Handbook of Interview Research

http://www.ceacb.ucl.ac.uk/cultureclub/files/CC2006-02-28_Fitch.pdf

The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective

Hailed as \"one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West\" by Alan Brinkley in The New York Times Book Review, Donald Worster has been a leader in reshaping the study of American history. Winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl, Worster has helped bring humanity's interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. Now, in The Wealth of Nature, he offers a series of thoughtful, eloquent essays which lay out his views on environmental history, tying the study of the past to today's agenda for change. The Wealth of Nature captures the fruit of what Worster calls \"my own intellectual turning to the land.\" History, he writes, represents a dialogue between humanity and nature-though it is usually reported as if it were simple dictation. Worster takes as his point of departure the approach expressed early on by Aldo Leopold, who stresses the importance of nature in determining human history; Leopold pointed out that the spread of bluegrass in Kentucky, for instance, created new pastures and fed the rush of American settlers across the Appalachians, which affected the contest between Britain, France, and the U.S. for control of the area. Worster's own work offers an even more subtly textured understanding, noting in this example, for instance, that bluegrass itself was an import from the Old World which supplanted native vegetation-a form of \"environmental imperialism.\" He ranges across such areas as agriculture, water development, and other questions, examining them as environmental issues, showing how they have affected-and continue to affect-human settlement. Environmental history, he argues, is not simply the history of rural and wilderness areas; cities clearly have a tremendous impact on the land, on which they depend for their existence. He argues for a comprehensive approach to understanding our past as well as our present in environmental terms. \"Nostalgia runs all through this society,\" Worster writes, \"fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation.\" These reflective and engaging essays capture the fascination of environmental history-and the beauty of nature lost or endangered-underscoring the importance of intelligent action in the present.

The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

and general in order to be able to be performed on a wide variety of new inputs. The inputs may be an inventory of notes based upon key, style, et cetera. (Pressing’s cognitive model calls this the “referent.”) My taxonomy is a way of making those inputs clear. 184 Since improvisation (and composition) is fundamentally cognitive and motor selection, then this presupposes a set of things from which to select. One can only select if there are options, choices. Now, it seems that whether a person (agent) is aware (conscious or cognizant of the options (all or even some)), one may always post facto reconstruct the set of choices which were available or present to the agent at the time of selection. By this I mean the set of choices that were available to the agent from an objective point of view. This set has little to do with the actual, individual conscious states of the agent; however, it does involve many specific conditions of the agent and the agent’s environment. For example, a musician S may say that “it never occurred to me to play that B-flat after the A,” even though objectively that choice was available to S. Sometimes, however, we describe others, and even ourselves, as just doing something—no other options presented themselves to consciousness. So, “selection” may seem like an inappropriate term or concept for what is going on in improvisation. It may, however, seem more accurate in composition. When humans perform actions in quick succession, consciously it does not seem like a choice or decision is being made for each separate action. In fact, in some cases it may be difficult to individuate the rapid succession of actions into discrete units. It seems to be a unitary flow of movements. These are half-intentional actions. Beside the (SCI) case, examples of this kind of phenomenon are playing sports, talking, and just mundane actions like walking to the market. From a phenomenological perspective, in some moments the choice or decision aspect can be discerned, while other moments “feel” automatic. Consequently, it is in these seemingly automatic moments that selection may be an erroneous description. But there are several pieces of evidence that suggest that in both cases similar or the same processes are realized. First, it would be impossible to account for talent and skill if some sense of choice or selection or decision was not involved. Indeed, psychologists and others 185 indicate that some people are better than others (usually in some specific domain of behavior) in their speed of thinking, choosing, and moving in situations that require rapidity. In other words, if we cannot attribute responsibility to selection or choice, even in an attenuated sense, training and effort would be diminished or demolished. Why would one train if one could not control the automatic thinking or moving? What would be our understanding of talent and expertise? Second, there is reductio ad absurdam argument that can be given here, analogous to the one Thomas Nagel presents in the classic “Moral Luck” article. One could argue that artistic agents are never responsible for anything they do; they have no agency because all novel thoughts impinge. Humans do not cause their thoughts and selection. My only response is that creativity is still a mystery, and we are not yet epistemically entitled to run this argument to the point of absurdity. Furthermore, cognitive science has informed us that even in these moments sub-conscious motor and kinetic programs or mechanisms are running. Some of these were delineated for improvisation above. This is one reason why a phenomenology needs to be appended to cognitive models and the like. One should also be interested in what is present to the consciousness of the agent, and what is consciously occurring while playing (if anything), not only the underlying processes posited by a cognitive theory, nor what could be going on as argued for in a philosophical theory. David Sudnow is perhaps the best example of a phenomenological approach to improvising. By introspecting on his improvised piano playing and his learning how to play 62 For example, see Sian Beilock, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting It Right When You Have To (New York: Free Press, 2010). 63 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck” in Mortal Questions, Canto Classics Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24-38. 64 David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), and David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account, foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 186 paino and improvise, Sudnow gives excellent descriptions of the process and actions. One of the most important insights he gives is that selection in jazz piano improvisation is in large part about fingering and the way one’s hands and fingers move across the keys. I can attest that the same is true for stringed instruments, like guitar. Often, when I improvise, my attention is on finger patterns that I know work (with embellishments) over certain “changes.” How strongly the phenomenology of playing an instrument comes to play in thinking about creativity and improvisation in particular comes to the fore in this extraordinary account of a conversation with the famous, brilliant pianist Bill Evans. ... I [Gene Lees] kidded him [Bill Evans] about his rocking a finger on a key on a long note at the end of a phrase. After all, the hammer has already left the string: one has no further physical contact with the sound. ‘Don’t you know the piano has no vibrato?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Bill responded, ‘but trying for it affects what comes before it in the phrase.’ Evans reveals that there are motor selections that do not enter into the perceivable product (in this case sounds) but yet affect properties of that product. Not all selections will be perceivable in the final product (e.g., performance, recording). One should also be aware that selection may be coerced in both a literal and metaphorical sense. External factors such as authorities may constrain what artists do, thereby eliminating or reducing choices. I may only have the resources to learn one instrument. If I only know how to play saxophone, I am not going to pick up a trumpet. At any given time t, the agent (improviser, player, performer) has twelve pitches available in the range physically determined by the instrument. This range is vague because 65 Gene Lees, “The Poet Bill Evans,” in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed. Robert, Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 424. 187 given certain techniques, which some musicians are able to do and others not, and physical enhancements to instruments, the range can be extended, both to the top and bottom of the frequency or pitch range. But it would wrong to suppose that this complete selection options set is fully available every time, in every context to an improviser. What decreases the possibilities of the selection options group are the constraints that are given and/or accepted by the player, the genre, context, et cetera. Now, the agent may at any point deviate from these constraints (intentionally or otherwise), but she may not deviate from the complete selection options group, unless she changes instrument or technique. The idealized selection options group is coextensive with the set of all physically realizable pitches and all possible durations. This set may be expressed in many ways. For instance, one could simply give the Hertz (Hz) cycles (frequency) of the pitch indexed to a timed duration, such as eight seconds or two seconds. Obviously, this is an infinite set, because the duration of a produced pitch could be infinitely long, and the sound waves, although severely limited by human audibility capacity (even non-human animal audibility) could be infinitely low or high, although there are frequencies which we cease to call sounds. Practically, in Western music theory, the accepted range of pitches is the human audition range (called audio or sonic), 66 I am assuming the agent is using the Western Equal Temperament (ET) tempered system. On the drawbacks of the exclusive use of the ET system that was more or less codified in the eighteenth century, see Ross W. Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Scholars have identified at least 150 different temperament tuning systems in Western art music. Of course, ET does not apply to many non-Western music systems. The locus classicus is J. Murray Barbour, Tuning and Temperament: A Historical Survey, Dover Books on Music Series (n.d., n.p., 1951; reprint ed., New York: Dover, 2004). 188 which is approximately from 20 50 Hz (the lowest pipe organ sounds) to 20,000 30,000 Hz; while the accepted range of durations caps out at 128 notes. Selection is the process of choosing an output. The output may be physically realized or produced sound, or a notation for a realizable sound, or both. A single selection is actually an array of various factors as explicated in Pressing’s cognitive model. In using the term “choosing,” or “choice,” again I make no commitment to a theory of free will. This theory and taxonomy may remain neutral. If free will is false, then the selection process will be a product of some set of causal laws. Those causal laws will still have to operate within the taxonomy. Moreover, ideally a selection may be viewed as a choice of each discrete unit with relevant arrays, even though phenomenologically one may not be aware of all of the arrays. A musical phrase or lick may be played wherein the agent chose to play the lick as a whole. The entire phrase, then, which may consist of several pitches of different durations, dynamics, rhythms, and attacks, is the unit of selection—not each discrete pitch et cetera. Following are the selection options sets for musical sound generation (

The metaphysics of improvisation

In recent years, work in ethnomusicology has moved decisively toward a fully anthropological perspective. Rhetorically evolving from an anthropology of music (229) to a musical anthropology (297), from the study of music and or in culture, society, and history to the study of music as culture, society, and history (28, 34, 35,70,91, 116, 127,230,250,265,268,272,298,346,347), ethnomusicological perspectives are increasingly social, linking the structure and practice of musical performances and styles with music's deep embedded­ ness in local and trans local forms of social imagination, activity, and experi­ ence. These shifts parallel similar movements in linguistic anthropology that emphasize the social, pragmatic, and emotional constitution of linguistic struc­ tures emerging in discourse, performance, textuality, and poetics. Although these latter shifts have been well chronicled recently (e.g. 17, 18,25,47,99, 109, 119,217,218,354), it has been twenty years since the last review of developments in ethnomusicology and musical anthropology appeared in this journal (227). In that review, McLeod predicted that the relationship between musical and linguistic approaches to culture would be crucial to a future of more rigorously contextualized ethnographic descriptions of musical behavior. The descriptive and analytic issues she raised, however, have developed both beyond and

Music and Language

The music-culture as a world of music / Jeff Todd Titon and Mark Slobin -- North America/native America / David P. McAllester -- Africa/Ewe, Mande, Dagbamba, Shona, BaAka / David Locke -- North America/Black America / Jeff Todd Titon -- Bosnia and Central/Southeastern Europe : musics and musicians in transition / Mark Slobin -- India/South India / David B. Reck -- Asia/Indonesia / R. Anderson Sutton -- East Asia/Japan / Linda Fujie -- Latin America/Ecuador / John M. Schechter -- Discovering and documenting a world of music / Jeff Todd Titon, David B. Reck, and Mark Slobin.

Worlds of Music : An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples

A LIFE STORY IS, simply, a person's story of his or her life, or of what he or she thinks is a significant part of that life. It is therefore a personal narrative, a story of personal experience, and, as it emerges from conversation, its ontological status is the spoken word, even if the story is transcribed and edited for the printed page. The storyteller trusts the listener(s) and the listener respects the storyteller, not interrupting the train of thought until the story is finished. That is not to say the listener is passive as a doorknob; he nods assent, interposes a comment, frames a relevant question; indeed, his presence and reactions are essential to the story. He may coincidentally be a folklorist, but his role is mainly that of a sympathetic friend. This essay is directed to folklorists whose fieldwork, like my own, involves talking to people and finding out about their lives. My intention is to define and develop an approach to the life story as a self-contained fiction, and thus to distinguish it sharply from its historical kin: biography, oral history, and the personal history (or "life history," as it is called in anthropology). Among the dimensions of folk culture which Richard Dorson observed during his 1968 field trip to Gary, Indiana, and East Chicago, was something he called "personal history." In the 1970 article which resulted, "Is There a Folk in the City?" he told folklorists to cast aside worries over whether the personal history is a traditional oral genre, and urged them to collect the "thousands of sagas created from life experiences that deserve, indeed cry for, recording."' Dorson caught the documentary spirit of the times. The following decade witnessed a rebirth of interest in the experiences of ordinary Americans, especially blue-collar workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/540572.pdf

The Life Story

Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis

Attempts to preserve music as cultural heritage put applied ethnomusicologists and public folklorists in a defensive posture of safeguarding property assets. By supporting the conservation of those assets with tourist commerce, heritage management is doomed to the paradox of constructing staged authenticities with music treated as a market commodity. Instead, best practices arise from partnerships among ethnomusicologists, folklorists and music culture insiders (community leaders, scholars, and musicians), with sustainability interventions aimed directly inside music cultures. These efforts should be guided by principles drawn from ecology, not economy; and specifically by four principles from the new conservation ecology—diversity, limits to growth, interconnectedness, and stewardship.

Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint

Those of us who have waited a long time for Jeff Titon's book on folk religion to appear have been richly rewarded. Titon's book is a powerhouse. It is not a book to read quickly or to savor all at once. A rich profusion of material is presented in this substantial volume; the book is so complex, in fact, that it may initially put readers off. Yet, this reviewer challenges all folklorists, whether their interests lie in the religious arena or not, to take the time to read this important ethnographic work. Early on, Titon acknowledges a debt to folklorist Henry Glassie, and comparisons between Powerhouse and Gladdie's Passing the Time in Ballymenone will most certainly be forthcoming and justified. Like Passing the Time, Powerhouse is a detailed study of one situation, an examination of texts firmly embedded in their context. Powerhouse for God, the book, was preceded by Powerhouse for God, the record, and was published in close conjunction with Powerhouse for God, the film produced by Titon, Barry Dornfeld, and Tom Rankin. The presentation of three different types of scholarship to document the same material adds much depth to our understanding of Titon's main research subject, Brother John Sherfey, and the other prominent performers in this Appalachian Baptist church. The record allows us to hear the sermons, conversations, life history, and testimonies that appear as verbatim transcripts in the book, and the film visually adds to our perceptions of BrotherJohn, his world, his family, his community, and his church. For this reason, Titon's material, in its totality, will prove to be an invaluable resource to those of us teaching courses that focus on religious traditions and religious genres in performance. Titon does not tell us how to do good ethnography; he shows us. Titon is able to place himself squarely in the center of this book, the church he is studying, and the material that is generated by the people who make up the congregation. He emerges from the pages as a living, breathing folklorist asking questions, occasionally realizing that he has asked the wrong questions, and asking more questions. In his prologue, he tells us how he felt on a "hotJuly afternoon in 1977" (p. 1) as he embarked on this project, and in the epilogue, nearly 500 pages later, he tells us how he felt ten years later as work on the film was drawing to a close. Like his beginning and his ending, the core of the book relies on Titon's sense of the people he is studying and his relationship to them, as a human being trying to understand other human beings and as a scholar trying to write about them and communicate that understanding to other folklorists. Glassie calls his ethnographic approach in Ballymenone "existential ethnography" which, he says, must "push things to meanings and grope through meanings to values.., to search through forms for meanings" (p. xv). This is not unlike, I think, Titon's "hermeneutic phenomenology," which he sees as the best framework for contemplating the "affective performance of folklore within a community," where "the 'folk' will be allowed to speak for themselves, and they will speak-as they do-to each other and to the folklorists" (p. 13). Titon tells us "the folklorist's ultimate object of study is folk 'art' (with art understood as the art of living, the shaping, forming, designing that people give to their daily lives). Folk art has no meaningful existence apart from a human community with a shared set of traditions, aesthetic preferences, and worldview" (pp. 13-14). Folk art resides in the "well-lived traditional life" (p. 14). Titon centers this book on language and life as they intersect with religion. The symbolic core of this intersection is the worship service, just as the core of his book is the examination of this

Jeff Todd Titon

Papers

Worlds of Music : An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples

The Life Story

Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis

Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint

Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church