Songs of Earth

Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music

Anna L. Wood

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi/The Association for Cultural Equity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496840363
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Ethnomusikologie

Based upon Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music (1976), by Alan Lomax, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music is a contemporary guide to understanding and exploring Cantometrics, the system developed by Lomax and Victor?Grauer for analyzing the formal elements of music related to human geography and sociocultural patterning. This carefully constructed cross-cultural study of world music revealed deep-rooted performance patterns and aesthetic preferences and their links with environmental factors and ancient socioeconomic practices. This new and updated edition is for anyone wishing to understand and more deeply appreciate the forms and sociocultural contexts of the?musics?of the world's peoples, and it is designed to be used by both scholars and laypeople.Part One of the book consists of a practical guide to using the Cantometrics system, a course with musical examples to test one's understanding of the material, a theoretical framework to put the methodology in context, and an illustration of the method used to explore the roots of popular music. Part Two includes guides to four other analytical systems that Lomax developed, which focus on orchestration, phrasing and breath management, vowel articulation, instrumentation, and American popular music. Part Three provides resources for educators who wish to use the Cantometrics system in their classrooms, a summary of the findings and hypotheses of Lomax's original research, and a discussion of Cantometrics' criticisms, applications, and new approaches, and it includes excerpts of Lomax's original writings about world song style and cultural equity.

Part I

A Method

Jelly Roll Morton used to say, “It doesn’t matter so much about the type of melody you use. It’s what you do with it that makes the difference. Now in my style of playing sometimes I would pick up some tune out of some low dive along the river where you had to be careful about the guys actually putting a louse on you if you was to go in there—sometimes I would take a strain from some big opera like Rigoletto or Pagliacci—but when I applied my method to it, it all came out sounding like jazz.”

~Alan Lomax’s Preface to the Cantometrics Coding Manual (1976: 1)

1. Touchstones of Singing

Music and Cultural Equity

Although he did not coin the term until the 1970s, and was not its sole practitioner, Alan Lomax ran head-on into the concept of cultural equity on his first day of field recording in 1933. This is a well-worn story but worth repeating. Alan and his father, John, came to a ranch north of Dallas one late afternoon and asked permission of the foreman to record the workers if they were willing. Consent given, the Lomaxes set up their equipment and the folks gathered around. In spite of the weary hour, the setting, and the sudden call to perform, beautiful songs, harmonically and rhythmically innovative, were sung that evening. Then two things happened. Braving the watching “boss,” a man called “Blue” stepped up to the Edison recorder and, refusing to try out first, sang out the plight of the workers:

Work all week

Don’t make enough

To pay my board

And buy my snuff

It’s hard, it’s hard

It’s hard on we poor farmers

It’s hard

After several stanzas, Blue addressed the President of the United States, sure that he was listening at the other end: “Now Mr. President, you just don’t know how bad they’re treating us folks down here. I’m singing to you, I’m talking to you because I hope you’ll come down here and do something for us folks in Texas.” The Lomaxes played the recordings back to the assembly.

There was immense joy in this group because they felt they had communicated their problem to the big world. They wanted those people at the other end of the line to hear what life was like for them. That’s why they were singing for us; they wanted to get into the network… That experience totally changed my life. I saw what I had to do. My job was to try and get as much of these views, these feelings, this unheard majority onto the center of the stage.¹

As field researcher, writer, popularizer, advocate and scientist, Lomax pursued this goal all of his working life. “The folk, the primitive, the non-industrial societies, account for most of the cultural variety of the planet,” he wrote in 1968.

Though rich in the expressive and communicative arts, these folk communities seldom have the means to record, evaluate, or transmit their songs and tales, except by word of mouth; and the noise of our hard-sell society is drowning the quieter communications of these word of mouth traditions. (Lomax, 1968: 4)

Lomax advocated for “cultural feedback”. He meant that regional, indigenous, and marginalized cultures need to contribute to and be seen and heard on mass media, on their own terms. Their cultural practices and expressive traditions must be projected back to them. The vulnerable streams of creativity—the small, the local—require reinforcement, as Lomax had unexpectedly and miraculously learned as a very young person that evening in Texas.

Electronic communication is intrinsically multi-channeled. A properly administered electronic system could carry every expressive dialect and language that we know of, so that each one might have a local system at its disposal for its own spokesmen. (Lomax, 1980: 22-31)

As if anticipating social media, Lomax frequently spoke of the democratizing potential of communications technology to “become the prime force in man’s struggle for cultural equity and against the pollution of the human environment” (1980: ibid).

To Lomax as to many fellow musicologists, it had long been clear that the Western system for transcribing, describing and analyzing music was inadequate to the world’s wildly diverse musical traditions, yet it was almost universally held to be the gold standard by which all other musics are understood—and judged. The International Council on Traditional Music and the Society for Ethnomusicology were founded in 1947 and 1959, respectively, to study the world’s music comparatively and on its own terms. During this period, Lomax began a new line of inquiry, building on the work of scholars who preceded him.

Lomax envisioned a broad, culturally balanced method of musical description and analysis. He believed that the character of each musical culture would emerge from a range of universally applicable criteria that considers local standards of “the good and the beautiful”. He predicted that systematic method of inquiry and description in which every performance is filtered through the same screen would reveal patterns of similarity and difference in musics on a worldwide scale. It would then be possible to map and correlate the musical traits being measured with other aspects of culture. Lomax also hoped that the dissemination of this perspective would help to bring about greater recognition and appreciation of the aesthetic values of all people.

What’s in a Song?

We are in Northern Europe, in a farming and dairying region. A man sings a ballad. His wife sings to their cow while milking. The school children sing game songs. The assembly sings the school song. The congregation sings praise songs. At the pub, folk take turns making up risqué verses. At Christmas, carolers sing. A regional favorite comes to town to give a concert. In the next village, in fact in the entire area, nearly the same situation prevails, even though each place has its own peculiarities. But if you take a good sample of these performances, you will find that everyone sings in solo voices, or in unison with casually blended voices, and decent, but not at all precise rhythmic unison—they’re all just having a jolly old time. Their songs are almost always in four-phrase strophes with medium length phrases and arched melodies, unornamented except with glottal movement and some embellishment. Their voices are relaxed, wide and rather low. The men particularly sing with tremolo and some raspiness. Songs for play and dancing are in regular rhythm while solo ballad singing is often in irregular or free rhythm. Tempos are measured, volume too, except in the schoolyard and the pub.

Taken together, these characteristics are common to a whole cultural complex. Together, they signal home base and cultural membership. If we take those same parameters to Naples, Italy, or to Mali, the Sudan, Thailand, or Malaysia, we will find that they are handled quite differently in each of those areas.

In the 1950s, Lomax experimented with comparisons of songs from around the world. He hypothesized that a dynamic design he called “style” was at work in sung performance. Working closely with singers in the U.S., the Caribbean, Spain, and Italy, he recognized that dynamically related performance attributes contribute to an aesthetic blueprint—a set of “rules” or guidelines according to which each singing tradition is generated, maintained and renewed.²

In fieldwork I noticed that the singers in any one tradition conformed to distinctive patterns of vocalizing and coordination that their listeners seemed to expect. It was in these frameworks of performing style that I looked for general and stable properties of musical traditions, using the cross-cultural method. (Lomax, 1976: 11)

In 1960 Lomax began a lifelong collaboration with Columbia University anthropologist Conrad Arensberg. He served for nearly four decades with Lomax as co-principal investigator of the Expressive Style project, housed first at Columbia University’s Anthropology Department and its Bureau of Applied Social Research, and after 1983 at Hunter College. In Lomax, Arensberg the behaviorist recognized a kindred mind. Arensberg and Lomax were committed to a science of culture and to the concept of branching evolution. They practiced observation, measurement, and experimentation. With Eliot Chapple at Yale, Arensberg had observed how people develop a workplace culture through repeated sequences of interaction. Applying this approach to whole societies, Arensberg looked for what actually produces c...