Acting Like a Moron Before the Natives

Summer holiday's over, work has started. The PhD is written, so time for a new project. I am not going to tell you what it is, only that it is ethnomusicology - anthropology of music, if you want - and that it is just around the corner. And that I will be doing participant observation, this time, rather than an interview study.

I can't wait to start!

I was reading We, the Tikopia by Raymond Firth, an anthropological classic. And right in the beginning of the book I found a quote which reflects my feeling of embarking on this new voyage - because a voyage it is, even if the fieldwork is nearly in my back yard and the new language I need to speak is only metaphorical new.

So there we go:

"The reality of the native life is going on all around him [the anthropologist], but he himself is not yet in focus to see it. He knows that most of what he records at first will be useless: it will be either definitely incorrect, or so inadequate that it must later be discarded. Yet he must make a beginning somewhere. He realizes that at this stage he is incapable of separating the pattern of custom from the accidentals of individual behaviour, he wonders if each slight gesture does not hold some meaning which is hidden from him, he aches to be able to catch and retain some of the flood of talk he hears on all sides , and he is consumed with envy of the children who are able to toss about so lightly that speech which he must so painfully acquire. He is conscious of good material running to waste before him moment by moment; he is impressed by the vastness of the task that lies before him and of his own feeble equipment for it; in the face of a language and custom to which he has not the key, he feels that he is acting like a moron before the natives. At the same time he is experiencing the delights of discovery, he is gaining an inkling of what is in store; like a gourmet walking roound a feast that is spread, he savours in anticipation  the quality of what he will later appreciate in full."

Raymond Firth. We, the Tikopia. Kinship in Primitive Polynesia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963 (1936), p.3.

Real People

I was in Shanghai for an ethnomusicological conference. On the day-off, we had the option to go on excursion. I chose to go to Wu Zhen, a ‘water town’ – a village with a lot of little canals and many boats and bridges. Like Venice, maybe (never been there); or Giethoorn, if you look for a Dutch equivalent.

It was hot. There were many tourists (most of them, of course, Chinese), who all had paid in order to be able to visit the village. The village brimmed with tourist shops. Obviously it lives from tourism these days, like for example Schiermonnikoog.

When we were back in Shanghai, I bumped into a fellow ethnomusicologist acquaintance, someone researching Chinese music. I asked him where he had been. He had also been to Wu Zheng, and was furious. “Why did they take us to such a stupid tourist village! Couldn’t they have brought us to a real Chinese village? There are many of them around. Much more interesting. And at least there are real people there!”

I understand the feeling and appreciate it, although I myself don’t worry too much about being a tourist at periods – every role has its pros and contras. But many ethnomusicologists are busy with research into the real life of ordinary people – and then tourist representations of real life are generally not too interesting indeed.

That is: if one takes tourist attractions such as Wu Zheng to stand for ‘the real thing’. The other option, of course, is to take Whu Zheng for what it is: a tourist attraction. I found it rather interesting to see how the Chinese handled their version of heritage tourism.

And, contrary to my fellow ethnomusicologist, I wasn’t missing ‘real people’. Because why should a tourist shop owner, a tourist temple guard, or a tourist from a Chinese suburb, be less ‘real’ than a Chinese traditional villager? Beats me.

The Sorcerer's Head

Amongst anthropologists and their musical counterparts, ethnomusicologists, one of the shared pleasures is story telling.

Widely shared are stories during dinner, recounting what has been eaten with whom, where and how, and what the consequences were. I have not many stories to share, I must say; yes, we eat raw fish in the Netherlands, I ate dried worms in South Africa, barbecued shark in Yemen, buried and then dug-up shark in Iceland, stinky tofu in China recently, and mock-dog in Timor (they threatened to feed me dog every day but never did). But all that's nothing to compare with what many of my fellow researchers had to eat all over the world, so usually I keep my mouth shut - and most of the time I try to keep my ears shut as well; I have a too vivid imagination.

Less shared are stories about atrocities witnessed in 'the field', though some of my fellows have had their share of it. But those apparently are stories not to be shared widely; maybe the more (un)edible variants mentioned above function as their substitutes for some of them? In the monographies written by researchers you do occasionally find references to the incomprehensible cruelty of daily life, but those are never transferred to the table or the pub.

It was therefore astonishing to witness a paper presentation lately by an ethnomusicologist studying Balinese witchcraft and its music where the presenter showed, in his second slide, a mob of people carrying a head of a sorcerer on a stick. More astonishing was the fact that the slide had some sort of novelty- or freak-character; no story was given about the slide, it did not play any crucial role in the presentation, it was just shown - with a warning beforehand to maybe close your eyes if you were not up to terrible pictures, but that was it.

No-one asked a question afterwards about this strange slide in a for the rest interesting an quite good presentation; including me. But the ease with which we apparently allow ourselves to show and be shown, under the pretext of research, the most terrible things shocked me.

I know people generally seem to think recent James Bond movies are violent-but-innocent; and when I sometimes point out that I don't want to be confronted with such an amount of violence on my screen people reassure me that it is just a movie; it's not real, really.

Yeah; who do you think I am? Still.

The same counts for the arts world (I commented earlier on it in a side remark). I remember being presented an Art Work in which you could make a puzzle or another funny something out of the image of the corpse of Khadaffi - or was it Saddam Hussein? I remember talks on art showing the pictures of the corpse of Pim Fortuyn. I know those pictures exist, I know they represent a reality in which they all have been killed. But the question is: am I really so close to those people who talk to me because I am in their audience that I have silently invited them to cross all boundaries about what I think is still decent to show someone unasked for?

I often sympathize with mr. Gautama, father of Siddharta, who tried - says Wikipedia - 'to hide from him  the sick, aged and suffering'. I know it is undo-able - eventually mr. Gautama didn't manage to keep hiding the lot, and you all know where that led to - but living my life as if walking around in candid camera full time is the other extreme, I think.

Oh yeah, by the way: I saw a girl walking through town yesterday with a T-shirt announcing "Fuck you". Or was it an invitation rather than an annnouncement?

Anyway, I am also not going to the exhibition "Fuck Off part II". I rather fuck off, as it were, to hide in the shade and watch the people go by, including the sick, aged and suffering..

What do I need research, movies or art for anyway?

Nr. 100

I am sure it will not be of interest to many of you, but this is blog entry nr. 100. 2.5 years of writing an average of one entry every week, apart from holidays. Nearly 7300 page views from - in descending order - the Netherlands, the US, Germany, Russia, the UK, France, Latvia, the Ukraine, China, Sweden and many more countries.

I started this blog for a reason. I was writing a PhD dissertation and thought a form of 'public thinking' might help me to develop my ideas. And actually it has worked well. Not that my thinking became 'public' because of readers' reactions (it did happen, though - thank you), but rather because the public character of the blog kind of ordered me to write a bit about music every week, thus forcing me to put thoughts on paper. It kept me writing and thinking, and some of the thoughts have eventually ended up in the dissertation.

This morning I sent the dissertation to the committee which is going to judge whether the research I did is original  enough to grant me the title of doctor. We'll find out in due time. The rather new illustration of the parachute guy you find somewhere on my blog actually is an artistic  interpretation of the result of the PhD; study the illustration a bit and you know all you will have to know. In the meantime, there is the feeling of 'job done'. If they would ask me to write another dissertation I would accept immediately, but for now it's over. So it feels fitting this is a celebratory nr. 100.

I could therefore stop this blog. But I guess I'll continue. Because writing about music in this way has made me think, which I value. So let's see what happens next week on this place. After a remark of a friend I guess I could shift my attention away from the 'quality-critique' of the past few weeks, and find something new to write about. I'll do my best (although I have become rather fond of the idea of quality-critique).

At the same time, there is this feeling I described some weeks ago: a certain tiredness of all this argumentation going on in my blog, and my head. So I am thinking of starting yet another blog, in another place. A blog in which there will be no argumentation at all, just pure description. A blog unrelated to music, although music may figure in it.

A blog because, now that I know that writing can make you think, I am curious about the reverse: can you also write in order to stop the thinking?

With Music Education to the Top

When we came back from a visit to something we saw a huge van parked in the street. A colorful van, advertising itself as the 'Classic Express'.

The Classic Express is the van of the 'Prinses Christina Concours', a classical music (and jazz, nowadays - which shows that jazz has become classical music in many ways) contest for young musicians. The van is a mobile stage which drives around the country offering concerts  to primary schools.

Great. Why not give every child the possibility to regularly hear live classical music? And when played by young musicians the possibility of identification grows, of course, which is good too. I can imagine what goes on in the heads of the inventors of the van. An initiative, I think, to be picked up by the rap world, the pop world, the Dutch schlager world, the bluegrass world and the shanty world too. Wouldn't it be great to have dozens of vans cruising the country, providing primary schools with live music?

But there is that one little thing at the back of my mind, and that is the way this vanning around reinforces the general discourse about what music is supposed to be. All those vans whisper at you: music is meant to be a performance. It is done on a stage, by someone who is Really Good, and this someone is playing for an audience who are Slightly Less Good. Music is something to be performed on a stage by Those Who Can, to be listened to by Those Who Can't.

It's just a whisper, I know. There is nothing against listening to a great performance, and much in favor of it; I will be the first to acknowledge that. And of course everyone has the right to witness a concert of great quality if possible, rather than a mediocre one; yes, yes, I agree totally. And of course all this should be balanced by other musical activities in schools where children are encouraged to sing and play themselves - even if they will never be the prize winners of our musical competitions; and we do our best for that, too, I know.

But sometimes it's more than just a whisper, and then I notice my eyebrows raising themselves involuntarily. See the picture below, and see what it screams at you: "Classic Express, The mobile concert stage; with young top talent to the schools."

Sounds like a one-way street, doesn't it? And: "Young top talent", rather than "great music". What's the message here?

For sure, it will also be meant to please those who finance the van with grants - nowadays the only way to acquire grants is to mention the world 'talent' in every other sentence. But I guess it's not only that - it is also expressing what we, what 'our culture', thinks about music in general. Which is the same as what we think of everything else:

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL; BIGGER IS EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL.

EVERYTHING MUST ALWAYS BECOME EVEN BETTER.

INNOVATION FOR GROWTH.

WHO IS BEST GETS THE BIGGEST PART OF THE CAKE.

LIFE IS SPORTS, REALLY.

Having said all that, I also want you to know that my kids really liked the concert in the van.

Music makes you musical

"I don't teach music because it makes you smart. I teach music because it makes you into a human being." That's the way music teacher Jeroen Schipper ends a recent blog entry. It's a charming piece of prose, in which he explains that he understands why music teachers keep hammering on about music's contribution to our IQ (firmly seated in the brain and observable by means of a brain scanner, as we now all know) but that  he is actually fed up a bit with all that.

I agree with him. And I would like to add that I am also not a fan of the newest fad, which is an old fad really: the claim that music, as an art subject, makes you creative - and creativity is what our society (and especially our economy) needs. Apart from the fact that music is so much more than just creativity, and that there is a lot of uncreative but nevertheless very worthwhile musicking going on in most human lives, I dislike the ugliness of the arguments around creativity because they are so intensely tied to thoughts about being a winner and not a looser, about economic growth rather than modesty, about wanting to be better, newer, more advanced and more innovative rather than about being simply happy. (Remember the Lisbon-agenda of the EU? "The most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy of the world.")

Ach, I know, I'm old-fashioned. But music might be more than yet another instrument to be in one of the world top-3s.

What I liked best about Jeroen's blog is his question why we shouldn't turn the question around. Why do we expect music to contribute to mathematical or linguistic abilities? Why don't we ask mathematics to contribute to the rhythmical abilities of children? Why don't we ask from English to contribute to a better understanding of pop music? We know the answer: because mathematics and English have an intrinsic value. So if we want to justify why we should teach music in schools, let's not talk about how music contributes to something else. Let's talk about the intrinsic value of music, about how music makes you more musical.

Jeroen argues for precisely that. He does so by saying that music is a unique means of communication which can convey things that in no other way can be communicated. I am not so sure if that's a good argument - I'm not sure if it holds, and I would like to keep the possibility open that with music you teach something that also can be taught by other means; why would that make music less worthwhile?

But I like Jeroen's expression that music makes you human. In a way this is of course also an example of instrumental reasoning - music is good for something else. But by adding just a word it loses its instrumentality.

Music is worthwhile because it makes you into a musical human being.

Problem solved.

André Rieu - Respect.

We were watching a show on television - André Rieu and his orchestra playing in Sao Paolo (Brasil). Lots of Japanese in the audience, of course, as Sao Paolo hosts what I believe is the largest Japanese community outside of Japan. Lots of waltzes, lots of costumes, a bunch of sopranos, three tenors of course. Funny sketches in between and during the pieces. Lots of operetta tunes. Not really my music, but then again: the music was not really meant to be for me, so why bother about that?

The audience had fun, that was clear. So had the musicians. The audience came expecting a great show and they got it. Not only did Rieu play the repertoire he is famous for, he also played a couple of latin pieces and finished the show with Brasilian Michel Telo's world wide hit  'Mosa Asi Voce Me Mata'. He spoke to the audience in (a sort of) Portuguese. And he played 'Amazing Grace', complete with tin whistle and bagpipes - which moved the audience to tears. I was wondering why, but a bit of googling around gives a possible reason: a Brazilian kid gospel singer Jotta A. performed the song in 'Brazil's Got Talent' with enormous success.

'Smart guy, our André', I said to my wife when the show was finished and we talked about how he completely captured his audience. She replied: 'He shows respect.'

I guess we both were right. But I think my wife's remark was smarter than mine, as well as more respectful.