Hail and farewell

Folks:

Let me just reiterate one last time how very pleased and impressed I was by the work that many people did this semester. As I said, this is possibly the first seminar at TTU I've been able to teach at the level of intellectual discourse and scholarly analysis which it was my good fortune to experience as demonstrated by my teachers (no braggadocio there: I couldn't do it myself, but I knew it when I saw it). I truly believe that this kind of scholarly, investigative, and interpersonal research makes us better people: more open, less judgmental, more sophisticated, less conservative, more musical, less prejudiced.

I was very moved by the efforts and insights that many teams provided for seminar colleagues. In my opinion, this is the best justification for the academic study of music: because of the insights, enrichment, and expanded horizons we can give to one another.

Let me encourage you all to consider continuing to work in these areas (either formally or informally); virtually everyone supplied crucial and wonderful contributions. You all made the seminar what it was. Well done!

(see you Thursday noon at Cricket's)

all the best,

cjs

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.

Mariachi presentation (I, K, S)

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.geocities.com/superawesomemariachiproject/

1. Issues of CONFLICT: the reality is that one of the principle functions which underlie various human communicative art forms is the resolution (e.g., “negotiation”) of conflict. Humor does this, music does this, debate does this, ritual does this, etc. In the absence of these communicative forms, conflict is irreconcilable. In the case of your own team’s individual fieldwork, what sorts of conflict arose: between informant groups? Between informants and fieldworkers? Between fieldworkers? Provide an example (anonymized if you wish) and articulate ways in which these various communicative arts did or did not play into conflict’s resolution.

2. Further to the above: think about the tensions that emerge via mis- or incomplete information. In the fieldwork situation, there are many more things that you don’t know than that you do. In what ways can observing conflict—or even participating in its resolution—help you understand complex social dynamics? What are the implications of this? Can you use “negative” reactions from informants or other persons to understand various types of social sub-texts? Of social priorities?

3. Excellent commentary about “comments”; confirms the unavoidable reality that, in cross-ethnic situations, racial tensions are present. They are unavoidable and they will impact the situation. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize their presence and think with some sensitivity and some insight about how to cope with them. Sometimes this will entail explicitly articulating the “elephant in the room” (e.g., the tension of which all are aware but of which no one has spoken yet) and sometimes the opposite: finding indirect ways of signaling that you are aware of and sensitive to these issues. Sometimes it is a product of using or not using certain words, body language, tones of voice, and so on. Provide and describe at least one example of a situation encountered in your own fieldwork in which you consciously chose a strategy to address the conflict.

4. Note the strategy, in presentation, of one-speaking while one is surfing through the site. This gets at an issue: the practical implications of presenting your material. If you were to present your website on your own, what would you need to do to streamline and maximize the impact of your presentation? If it is helpful, ask yourself what you would do in a future presentation of the material?

5. Use of setlist as a way of getting repertoire “maps”. In your particular fieldwork, how did musical repertoire map ways that informants saw their musical world? How did it map responses of musicians to changing contexts? Provide specific examples.

6. Note this team’s nice description of performance practice and behavior (and diagrams for same). How can you use analysis of physical layout to get at relationships, priorities, social connections, etc? Give at least one example, from your own fieldwork, of ways in which physical space map social organization.

7. Note Seong’s good observations about his attendance (at River Smith’s) and the audience’s focus upon band, and also the roles of certain “guest singers,” who appears to attend purely for the purpose of participating in the music. What does that reveal about the relationship between musicians and their audience? Are there gradations of “intimacy” between audience and musicians? Provide at least one example, with commentary, of the observable behaviors which diagram these relationships.

8. What would be the role of commentary about the demographics (ethnicity, age, economic class, etc) of audience, and what would be the best way to present this commentary? Provide examples of “demographic analysis” of your own target audiences.

9. This team made observations about the impact of certain songs upon certain “insider” members of the audience; what tools could get at and help the fieldworker understand the impact of specific texts or pieces upon “insider listeners”? Provide example from your own fieldwork.

Mariachi presentation (R, T, J)

Mariachi presentation (R, T, J)

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.freewebs.com/joshttu/

1. Good description about strategies for adapting fieldwork to what was schedule-feasible and how that might have evolved. As I have said in class, sometimes, when we’re “handed lemons, we make lemonade.” In other words, sometimes we have to take the necessary strictures of schedule/hours/etc and work within them—but it is important to “work smart,” and try to turn those limitations into advantages. How did time- or schedule-limits impact on your own team’s work? Give examples.

2. The comment was made that mariachi’s functions seem to include “remembering one’s heritage”; this in turn would seem to implicate issues of the construction of cultural identity. At the end of the semester, can we make observations across fieldwork situations about music’s use in the construction of identity? Each seminar member: please cite at least one (1) example of “music as a tool for constructing identity” from your own fieldwork, cite at least one (1) example of similar usage from at least two (2) other team’s work, and explain why the “identity-construction” in your fieldwork is similar to the “identity-construction” in the other two teams’ work. Be specific.

3. How can a fieldworker employ the subjectivity of informants’ “versions of history” versus the “factual” record? What role does “history” play in a community’s musical construction of identity? Provide at least 6 lines summarizing your own target group’s “community history” or “community myth.”

4. What does the ubiquity of mariachi in a very wide range of sub-community situations reveal? What are the implications of this “soundtrack” for this part of the Hispanic community? Articulate a comparison to the target music’s role in your own fieldwork: give at least 3 examples of the target music’s use in your informants’ lives, and compare/contrast to that of the mariachi community’s.

5. Issues of adaptation of outside repertoire into the insider style: how can a style “stamp” or “re-brand” a song originating with one culture with an Hispanic cultural activity? Can a song from outside Hispanic community culture be thus “re-stamped”? What about “appropriation” (meaning: the symbolic acquisition of cultural materials, the “claiming as one’s own” materials that might formerly have been alien)?

6. Good observations about ways in which fieldwork can the fieldworker’s own growth and cultural enrichment. In the best of all possible fieldwork situations, both informants and fieldworkers conclude that they have gained by the experience; this is how ethnographic fieldwork is transformed from being “only” scholarship, growing to also encompass communication, relationships, mutual enrichment, and a better world. What have you gained from your individual experience of fieldwork?

7. Good commentary about shifting repertoires in different contexts or for different (ethnic) audiences. Please provide examples from your own observations about ways in which your informants adapted musical repertoires, styles, or behaviors to fit within (or to transform) contrasting situations.

8. Insights about musicians’ (and music’s) cross-cultural adaptability. Almost by definition (and as we have seen from numerous readings) musicians have to be especially skillful at moving across cultural boundaries which non-musicians may experience as much more problematic. Please provide examples from your own fieldwork of ways in which your informants used (or didn’t use—and if so why not) music to move across such social/cultural boundaries. Did their strategies provide strategies which you think you could use in your own life and career? Describe these, and explain how they might play out.

9. Excellent use of glossary as heard in rehearsals. “what people hear” is a crucial indicator of how they experience the world. Please provide at least 3 examples of specific dialect, terms, adjectives, or other jargon, unique to your sub-community, which your informants used repeatedly to describe certain desirable or undesirable results. What do these specific words imply about how your informants saw the world, the music, and their own individual places within both?

Ballet folklorico presentation

Ballet folklorico 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://members.cox.net/robvela1/WWW/

1. Good description of original research construct and how that evolved, and good articulation of necessity of scaling-down scope. In what ways might the (necessary and inevitable) scaling-down of a project’s original parameters help to focus that presentation’s goals? Give examples from your own team project

2. Did language skills or ethnicity play a role in this research? Do language skills or ethnicity (or other markers of group identity) play a role in various teams’ research? What roles do they play? Please make specific reference to various “markers of identity” which you observed your informants to be using towards you the fieldworker. In other words, how were your informants identifying you, and what impact did that have on the nature of your work together?

3. Nice comment: in presenting research, fieldworkers can choose to “go through our individual experiences”. Excellent observations about the differing (but complementary) perspectives of 2 different fieldworkers. What does this make possible? ALG spoke in an earlier comment and presentation of the ways in which having both (or all) fieldworkers present in a situation enriched their observations. It would seem that threads of both continuity and discontinuity might emerge from different fieldworkers’ accounts. How can you allow for this and exploit those threads to aid your analysis?

4. Good observations about evolution of insights, observation of patterns, and the way they shaped subsequent research and fieldwork. Please articulate how the interaction of these factors shaped or evolved your own team research.

5. Good observation about overlap between informants: that is, different fieldworkers encountering the same informants in different environments. Did this occur for your team as well? What was the impact of this overlap? Did it enrich your team’s insights? How?

6. Good observations about presumptions w/ which fieldwork began, and how they changed (especially about the target community’s desire for outreach versus lack of such desire). How do you do fieldwork with a group that doesn’t particularly want it done? How do you win over informants? Give examples from your own fieldwork.

7. Use of keywords: “family”, “heritage”, “authenticity”, “competition.” What would be the shortlist of your fieldwork’s “keywords”?

8. How/why is this idiom ethnically specific? Is there something about its function that tends to make it ethnically specific? Please express an opinion backed up by comments made by the presenters.

9. What are the implications of informants’ self-identification as “insider” versus “outsider”? How might that impact the fieldworker’s assessment of that informant’s insights? Give examples from your own fieldwork of informants supplying these “insider versus outsider” constructions, and articulate possible motives.

10. Does this contrasting self-identification reflect informants’ contrasting perceived roles as “historian” versus “teacher”? Might these two roles entail different agendas or goals? What methodology would let you investigate, model, and interpret these agendas or goals? Who were the “historians” in your team fieldwork? Who were the “teachers”? Who got more respect? Why?

11. What is the relationship, in this idiom or others, between “authenticity” and “place”? Does place confer authenticity? Must one come from that place? Merely visit that place? Own (physical or communicative) artifacts of that place? Unpack this in light of your own fieldwork.