Book Summary: Anthropology of Music

The book Anthropology of Music talks about a new awareness of ethnomusicology's obligaton and a probling for what it is, does and the purposes toward which it is directed. It's the author's contention that ethnomusicology should focus on concepts about music, how music and behavior are interrelated and the sound of music. The author states that ethnologic behavioral concerns have not received an equal amount of attention by ethnomusicologists.

Performers and the performance context should be more fully at the center of analysis. The mere preservation of music has been overly focused upon,and ethnomusicology's role needs to be wider than that. More fully, ethnomusicology should have technical goals such as determining what music is to the extent possible, how music is made and what it's structure is both from a microscopic view and from the big picture.

Ethnomusicology also should have behavioral concerns relating to physical, conceptual/cultural, social, and learning what it means to be a musician, a listener or a participant in the culture in question. It should also be concerned with showing connections betwen ethnomusicology, the humanities and the social sciences. One of the problems that has been plaguing ethnomusicology has been it's inability to combine the social sciences and the humanties together.

The author states that the social sciences are concerned with the economic, political and social aspects of humanity while the humanities are concerned with art, religion, and philosophy. Social science stems from the needs of the body and the humanities stems from humanitiy's purposes. Social science engages in descriptions of behaviors while the humanities are concerned with human values.

The author believes that the thread connecting them is that they are both interested in what people do and why. The author goes on to say that ethnomusicologists have not consistently and completely applied the scientific method and have placed too much emphasis on the laboratory phase and not enough concerning the proper things to do before going into the field and in the field once they get there.

Ethnomusicologists should institutionalize a field method that is taken from ethnomusicology's base of accepted theory and then create hypothesis', field problems and research designs based upon the theory/theories. Concerning a good research plan there are four points to consider. Is the research possible? Does it have a goal? Has the methodology been recorded and which to employ based on a knowledge of the variety of methods available.

It should also say what the study did and did not accomplish. Musicology's neglected field phase can be broken down further to 6 areas of inquiry. 1 The material culture of music such as where the instruments fit within the taxonomy. 2 Song texts. 3 Categories, 4 The musician. 5 The uses and functions of music. 6 Music as a creative cultural activity.

Ethnomusicology also needs to determine the optimum number of song samples necessary to isolate styles and sub-styles. Lastly, ethnomusicology needs to be able to determine what aspects of structure constitute the determining factors of a certain style such as range, level, direction, countour, interval, interval patterns, ornamentation, melodic devices, melodic meter, duration values, structure, scale, mode, duration tone, subjective tonic, meter, rhythm, and tempo.

Aesthetics

Nature:

Some aestheticians say the reason we are all so concerned with beauty in art and music is because we don't live close enough to nature. We yearn for it and try to create it. I tentatively add that we may be trying to create it in our own image.

Math and Music:

Pi is a property often associated with beauty. The spiral in sea shells, like that of the chambered Nautilus, have the property of Pi in their construction and are considered beautiful. It seems that math is intrinsic to nature. Often sacred geometry around the world utilizes Pi and goes into the construction of temples and palaces. There are many other ratios that occur in nature and all are fair game for the composer.

e=2.7182818284590452353602874713526624877572470

9369995957

Pi=3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693

9937510582097494

Copeland/ Erdo=.023571113171923293137414347535961677173798

38997101103107109113127

Froda=6.5808599017920970851452403886486491573077

438348074005121512

Omega=0.567143290409783872999686622103555497538

15787186512508135131

Omega Inverse= 1.7632228343518967102252017769517070804360179866

674736345704569

Ramanujan’s#=262537412640768743.9999999999925007

25971981856888793538563373

Phi=1 1 2 2 4 2 6 4 6 4 10 12 6 8 8 16 6 18 8 12 10 22 8 20 12 16 12 28 8

Niven=1233456789 10 12 18 20 21 24 27 30 36 42

Golden String=1.6180339887498948482045863436563811772030

917980576

Tau=122334243426244526264428344628

Ugliness:

Protestantisms belief that the deity should not be represented and that art and music are not to be trusted since they take one away from God, created an architecture by modernists that is bereft of ornament. That’s why modern cities are so ugly. !

Finery:

Yes, we should avoid excessive finery but no ornaments? That’s going too far. Indian sitar music is often too heavily ornamented. For my taste, its use of ornaments should be more sober.

Aniconic Architecture of Persia and Music:

The aesthetic of Persian architecture is such that Allah is never to be represented using any kind of icon. But where the Protestants don’t use any ornaments, the Persians represented the deity in beautiful geometrical patterns, lattice-work and symmetry of which the Allhambra in Moorish Spain and the Taj Mahal in India and wonderful examples.

Music That Accelerates From 0-60 p.5

One thing that can be done with additive and subtractive techniques are to create transitions between sections by shortening the last repeat of a section by one beat or whatever because polyrhythmic music has traditionally used rhythm as a structural element rather than harmonic considerations which is another aspect whose stranglehold post-postmoderns are trying to escape. This also helps break up the authority of form which people in the postmodern era have been trying to do but all too often wound up facing 180 degrees and embracing formlessness. 180 degrees of sick is still sick.

180 degrees of burning up is freezing cold. The resulting chaos is something else I do not wish to recreate. Having transitions between sections helps get away from the 3 1/2 minute radio format and 15 second attention span of the verse, verse, chorus, verse, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus of the pop song and the AABA jazz form (when lengthened much becomes quite boring) without succumbing to the formless hour long pieces sometimes found in minimalism.

The historical precedent in the western world for a longer music with transitions, known as the long form, is found in big band arrangements and musical theater although, there, the music isn't rhythmically shortened to make transitions which is more akin to African music.

In Thailand, sometimes the gongs are played in a manner where the parts of the rhythm on beats 2 and 4 would be played the first time through, then the complete rhythm would be played on the next repeat, now including the rhythmic events on beats 1 and 3 also. This is an additive technique. I like this because it is a way to achieve more with less which is similar to minimalism.

Minimalim was mostly just a reaction to modernism. It was primarily based on deconstruction, on negating what went before. Unlike most minimalists, we should know why we're doing additive/subtractive procedures.

I want to avoid elitist music and, more importantly, move toward having several easy parts that don't require very much memorization to learn. I would like music to bring people together in performance not just professional musicians. Good teachers and manuals only introduce 1 new element at a time.

They only add on what is absolutely necessary to what a person already knows one step at a time. Additive procedures are one way to accomplish this educational goal of connecting to a person's prior knowledge. It can be intuitive and user friendly as opposed to counter intuitive and difficult.

I'd like to avoid some of the separation of the audience and performers. I think additive/subtractive procedures help facilitate that.

Another competing force is that the music needs to be likeable. Music does not have to pander to the adolescent 15 second attention span and 3 minute radio format like Britney Spears, yet not stretch the attention so far that it breaks as did early minimalism. Music does not need to sound so different that it alienates the audience.