in the days when music came only on vinyl records.

I knew that among die-hard fans it was frowned upon to like "Stairway to Heaven." It had become too popular. Connoisseurs were not supposed to share the taste of the masses. But I never disowned my first loves. From the age of fourteen, I'd been convinced that the song was written for me. On hearing the song again in that impenetrable jungle, I wept at the promise of freedom made to me long ago, that I had never understood before: "And a new day will dawn for those who stand long, And the forests will echo with laughter."

Tradition and the pursuit of happiness

2010-11-25T22:33:00.006-05:00

Tradition
can be seen as the bad old days,
a straitjacket of custom, ignorance, and intolerance,
to be superseded by a bright, new modern tomorrow,
a liberation from hidebound views,
oppressive authorities,
and arbitrary violence.

At the same time,
tradition can be seen from a romantic perspective
as a repository of solid, genuine, humane, community values,
rich with sentiment, sincerity, and peacefulness,
which is being corrupted by modernity,
thought of as some combination of
the prison of bureaucracy,
the inhumanity of commercial imperatives,
the glossy sham of rapidly changing appearance,
and increasing violence to humankind and nature.

Happiness—
more broadly understood as contentment,
being at one with the world and oneself—
may lie in either, or both, directions,
depending on one's point of view.

(From Peter Wade, Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia, p. 140.)

A Convergence of Ethnomusicology and Jurisprudence

2010-11-11T20:03:00.005-05:00

Today I presented a talk, "A Convergence of Ethnomusicology and Jurisprudence: Contextual views on whether performing sacred choral music endorses religion in U.S. public schools," at the conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Los Angeles. This talk is based on my recent article published in the Journal of the Society for American Music.

I provide commentary on a 1997 court case, Bauchman v. West High School, concerning the performance and study of sacred vocal music in a public school curriculum. I argue that the doctrine of "endorsement," first articulated by Sandra Day O'Connor in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), has much in common with an ethnomusicological approach to finding musical meaning in the context of performance. It is not sufficient to study the content of a musical work and declare that this content automatically promotes religion. Only a case-by-case examination of the context of performance can show when performance of a certain work promotes religion.

Linguistic anthropology at the grocery

2010-10-24T21:44:00.008-04:00

When I saw the heading "cultural foods" at a Whole Foods Market in Princeton, New Jersey, it reminded me of people who ask me about "cultural music." If I were not a native English speaker, I might consult a dictionary and surmise that the "cultural foods" aisle contains items produced through agriculture, or perhaps items like yogurt that deliberately serve as hosts for microorganisms.

Of course, this meaning is not the intended one. In reality, this aisle is similar to one labeled "ethnic foods" at other groceries. There seems to be a distinction being made between foods that are "cultural" or "ethnic," and foods that are not (i.e. what is found in the other aisles).

What makes a food "cultural"? The other entries on the signs give some clues: not a definition but a series of examples. In the foreground the sign lists Mexican and Jewish foods; in the background at the other end of the aisle, Asian, Indian (distinct from Asian?), and Mediterranean.

What do these five examples have in common? With the possible exception of Mediterranean, these terms describe social groups that have faced marginalization and exclusion from U.S. society at some point in their histories. ("Mediterranean" seems to me more a trendy term for a certain health-conscious diet than a coherent social group or cuisine.)

Is the answer that to be "cultural" is to be an immigrant? Perhaps, but think of how many emblematic American picnic foods have immigrant origins: hamburgers, hot dogs, coleslaw, French fries (actually Belgian), ketchup. Is a hamburger a "cultural food"? Not at this Whole Foods, it seems.
Is the answer that to be "cultural" is to practice a religion other than Protestant Christianity? Perhaps, though it is striking that kosher food is listed on the sign but not halal food. Is Islam "not cultural enough"?
Is the answer that to be "cultural" is to be nonwhite? Not in the case of Jews, of course. Some people of Indian descent identify themselves as white according to the U.S. Census racial classifications (which have a dubious past). Wouldn't African foods be advertised as part of this aisle if being nonwhite were essential to being "cultural"?

In short, there is no coherent principle that accounts for every example. But it is clear that the anthropological concept of culture is not guiding the designer of this store. An anthropologist would say that all social groups have a culture: learned behavior for coping with the environment, including foodways. Native-born white Protestants have a culture (or cultures) of food just as much as the groups singled out in these signs.

Sacred Harp "Hoboken Style"

2010-09-16T21:18:00.002-04:00

Laurie Kay Sommers, a folklorist from Georgia, has published "Hoboken Style: Meaning and Change in Okefenokee Sacred Harp Singing" in the online journal Southern Spaces. Besides being a definitive treatment of the unique traditions associated with Sacred Harp singing in the Okefenokee Swamp region of southern Georgia, this article also beautifully exploits the possiblities of online publication.

Liberal Religion, Artistic Autonomy, and the Culture of Secular Choral Societies

2010-08-11T10:17:00.003-04:00

My article, "Liberal Religion, Artistic Autonomy, and the Culture of Secular Choral Societies," has been published in the August 2010 issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music (4: 339-367).

A week at Westminster Choir College

2010-07-29T12:23:00.013-04:00

I spent last week at Westminster Choir College, now part of the Westminster College of the Arts of Rider University, located a short walk from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. I was there to take the Group Vocal Techniques course offered by James Jordan, in which he presents a systematic approach to developing a choir's voices through the warmup sequence.

Besides learning much from the course, I also was thrilled to visit one of the totemic places in the history of choral music in the United States. As Jordan says, Westminster Choir College may be more devoted to the maintenance of a particular choral sound than any other place. Its founder, John Finley Williamson (1887-1964), was a visionary musician and organizer, one of the giants in the history of American music of the 20th century.

So many aspects of choral singing are often passed down in a process more resembling folklore than schooling. Anyone who has sung with a variety of directors knows that there is great variation in the warmup procedure from group to group. Of course, there is no one "right" warmup that is applicable to every possible choral ensemble; but on the other hand, many warmups seem to owe their genesis more to habit than to systematic thought. Moreover, in the culture of a choral society, the warmup sometimes acts more as a framing device to put distance between the "real world" and musical labor, than as an effort to accomplish specific goals in the development of the voice. Put more bluntly, if a choir has a certain vocalise that begins every warmup, its function is as much to communicate "please stop socializing and take your seats" than anything else.

Jordan's teaching serves to question these habits and to make the warmup serve a purpose. One area in which he opened new doors for me is to rethink the role of the accompanist in the warmup. When I have led choirs, I have used vocalises that climb by a half step with each repetition. (Having sung bass before, I also like to use vocalises that descend, something that is less common in the choral warmup, in my experience.) But I did not give much thought to the accompaniment to these vocalises. Usually, I would just play the tonic chord of whatever key the vocalise is in, and perhaps hammer out the notes of the vocalise if the singers were having trouble staying on pitch.

Jordan's technique (developed in collaboration with accompanist Marilyn Shenenberger, whom I also met at this seminar) is not obvious but makes perfect sense once encountered. First of all, one should use the dominant chord, not the tonic, to introduce each successive key. Second, the accompaniment should not simply hammer out the notes of the vocalise, but should provide a contrasting line which singers should hear and sing in harmony with. Finally, the accompaniment can often include high-pitched, percussive notes outlining the harmony. (Warmup exercises employing these techniques can be found in Jordan's textbook Evoking Sound: The Choral Warm-Up.)

(Photo: the Playhouse at Westminster Choir College, an imaginative use of an iconic mid-20th century architectural form, the Quonset Hut.)

Mim's Conn organs

2010-02-26T21:02:00.005-05:00

You always take for granted what you experience growing up. Unlike many people, I had a variety of keyboard instruments available to me in my formative years. One of the instruments I fondly remember is pictured at left: a 1970 Conn electronic organ (Prelude Theater model 305), which I got to play whenever I visited the farm where Mim, my maternal grandmother lives (and is still going strong at the age of 90).

When she was younger, she used to play often for me. I wish I could remember more of the songs she used to play. One of her favorites was "Rose of Washington Square," here presented in a Dixieland jazz arrangement by Red Nichols and His Five Pennies:

Unfortunately, this instrument no longer works. It may have fallen victim to a lightning strike. I suspect that the problem may be as simple as a failed power supply, since there are two power switches to the organ (one for the sound and one for the lights), and both are equally dead. It's a shame that I can't share a sample of what this instrument sounded like.

The Conn organs do not have the panache (or resale value) of the legendary Hammond B3, but they have much to recommend them. The Prelude Theater had a wonderful sound that I associate with baseball and roller skating. The key to the sound was a shimmer produced by a rotating Leslie speaker (much like in the Hammond B3), as well as a deep reverb produced by a set of coiled springs inside a metal box (also found in many guitar amplifiers of the era).

(At the end of Deep Purple's 1972 song "Highway Star," the crash you hear is caused by kicking or dropping a reverb unit, causing the springs to rattle violently inside the metal box.)

On YouTube there are several videos of Conn organs of similar vintage. This one has just the sound I remember from my grandmother's instrument, though this instrument has more bells and whistles (including a buggy whip effect, apparently triggered by a toe button). It also has a full pedalboard and larger manuals.

The Prelude Theater 305 also had a drum machine, the Min-O-Matic. Amazingly, someone has made a digital emulator of this drum machine. The sound is a little tinny compared to what I remember, but I'll take it. "Teen Beat" is a rhythm often used in 50s rock 'n' roll: a backbeat with snare drum doubled on beat 2. "Latin" is the familiar 3+2 clave. "Metro" is a metronome. "Double Beat" caused the bass drum to sound twice as often. There's no "Fatback" or "16 beat" button, sadly.

The Chorus of Westerly celebrates its 50th anniversary

2009-11-10T10:49:00.006-05:00

The Chorus of Westerly was founded in 1959 in Westerly, R.I., by George Kent, who remains its director today. They recently celebrated their 50th anniversary in the George Kent Performance Hall, a former church that the Chorus has bought, renovated, and converted into a concert hall.

I was privileged to be a part of this wonderful community from 2001-03 as I conducted the fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation, and I greatly enjoyed singing through Handel's Messiah at the open singing that was part of the 50th anniversary celebration.

Photo: interior of the George Kent Performance Hall, taken 11/7/2009.

Frank Zappa's prophetic imagination for the music business

2009-10-18T21:49:00.010-04:00

I was reading through The Real Frank Zappa Book, as told to Peter Ochiogrosso, and came across a remarkable document, "A Proposal for a System to Replace Ordinary Record Merchandising." In this prescient 1983 essay, Zappa foresees many of the transformations that have rocked the music industry since the opening of the original Napster in 1999.

"... think what is being wasted in terms of GREAT CATALOG ITEMS, squeezed out of the market place because of limited rack space in retail outlets, and the insatiable desire of quota-conscious company reps to fill every available niche with THIS WEEK'S NEW RELEASES."

Zappa would have loved Amazon.com and the other Internet-era merchants based on providing the "long tail": multitudes of niche products rather than a few blockbusters aimed at a mass audience. Yet the Internet is a technology entirely absent from Zappa's 1983 vision. He imagines that sound recordings will be transmitted by telephone or cable TV (an emerging technology in 1983) rather than through a dedicated data network. When he talks of album art and other details being transmitted to a TV screen while the music loads, he sounds almost as if he is describing digital cable channels such as Music Choice (which are not an ideal medium for encountering Zappa's music).

Another major technological advance Zappa does not foresee is the encoding of digital music in compressed formats such as mp3. In 1983, research for such compression schemes was still in its infancy. Transferring digital music as uncompressed data, using the analog modems available in 1983, would have taken an eternity. I remember dialing into BBS systems with a 300-baud modem connected to a Commodore 64, and plain text scrolled across the screen at about my reading speed. There were faster modems then, but nothing even close to the broadband connections we enjoy today.

Finally, it's fascinating to note that Zappa's vision for the music industry of the future looks more like Rhapsody than iTunes:

"We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances ... The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape."

Rhapsody, unfortunately, has struggled to reach a market share of 7%. Something in the psychology of music consumption still leads most people to buy a single-purpose music hardware device (iPod, etc.), then to "buy" songs or albums one by one. (I put "buy" in quotation marks because in many cases, the transaction is more like a "lease" that only allows you to do certain things with the audio file.) The idea of music as a subscription accessible from any device (computer, mobile phone, TV) has not caught on as much. Even Rhapsody seems to be moving away from this business model and is now offering mp3 downloads.

Isn't it ironic that today, Zappa's music is hard to find at the online music retailers? Currently Rhapsody lists only 31 tracks composed by Zappa, and none of them in his original performances. iTunes has more than it used to, but still only a fraction of his releases. Is it merely nostalgia that leads the rights holders for the catalogs of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Frank Zappa to resist offering this music digitally, forcing one to consume the music through older technologies such as the CD or LP?

Review of Timothy Taylor, Beyond Exoticism

2009-10-02T20:57:00.004-04:00

My review of Timothy Taylor's book Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World has been published in The Bulletin of the Society for American Music, 35 (Fall 2009): 49-50.

In appreciation of Forbes Piano Company

2009-09-25T11:38:00.012-04:00

Birmingham, Alabama, where I spent my childhood, has lost an institution in its musical life, the E. E. Forbes Piano Company, which closed this summer. (The Montgomery location is still open.) Until I moved away from Birmingham, I did not realize what a treasure this store was. As a piano student, I spent plenty of time at Forbes browsing through filing cabinets of sheet music, trying pieces out on one of the display pianos. They had an astonishing inventory, some of it decades old, and I can remember buying a few pieces for the original publisher's price of less than a dollar.

(Perhaps I am remembering wrong, but I think Forbes also had a location in Eastwood Mall in the early-mid 1980s, which moved to the Golbro shopping center, then closed around 1990 or so. The Golbro location is where I took some guitar lessons during one of my rebellions from classical piano. Eastwood Mall yielded to the wrecking ball in 2006-07 in favor of a Wal-Mart Supercenter, and the recent recession finally brought about the demise of Century Plaza.)

Of course, as with book and CD stores, this kind of shopping experience is becoming obsolete with the development of Internet retailers who can provide the "long tail" on demand. While much of the sheet music available at Forbes is available from retailers such as sheetmusicplus.com, and the out-of-print items might turn up on eBay, one must know in advance what to look for. It's harder to enjoy the serendipity of finding a new piece, trying it out on the piano, and then adding it to one's repertory.

In particular, I have a memory of finding a contemporary score at Forbes that I never would have found otherwise: Fantasia on an Ostinato by John Corigliano, a minimalist work by an otherwise neo-Romantic composer. I was intrigued by this work as I played through it in Forbes's showroom, bought the score, and played around with it at home (especially the passages in indefinite notation, where the performer is given latitude to construct a realization). As I put together my senior piano recital at Sewanee, I wanted at least one work by a living composer, and this one fit the bill nicely. My teacher, Steve Shrader, had not been familiar with the work before I introduced it to him, but he generously allowed me to add the work to my lessons. I could not have managed the technically difficult passages without his input.

I remember reading in John Szwed's biography of jazz great Sun Ra, Space is the Place, that Sun Ra (then known as Sonny Blount) spent plenty of time at Forbes in his youth. It is a testament to Forbes's reputation that they nurtured such an artist at a time when many downtown Birmingham merchants treated black customers as second class citizens. For example, as recounted in Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home, until the civil rights protests of the 1960s, black customers at the downtown department stores could buy clothing, but they were not allowed to try the clothes on, and all sales were final.

At the border between North and South

2009-07-29T20:27:00.009-04:00

Two photos I took this summer while living in suburban Washington, D.C.

Top: The Appalachian Trail crossing the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, W. Va.

Bottom: The Great Falls of the Potomac from Olmstead Island, looking south toward Virginia.

When style categories like "neoclassical" confuse more than they enlighten

2009-07-21T09:45:00.013-04:00

One of my tasks this summer has been to dig deeper into the music of Igor Stravinsky as I complete an article on the nexus between liberal theology and choral singing. Stravinsky's choral music, his religious life, and his approaches to text setting are fascinating and complex matters. But rather than rehearse here what I intend to argue in my article, I thought I would use this space to discuss a side issue that I won't be treating there.

I am increasingly suspicious of the division of Igor Stravinsky's career into three periods (folkloric, then neoclassical, then serial). Ever since Beethoven, the notion of three style periods has become an overused crutch. The more I listen to Stravinsky's works, the more I am unhappy with the notion that everything from the ragtimey chamber music of The Soldier's Tale (1918) to the hieratic ritual of Oedipus Rex (1927) constitutes a "neoclassical period."

(And even in Beethoven's case, it is debatable how useful it is to speak of three style periods. The Eighth Symphony is neither "heroic" nor "late," and perhaps we neglect this wonderful work because it doesn't fit our preconceived notions of "second period" or "third period" style.)

Take the three mature works which Stravinsky named with the word "symphony," often grouped on a single CD: the Symphony of Psalms (1930), Symphony in C (1938-40), and Symphony in Three Movements (1942-45). As a choral singer, I have had a long interest in the first work, one of the major works for orchestra and chorus from the 20th century. I have gotten to know the others more recently. Surely if any work of Stravinsky's deserves the label of "neoclassical", it is the Symphony in C, with its obvious debt to Mozart and Haydn for its balanced phrasing and form. Next to it, the Symphony of Psalms seems from another world, with its wind-heavy orchestration, chantlike themes, and dissonant counterpoint.

Then there is the Symphony in Three Movements, which at first I found elusive, perhaps because I was trying to square my experience of the work with the category of "neoclassical." My first impression of the work was that Stravinsky was trying to sound too much like the Stravinsky of the popular early ballets such as The Rite of Spring (1913). With repeated listening, I began to focus on a comic tone found through much of the symphony. Perhaps I was hearing the work with the ears of Hollywood, because a number of passages seem to be closely imitated by numerous film composers these days. The bouncy, slightly askew opening of the slow movement could easily appear between scenes of a romantic comedy, while the theme beginning at 1:21 in the third movement seems a dead ringer for depictions of comic mastery in blockbusters of the Spielberg type. (Is the melody at 2:00 a premonition of one of the themes in Star Wars?)

Recently, I have been reading Robert Craft's most recent compilation of his conversations with Igor Stravinsky, Memories and Commentaries (2002). Stravinsky's discussion of the Symphony in Three Movements is an eye-opener because, despite his protestations, the work seems to have a specific program drawn from the events of World War II, particularly as experienced in newsreels. It is not just a matter of later film composers raiding the Symphony for ideas; there is already something cinematic about the work's musical language. (And in fact, some of the music in the symphony comes from abandoned film projects.) On the other hand, Stravinsky's imagery seems to be different from mine. The passage I experience as "comic mastery" above Stravinsky describes as a "rumba ... associated in my imagination with the movements of [German] war machines": comic "immobility" rather than mastery.

(You can read a version of Stravinsky's program from an earlier Craft conversation book here. In Craft's 2002 book, the account of being roughed up by Nazi brownshirts does not appear in conjunction with the Symphony, but in a completely different context. Making sense of the multiple versions of Stravinsky conversations would be a fine topic for a folklore or musicology dissertation.)

One of my favorite writers on music, Joseph Horowitz, has posted a wonderful video that attempts to couple Stravinsky's music with the newsreel footage that inspired it. (It does not appear to be available on video sharing sites, so you will have to download the file to your computer. It is well worth the effort.) While obviously this video is not the last word on "what the music means," it makes clear that the finale of the Symphony in Three Movements could be heard as a "film score without images" (rather like a "song without words"). Perhaps one could call the Symphony "neoromantic," but "neoclassical" just does not apply.

Ethnomusicology, baby formula, and the perfume of language

2009-05-07T09:18:00.004-04:00

The things you notice when you're both a parent and an ethnomusicologist. One day 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

2009-03-06T14:37:00.005-05:00

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

2009-01-19T15:37:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-06T10:10:00.004-05:00

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

2008-10-29T15:32:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-08T18:58:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-23T16:44:00.005-04:00

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.)

Continuing as treasurer of NECSEM

2008-04-13T22:21:00.002-04:00

I have been reelected treasurer of NECSEM for another two-year term.

NECSEM at Amherst, 4/12/08

2008-04-02T11:05:00.003-04:00

I will be at the Northeast Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (NECSEM) meeting at Amherst College, Saturday, April 12, in my capacity as treasurer.

Lecture on singing style at Sewanee, 3/24/08

2008-03-16T23:34:00.002-04:00

I will be giving a lecture, "Beyond 'African Rhythm': Singing Style and the Africanization of North American Music" at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, on Monday, March 24, 2008, at 4:00 P.M. In part, this lecture will draw on my research into singing techniques among Sacred Harp and choral singers. I will also discuss examples by jazz, blues, and rock vocalists.

Talk on teaching world music

2007-01-31T16:10:00.001-05:00

I will be presenting a talk, “Integrating Western Art Music into the World Music Survey” at the Northeast Chapter of the College Music Society, March 23-24, at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, Princeton, N.J.

New publication on Sacred Harp singing

2006-11-15T16:09:00.000-05:00

My article, “’As Far From Secular, Operatic, Rag-time, and Jig Melodies As Is Possible’: Religion and the Resurgence of Interest in The Sacred Harp, 1895-1911” is in the Fall 2006 issue of the Journal of American Folklore (119: 413-443).