World Music class response essay

J EFF TODD TITON

The Soundscape The world around us is full of sounds. All of them are meaningful in some way. Some are sounds you make. You might sing in the shower, talk to yourself, shout to a friend, whistle a tune, sing along with a song on your mp3 player, practice a piece on your instrument, play in a band or orchestra, or sing in a chorus or an informal group on a street corner. Some are sounds from sources outside yourself. If you live in the city, you hear a lot of sounds made by people. You might be startled by the sound of a truck beeping as it backs up, or by a car alarm. The noise of the garbage and recycling trucks on an early morning pickup or the drone of a diesel engine in a parked truck nearby might irritate you. In the country you can more easily hear the sounds of nature. In the spring and summer you might hear birds singing and calling to each other, the snorting of deer in the woods, or the excited barks of a distant dog. By a river or the ocean you might hear the sounds of surf or boats loading and unloading or the deep bass of foghorns. Stop for a moment and listen to the sounds around you. What do you hear? A computer hard drive? A refrigerator motor? Wind outside? Footsteps in the hallway? A car going by? Why didn’t you hear those sounds a moment ago? We usually filter out “background noise” for good reason, but in doing so we deaden our sense of hearing. For a moment, stop reading and become alive to the soundscape. What do you hear? Try doing that at different times of the day, in various places: Listen to the soundscape and pick out all the different sounds you may have taken for granted until now.

Just as landscape refers to land, soundscape refers to sound: the characteristic sounds of a particular place, both human and nonhuman. (The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer developed this term; see Schafer 1980.) The examples so far offer present-day soundscapes, but what were they like in the past? What kinds of sounds might dinosaurs have made? With our wristwatches we can always find out what time it is, but in medieval Europe people told time by listening to the bells of the local clock tower. Today we take the sounds of a passing railroad train for granted, but people found its sounds arresting when first heard.

The American naturalist Henry David Thoreau was alive to the soundscape when he lived by himself in a cabin in the woods at Walden Pond 160 years ago. As

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he wrote inWalden, “The whistle of the steam engine penetrated my woods summer and winter—sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard.” After this ominous comparison—the hawk is a bird of prey—Thoreau describes the train as an iron horse (a common comparison at the time) and then a dragon, a threatening symbol of chaos rather than industrial progress: “When I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder—shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new mythology I don’t know.” Writing about his wilderness soundscape, Thoreau first made sure his readers knew what he did not hear: the crowing of the rooster, the sounds of animals—dogs, cats, cows, pigs—the butter churn, the spinning wheel, children crying, the “singing of the kettle, the hissing of the urn”: This was the soundscape of a farm in 1850, quite familiar to Thoreau’s readers. (We might stop to notice which of these sounds have disappeared from the soundscape altogether, for who today hears a butter churn or spinning wheel?) What Thoreau heard instead in his wilderness soundscape were “squirrels on the roof and under the floor; a whippoorwill on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming in the yard, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat- owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon in the pond, a fox to bark in the night”; but no rooster “to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard—no yard!” In Thoreau’s America you could tell, blindfolded, just by hearing, whether you were in the wilderness, on a farm, or in a town or city. How have those soundscapes changed since 1850? What might Thoreau have written about automobiles in the countryside, tractors on the farms, trucks on the interstate highways, and jet planes everywhere?

In Thoreau’s “wild soundscape” at Walden in 1850 each living thing that made a sound had its own niche in what we might think of as an acoustic ecology or what the aural environmentalist Bernie Krause calls a biophony, the combined voices of living things. Krause points out that “non-industrial cultures,” particularly those that live in the more-remote regions of the planet, like the BaAka of central Africa we will learn about in Chapter 3, “depend on the integrity of undisturbed natural sound for a sense of place,” of where they are as well as who they are (Krause 2002:25). Every nonhuman species has its own acoustic niche in the soundscape, whether it is a bird singing or an insect making noise by rubbing its legs together. Dolphins, whales, and bats navigate largely by means of sound. But as we have learned, humans make their own acoustic niches and interact sonically with nonhuman sounds in whatever soundscape they encounter, whatever place they happen to be.

Listen now to CD 1, Track 1. The soundscape is a post office, but it is unlike any post office you will likely encounter in North America. You are hearing men canceling stamps at the University of Accra, in Ghana, Africa. Two of the men whistle a tune while three make percussive sounds. A stamp gets canceled several times for the sake of the rhythm. You will learn more about this example shortly. For now, think of it as yet another example of a soundscape: the acoustic environment where sounds, including music, occur.

CD 1:1

Postal workers canceling stamps

at the University of Ghana post

office (2:59). The whistled tune

is the hymn “Bompata,” by the

Ghanaian composer W. J.

Akyeampong (b. 1900). Field

recording by James Koetting.

Legon, Ghana, 1975.

The Music-Culture Every human society has music. Although music is universal, its meaning is not. For example, a famous musician from Asia attended a European symphony concert approximately 150 years ago. He had never heard Western music

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before. The story goes that after the concert, his hosts asked him how he had liked it. “Very well,” he replied. Not satisfied with this answer, his hosts asked (through an interpreter) what part he liked best. “The first part,” he said. “Oh, you enjoyed the first movement?” “No, before that.” To the stranger, the best part of the performance was the tuning-up period. His hosts had a different opinion. Who was right? They both were. Music is not a universal language in the sense that everyone understands what music means. People in different cultures give music different meanings. Recall from the Preface that culture means the way of life of a people, learned and transmitted from one generation to the next. The word learned is stressed to differentiate a people’s cultural inheritance from what is passed along biologically in their genes: nurture, rather than nature. From birth, people all over the world absorb the cultural inheritance of family, community, schoolmates, and other larger social institutions such as the mass media—books, newspapers, video games, movies, television, and computers. This cultural inheritance tells people how to understand the situations they are in (what the situations mean) and how they might behave in those situations. It works so automatically that they are aware of it only when it breaks down, as it does on occasion when people misunderstand a particular situation. Like the people who carry them, cultures do not function perfectly all the time.

Musical situations and the very concept of music mean different things and involve different activities around the globe. Because music and all the beliefs and activities associated with it are a part of culture, we use the term music-culture to mean a group’s total involvement with music: ideas, actions, institutions, material objects—everything that has to do with music. A music-culture can be as small as a single human’s personal music-culture, or as large as one carried by a transnational group. We can speak of the music-culture of a family, a community, a region, a nation. We can identify music-cultures with musical genres: there is a hip-hop music-culture, a classical music-culture, a jazz music-culture. We can identify subcultures within music-cultures: Atlanta hip-hop, for example, within the hip-hop music culture, or early music within classical music, or progressive bluegrass within bluegrass. In our example of concert music, the European American music-culture dictates that the sound made by symphony musicians tuning up is not music. But to the listener from Asia, it was music. That we can say so shows our ability to understand (and empathize with) each music-culture context from the inside, and then to move to an intellectual position outside of them. We can then compare them and arrive at the conclusion that, considered from their points of view, both the stranger and his hosts were correct. Contrasting the music of one culture with the music of another after stepping outside of both is a good way to learn about how music is made and what music is thought to be and do.

People may be perplexed by music outside their own music-culture. They may grant that it is music but find it difficult to hear and enjoy. In Victorian England, for example, people said they had a hard time listening to the strange music of the native peoples within the British Colonial Empire. The expansive and exciting improvisations of India’s classical music were ridiculed because the music was not written down “as proper music should be.” The subtle tuning of Indian raga scales was considered “indicative of a bad ear” because it did not match the tuning of a piano (see Chapter 6). What the British were really saying was that they did not know how to understand Indian music on its own cultural terms. Any

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music sounds “out of tune” when its tuning system is judged by the standards of another.

A person who had grown up listening only to Armenian music in his family and community wrote about hearing European classical music for the first time:

I found that most European music sounds either like “mush” or “foamy,” without a solid base. The classical music seemed to make the least sense, with a kind of schizophrenic melody—one moment it’s calm, then the next moment it’s crazy. Of course there always seemed to be “mush” (harmony) which made all the songs seem kind of similar. (posted to SEM-L public listserver July 9, 1998)

Because this listener had learned what makes a good melody in the Armenian music-culture, he found European classical melodies lacking because they changed mood too quickly. Unused to harmony in his own music, the listener responded negatively to it in Western classical music. Further, popular music in the United States lacked interesting rhythms and melodies:

The rock and other pop styles then and now sound like music produced by machinery, and rarely have I heard a melody worth repeating. The same with “country” and “folk” and other more traditional styles. These musics, while making more sense with their melody (of the most undeveloped type), have killed off any sense of gracefulness with their monotonous droning and machine-like sense of rhythm. (Ibid.)

You might find these remarks offensive or amusing—or you might agree with them. Like the other examples, they illustrate that listeners throughout the world have prejudices based on the music they know and like. Listening to music all over the planet, though, fosters an open ear and an open mind. Learning to hear a strange music from the viewpoint of the people who make that music enlarges our understanding and increases our pleasure.

What Is Music? Sound is anything that can be heard, but what is music? In the Preface I emphasized that music isn’t something found in the natural world, like air or sand; rather, music is something that people make. And they make it in two ways: They make or produce the sounds they call music, and they also make music into a cultural domain, forming the ideas and activities they consider music. As we have seen, not all music-cultures have the same idea of music; some music-cultures have no word for it, while others have a word that roughly translates into English as “music-dance” because to them music is inconceivable without movement. Writing about Rosa, the Macedonian village she lived in, Nahoma Sachs points out that “traditional Rosans have no general equivalent to the English ‘music.’ They divide the range of sound which might be termed music into two categories: pesni, songs, and muzika, instrumental music” (Sachs 1975:27). Of course, this distinction between songs and music is found in many parts of the world. Anne Rasmussen, when chatting with her taxi driver on the way to a conference at the Opera House in Cairo, Egypt, was told by her taxi driver that he liked “both kinds of music:

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singing ( ghina) and music with instru- ments (musiqa).” We also find it in North America. Old-time Baptists in the southern Appalachian Mountains (see Figure 1.1) sometimes say, “We don’t have music in our service,” meaning they do not have instrumental music accompanying their singing. Nor do they want it.

Some music-cultures have words for song types (lullaby, epic, historical song, and so on) but no overall word for music. Nor do they have words or concepts that directly correspond to what Euro-Amer- icans consider the elements of musical structure: melody, rhythm, harmony, and so forth. Many of the readers of this book (and all of its authors) have grown up within the cultures of Europe and North America. In Chapter 5, the sections “Europe: An Overview” and “The Sounds of European Music” con- sider specific qualities of European and, by association, North American musical practices that Euro-Americans consider “normal.” Consciously and uncon- sciously, our approaches and viewpoints reflect this background. But no matter what our musical backgrounds are, we must try to “get out of our cultural skins” as much as possible in order to view music through cultural windows other than our own. We may even learn to view our own music-culture from a new perspective. Today, because of the global distribution of music on radio, television, film, digital video, sound recordings, and the Internet, people in just about every music-culture are likely to have heard some of the same music. Although the local is emphasized throughout this book, music-cultures should not be understood as isolated, now or even in the past. In particular, thinking about the interaction between the local and the global can help us appreciate music- cultures, including our own.

If we want to understand the different musics of the world, then, we need first to understand them on their own terms—that is, as the various music-cultures themselves do. But beyond understanding each on its own terms, we want to be able to compare and contrast the various musics of the world. To do that we need a way to think about music as a whole.

To begin to discover what all musics might have in common, so that we may think about music as a general human phenomenon, we ask about how people perceive differences between music and nonmusic. The answer does not involve simple disagreements over whether something people call “music” is truly music. For example, some people say that rap is not music, but what they mean is that they think rap is not good or meaningful music. Rather, there are difficult cases

FIGURE 1.1

Russell Jacobs leading the

singing at the Left Beaver

Old Regular Baptist Church

in eastern Kentucky, 1979.

Je ff To dd

Ti to n

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that test the boundaries of what differentiates sound from music, such as the songs of birds or dolphins or whales—are these music?

Consider bird songs. Everyone has heard birds sing, but not everyone has paid attention to them. Try it for a moment: Listen to the songs of a hermit thrush at dusk in a spruce forest (CD 1, Track 2). At Walden Pond, Thoreau heard hermit thrushes that sounded like these.

Many think that the hermit thrush has the most beautiful song of all the birds native to North America. Most bird songs consist of a single phrase, repeated, but the hermit thrush’s melody is more complicated. You hear a vocalization (phrase) and then a pause, then another vocalization and pause, and so on. Some people hear them in pairs, the second a response to the first. Do you hear them that way, or as separate vocalizations? Each vocalization has a similar rhythm and is composed of five to eight tones. The phrase is a little higher or lower each time. If you listen closely, you also hear that the thrush can produce more than one tone at once, a kind of two-tone harmony. This is the result of the way his syrinx (voice box) is constructed.

Is bird song music? The thrush’s song has some of the characteristics of music. It has rhythm, melody, repetition, and variation. It also has a function: Scientists believe that birds sing to announce their presence in a particular territory to other birds of the same kind, and that they sing to attract a mate. In some species one bird’s song can tell another bird which bird is singing and how that bird is feeling. Bird song has inspired Western classical music composers. Some composers have taken down bird songs in musical notation, and some have incorporated, imitated, or transformed bird song phrases in their compositions. Bird song is also found in Chinese classical music. In Chinese compositions such as “The Court of the Phoenix,” for suona (oboe) and ensemble, extended passages are a virtual catalog of bird calls and songs imitated by instruments.

Yet people in the Euro-American music-culture hesitate to call bird songs music. Because each bird in a species sings the same song over and over, bird songs appear to lack the creativity of human expression. Euro-American culture regards music as a human expression, and bird songs do not seem to belong to the human world. By contrast, people in some other music-cultures think bird songs do have human meaning. For the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, bird songs are the voices of their human ancestors who have died and changed into birds. These songs cause humans grief, which expresses itself in weeping (Feld 1990). The Kaluli give a different meaning to bird songs than Euro-Americans do. Does this mean it is impossible to find a single idea of what music is? Not really. Euro-Americans may disagree with the Kaluli over whether bird songs have human meaning, but they both agree that music has human meaning. Our thought experiment with bird song and its meanings in different music-cultures suggests that music has something to do with the human world. We can go further and say that music is sound that is humanly patterned or organized (Blacking 1973).

For another example of a sound that tests the boundary between music and nonmusic, listen again to CD 1, Track 1. Throughout the life of Worlds of Music, listeners have found the Ghanaian postal workers’ sounds especially intriguing. Not long ago we learned a little more about the circumstances of the recording.

CD 1:2

Songs of hermit thrushes

(0:44). Field recording by Jeff

Todd Titon. Little Deer Isle,

Maine, 1999.

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Henrietta Mckee Carter (personal communication to Jeff Todd Titon, July 2000) wrote as follows:

Sometime in 1975, Bill Carter and I were sitting in Jim and Ernestina Koetting’s quarters at the University of Ghana chatting with Ernestina, while awaiting dinner. Jim came in excitedly, picked up his recording equipment and disappeared, saying on his way out that he had just heard something he wanted to record. He came back a while later and described the scene.

These postal workers hand-canceling stamps at the post office of the University of Ghana are making drumming sounds, and two are whistling; but there are no drums, and the workers are just passing the time. How, exactly? Koetting (Titon 1992:98–99) wrote as follows:

Twice a day the letters that must be canceled are laid out in two files, one on either side of a divided table. Two men sit across from one another at the table, and each has a hand-canceling machine (like the price markers you may have seen in supermarkets), an ink pad, and a stack of letters. The work part of the process is simple: a letter is slipped from the stack with the left hand, and the right hand inks the marker and stamps the letter: : : .

This is what you are hearing: the two men seated at the table slap a letter rhythmically several times to bring it from the file to the position on the table where it is to be canceled. (This act makes a light-sounding thud.) The marker is inked one or more times (the lowest, most resonant sound you hear) and then stamped on the letter (the high-pitched mechanized sound you hear): : : . The rhythm produced is not a simple one-two-three (bring forward the letter—ink the marker—stamp the letter). Rather, musical sensitivities take over. Several slaps on the letter to bring it down, repeated thuds of the marker in the ink pad and multiple cancellations of single letters are done for rhythmic interest. Such repetition slows down the work, but also makes it much more interesting.

The other sounds you hear have nothing to do with the work itself. A third man has a pair of scissors that he clicks—not cutting anything, but adding to the rhythm. The scissors go “click, click, click, rest,” a basic rhythm used in [Ghanaian] popular dance music. The fourth worker simply whistles along. He and any of the other three workers who care to join him whistle popular tunes or church music that fits the rhythm.

Work song, found in music-cultures all over the world, is a kind of music whose function ranges from coordinating complex tasks to making boring and repetitive work more interesting. In this instance the workers have turned life into art. Writing further about the postal workers’ recording, Koetting says,

It sounds like music and, of course it is; but the men performing it do not quite think of it that way. These men are working, not putting on a musical show; people pass by the workplace paying little attention to the “music.” (Titon 1992:98)

Even though the postal workers do not think of this activity as a musical performance, Koetting is willing to say, “It sounds like music and, of course it is.” He can say so because he connects it with other music-cultures’ work-song activities (see for example, the work songs in Chapter 4). He has found a common pattern in their musical performance that transcends the specificity of any single music-culture, in the sense that he hears people whistling a melody and accompanying it with interesting percussive rhythms: The music affected him, and not only did he feel himself moved, he was moved to record it. At the same time he respects the postal workers’ idea that, in their way of thinking, it is “not quite”

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music. In other words, the workers are doing this as a part of their work, to pass the time; it is their way of being in the world as workers canceling stamps, not as singers and musicians intent on a musical performance.

People in music-cultures organize sounds into musical patterns. Although the patterns vary across cultures, all music-cultures pattern sounds into something we call music. How can we think comparatively about the kinds of musical organization that we find throughout the world? Koetting understood the postal workers’ activities as music in comparison with other musics he knew. He recognized a familiar pattern of melody and harmony that he heard, as you probably did too. Although this hymn- tune was composed by a Ghanaian, the melody is European, a legacy of Christian missionary music in Ghana. As a student of Ghanaian drumming, he recognized the cross-rhythms of the percussion as native Ghanaian. He thought in terms of melody, harmony, meter, and rhythm.

Indeed, the European American music-culture recognizes these four character- istics and talks about them in ordinary language. The ideas themselves are already familiar to many readers of this book. These terms describe patterns or structure (form) in sound. It will be interesting to see what happens to these Western (but not exclusively Western) ideas when, for better or worse, they are applied to every music-culture throughout this book. In the next section, on musical structure, we briefly review these ideas. Then in the following section we turn our attention to a music-culture model and show how music becomes meaningful in performance. In the next section we consider the four components of a music culture, which in music textbooks are not usually considered rudiments but are no less a part of humanly organized sound: ideas, activities, repertories, and the material culture of music. In the last section of this chapter, we return to the idea of acoustic ecology with which we began. We do this not only in terms of the interactions of sounds in a soundscape but also in terms of the interconnections of music cultures throughout human history on planet Earth, as well as the sustainability of music in the future.

Structure in Music RHYTHM AND METER In ordinary language we say rhythm when we refer to the patterned recurrence of events, as in “the rhythm of the seasons,” or “the rhythm of the raindrops.” As Hewitt Pantaleoni writes, “Rhythm concerns time felt as a succession of events rather than as a single span” (1985:211). In music, we hear rhythm when we hear a time-relation between sounds. In a classroom you might hear a pen drop from a desk and a little later a student coughing. You do not hear any rhythm, because you hear no relation between the sounds. But when you hear a person walking in the hall outside, or when you hear a heartbeat, you hear rhythm.

If we measure the time-relations between the sounds and find a pattern of regular recurrence, we have metrical rhythm. Think of the soldiers’ marching rhythm: HUP-two-three-four, HUP-two-three-four. This is a metered, regularly recurring sound pattern. The recurring accents fall on HUP. Most popular, classical, and folk music heard in North America today has metered rhythm. Of course, most of those rhythms are more complex than the march rhythm. If you are familiar with Gregorian chant, of the Roman Catholic Church, you know

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