Abstracts:

Niagara Chapter

Society for Ethnomusicology

Annual Meeting, March 26-27, 2010

The Kent State University School of Music

 

 

Session 1: Music from the Past (Chair: Terry Miller)

 

Jim Kimball , SUNY Geneseo

“Working with Emily's Music Book”

 

A project which has taken up much of my time in recent months has been co-editing, along with Mark Slobin, Dean Root and Katherine Preston, a bound collection of sheet music once owned and played by one Emily Esperanza McKissick.  Initially nothing more was known except what was on the music itself and the name, Emily E. McKissick, on the cover.  It was my job to discover who this was and to produce an account of her life and musical surroundings.   In addition to genealogical  and local history sources, as well as information within the collection, an import source for my part of the project was period newspapers.  What was relatively new, and important for this project was the ready availability of applicable newspapers in digital, on-line versions.   Emily was born near Syracuse, grew up in Albany, got married, moved to Buffalo and died in Brooklyn. The old way of going through years of microfilms from all those places would have taken more time than was feasible.  A recent source has made available, on-line and searchable in, some 11 million pages of New York state newspapers.  Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Brooklyn, etc. are all there, covering the whole period of Emily’s life.  Touring artists, music dealers, new music announcements and the like are all there, right from my computer – also personal notes, including graduations and obituaries, on Emily and her circle.  The presentation will discuss not only the research for this specific project, but similar possibilities in other areas of interest.

 

Amy Unruh, Kent State University/ Independent Scholar

Echoes of Africa in New Orleans: Did Louis Moreau Gottschalk Do More Than Imagine How Bamboula Sounded?

Louisiana-born pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) lived the majority of the first twelve years of his life in New Orleans, immersed in diverse musics and cultures from both Europe and Africa.  His talents as a musician and composer allowed him the ability to incorporate diverse musical ideas into hybridized compositions, thereby establishing him as the beginning of an “American” musical identity.

My interest Gottschalk began while looking at a score of one of his earliest works for piano, Bamboula, danse de nègres, op. 2.  Though his piano compositions like Bamboula sounded nothing like any of the diverse West-African music and dance genres I had studied over the previous thirteen years, when I perused the score of Bamboula, I was struck by how similar its musical structure seemed to be to that of a West-African percussion ensemble.  Was it merely a coincidence, perhaps suggested by the title, or something more? 

In order to suggest that Gottschalk incorporated African-derived musical elements into his compositions such as Bamboula, I first had to show that he would have been familiar with such traditions.  In this paper I will present evidence which shows that not only were African-derived musics surviving in New Orleans at the time of Gottschalk’s childhood, these traditions were  an integral part of the New Orleans soundscape and Gottschalk would have had ample opportunities to hear them. 

Session 2 A: Jazz and Native American Music (Chair: Milagros Quesada)

Susan M. Taffe  (Cornell University)

Colonization's Chain: Tracing the Links that Bond Communities Through the Delaware Skin Dance

 

Colonization of the Americas has significantly influenced American Indian musical traditions, evolving from colonizers’ attempts to control the physical and cultural state of Native America through decimation, relocation, and assimilation of American Indian populations.  Its repercussions reverberate not only in the loss of music, but also in American Indians’ treatment of it.  The Delaware Skin Dance demonstrates musical displacement in the midst of colonization’s multifaceted and often disastrous consequences.  Also known as the Stick Dance, its unique history spans origins among the Delaware people whose homelands occupied parts of present day New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, through its transmission to their northern neighbors, Haudenosaunee people whose communities harbored Delaware refugees.  Little has been written on the Delaware Skin Dance, although it makes appearances in the writing of anthropologist Frank G. Speck and ethnomusicologist Gertrude Kurath.  Consequently, the importance of these songs and what they represent has been largely overlooked in academia.  Although not performed by contemporary Delaware people, the numerous short songs that accompany the dance survive as perhaps one of the largest and oldest bodies of Delaware music in existence.  Today the dance holds an important place in Haudenosaunee social dance repertoire. My work incorporates perspectives from Haudenosaunee singers, dancers, and elders gathered through fieldwork interviews with participant observation and references from ethnomusicological and historical sources.  I seek to understand colonization’s contribution to shaping music history as well as the vitality and resilience of Haudenosaunee musical traditions through the specific illustration of the Delaware Skin Dance.

 

Kyle Brenders (York University)

Old Ghosts and Free Spirits: The Synthesis of Jazz and Native American Music

 

The synthesis of styles is a common practice within historic and current Jazz practice. The hybridization of Jazz with Rock and ‘Classical’ music created new distinctly identifiable genres of Fusion and Third Stream. This combination of styles became easily recognizable because of the ease with which one style interconnects with the other. However, attempts to fuse certain musics with Jazz have not been successful because the composite does not create a succinct ‘new’ style.

 

The efforts to synthesize Jazz and Native American music exemplify the problems of synthesis that does not result in a new recognizable style. This paper proposes that the combination of Jazz and Native American music developed through two separate methods of synthesis and because of this has not easily integrated into common Jazz practice.  One can separate these two methods by identifying which of the two root styles becomes more dominant within the new combination. Thus, this synthesis results in either one that directly uses Native American music or another that uses Native American music indirectly.  This paper looks at the music of Jim Pepper and Anthony Braxton as
illustrations of artists that use Native American music directly and indirectly, respectively. Pepper’s music exemplifies a synthesis that lies heavily on its Native American sources. While Braxton’s music uses the influence of Native American music and culture as a motivating structure within his own musical system.

Kimberly Hannon, Eastman School of Music
Saving Entertainment: Maintaining a Niche for Early Jazz Styles in a Modern Jazz Scene

 

This case study based on the Flower City Jazz Society in Rochester, New York delves into the marginalized state of early jazz within the contemporary live performance world.  Jazz has increasingly come to be recognized as an art music over the past several decades, and it has garnered unprecedented institutional support.  The dance-based, light-hearted, popular jazz of the 1920s, however, has been largely unable to capitalize on the recent attention paid to the broader jazz community.  Yet, by embracing early jazz as a fun-loving, functional music, organizations like the Flower City Jazz Society have been able to attract and maintain a following for this music though their monthly social events featuring drinks, dinner, and dancing.  This paper follows the experiences of Katie Ernst, a young modern jazz vocalist who has spent the past two years acquainting herself with early jazz via performances at the Society’s events.  She describes learning a new way of conceptualizing her role as a singer that, in comparison to post-bebop mainstream jazz, has more to do with connecting with audiences and less emphasis on technical facility or virtuosity.  At the same time, the sense of social responsibility for protecting and preserving early jazz expressed by members of the society demonstrates a clear sense that this music should be considered more than mere entertainment and held on an equal artistic plane with more recent jazz styles.

 

 

Session 2 B: Continuity and Change of Musical Traditions: A Case Study of Ghanaian, Chinese and Indian Music in the Diaspora (Chair: Ellen Koskoff)

 

Panelists: Ming-Yen Lee, Mitchell Greco, Noraliz Ruiz, Praphai Boonsermsuwong, Kent State University

 

In the field of ethnomusicology, the concepts of "continuity" and "change" have been rigorously discussed and applied to the study of various musical traditions. Both concepts provide an ample theoretical perspective which facilitate the diachronic interpretation of musical styles. The "changes" exhibited by a particular musical expression should be scrutinized after the assumption that they have been subject of "continuity".  As Alan Merriam mentioned, "No matter where we look, change is a constant in human experience; although rates of change are differential from one culture to another and from one aspect to another within a given culture, no culture escapes the dynamics of change over time. But culture is also stable, that is, no culture change wholesale and overnight, the threads of continuity run through every culture, and thus change must always be considered against a background of stability" (Merriam, 1964, 303). 

Our panel discussion will be centered on the analysis of "continuity and change" as manifested in the Chinese Traditional Music performed by the Ann Arbor Chinese Traditional Musical Ensemble, in the practice of Sai Bhajan (Hindu devotional songs) sessions in Pittsburgh, and the Ghanaian drumming pedagogical techniques in the United States. The discussion and topic presentation will be mainly based on fieldwork projects implemented by the panelists.

 

Session 3 A:  Music in the Present (Chair: Andrew Shahriari)

 

Dennis Cole, Kent State University
Impoverishment, Immigration, and Assimilation: Contextualizing the Origins of Hip Hop

 

Hip hop emerged out of diverse aesthetic and performance expressions within the youth culture of the Bronx as a reaction to the social and political climate of the 1960s and 70s. Rooted in the African-American urban youth culture of New York City, hip hop originally displayed a unique cross-cultural blend of Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Brazilian influences. But exactly how did the Bronx become the ideal breeding ground for the eventual global phenomenon known as hip hop?

 

With this paper, I intend to isolate contributing factors that allowed the Bronx to emerge as the prime location for the rise of hip hop. Three significant events to be surveyed include:

 

1)      the urban development of New York City by Robert Moses during the 1950s and 60s;

2)      the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; and

3)      the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s.

 

Throughout this paper I seek to revisit the origins of the hip hop culture within the context of several key socioeconomic and political conditions, each of which played a role in the assimilation of African-American, Caribbean, and Latino communities throughout New York during the 1960s and 70s.

 

Amanda Crespo, Carleton University

Girl Guitars: Negotiating Gender Through Design, Mediation, and Us

 

Musical instruments have a long history of being ‘gendered’ (flutes have traditionally been considered ‘feminine’ while tubas have been ‘masculine’).  Since its prolific rise in the 1960s the electric guitar has, likewise, been viewed as a ‘masculine’ technology.  For the past ten years, guitar manufacturers have tried to encourage females to play the guitar by manufacturing ‘girl guitars,’ acoustic and electric models designed specifically for and marketed to females.  My paper examines ways in which gender is both negotiated and reinforced through the designs of the guitars and the images used in girl guitar advertisements.  It also considers whether or not girl guitars have given women further access to the creation of rock music.  By looking at the designs, marketing schemes, and uses of girl guitars, the study evaluates the extent to which masculine ideologies surrounding the electric guitar have altered due to the creation of girl guitars.

 

Lauron Kehrer, Eastman School of Music

Balancing Revolution and Capitalism: Lesbian Community Building and Goldenrod Music

 

Of the sixty or so companies that comprised the collective WILD (Women’s Independent Label Distribution), Goldenrod Music is the only one that remains and still specializes in women’s music. The company’s survival is contingent upon its ability to adapt to changing lesbian communities; it must both meet the communities’ needs and maintain continued support from them.

 

Goldenrod has been integral in building lesbian feminist communities on both a localized and national level, but these communities have changed since the company’s inception. As new generations of queer and feminist women are producing and consuming music, community members have disagreed about what women’s music is and whom it is for. This has sparked new conversations on how to define gender and lesbian and/or feminist communities, leading to a diversification of women’s music. For example, the emergence of lesbian rap artists reflects a generation of queer youth raised on hip-hop music, set apart from the folk music popular among lesbian communities in the 1970s. Additionally, the economic climate has become increasingly hostile to small businesses and Goldenrod is struggling with the proliferation of digital music formats. The number of Goldenrod employees has significantly decreased in the past decade as a result of this trend in music consumption, and they now rely heavily on volunteer support at major events throughout the year, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. This paper will show through ethnographic examples Goldenrod’s symbiotic relationship with shifting lesbian feminists communities.

 

Ty-Juana Taylor, University of California, Los Angeles

The Voices on the Street

 

It was a slow evening. Each musician waits their time with buggies, chords, mikes, stands, instruments, and car batteries on hand. They each wait patiently for their perfect location, the best acoustics in the area, while other musicians finish their set. Every performer plays a silent, but visual game of seek and claim on the promenade. Some days are worth the wait and the trouble of carrying around the load, but some days things are really slow. People meander from store to store, gliding past performers with a short-lived interest. Sometimes a crowd gathers, while other times not.  Along with the unpredictable nature of the crowds, the performers are competing against each other’s reverb and noise for the attention of the few who are interested. This is the life of a street musician.

After meeting several street musicians on the Santa Monica Promenade and in the Westwood area, I became interested in the musical identity, the constructed set of characteristics by which an individual recognizes himself or is recognized by others, constructed by four particular street musicians. Apostle Smith, Josh Vietti, Sammie Jay, and Seis Cuerdas, my informants, range between amateur and semi-professional musicians. While each of the performers have different agendas when performing, come from very different musical backgrounds, and play varying styles of music, all are street musicians. These four very dynamic musicians are the voices on the streets.

 

 

Session 3 B: Performance and Pedagogy (Chair: Denise Seachrist)

 

Eric Murray, director, Kent State University

Ohio Choro Club, roda de choro (Performance for one hour, in band rehearsal room)

 

Rachel Muehrer, York University
"Ennangaenyumya" Playing Techniques of the ennanga of Buganda, Uganda

 

The bowed-neck harp of the Buganda Kingdom, the ennanga,requires a demanding playing style. In each song, the harpist’s right and left handplay two distinct parts that interlockto create one resultant, cyclical pattern. Yet within one cyclical pattern, several melodies emerge. In his work,The Phenomenon of Inherent Rhythms in East and Central African Instrumental Music, Gerhard Kubik (1962) introduced the concept of “inherent rhythms,” or patterns that arise when these interlocking patterns are performed together. This technique, almost identical on the ennanga, creates variation in an otherwise repetitive cyclical pattern andcan also cue the listener’s ear to the vocal melody. In contrast to xylophone players however, the omulanga, or harpist,has the ability to manipulate the resultant patterns. The omulanga can choose to emphasize notes from either hand in order to bring out a new melody,a skill calledokukatiliza (to make stronger), all while maintaining the rapid tempo of the interlocking pattern and singing. In this paper, I will examine the playing techniquesfound on the ennanga, played by thetwo remaining omulanga in Buganda. Iwill then compare their performance practices with that of their teachers. Using interviews, archived recordings, and field recordings, I attempt to learn how these techniques function in the music and how this technique has been passed from one omulangato another.

 

Jeffrey W. Cupchik, York University/Independent Scholar

A Record of Survival: Pedagogy and Transmission of a Musical-Spiritual Tradition

 

The Tibetan Buddhist Chöd tradition was developed by the female ascetic Machik Labdron (1055-1153), and involves meditative visualization and a musical ritual performance of sacred liturgical song-poetry. Chöd has been transmitted in unbroken lineages from master to disciple. The highly ornamented melodies are said to be the “actual wisdom of the dakinis [female Buddhas].” Yet these ornaments are only ever sung in extended melismatic passages when a capella versions are performed; during drum-accompanied renderings, these melismas are curtailed – yet meditators are expected to know them.  My paper examines the new challenges and solutions affecting Chöd transmission with the advent of consumer-affordable recording technology. In 1984, a Tibetan master elder in his last year – who was head of a prominent lineage of the Chöd tradition and responsible for its survival – recorded his melodies. In his tactical effort at lineage continuity, he recorded both a capella and drum-accompanied versions of each melody for his students to learn. Since 1995, the new head of this lineage has been encouraged to record his melodies in only one of these two ways -- which has resulted in what I call a “conflation of transmission with dissemination and preservation.” I propose a longer-term strategic intervention that complements the nature of the media in Chöd that is transmitted, and allows for a more efficient use of the capabilities suggested by the new technology. I provide musical examples illustrating the value of making strategic recordings when the continuity of a rare musical-spiritual tradition is at stake.

 


Session 4 A: Aesthetics and Performance Practice in African and African-derived Music (Panel of Papers) (Chair: Kazadi wa Mukuna)

           

Anicet Mundundu, Jambo Lugamba
Praise Singing and Patronage in Congolese Popular Music

 

Praise singing has a long tradition in African cultures.  Through the years, traditional kings and dignitaries have benefited from it, and the tradition continues.  Modern rulers and politicians have used praise singing to promote their self-image, or their political agendas.  Popular musicians are often rewarded for praising the person in power, especially the president of the country.  Nowadays, with the dictatorship slowly giving way to the democracy current in the continent, Congolese pop musicians have turned to wealthy people in the society who are able to patronize them.  At many levels, some get a simple shout out, some entire songs dedicated to them.  While this new practice has become annoying to some listeners, it has become a way of life to many recording artists.  My research focuses on how this practice is affecting music making and the quality of music that is produced today, and compares it with the practice in popular music from previous eras. 

 

Eric Beeko, University of Pittsburgh

Modes of Cultural Representation: Koo Nimo's Sung-Tales as Rhetoric, Innuendo and Double-Entendre

 

Many sub-Saharan African songs consist in the form of speech utterance, which is a stylized form of dialogic discourse, used to establish indirect but powerful patterns of communication between speaker and his/her audience. I will analyze how this form of utterance works, and how it serves as a mode of cultural representation.

 

Kenan Foley, Carlow University

Experience and its Expression in Jazz Drumming Performance: An Example from Pittsburgh

 

My research focuses on the various ways in which musicians personalize the jazz drumming tradition to express their individual experiences and artistic sensibilities.  A key point here is that within the jazz tradition, the musician is expected to interpret the music when he plays it, however, importantly, he interprets his experience in the way he plays it. My presentation will address these ideas as manifest in a performance featuring the late Ron Tucker, documented in situ at the Casbah; a neighborhood tavern in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

 

 

Session 4 B: Organology (Chair: Jim Kimball)

 

Rohan Krishnamurthy, Eastman School of Music

Virtual Mridangam: Internet Training for the Modern Mridangam Student

 

Since the advent of the internet, numerous practitioners of the mridangam, a popular South Indian drum, have turned to virtual resources as an outlet for mridangam study.  This is fascinating in view of the traditional apprenticeship system called gurukulavasa, which requires years of direct training wherein a student lives with their guru and learns the nuances of their particular bani or artistic style.  In this paper, I will present my recent ethnographic research with several mridangam students in the United States, Canada, and India who represent a diverse musical and cultural demographic.  This will include a discussion of the types of internet resources that are being used by these 21st century mridangam practitioners and how they are either substituting or supplementing direct musical training.  I will explain the advantages and disadvantages associated with online resources compared to direct training and the musical implications of these resources on the mridangam repertoire and style.  This study will update our understanding of musical transmission in the context of global, virtual technology.

 

Benjamin Pachter, University of Pittsburgh

Bring World Music to the Community: Creating a Japanese Taiko Ensemble at the University of Pittsburgh

 

Beyond their existence as performance opportunities, world music ensembles often used in academia as a pedagogical tool meant to foster knowledge of and appreciation for other cultures. Through the study and performance of music, students and audiences alike can learn about different facets from cultures from across the world. Behind this noble goal, however, lay a number of hurdles that must be overcome by the ethnomusicologist. Practicalities such as funding, departmental support, and the acquisition of instruments must be considered during the creation and operation of world music ensembles. It is an undertaking rarely discussed during the scholar’s training period, but one faced by most when they receive a position in an academic institution.

This paper will describe the obstacles encountered during the creation of a Japanese taiko ensemble at the University of Pittsburgh. The venture quickly emerged as a lesson in the realities of working within an academic institution. The manner in which the group evolved from an idea on paper into a performing ensemble will be discussed, encompassing both questions of performance practice, transmission, and repertoire encountered during the process, and practicalities such as grant proposal writing, membership recruitment, and the obtaining of instruments.



Roderic Knight, Oberlin College

The Knight System for Musical Instrument Classification: An Answer to Hornbostel-Sachs

Draeger, Schaeffner, Montagu, Dournon – these are names that are familiar to organologists, but perhaps not to others.  They have put their minds to revising the revered, yet reviled, 1914 Systematik der Musikinstrumente of Hornbostel and Sachs.  I am throwing my hat in the ring.  I want the world to adopt my system.  I have no quarrel with the idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, and aerophones of Hornbostel-Sachs, but I can't work with the subdivisions.  I am a student of Klaus Wachsmann, translator of the Systematik into English, and I propose here a system that upgrades Hornbostel-Sachs to a more workable document.  Like H-S, K-S is a system for the acoustical classification of instruments; it does not take into account cultural ways or other factors that may be equally valid for classification, but it does put more weight on playing techniques and significant visible features of instruments than does Hornbostel-Sachs.  Every family and sub-family has been reworked to incorporate current thinking.  The Dewey-like numbering system is retained, but with a letter for the first digit to distinguish it from Hornbostel-Sachs.  Gone are the awkward terminologies (indirectly struck idiophones, plucked drums, single plaques and sets of plaques, etc.) and in their place are more relevant criteria and simpler terminology.  Retained are the inconsistent subdivisions (method of playing for idiophones, shapes for chordophones) because the system is still more empirical than  (artificially) logical.  I will present the system in overview and then focus on the portions that differ most significantly from Hornbostel-Sachs.  

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