To disclose a musical understanding.
This is the answer, in brief, to a question endlessly posed in myriad forms by discerning granting committees, well-intentioned advisors, curious colleagues, befuddled friends and family, and, not least among them, ourselves. Why do we study the musical practices of others and our own? Why do we expose an otherwise enjoyable past-time – in our case – to excruciating dissection? Would the world be any different were we to desist? I have toiled with these questions as much as any other and I wish to suggest an answer. Musicologists, in the catholic meaning of the term, are no different from others in their ability to understand music, to learn to play instruments, or even to recognize the intricate interrelations music has with other spheres of human activity. In fact a stronger argument could be made to the contrary, that musicologists are too often cloistered in their world of theory and abstraction to really get to the heart of the matter as do unreflective musicians, performers, or listeners. Their skill, and hence utility, lies elsewhere. Musicologists make explicit that which we always already knew; they help us see, hear, and feel that which was always already present in experience and practice.
Musical understanding, musical being is, I maintain, not something privy solely to a few Bach specialists, sitar gurus, Bird devotees, or the like. It is, rather, a species of experience common to most all humans. Perhaps the Suyá of the Amazon’s Upper Xingo Basin spend more of their time singing than we do, but music as a meaningful experience pervades our lives nonetheless. Were alien anthropologists to live among the people of the cosmopolitan West, to take one example, certainly they would note that, while particular topics rouse the interest of only a few at any given gathering – some talk on the politics of paper versus plastic bags, others the statistics of a certain Cubs sporting team – all seemed possessed of adept knowledge in the realm of what they call ‘music.’ A small majority had some training as practitioners on piano, guitar, or another common instrument; many attended musical rituals called ‘concerts’ on a semi-regular basis – some in large, grandiose halls, others in dark, alcohol-soaked chambers; all were familiar with innumerable performers, historical events of musical import, and the correct behavioral norms specific to various activities. To boot, their daily routines were saturated by mechanically-reproduced music issuing forth from radios and iPods, computers and elevators. Music was everywhere and everyone an expert they would have to conclude. But if musical understanding is so common a good, then it cannot be in its attainment that lies the distinctiveness of musicologists. Their skill, simply or not so simply, is to allow our musical understanding to disclose itself to us; to aid us in seeing what lies right before our noses.
Of course a visual metaphor will not do if the phenomenon is, in the first place, aural. To appreciate what is valuable in the musicological endeavor we must first clarify what is meant by the experience in question. What does it mean to experience music as meaningful? Why do unfamiliar musics often irritate or fascinate us, or at least leave us cold? In short, what does musical understanding consist in? Perhaps two brief tableau will make clear what phenomenon we’re after here.
1. Sunday Jam Session
The Velvet Lounge on Chicago’s near South Side, 9:30 pm. The small, dark, intimate interior – last renovated in the 1960s, when wallpaper with large-print flowers in pastel pink, orange, and green was still en vogue – is populated almost exclusively by men is ‘casual attire.’ The house band, a handful of other musicians who have come to sit in, and ten or so familiar listeners are here, chatting and babying a $1.50 Schlitz or a bottle of High Life. No one’s really here to drink – they’ve come for the music. Kobe, Josh, and Jim (drums, bass, and piano, respectively) take the stage and the already subdued crowd ceases to talk. The altoist Dennis Winslett climbs the three wooden stairs to the stage, inaudibly asks the band if “Cherokee” is ok, and they nod. Dennis closes his eyes, puts his horn to his mouth, taps his foot, and counts quietly, “a-one, a-two, a-one, two, three…,” and they’re off. The audience members smile appreciatively, bop their heads, feet, or hands along to the beat. One furrows his brow as Dennis begins his solo with a clever repetition of one tone in an unpredictable rhythm, waiting anxiously for the pending torrent of notes we all know is to come. Another focuses on Jim’s reserved, but way-out comping style, trying to jive the chord changes in his head with those emanating from the piano’s amplifier. When Kobe’s turn comes, all concentrate on the mixture of Art Blakey’s intensity and Roy Haynes’ inventiveness this ‘young lion’ embodies. People shake their heads in disbelief, but in truth they know exactly what to believe. This is ‘sick’ jazz, as Josh would put it, as good as it gets, and everyone feels it way down inside.
2.Mom listens to the BaAka
The built-in oak desk in the kitchen of my childhood home in Iowa, 9:30 am. Having cleared away the breakfast things, I boot up the computer at my mother’s desk and open a web site created by the ethnomusicologist Michelle Kisliuk on the BaAka pygmies of the Central African Republic. I navigate to the short video clip of the Mondimba dance and call over to her, “Hey Mom, could I show you something?” wanting to see what her reaction might be. She’s removed her apron and found a lukewarm cup of coffee; she comes and sits at the desk. The footage begins. A couple dozen people in little or no dress dance in a rough circle. Straw huts can be seen in the background on the red dirt earth. In the clearing formed by the short, dark-skinned men and women is a figure covered in a full-body cone-like mask made of leaved branches tied at one end and inverted over the head of the dancer beneath. He or she twirls in one direction, then the other with no discernible regularity. The other dancers sing in seeming disharmony; the song has no obvious structure; the words are indecipherable. The video ends. Mom doesn’t know what to make of it, and, having humored me, goes off to do her morning crossword.
In addition to what phenomenon I’m interested in here, I hope these two scenes have provisorily shown the degree to which music is entwined in a ‘web of culture,’ to use the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (1926-2006) well-worn turn of phrase. Beginning with something as artless as music the understanding situation quickly thrusts one into cultural domains once thought truly far afield. As though we were ever innocent of its kin, we find ourselves no longer talking just about ‘music,’ but about religion, bodily practice, and sexual mores. In short, in understanding music we may begin with music, but we soon find ourselves concerned with a whole way of life. This strikes me as a fitting metaphor. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1967, b. Meßkirch), with his passion for etymology, would surely have pointed out that ‘way’ comes from the German ‘Weg’ meaning a ‘path.’ Paths are connections between points created by habit, by wearing down the earth, by impressing the ground with the regularities of our lives. As individuals pass over the same route, one following the other, day after day, the grass – at first merely trampled and sad – recedes and dies, leaving the bare earth. More time passes and the barren path eventually becomes a deep scar on nature’s visage. Thus practice marks the landscape, just as the landscape of human activity is guided by the path, leaving its traces in our talk (“That’s the way to Erlangen.”) and our things (shoes, walking sticks, backpacks). Following the path is much easier than forging one anew. To understand walking begins with the path, but quickly takes us to speech about directions and equipment for the practice. They, in turn, take us to spatial arrangement of villages, forms of instruction, the material bases of leather production, and so forth. To understand means to understand a way of life, to be fluent in a practice.
