As part of my current J Dilla binge, I was excited to find a track where he flips a Herbie Hancock sample (no, not “Come Running To Me“, though that one is great too.) This sent me down a rabbit hole with “Watermelon Man.” This track has had quite a journey, both in its prehistory and …
Tag Archives: ethnomusicology
Tim Eriksen is the best folk musician in the world
I grew up with folk music, attending schools run by hippies and a summer camp run by Pete Seeger’s family. But I didn’t realize that folk music could be cool until I got to college. It was there that my friend Jeremy Withers turned me on to a band called Cordelia’s Dad, fronted by a singer …
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Teaching whiteness in music class
Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem. Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post. Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music …
Ngoma aesthetics after apartheid
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Louise Meintjes (2017) Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics After Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press. Brian Larkin (2008) Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. The image of Zulu men dancing, singing and drumming carries heavy symbolic weight. …
Aurality
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014) Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press. The nineteenth-century Colombian writing discussed by Ochoa Gautier, like Western convention generally, opposes “art” and “folk” musics. “Art” music is comprised of works created by named authors, transmitted visually via …
Theorizing sound writing
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Deborah Kapchan, editor (2017) Theorizing Sound Writing. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. My doctoral advisor Alex Ruthmann, when evaluating some piece of technology used for music education or creation, asks: what does the technology conceal or reveal? Writing is what Foucault called a “technology of the self,” …
White nationalist music in Sweden
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Benjamin Teitelbaum’s study of Nordic nationalist music could not be any more timely. Gramsci diverged from classic Marxism when he argued that shifts in the cultural sphere create the conditions for political or economic change, rather than the other way around. Since Swedish nationalists do not …
Ethnomusicology and the voice
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Kane (2014) critiques Schaeffer’s notion of “reduced listening,” which ignores a sound’s referential properties and considers it independently of its causes or its meaning. Bracketing the question of whether this is even possible, is it desirable to restrict musical discourse so much by neglecting sound’s signifying …
Ethnomusicology and the body
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels It is such a strange artifact of Cartesian dualism that we have to specify experiences as being “bodily,” as if there were some other kind. It’s like specifying that a place is in the universe. Blacking (1977) observes that we can understand the convention of the …
The value of music
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels In a capitalist world, one job of anthropologists is to explain behavior that is “irrational” or “inefficient” (what even is the difference, right?) Anthropologists also get hired to understand the mindset of consumers, since economics has tended to regard individual humans as black boxes. When we …