Seaman Dan

Have you ever heard of Seaman Dan? I stumbled on him listening to a cd of Australian aboriginal music – the Rough Guide to Australian Aboriginal Music, to be exact. His song on this sample cd made me curious. It took me a bit of trouble to lay my hands on more of his music, as the guy is a big name in Australia but not really known anywhere else, I believe, but of course internet helps out eventually so now I listen to his cd’s on a daily basis.

What makes his music so charming? I cannot tell exactly but let me give it a try. It is very sweet music, very relaxed, very arranged (lots of horns), very sophisticated. The fact that a ukulele is strummed in at least every other song lifts my spirit, especially because in most of the other songs a mandolin is heard. There is drumming and multipart singing reminding you of Polynesia, hula & Hawaii, a melancholic mouth harp, occasional Malay lyrics as one would expect from a seaman from that region, and reggae – Seaman Dan’s grandfather came from Jamaica. A typical seafaring mish-mash. You get the idea?

"Our" Music

Students asked me the other day if I could not teach a class on Dutch music. They will soon leave for a week in Portugal, doing an international project with students from all over Europe. And they felt a bit ashamed that they could not answer questions about “Dutch music” – the general opinion seems to be that there is no such thing as “Dutch music”, and that whatever there is is not presentable in public (old-fashioned, or second-rank, or “bad”). The painful question arises:  are we allowed to sing “Het kleine café in de haven” as expression of our Dutchness?

I agreed to teach the class willingly. I think the question is great. “What is Dutch music”? It reads to me as an interesting subspecies of the generic “What the hell is going on here?”-question (see the first entry of this weblog). And, contrary to popular belief, there is a lot to teach about the subject. Funnily enough, when I was in Sarajevo teaching a guest lecture ethnomusicology last year I asked the students over there what they would like to be taught about – and their answer was “Dutch music”.

Perfect Day

The month of December was filled with snow and ice. January was rather soft and now, early February, spring is in the air.

Don’t worry, this blog will not continue describing singing blackbirds and budding crocuses. But when I biked through the city center the other day, I cannot deny that the sun and the mild temperature made me feel “springy”.  Adding to this feeling was the fact that the chimes from the Martini tower, the town’s main church tower, were playing Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”.

Will Volendam win the Eurovision Song Contest 2011?

Volendam is a small fishing town bordering the former Zuiderzee (the current IJsselmeer). It is known to tourists because of the nice old village and the traditional Volendam costumes.  It became tragic world news in 2001 when one of its cafés burned down, killing 14 and wounding 180.  For many Dutch people it is known because their football team, clad in orange, has in 55 years of professional football suffered degradation from the premier league nine times and came back to the premier league just as many times – hence their team is also called “the back and forth”.

And it is widely known for its music. Since the invention of the “Palingsound” (“Eel sound” - Volendam was, and still is, a fisherman’s village) at the end of the 1960s, represented by The Cats, BZN and numerous other groups, Volendam is a household name in Dutch pop music. Up till today – news items, docusoaps and concert registrations of Volendam singers like Jan Smit and Nick & Simon are regular items on Dutch television. And now another Volendam group, The 3J’s (Jan, Jaap and Jaap), will represent the Netherlands at the Eurovision Song Contest.

Music is good for nothing

In these days of cuts on the national and local culture budgets, the cultural sector frantically tries to answer the question “What good is culture anyway?” And for good reasons. It is never straightforward that tax money paid by state citizens is spent on roads, hospitals, guns or music. We owe the tax payer a good story.

So, rephrased to music: what good is music anyway? Basically there are two types of answers. One is intrinsic: everybody needs, or deserves, music. Because music is beautiful, or relaxing, or energizing. Music is “good”. The other is extrinsic: music fosters social coherence, for example, or makes you more intelligent. Singing prevents fights. Mozart helps math. Music is “good for something”.

Both answers – “good” or “good for something” – are undoubtedly true. But the answers are problematic for two reasons. One is that it depends too much on a formulation of what is “good”. The other is that, as a consequence, the “bad” comes into play. Music is able to contribute to hypnotize a mass of people towards violence. It is able to distract pupils from their homework. If played long and loud enough, it is able to drive detained people crazy.

An alternative for the “good (for)” justification might be to look for a more neutral one - good for nothing, as it were. Recently, Henk Jan Honing, the Dutch professor in music cognition, started to argue along this path. He discusses the idea expressed by many that the existence of music must be explained in terms of evolutionary advantages. He dismisses all those ideas, and then makes a for me rather disappointing U-turn: because music is evolutionary meaningless, he says, it opens up a place where humans are able to play, to experiment without grave consequences. In making this U-turn, he actually re-introduces via the back door a strong idea of the “good (for)”-argument: music is good for harmless experimenting. Attributing evolutionary significance to that seems just one step down the road.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“What the hell is going on here?” The question, by many attributed to the famous American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, is at present one of my most beloved quotations. It represents a deep curiosity which I think is vital for anyone trying to understand anything of the world we live in.