Salsa presentation
All:
Please read and respond (via "Comments") to at least 3 of the following observations/queries arising from this presentation. Both team members and other class members should comment, and should particularly focus on ways in which insights from this presentation reflect, nuance, or contradict insights from your own fieldwork. Make sure your comments address this latter point.
Website at http://www.angelfire.com/planet/ethno-salsa/
1. Note the idea of analyzing “time,” “space,” and “place” as organizing principles for understanding social communities—and music’s role in the creation and maintenance of same. Please provide concepts of time, space, and place as they were articulated and/or created by your informants. NOTE: this does not simply mean describing the site of your fieldwork, or the time of day at which it occurred—rather, describe the conceptual or cognitive “spaces” which music, in your target sub-community, was used to create.
2. Note ways in which music plays into issues of social connection, economic and social status and IDENTITY. We spoke, over the course of the semester, about identity (like “class,” or “ethnicity,” or “gender,” for that matter) as “constructed”—that is, not an objective quantifiable phenomenon, but rather a mental/emotional/spiritual selective creation, and ways in which music played a role in such creation. Give an example from your own fieldwork of music used as a tool for the construction of identity: preferably, give an example of an informant who used music to recreate or transform his/her cultural identity.
3. How/why do informants develop/articulate/”use” history to create sense of community identity? Give an example (perhaps from your fieldwork interviews) of an informant who provided a “history” of the community, and provide an interpretation of the meaning of the particular historical factors that informant chose to emphasize—or even mythologize.
4. Note the interesting, revealing comments by insiders using “us” and “them” constructs; what does it mean when one “insider” uses such constructs about another “insider”. Does this nuance our (admittedly very simplistic) binary designation of “insider” and “outsider”? Please provide at least 2 examples of individuals (suitably anonymized) from your community whose perceptions of “insider” and “outsider” were contradictory, and interpret the significance of these contradictions.
5. Are there personal, musical, experiential, pedagogical, or other behavioral patterns that emerge from bios? Provide at least 2 examples, from your own fieldwork and informants, of behavioral patterns that seem to be relatively common among your target sub-community. Do these patterns play into the group’s shared sense of cultural identity?
6. Note the sense of a local community and the various “maps” overlaid upon that landscape. “Landscape” as we know is a cognitive construction; what do your informants have to say about such landscapes, and what do those landscapes reveal about identity and community priorities? Describe at least 3 locations in your sub-community’s “cognitive landscape” and interpret the meaning of those locations to your informants.
posted by CJS at 3:50 PM
4 Comments:
1) Imagine: You are a Mexican-American in Lubbock, Texas and have a strong sense of cultural pride. One night, you're casually eating dinner with your friends or family and a mariachi band strikes up a tune in the back corner of the restaraunt. You know this one, since you have heard mariachi music from an early age...or maybe you just enjoy it. Suddenly, the restaraunt ceases to be just a restaraunt. You become aware of the other patrons...you maybe even recognize a few from the last time you ate there. A table just across the room from you is being played to. The children from that table leave their chairs and begin flailing themselves in a dancelike-way (as children do) out of excitement. Your spouse grabs your hand and pulls you out into the middle of the floor and makes you dance! At first, you're a little hesitant. This IS public, afterall...but the music keeps playing and you keep dancing, sometimes you sing along when you know the words. More and more people join you in the middle of the floor. What has just happened? The music transformed the restaraunt into a cultural space...the space which was sometimes created during our fieldwork observations.
3) When we asked our guitarron player about the history of their group, he strongly emphasized the part where he told us that he split from his first group because of musical disagreement. This leads me to believe that, while we didn't see a lot of evidence of this in the following rehearsal, his interpretation of Mariachi was in a different direction than the ensemble he left. This would mean that the music has potentially thousands of different individual meanings, and that *smaller* "sub-communities" within the larger mariachi community are formed based on how people identify themselves with this music. Our guitarron player obviously left his previous "community" because he disagreed with how they interpreted that cultural aspect of it.
5) I am not exactly sure about the personal "start times" for mariachi for all of the individuals in Mi Tierra, but based on what I know of them and other mariachis not in the group, many of them start learning, playing, and listening to mariachi when they are very young. This was either through learning it in middle school, learning it from a family member, teaching themselves through lots of listening, or learning it from another player in a private lesson type way. To think about this, I usually connect it with what I know about Irish music (since I'm at least a little more familiar with that)...because while some mariachis learn their music from a printed page, others learn it by ear. For example...you can either learn Irish music from a CD, from a printed page (which seems to not be generally recommended), or from another person. For both Irish Trad. and Mariachi, learning the music from somebody else makes it an extremely social experience. Because of the ways which Mariachi is carried through the generations ensures that the people who are learning the music learn it while also learning the intent of who they learn it from. In turn, it helps to preserve the sense of cultural identity in a way that is semi-consistant across different age groups, which makes the music more accessible to everyone in that community.
1. I think the ideas of time, space, and place are evident in the VOL community. They have created a space of worwhip where none such space existed for them. The choir wanted to incorporate other ethnicities, religions, and members of churches into one conglomerate and that is exactly what they did. They needed a space to sing the word of God and to rehearse and use the gospel to worship and they did just that. Time is non-existant. They use any time they have to praise the word of God and to praise Him as well.
2. I think that is exactly what C used. He used gospel music to create his identity as a song leader. He uses gospel music to see himself as a whole person. I asked him in the interview if gospel music was a lifestyle, and he said he didn't know any other way. It was definitely a lifestyle because if you did not live the music you preached, they you lied to yourself. He told me that you had to live life like you live your music.
3. C used the history of gospel music to paint a picture for me of the way gospel music is today. He told me about how gospel stemmed from spiritual music and how it has changed over the years. He emphasized the rold of the song leader and of the actual text itself and the comradery of the members of the group. He would talk baout choirs and how they were "tight" and could sing well together. He talked about different people that helped pave the way for gospel music. He was very informative. I guess calling him an informant is sufficient.
3. the history thing popped up over & over in our interviews...Rodolfo discussing how each town/village/city, or even regions within each of those might have a take on a dance that cited their history, their value system, etc...
4. the insider/outsider thing also popped up a few times, Daniel describing himself as part of the community, but separate from it as well, Zenaida describing to us how things were & how they are now, with the fracture of groups and those who broke away being outsiders to her now, even though they were all once a whole.
6. Like Josh says above, landscape is important, the dresses, the dances, the meanings behind those things are all based off of what people were seeing, feeling, smelling, etc in the areas where these art forms developed.
5.A common thread we found was that most of the girls who danced BF, one or both parents danced it when they were young. With in the Aztec group from Taos (who played at the Day of the Dead), a mom and daughter both danced together throughout the night. This is about the cultural identity. The parents want their child to continue the cultural they have grown with.
3.BF dancing is largely based on the history of the region its from. For example, at the Day of the Dead festival, Debbie’s group did a long dance about a man who came home from the Mexican Independence war. It told a great story about love and jealousy. The fact they the BF community is strict with authenticity, shows how ‘real’ they want to keep the stories of their history.
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