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.

Purpose of Music

On the surface it appears that music is for entertainment or as a money-making opportunity for the gifted or the lucky. But if one looks a little deeper it can be seen that music can be used to bring people together to build community in group performances whether that community is in the audience, in the ensemble or both. Music can be used in psychology to help people express their emotions when they find it difficult or impossible to use words. Music therapists use music for healing the sick or the bereaved through its power to stir the emotions. Music can be used to help people unwind after an upsetting day, to enter into meditation, to express the religious sentiment or create drama in the movies. The powers of concentration involved in performing and composing music can give a person a greater chance of success in the world. It can help people see themselves as having an influence on the world and therefore feeling contented if they create something useful and beautiful. A person becomes a co-creator of the universe with the source of all life instead of merely theorizing about life in lofty spheres of abstraction which alone leads to depression and a lack of passion.

Many people are becoming unbalanced as a result of modern life due to its complexity and the difficulty of living sustainable with nature and each other. A call to greater complexity, disharmony and distortion for no other reason than because it is the way we seem to be going is like intentionally stepping on the gas while approaching a fatal fall from a cliff. There must be a balance between randomness and control.

I like aspects of modern education because it is sometimes saying that fields such as music are not separate boxes from other subjects. For example, music composition overlaps music theory, performance and aesthetics. These are obvious. What is not obvious is that music composition overlaps other fields such as religion, philosophy, mythology, architecture, mathematics, sociology and psychology. Music does not have hard boundaries that separate it from everything else and therefore cannot be thought of as a box. The same way that we cannot place ourselves outside nature. We are a part of nature, the trees are our external! lungs and there is no escaping the fact without them we would all die.

About the Music 6

In the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma says that the only thing that can be said to be inherent is truth which is not conditioned.

On what should everyone in the world concentrate? There are as many answers as there are people. Joseph Campbell and I would have everyone concentrate on what truthfully heals you and makes you happy. Besides an experience of nature and other people, ambassadorship, medicine, literature, music, art, gardening etc... are possible foci.

Concerning relationships with other people, western traditionalists and some conservatives are well networked. They may meet every Sunday in Church, in the board room or at power lunches. Cultural creatives think they're alone and there's nowhere to meet. The Unitarian Universalist church is trying to be everything but they wind up alienating just about everyone.

Many Buddhists and Hindu's want to eliminate all desire for happiness. This is one of the problems of cultural creatives. But if the truth is that gardening makes you happy now, no amount of Buddhist philosophical gynmnastics about it ULTIMATELY not making you happy since it's not eternal is nonsense in my opinion.

What is eternal is this moment we have now which is all there ever is. If what makes you happy changes over time then change. It's not that difficult to do, in fact, its inevitable. Anyway, we don't need to be copying Jesus or Buddha, we just need to live up to our divine nature.

About The Music

I compose music because its a big part of myself. If I don't put something on paper and play an instrument everyday, I will get cranky. Now, when I'm composing music, I start with the big picture and I mean really big.

In talking about it, it quickly veers into politics, sociology and the philosophy of religion. I ask what I'm trying to communicate. I'm usually trying to communicate something mystical, transcendant, infinite, communal and/or abundant.

I try to recreate a feeling of the mystical, transcendant and infinite through the use of drones, chimes, gongs and finger cymbals, and through the use of rhythmic cycles. I also try to create a sense of transcendence by including techniques and instrumental timbres foreign to my own roots of rock, jazz, classical, guitar, sax, violin and piano.

As far as the music communicating or, better yet, actually building and strengthening ties between community members, I try to write music with at least a few easy parts so that anyone, even children, can also participate and I try to have a high tolerance for change and diversity based on the needs of other people playing with me. However, even I have limits. I would like to create music for people's daily activities or at least tied to utility somehow such as when two people make love, exchange massage or good conversation.

I'd like to explore more dance and rave music. Sometimes, I try to mix quartal jazz piano voicings (because its good for minor and pentatonic music)