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Notes on
Fred Myers
Painting Culture

This magnificent text is not only full of precise information and descriptions of Pintupi beliefs, customs, artistic representation, social interactions, et al but it is an incredible artistic and philosophical evaluation of art. The commodification of the paintings of these aboriginal tribes (besides the Pintupi) is a very intriguing process. Good to clarify that ‘objectivations by emphasizing iconography tend to be “intellectualist,” the product of a theoretical gaze or a contemplative eye.’ This is explained to not simplify or outright ignore the social context in which works are created. Pintupi paintings are not to be argued to be good or bad, but to be true. They are representations of Dreams, and whoever had certain dream is the owner of it. Others had to ask permission to paint an image that someone else ‘owned’. Myers agrees with Boas in the ‘technical experience’ concept, in trying to answer how almost every Pintupi man can take up painting and produce interesting images. That technical experience goes together with ‘an emerging social context that provides economic, social and political value for paintings of the Dreaming.
*Interesting how they feel so attached to their dreamings.
Again, in this text the commodification of art is raised as an important development for the Pintupi painters and the works per se. Myers is very detailed in economical aspects of the Pintupi paintings. The unvaluable owned dreams began to be sold by less than $A30 and their price began to raise as they were valued continuously more by the international community and as they gained exchange value.

Notes on
Alan Merriam
The study of Ethnomusicology

Alan Merriam discusses how the term of ethnomusicology developed to the present stage and she adds her own definition and arguments for it. She says that ehthnomusicology is: the study of music in culture. “Human behavior produces music, but the process is one of continuity; the behavior itself is shaped to produce music sound, and thus the study of one flows into the other.” The main aim of ethnomusicology would be to understand music, but it is  not supposed to understand music sound alone, and this is probably what differentiates it from musicology. Ethnomusicologists follow three stages: collection of data, two kinds of analysis (collation of ethnographic and ethnologic materials into a coherent body of knowledge about music practice, behavior and concepts in the society being studied, and the technical lab analysis of the music sound materials collected), and the data analyzed and the results obtained are applied to relevant problems, in ethnomusicology, the social sciences and the humanities. She reminds the reader that there has always been a fear of losing the endangered musical cultures. But also, music is constantly changing just as humans do and evolve. Merriam also argues the music can be used as a means of understanding other things about other cultures since it may convey symbolic representations to use as a new vocabulary.

Notes on
Charles Keil
Motion and feeling through music

What is felt through music? How is something felt? Why is something felt? This is why Keil tries to answer in his essay. Keil says that all music has syntax or embodied meaning. From this he will use a syntactic analyisis together with the ‘engendered feeling’ felt. He reminds the reader that most of music traditions outside the West are almost exclusively based on performance. There is a comparison between classical music and jazz in 10 distinguishing points: Mode of construction, mode of presentation, mode of understanding, mode of response, guiding principles, tehnical emphases, basic unit, communication analogues, gratifications, and relevant criteria. There are also references to the flirtation between music of the engendered feeling type and dance. And also of the symbolic action that exists between dancers and musicians, which is relevant to a discussion on non-verbal communication. *nice quote: In our culture ( and perhaps in others where repression and oppression must be fought) it may be that music chose goal is engendered feeling, spontaneity, and the conquest of inhibition is of far greater value than music which aims to reflect our civilization and the repression-sublimation-Protestant-ethic syndrome upon which it is based simply because, like much great art, it offers an antidote, a strategy for dealing with our situation, rather than reinforcing it. He concludes by saying that by creating a theory based in one musical idiom  it can have validity when applied to the musics of other cultures.

Notes on
Charles Keil
People’s music comparatively

Keil starts by defying the popular concept of ‘folk’ and presents how everyone participates to some degree in folk subcultures, as those centered on sports, hobbies, musical tastes and so forth. Since we all share values and consciousness with various groupings, even though they are not studied by scholars, we are all folk. Then rather than using the term folk music, he uses ‘people’s music’. Form here, he would analyze blues and polka and how they developed recently. And he will base his study in a dialectical ethnomusicology. *The presence of style indicates a strong community, an intense sociability that has been given shape through time, an assertion of control over collective feelings so powerful that any expressive innovator in the community will necessarily put his or her content into that shaping continuum ad no other. After this argument he presents the conflict of using the term style in a classless society. And we don’t know about style in classless societies because we can’t measure stylistic changes in people’s music before the impact of imperialism. Also, a style must first start to decay for people to be able to understand its growth and maturity. Still the word style, appears to be a lodestar for the dominant class, without really knowing what it represents. But in 20th century America, style is almost an entirely an ethnic working-class phenomena. Keil’s main hypotheses is that Style is a reflection of class forces. It has its basis in community recreation through ritual. In class society the media of the dominant class must be utilized for the style to be legitimated. For a working-class style to grow and prosper, the dominant culture’s stereotypes must be accepted and transcended. The first efforts of ethnic working-class communities to work through the dominant stereotypes using the dominant media borrow from both ‘high-culture’ and ‘popular’ culture,’ while second efforts toward the same goal tend to repudiate these borrowings. Style always has hegemonic thrust as it works out the implications of form in terms of inclusion and exclusion principles. A vital style always has Dionysian and Apollonian aspects competing for primacy. Both the thrust toward hegemony and the play of Dionysian and Apollonian processes are confused and confusing due to the pervasive influence of mass mediation on music in this century. He concludes by saying that styles of music from the working class arrived in the decade of ‘high culture’ fragmentation following World War I.

Notes on
John Chernoff
Ideas of Culture and the Challenge of Music

On how anthropologists view art: Culture is based on patterns of interaction with the material world and art is a reflection and affirmation of that level of culture, not even necessarily self-conscious. Therefore in anthropology music is the least considered art since it is the least material. On the term ethnomusicology: the [name] links it to an inherent and invalid negation that alienates anything non-western in many subtle ways. ‘New’ anthropology of music: music-making is a type of behavior, and people interested in music can study the institutionalization of music-making in that light: the recruitment and training of musicians, performance styles, performance venues like festivals and celebrations, religious and political roles of music, song texts, composition, patronage, ecological and instrumental resources and so on.
Before there were many concerns on tradition and authenticity: In mid-century… ethnomusicologists accepted a narrow Western definition of aesthetic values as judgments on matters of beauty and feelings about art objects.
Now, ‘although many scholars continue to address theoretical concerns about music as structured sound, the main influence of anthropologically informed studies of music has been to undermine the musicological approach.’ ‘Efforts to isolate or abstract so-called musical elements analytically have tended to yield not just one-sided or limited descriptions but have often led to actual mistakes in perception and analysis,’
*The insights that reward people who think of music primarily in musical terms are simply not available to those who think mainly in musicological terms; indeed, the latter are often victimized by a narrow conception of music that practically precludes their understanding the breadth of their artistic conception of many non-Western idioms.
Chernoff concludes with the impermanence of music: Our understanding of music has reached the point where we recognize that musical performances are momentary events and that music’s cultural meaning lies within its potential to transform the people who participate in, or attend, or are involved in musical events.

Notes on
Steven Feld
Waterfall of Song

Definition of Acoustemology: local conditions of acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination embodied in the culturally particular sense of place resounding [in this case] in Bosavi. In this essay Feld will explore how the acoustic experience of waterfalls (more concisely the place in which they inhabit) acts in the life of the Kaluli people of Bosavi.
On Sense, embodiment and synesthesia: Because motion can draw upon the kinesthetic interplay of tactile, sonic, and visual senses, emplacement always implicates the intertwined nature of sensual bodily presence and perceptual engagement.
Experiencing and knowing place-the idea of place as sensed, place as sensation-can proceed through a complex interplay of the auditory and the visual, as well as through other intersensory perceptual processes.
Kaluli naming and storying are highly salient and sociable everyday practices, forms of social participation thoroughly related to other everyday practices such as traveling, working and visiting.
The aesthetic power and pleasure of Kaluli songs emerges in good part throught their textual poesis of placename paths.
Imagery of the Kaluli: Land, water, tree and place features are joined together with images of loss, indicated as family, bird sporits, places left, places to go toward. All of these are forcefully united through sound and the presence of a bird’s voice calling in a progression of verbs linking reported to quoted speech.
…the terminology of musical rhytm and meter are polysemic to the pulsing, splashing, and motional qualities of water.

Notes on
Steven Feld
World Beat

Very nice and short essay on the mixture of the fast music mixtures occurring all around the world: This complex traffic in sounds, money, and media is rooted in the nature of revitalization through appropriation.
*Extensive copyright controls in the hands of a few Western countries are having a riveting effect on the commodification of musical skills and styles, and the power of musical ownership.
Graceland, 1968…mix of world pop and African ‘folk’ music.
Definitions: Major Contract Artists are only granted the possibility of producing their own work and taking economic and artistic risks commensurate with their sales.
Muscians are laborers who sell their services for a direct fee and take the risk (with little expectation) that royalty percentages, spinoff jobs, tours, and recording contracts might follow from the exposure and success of records with enormous sales.
*Elite pop artists are in the strongest artistic and economic position in the world to appropriate what theylike of human musical diversity, with full support from record companies and often with the outright gratitude of the musicians whose work now appears under a new name.

Notes on
Steven Feld
From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis.

Chapter on struggle over musical propriety in the production of discourses on world music and world beat.
“In thh current global ecumene, where cultural interactions are characterized by increasingly complex exchenges of people, technology, money, media, and ideology, transcultural record productions tell specific stories about accountability, authorship, and agency, about the workings of capital, control, and compromise, and about the strategies and possibilities for valuing indigeneity as something more than essentialized otherness or generic opposition and resistance.”
schiz-:mediated music, commodified grooves, sounds split from sources, consumer products with few if any contextual linkages to the processes, practices, and forms of participation that could give them meaning with local communities.
Schizophonia needs to be imagined processually...as varied practices located in the situations, flows, phases, and circulation patterns that characterize particular cultural objects moving in and out of short and long commodity states, transforming with the experiential and material situation of producers, exchangers and consumers, located in historically specific national and global positions vis-a-vis late capitalism and development, cultural domination, modernity and postmodernity.
*Pop is a classic case of what Marx called alienation: Something human is taken from us and returned in the form of a commodity.
World vs pop vs pop world vs world pop: It is important to have a view of a world music industrialization that views power relations as shaping forces in the production of musical styles and icons of cultural identity.
93% world musical sales concentrated among six companies.
‘world music’: term refers to any commercially available music of non-western origin and circulation, as well as to musics of dominated ethnic minorities within the Western world: music of the world to be sold around the world.
-the invention of ‘world beat’ reproduces a western gaze toward the exotic and erotic, often darker-skinned, dancing body.
Music is the most highly stylized of social forms, iconically linked to the broader cultural production of local identiyty and indexically linked to contexts and occasions of community participation.
If schizophonia, the splitting of sounds from sources, is the antecedent to life in today’s global and transnational world of music, then schismogenesis is a way of describing the resultant state of progressive mutual differentiation that is  playing out in at least four ways:
a) escalating dominance-submission pattern of ownership among the major independents, paralleled by a similar relationship between Western pop stars and non-Western musicians; b) an escalating succoring-dependence pattern between world beat and world music; c) an escalating exhibitionism-spectatorship pattern between third- and fourth-world creators and d) an escalating homogenization-heterogenization struggle in the realm of musical style.
authenticty vs the dynamics of appropriation. (and patronage)
-in popular culture subordinate formations are always the sources of fantasy and relaxation for the dominant class or societies.

Notes on
Veit Erlmann
Politics and aesthetics of transnational musics

The emergence of world beat in the early 1980s coincides with a growing uneasiness in the social sciences and humanitires about the institutional practice and the conventional modes and politics of representation in anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore, comparative literature and other fields.
The magnitude and scope of the new global culture mark our century musically as a period of “unprescedented” diversity in the face of which the heuristic value of older conceptual models such as Westernizaation, syncretism, acculturation or urbanization has dwindled considerably.
*The production of difference...is inherent in the logic of capitalism itself.
*The eccentricity of the system is the symptom of an inner metastasis rather than a sign of his impending death.
-to “reatin a tension between what will remain an unsatisfactorily homogenizing term-postmodernism-and the heterogenous local forms produced within and sometimes against its logic.
-this aesthetic of the pastiche manifests itself at a variable of levels....the reconfiguration of time and space and its consequences for subjective identity, and, as a related phenomenon, the role of nostalgia.

Notes on
Jocelyne Guilbault
Redefining the local through world music, and ZOUK

homogenization and differentiation not as mutually exclusive features of musical globalization but as integral constituents of late capitalism. The contradictory experience of the universal marketplace alongside proliferating new traditional codes and new ethnic schisms, is the key signature of the postmodern era.
*this new acces to the markets of industrialized countries, designating the connection traditionally referred to as center/peripherry, has constituted one of the venues although not the only venue by which world musics have developed commercial value and public recognition.
The musicians of world musics also show that they are cosmpoplitans who function in and out, at will, of what has been traditionally perceived as totalizing “system”, that is, the system controlled by the dominating cultures.
Musics such as zouk, rai, or soukos, when played on the main radio stations and even on periphery radios (in France) and illegal radios (in Holland) where they receive the greatest amount of airplay are still ghettoized in their confinements of specific programs.
World musics have contributed to some degree to the repositioning of the local cultures to which they are associated by being part of a world movement that advances the desire of every nation not only to be recognized but only to participate in the workings of global economics and power.
*Zouk is helping shape economic, political and social change worldwide associated as it is with endogenous development and a growing sense of national identity in countries whose culture has been largely defined and most certainly heavily influenced by a colonial past.
Music functions not merely as a passive reflection of broader sociocultural phenomena but also as an active contributor to the processes of cultural change. While the international market in many ways forces regional music genres to become more homogeneous,it does not prohibit unique innovation and development at home.
Much of zouk’s strength in the four islands is the result of its being sung in Creole (the language is understood by everyone and zouk touches a sensitive chord because it endorses a language that has been totally rejected or at best ignored for generations. The sccess of a performing group...depends on the extent to which these characteristics are reflected in a performance-an experience within which ‘people feel themselves at home’.
Musical genres have often played a crucial role in the expression and negotiation of identity, Guilbault suggest that what zouk has done is to make more visible, in ways that are particular to the music field, the dilemmas faced by Antilleans iin their quest to assert their difference in the modern world. World music seems far ahead of other fields of activity in its use of active social forces that are diverse and contradictory as agents of change and in its reliance on both local and international forces in the shaping of individual and social identities.