essay

Performance and Music Culture Analysis

in Ethnomusicology MUSC 210

Today’s Goals • To learn three different frameworks/

models used in music-dance culture and performance analysis

• To learn identity categories that are expressed by music

Review

Culture: the way of life of a people, learned and transmitted from one generation to the next; the shared habits of thought and practice among individuals

Music culture: a group’s total involvement with music: ideas, actions, institutions, and material objects that have to do with music.

Can be small or large: a family, community, nation, or region.

Can contain sub-cultures within a larger group

Titon’s Components of a Music Culture

Jeff Todd Titon organizes music culture components into four categories:

Ideas

Activities

Repertoires

Material culture

Ideas about music

Music and the belief system

Aesthetics of music

Contexts for music

History of music

Activities involving music

Actual practice of music, not just theoretical

What audiences do (want to get the whole picture)

Behaviors involved with music production (Post office stamping, transplanting rice, etc.)

All behaviors/actions by all people involved in the music and the musical event

Repertoires of Music

Styles

Genres

Texts

Composition

Transmission

Movement

Material culture of music

Musical instruments

Musical scores

MP3s, CDs, iPods, etc.

Merriam’s Model

Sounds of music

Form, instruments, timbre, texture etc.

Behavior in relation to music

Performer, audience, ritual, costuming, etc.

Concepts/Ideas related to the music/music culture

What the music is, how to make it, why, issues of identity, etc.

Observation exercise: use Meriam’s model (sound, behaviors,

ideas) to discuss the following performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga-hR7CYbwQ

Turino’s Model

Thomas Turino: “Fields of Artistic Practice”

Notes that there are many music categories created by musicians, the music industry, academics, etc., but these tell us little about how/why people make the music they do

useful for framing different types of music performance

Two fields: live performance and recording (we will focus only on live performance for this class)

Turino’s Performance Fields

1) Participatory: no artist- audience distinction, only participants and potential participants in different roles

allows for wide range of abilities (balance of challenge/use of acquired skills)

sociality is usually favored over quality of music/dance

Turino’s Performance Fields, cont.

2) Presentational: Distinct artist-audience separation, one group (artists) presents to another group (the audience)

Expectation of artists to sustain interest of audience through their performance

Expectation of audience to grant attention to artists

Both these vary depending on the expectations of genre (i.e. heavy metal versus Western classical)

Participatory and Presentational

Both types of performances can connect individuals and groups of people

Differ ultimately in types of engagement, the level of intimacy, and the scale of the event

Participatory: Connection can be more intimate and powerful; bonds formed through actual doing of activities together

Presentational: Group bonds formed through shared identity, channeled through the performers

additional connection through sharing information/ideas about music and performers, attending events/listening together

Self versus Identity

Self: “The composite of the total number of habits that determine the tendencies for everything we think, feel, experience, and do.” (Turino)

Self versus Identity

Identity: “The partial and variable selection of habits and attributes that we use to represent ourselves to ourselves and to others, as well as those aspects perceived by ourselves and by others as salient” (Turino)

In other words, “I am this, I am not that.”

Identity categories

National

Cultural

Racial

Gender

Sexual

Political

Class

Religious

Social

–Thomas Turino

“I begin and end with individuals…It is in living, breathing individuals that

‘culture’ and musical meaning ultimately reside.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDTvX9JZRYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdyDl1ettPg

Andrew McMahon