On the Anthropologist Gradus J. Bosklopper

One of my favorite regional artists is Bert Hadders. I promised in my last blog I would write about King's Day. Well, here I go: I heard him play at King's Day in my village. He played with his band De Nozems at the central square. In front of him sat some real fans; they spoke dialect and had fun. On the side, on the cafe terrace, the local elite was looking blase over a white wine. A little bit the John Lennon-idea: "Those in the cheaper seats clap. The rest of you, rattle your jewelry."

But the band was great, as was Bert Haddders. One of his songs I like best is "Elvis, Keuning van de Bunermond", a song about a local hero somewhere in the Wild East of the Groningen province, the place we call Veenkoloniën (literally "the Peatbog Colonies", I guess), also because this song has such an irresistible video clip.

On Culture

If you do not like blog entries about abstractions, skip this one. It is about 'culture'. Soon I will write about King's Day - much more fun, I promise.

Some time ago I was giving a guest lecture in a course on research skills for teaching staff. I do those guest lectures a couple of times per year, and I like it - it forces me to think about my own research and to explain it to others.

On the basis of earlier experiences this year, I had decided that I would focus less on content and more on methodological issues, and specifically on what is called Grounded Theory: a type of research in which you do not test a theory, but develop it on the basis of empirical data.

So in the lecture I was talking about one of the principles of Grounded Theory, which is called theoretical sampling. The fact that you start your research without a theory makes it hard to decide where to begin your sampling of data. So you simply start somewhere, without  fixed theoretical preconceptions.

One of the people present thought long and hard about this and then disagreed with me. In my specific case, I sampled interviewees only within the province of Groningen, which for the person present meant that at least I had a basic preconception of culture - a preconception that my interviewees, varied as they might be, at least shared a culture to some extent.

Dolly Parton - A Review

The music critic has always fascinated me. He is the professional variant of something many people do continuously: talking about their musical experiences in an evaluating way.

I guess the music critic uses three ingredients: descriptions, judgments, and emotions. He describes what has happened: who was where when with whom, why, with which backgrounds, which history, et cetera. Then there are the judgments and the emotions. They are the equivalents of what I elsewhere called "judging talk" and "liking talk". Together they make up the discourse in which we describe our personal relationship to music. Music touches us - hence the "liking talk" with which we describe our emotions. And on that basis we pick the music we like to listen to - which leads to enormous amounts of "judging talk", in which we try to rationalize our musical choices. Of course that rational story is never convincing, precisely because it is the rational counterpart of the emotional process of liking music, a process which remains inexplicable and only expressible through - mostly material (often bodily) - metaphors: "It really entered"; "It touched my heart"; "It shook me"; et cetera.

Music Generations Groningen

After some years of making plans, (not) convincing possible partners and (not) finding money, finally this afternoon the first Groningen version of the Music Generations programme started after all. I was there to take a look, and I was proud.

Music Generations is a programme which aims at making an intergenerational production with amateur singers from the categories "25-" and "50+" (which makes me feel discriminated, but because that feeling will end in a few months I am not too worried).

It calls itself a talent development programme, and maybe it is. As you may know, I am not too big a fan of the Talent-buzzword; but politicians, policy-makers and money-investors are attracted by it, so talent development it is. But what I liked most about the first audition I saw this afternoon was not the talent-thing; it was the fact that people were allowed to do their own musical thing in public. People were allowed to present themselves as the musical persons they are, all their idiosyncrasies included.

They all deserve the workshops and masterclasses offered by the programme; and they all deserve to grow musically and to become even better than they already are. But what I really hope is, that in all that growing and becoming better they do not lose themselves. I hope they grow mainly in becoming even more of the  themselves they already are.

Because that is the great attraction of sessions like the one I witnessed this afternoon: it shows how music potentially is, in the words of my beloved Clifford Geertz, a meeting place to "enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way".

What It Really Is About

I am working ´in´ music. I teach about it. I talk about it. I write about it. I talk about teaching it. I write about teaching it. I teach about writing about it. I talk about writing about it. I teach about talking to write about it. Et cetera, ad infinitum, and sometimes ad nauseam (all this Latin to show that I am ´not from the street´, as we say in Dutch, or, ´reversely´, that I have ´street credibility´ in doing it).

And then, of course - talking about street credibility - I play it and I sing it.

But the secret of music lies not in the hands that move the pen or pluck the strings, nor in the mouth that sings the songs or speaks the words.

The secret lies in the ears that hear, and in the soul being moved.

At times, I become so tired with those hands and this mouth. It is all so haphazard, so unfruitful, so futile. I might as well do something else - I might be better off, and so might the rest of the world.

But then I return from a rehearsal of my beloved shanty choir. I sit in the car, I put on the stereo and I listen to Dave Rawlings' 'Bells of Harlem'. And I am dumbstruck with what the sounds of music continue to do to me. They uplift me, up to the point of annihilation.

And I realize that after all, there is probably nothing else I am supposed to do than to play it, sing it, speak about it, write about it, teach about it; if only to honor the listening to it.

So, let the dance continue.

Thank you, Dino

So here I am in Sarajevo, again. It has been quite some time - three years, to be precise. I wondered if again it would snow and I would spot a Dipper, but no. But the lovely smell of the charcoal fires needed to make cevabcici was there, as was the lovely sound of the muezzins of all the mosques; the Bosnian football team still plays in lovely blue, and Music Academy Sarajevo - which hosted me so kindly - was as filled with its lovely students and as hot as ever. So although I missed my wife and kids, I felt at home, in a way.

About the sounds of the muezzins - it is music to my ears. But I know that for some muslims, reciting the qur'an and music are two very very different things; we hear the same but it feels different and listens to a different name. Related to this: one of the ethnomusicologists with whom I worked these days told me that people in a village where she did fieldwork answered in the negative when she asked whether there was any music going on in processions; of course they were singing, she discovered much later, but they did not call it music.Thank you for the story, dear colleague - and oh, the power of words and feelings

Never take a word on its word.

And speaking about words: the wisest words these days came from a composer. In a reflective conversation he remarked that what we, human beings, do need amongst us is not so much that European buzz-word 'tolerance' - we need 'acceptance'. I couldn't agree more; I told him that his words would stick with me the rest of my life, and - pathetic as it may have sounded - I meant it.

Thank you, Dino.

Blowin' in the Wind

When I was about fourteen, I stopped taking violin lessons and switched to the guitar. At that time, I think there was no choice between classical or pop, or between Spanish or electric guitar; if you took guitar lessons, you bought a Spanish guitar and learned to play classical music. But I was lucky to have as my teacher Dries Lubach, who realized that, apart from playing the etudes of Emilio Pujol, it might be attractive for kids my age to also learn to read chord schemes and play basic finger-picking patterns by means of such songs as House of the Rising Sun and Blowin' in the Wind.