Analytical Approaches to World Musics
ISSN 2158-5296
2019, Volume 7, No. 2
AAWM JOURNAL Volume 7, No. 2 (2019)
Volume 7, No. 2 (2019)
Special Issue on Ethnography and Analysis
Introduction to the Special Issue on Ethnography and Analysis
Yonatan Malin
The introduction sets out the goal of this special issue: to explore relationships between ethnography and analysis in an open way, strengthening the discursive web of analytical approaches to world music while also bringing some of its challenges to light. The introduction reviews prior work beginning with a model from Nettl (2015) and the contrast between studies of Arabic maqam by Marcus (1992) in Ethnomusicology and Abu Shumays (2013) in Music Theory Spectrum. Four prior studies are shown to combine ethnography and analysis in distinct ways: Locke (2010) makes a notable move from ethnography to author-driven music analysis, Hesselink (2013) uses ethnography to decenter the solo author/analyst model, Polak (2010) develops questions for empirical analysis from musical experience in ethnographic settings, and Berliner (1994) treats ethnography and music analysis as complementary, mutually corroborating methods. Finally, the introduction presents the four articles of this special issue, situating them in dialogue with prior work.
Contextual Theory, or Theorizing between the Discursive and the Material
Chris Stover
How can ethnography and music theory and analysis richly inform one another? One way is to incorporate the words and concepts used by high-level practitioners to build a theoretical scaffolding—to build an analytic framework that stems directly from those words and concepts. This essay develops three theoretical concept-spaces from key words used by the samba and Candomblé communities in Brazil: ritmo, balanço, and circularidade. Rather than attempting to practice “analytic ventriloquism” by suggesting that practitioners thematize their own practices in the ways developed here, it carefully uses these words as entry points into a constellation of original, creative theoretical positions.
Rosa Abrahams
The analysis of movement to music often stems from examinations of video-recorded events. This allows the analyst an opportunity re-watch, pause, and slow down the movements of their participants, and to produce descriptive notation that appears alongside a score (e.g., Roeder and Tenzer 2012). Unlike prescriptive forms of dance notation (e.g., Laban 1928), such transcriptions of movement often illuminate metrical connections between music and movement. However, when video-recording is not permissible, other methods of movement analysis must be developed. This paper pilots a new technique for rigorous analysis of the interaction between movement and music, which may be used in ritual settings with no video-recording. By trying to embody worshippers’ movements in relation to the sonic environment—by moving as my participants move—I unearth not only differences between participants, but also an experience of the muscles and space required to complete individual movements. As the movements must be felt and experienced in “real-time” before being transcribed, I gain a different understanding of movement practices. Through a discussion of these mimetic observations and corresponding interviews in Chicago-based Jewish and Greek Orthodox communities, I explore the types of rhythmic-movement analyses that can be created from unrecorded (live) ethnographic data, focusing specifically on issues of metrical entrainment between body and voice. By classifying movement components and types, I distinguish between participants who make similar physical movements and those who move in metrically similar ways. Moreover, by noting not only when the physical emphasis matches with the vocal emphasis in a line of chant, but also how that physical emphasis is created, a deeper-level analysis is unearthed.
What’s the Meter of Elenino Horo? Rhythm and Timing in Drumming for a Bulgarian Folk Dance
Daniel Goldberg
The meters of numerous Bulgarian folk songs and dance pieces are understood to include beats with two categorically different durations, short and long. Commonly performed dance types bear conventional time signatures that index particular sequences of unequal durations, and many Bulgarian musicians know these time signatures. Yet in the case of one popular dance type, elenino horo, performers and published sources express considerable uncertainty and differences of opinion about the durational sequence and time signature. This lack of consensus serves as the starting point for a study of meter in elenino horo as performed on the tŭpan, a large, double-sided drum that is considered the time-keeping instrument in many Bulgarian folk music ensembles. To examine the meter of elenino horo, I put musicians’ statements and my participant observations in dialogue with existing metric theory and quantitative analysis of rhythm in my field recordings. My primary objective is not to settle the debate about elenino horo—though I do take a position about which time signature fits most current performances—but rather to consider what this point of contention suggests about how meters with unequal durations can be structured and how Bulgarian musicians conceptualize meter. I interpret the metric organization of elenino horo in terms of cognitive theory of meter, arguing that the meter of the dance type contradicts current assumptions about constraints on metric structure. I corroborate my perception of durations in the music by analyzing timing in a sample of recordings. In the second part of the article, I turn to musicians’ conceptions of meter in the form of rhythmic templates that many Bulgarian percussionists use instead of time signatures or notation when demonstrating dance types. By examining frequencies of rhythmic patterns and drum strokes in recordings, I show that these templates approximate drummers’ process of generating rhythms in performance, and I identify ways in which commonly used rhythmic patterns communicate meter to listeners and reflect stylistic differences among performers.
Ethnography and Analysis in the Study of Jewish Music
Yonatan Malin
Two analytical vignettes on distinct genres of Jewish liturgical music are situated in dialogue with ethnographic encounters. The first vignette reveals structural and expressive aspects of a Hasidic niggun, a type of sung melody that is understood to be a form of prayer. The analysis was first delivered in a public forum involving members of a local Jewish community and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, an influential rabbi who recalled the niggun from his family in Vienna before World War II. The analysis was therefore designed in both content and mode of delivery to resonate with ideas from Schachter-Shalomi and the community. This vignette shows how music analysis may reach new audiences by drawing on cultural knowledge and, conversely, how analysis may take on new meaning and relevance in the context of a given culture.
The second vignette juxtaposes my prior analysis of modal aspects of Jewish Biblical chant (Malin 2016) with accounts from practitioners. My prior analysis deals with generalized practice; it is based on my training and notated sources. Interviews with other practitioners documented in the present paper, however, reveal a profound form of orality in which the sacred text is imbued with the memory of individual voices. I transcribe and analyze my recording of one highly accomplished chanter and document discussions with him, including his response to my analysis. While this new analysis is congruent with the value placed on individual voices, other tools—such as the anthropological theories of Alfred Gell (1998) and Georgina Born (2013)—would be needed to address the personal connections mediated by Biblical chant.