The Sing-Alonger

Sometimes new insights come about because two experiences collide.

Experience 1.

I was reading an essay about André Hazes. André Hazes, for the non-Dutch amongst us, is - was - a phenomenon. He sang the 'levenslied', the Dutch schlager as it were, and became the larger-than-life representation of it. When he died, there was a burial ceremony in the Amsterdam Arena (you know, Ajax) which was televised and attracted six million viewers.

The essay is written by an anthropologist from the Meertens Institute for Dutch ethnology, Irene Stengs. I like the essay; at points it is too much sociology of culture and too little ethnography to my taste, but it makes an important distinction that I had not consciously thought about too much: that between singing culture and sing-along culture. Singing culture is about the way we sing songs. Sing-along culture is about the way we sing songs together with a singer. In a sense, sing-along culture unites what ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino would call presentational and participatory forms of singing. Singing is presentational when it is done by a singer for an audience. Singing is participatory when everybody joins in and there is no distinction between a singer and an audience, Sing-along means there is a distinction, but not between the singer and his audience but between the singer and the sing-alongers.

Music and Place - On Ethnomusicocartographology and the Kielsterachterweg.

One of our students has started working for her research on the topic of 'Music and Place'. I hope she will realize through her research the all-invading importance of this topic. Because one of the most important functions of music is to connect people with place.

It does so in many ways. It connects people to he place where the music was conceived of; to the place they first heard (or played, or saw, ore even smelt or felt or tasted) that music; to places where they heard (or played, etc) that music in significant ways; to their current place while listening, playing, seeing, smelling, feeling, tasting that music; et cetera et cetera. Any piece of music has a personal geography, which maybe might be expressed in a personal musical map of that piece of music. And any piece of music may also have a more general cartography, if there would be patterns in those connections between music and place that would be more general.

I just invented a new discipline in the previous sentence, I believe: cartomusicography, or musicocartography. And if you study musicocartography all over the world, no doubt you will be an ethnomusicocartographologist. Someone with an XXL businesscard.

"If You Do What You Always Did..."

I wrote a blog entry for the Reflective Conservatoire Conference - but I might have posted it here too. So scroll to the bottom of the page behind this link to find it.

I Wish You Rieu!

I was spending an evening in front of the television and ended up watching André Rieu's jubilee concert at the central 'Vrijthof' square in Maastricht. A spectacle, as usual - a child prodigy, a soprano singing higher than high, three male singers singing louder than loud, a Ukrainian-Russian ensemble piece in order to propagate peace, a laser show, animations on enormous screens behind the stage, confetti showers, two past and one present town mayor, Rieu dancing with a hundred years old nun  - all the ingredients were there to make the jubilee a jubilee as we televise jubilees nowadays.

I wrote about Rieu earlier in this blog (for example here and here), trying to make clear that I admire the man although what he does is not necessarily my taste. While sitting in front of the telly I again enjoyed watching the show. Of course also because I studied in Maastricht, so looking at the audience and hearing Rieu speak the local dialect took me back to the years when I was around twenty years old and tried to figure out how to live an independent life at the other end of the country amidst total strangers. Recollections of all kinds, happy ones and less happy ones, as things go, if only because at least one class mate and one good friend have past away in the meantime. Would they have liked the Rieu concert? I'll never know, I guess - but you never know.

The Market Failure Argument

I was at the Arts Council Groningen this week, to talk a bit about their role in arts funding. I had decided some time ago that I would not meddle into cultural policy making any more, but what is meddling? They asked me to tell a story, and as I love telling stories, I accepted.

As usually I tried to make the point that arts funding policy should look at a more inclusive way towards everyday life out there in the ordinary life world. Arts funding policy is, due to traditions, unnecessary exclusive. Decision making, for example, is often exclusively in the hands of a very homogeneous group of 'insider specialists'.

Dr. Jan and Mr. Raes

The directors of the Concertgebouw Orchestra are called Jan Raes.

One of them, Jan Raes, was a member of a small committee who wrote a report for the Ministry of Education about music education in primary schools. On the basis of that report, the ministry decided to invest 25 million euros in music education the next few years.

Jan Raes and his committee wrote in the report: "The snowball lies on top of the mountain, it just needs a little push". With this rather idiot metaphor Jan Raes meant that music education was really developing well those past few years and only needed a bit of money to get into excellent shape again.

A couple of weeks later, the other director, Jan Raes, published with his nine fellow-directors of the Dutch symphony orchestras a report on the future of the orchestras. In that report, he sketches a grim picture of music education in primary schools: it has nearly vanished. In this report, the other Jan Raes mentions the 25 million euros from the ministry not as the final little push in order to get music education in primary schools back to excellency, but as a first beginning to revive music education.

I wish I could witness the discussions between Jan Raes and Jan Raes after they found out how they differed in their estimation of music education in primary education."We're nearly there, you fool!", bellows Dr. Jan. "Not at all - it is nearly extinct", shrieks Mr. Raes. After which they start throwing snowballs at each other from the tops of their respective mountains.

In the meantime, the poor education officer of the Concertgebouw Orchestra witnesses this raging war between Jan Raes and Jan Raes, and no doubt wonders which one to believe. I don't envy her position.

I Like Songs

It was 05.30 in the morning, a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning, and I stepped in the car to drive to Bochum, Germany. I was going to read a paper on music education in secondary schools in the Netherlands. I had chosen a small pile of CDs to listen to while driving.

As the dark turned into grey and then the grey turned into daylight, and as I drove to the south on a very quiet German highway, I listened to Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin'), Dolly Parton (The Grass Is Blue), Gill Scott Heron (I'm New Here) and Wilco (The Whole Love).

This blog kind of follows the path of the research I am doing. It started off with me wondering what other people were doing with music, how they look at themselves, how we look at others and ourselves through those powerful glasses called Culture. It was connected to the fact that I was interviewing lots of people about their musical lives for my research. But at some point this blog has become more inward-looking. I write a lot about myself, these days. That is due to the fact that I am now doing a research project in which the research method is - at least at present - what is called 'participant observation': observing others while being part of and partaking in their community. 'Walking the walk, talking the talk'; 'deep hanging out'; up to the point of 'going native'. And as the history of anthropology shows (the early 1980s, in particular), at some point this kind of participant observation is doomed to change into self-observation, and ethnography becomes auto-ethnography. It is a necessary phase in my development as a researcher, but don't worry: I will soon be leaving the auto-ethnographic phase, I will re-focus on 'the other' rather than on myself, because I feel that is where the value in my research eventually lies. And with that, this blog will undoubtedly become more outward-looking again. There is hope.

However, right now I am in the reflexive mood. So I wondered about me listening to all those songs. And also to a specific kind of songs, often. Let's say: the straightforward songs. The songs telling a simple story. Or at least: me believing they tell a simple story (Wilco's lyrics are hardly 'simple', but still the songs are songs). The song being a song, nothing more. Someone writes down lyrics, picks up a guitar and sings what he wrote down. He doesn't care too much whether someone else has sung something comparable, on a comparable tune. The song has to be sung - not meaning some kind of 'artistic-drive-has-to-be-sung', but simply the fact that the song needs to be sung in order to be a song.

You still there?

"For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same." (Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping - by the way, the quote, for reasons I might explain some other time, brings me to Sarajevo and to its grandiose sevdalinkah.)

Infinite in number. All the same. The quote expresses precisely why I listen to songs. And why I don't care that Dylan reworks 'Girl from the North Country' into 'Boots of Spanish Leather', knowing this is based upon 'Scarborough Fair'. Or that Gill Scott Heron sings the blues accompanied by samples from old recordings. It doesn't matter - actually; it is the thing to do. Taking up history and re-writing it for your own purposes. I like it when one is satisfied with that humble thing.

It explains why I like Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and other American songwriters so much that they are able to move me to tears. They don't beat around the bush. If they miss someone, they write that they miss someone. If they feel they are so lonely they want to die, they write that they feel so lonely they want to die. If they cry a pool of tears, they sing they are crying a pool of tears. No metaphors, no poetry, no psychologizing, no irony and sarcasm, no tongue in cheek. Say how it is. A thousand songs. A thousand sorrows. They're all the same, sung in porches on mild evenings.

I might now write about my past, my personal background, to explain this. But I am not going to do that. I try to stick to the idea that it is enough to say how it is.

I like songs.