This is an anthology of pieces that were published, sometimes in offbeat places, and unpublished. I’m using a typewriter font in tribute to the decades when I hand-typed and re-typed thousands of pages of writing, skilled in those obsolete products, white-out and carbon paper.
I realize some of these writings are still under copyright, so would be glad to take them down if requested.
I’ve put the writings under general topic headings, though as is typical of my work, the writing crosscuts issues, materials, and ideas. At heart, I’m usually a comparativist. I’ve put these gathered writings under headings, with some cross-referencing. I place each piece in its time and my approach. I’ve avoided commenting on the evolution of my prose style from the cautious “scientific/objective” approach of the 1970s. Reflexivity started to appear in the 1980s in the Jewish culture work and shaping a more personal voice helped to make Subcultural Sounds successful, perhaps culminating in 2018’s Motor City Music.
Probably like any long-term author or scholar, I’ve found that I tend to put on familiar lenses to view the data at hand, no matter what the subject or the genre of the assignment. For me, it’s always been overlaps, ambiguities, multiplicity, and agency that drive my thinking and writing. This tendency emerged in Afghanistan as I was drawn to questions of shared vs. ethnic-specific musical repertoires, styles, contexts, and instruments. The same mentality runs straight through fifty years of writing to my 2018 book on music in Detroit, where I used the metaphor of traffic to guide a narrative about the ways that music flowed across policed and racialized boundaries into local spaces of musical pleasure and production.
As a grad student once acutely noted, I tended to “sit out” current trends if they rubbed me the wrong way or diverted my dealing with the issues at hand. In the “high theory/critical theory” phase of academia in the 1980s and 1990s this left me feeling out of sync with my times. Was I a “theorist,” even if I didn’t draw on the range of (mostly French or German) writings and vocabulary of so many colleagues in interdisciplinary studies? I recall being cheered by running across the film studies scholar Noel Carroll’s term “mid-level theory,” which seemed to fit my work well.
To put all this in context, a short intellectual autobiography might be helpful. In Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back (Oxford, 208), I did a more liberal retrospective, siting my place in my hometown, starting with the family musical context. In one sentence: my mother was an immigrant, Yiddish was in the home, the city was deeply multicultural, I grew up as a violinist in the classical world, and we spent a year in Vienna when I was just ten, giving me a solid intercultural formation and perspective.
As a freshman at Michigan in 1960, I took a year-long course just called “Asia,” which featured a parade of specialists on the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. It was the dawn of American “area studies” and Michigan was one of the strongest campuses to promote the government-funded effort to produce specialists, from CIA to State Department and USAID to academia, who could shape America’s role as the dominant world power. I loved it all,and neglected music studies.
But then by chance, I was redirected to consider a future as a violinist one more time and spent two years at the Manhattan School of Music, allowing me to think of myself as a New Yorker. I hated the conservatory atmosphere, realized I wan’t going to be like the kids I met at parties (Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman…) and transferred back to Michigan, graduating a semester late in December of 1964. It was then that I met Bob Sheff (aka Blue Gene Tyranny), who slipped me into the experimental music scene via the ONCE Festival, an offbeat influence on my thinking and the topic of my very first (co-authored) publication in 1965.
All the while, I had been a music critic for The Michigan Daily, a first-rank college newspaper, so the kindly deans let me slip into the M.M. graduate program in January 1965. I found out about a Seminar in Ethnomusicology with the recently-arrived William P. Malm and within two weeks knew where I was headed professionally: a new discipline that combined area studies with music.
Bill Malm was the perfect mentor, supporting me in every way to go my own way as I became the first-ever ethnomusicology grad student at Michigan. He had recently been on a stopover visit to Soviet Central Asia (from Japan) and brought back a shelf of books. “You know Russian-tell me what’s in these books,” he said, and so I discovered a large literature on the peoples of the Soviet Union, mostly Central Asia, and decided to take on this world region unknown in “the West.” The reigning ideology of ethnomusicology prescribed finding a musical terra incognita, planting the flag for the field, and filling in the map of world music cultures. Realizing I couldn’t exactly do fieldwork in the USSR, I learned that some of the same peoples lived across the border in Afghanistan, which had just opened up for research by foreigners. I started Persian language classes even as I was forced to fulfill all the musicology graduate requirements, which nearly gave me a nervous breakdown.
Let me concentrate more on the intellectual climate than the adventures of fieldwork, detailed in the Afghanistan tab of this website. Modern American ethnomusicology was in its infancy. Alan Merriam’s Anthropology of Music and Bruno Nettl’s Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology were brand-new. At the 2014 SEM convention, Tim Rice convened a panel on senior figures’ memory of how those two books impacted their development. I talked off some notes, inserting here unedited as a marker for my response to these early classics of the field. The entire bibliography on ethnomusicology topics fit into a fairly thin volume produced by Jaap Kunst, the Dutchman who gave the discipline its (originally hyphenated) name. When I was President of SEM around 1990, the Board asked the membership whether the name should be changed. Almost no one responded. Thirty years later, the Board brought up the question again.
I’m impressed with both how much they generalize and how cautious they are about generalization.
The great tension between wanting to give readers—including a rising generation of ethnomusicologists like me—something to build on and the lack of much data to base that on.
Nettl is given to the grand generalization that we have dropped, based on small samples of data or, as BN says himself, “ethnomusicology has developed a great deal of theory which exists, somewhat unorganized, under a still too small body of documentation.”
Today we have a great deal of documentation, highly organized into subfields, but a very small amount of theory.
Even the most unassailable generalization needs qualification:
“Song texts provide the student of human behavior with some of the richest material he has available for analysis, but their full potential remains to be exploited.”
Nettl: even as a beginning grad student, I see by my marginal remark, I was not convinced by “specialized features in music are less easily changed than generalized..[leading to] the hypothesis that generalized features are constantly undergoing change in the direction of becoming specialized.” I remark “-but more easily dropped.”
Or: “the larger a moving body of music, the greater is its influence on the repertories through which it passes, and the less it is itself subject to change.”
and: “in most cases, music seems to move from simplicity to greater complexity (but not always!)”
But: “measurement of the rate of change in music…awaits the discovery of proper methods.”
Still waiting.
Merriam: really interested in change, but not sure how to deal with it.
“In suggesting that melody may be more susceptible to change than rhythm, we have omitted detailed discussion of why this may be so for the simple fact that no really clear-cut explanations seem available.”
“Uses” and “functions” was a relevant topic when I began.
Merriam says “function may not be expressed or understood from the standpoint of folk evaluation,” which is “concepts.” “Function refers to the understanding of what music does for human beings as evaluated by the outside observer.” For example: “music, then, provides a rallying point around which the members of society gather to engage in activities which require the cooperation and coordination of the group.”
Nettl: uses “applied ethnomusicology” way ahead of its general appearance.
In summary, these two seminal works did what they should at the moment when academic ethnomusicology was just being launched:
-treat all the music in the world even-handedly, rather than just privileging some types of societies and issues;
-offer a platform for further research by suggesting hypotheses that would need testing by emergent data;
-stress the need for theory and method to go hand in hand, with a bias toward empirical research.
-define a set of core issues, particularly in Merriam’s case, not all of which we have yet to follow down systematically.
My own relation to Merriam’s book is unclear. When he was doing a history of the American ethnomusicology monograph, Tim Rice, after surprisingly saying that my Afghanistan book was probably the first geographically-based such work, asked why I didn’t reference The Anthropology of Music. It was a logical question to which I had no answer – seems like it could have been a helpful prop in my search for themes and patterns in the Afghan North. I still don’t have an answer. Not that I agreed with all of Merriam, but usually junior scholars cite their influential elders. I think I was more influenced more by a talk Merriam gave at the 1977 SEM convention, after my book had come out. He admitted openly that on a return trip after many years to the Congo, he didn’t understand what he encountered, and ask us for help. I was struck by such a canonical figure both admitting to his weakness and appealing for help. What it boiled down to was that he didn’t know how to deal with the effects of modernity and media, wanting to find “culture” as he knew it earlier, just as he had flagged “change” as a problem years before in The Anthropology of Music.
Getting back to my early years, if Ethnomusicology was so nascent, what did us newcomers have in our toolkit? Anthropology, of course, which was busy finding its own way as a suddenly well-funded discipline embedded in an American imperial project that it could resist or yield to. More pragmatic and less theoretical than European social anthropology and ethnology, “anthro” mainly coasted along with ethnography and systematic descriptive tools. It was ten to twenty years before the various “turns” and doubts shifted the discipline’s gears. By the mid-70s, the interventions of people like Clifford Geertz offered new perspectives of “interpretation.”
Linguistics was highly influential, and we found what we could, ranging from looking for musical “grammars” (which I found unhelpful) to the closer kinship of the new field of sociolinguistics, which I dabbled in, even writing a Working Paper in their series to show that music had something to offer. I’d insert that here, but I actually don’t have a copy. I think it was a draft of the multilingualism article given here in the “comparative” section. In the Afghanistan section, I talk about how I used some methods – anthropological linguistics was very helpful, both the technical-philological side, with its terminology (substratum, adstratum…) and its conceptual frameworks (Dell Hymes, William Labov). Slowly, we became aware of Erving Goffman’s ethnographically-based analysis of speech and encounters.
The rise of academic folklore impacted me as well. People like Richard Bauman, Roger Abrahams, Kenneth Goldstein, Henry Glassie, Archie Green, Norm Cohen, et al. moved that Anglo-centered, origins-and-diffusion discipline into ethnographic directions that were very appealing. I have independent evidence for this in a 1983 review in Journal of American Folklore by Jack Santino of my book Tenement Songs: “Slobin’s book shows, among other things, the influence the discipline of folkore has had and is having on related disciplines. Slobin is using anthropological, sociolinguistic, and folkloristic approaches to the study of popular culture, and this is to be praised.” Needless to say, it was a review I relished.
Crossover ethnomusicologists such as Jeff Titon also began to notice folklore, as did Steven Feld, who understood early on that ethnomusicology could only thrive with an acute awareness of linguistics, anthropology, folklore and even the new film studies. It was a heady period in the 1970s and early 1980s before cultural studies vacuumed up much of this energy and flavored it with European philosophy. I appreciated the turn towards “agency” and “actors.” Some of British cultural studies got through to me-Stuart Hall-, and its cousins in the US, with the work o f people such as Appadurai. Assorted thinkers who were also friends-- James Clifford, Hayden White, Paul Gilroy--left a personal imprint on my imagination. Conversations are the great unsung actors on the intellectual stage.
All along, I was in touch with and appreciated our European colleagues, mostly unknown to the surging American ethnomusicology scene. Schooled by that great bridge-builder Barbara Krader, I read works in Russian and German and traveled about making contacts. Despite the baleful influence of state socialism and leftover nationalisms (now resurgent, alas), scholars did deeply-documented explorations into vernacular cultures, sometimes in interdisciplinary teams, a valuable mode of work that Americans have never learned to use. While I thought some of their philological pettifogging was too narrow and didn’t share their political and ideological rubrics (some forced on them, some locally understood), I respected their thoroughness and dedication to the valuable work of analysis and archiving.
A significant chunk of my work has been filial piety, one word for shining a spotlight on what my predecessors accomplished. Like all of American academia, ethnomusicology has a short memory and a competitive approach to accumulated knowledge that values the most recent work above earlier contributions. I constantly admonished graduate students to look back as well as around and not to disparage “old” work from five years earlier, or even last year.
I also organized three anthologies, believing that collegial collaboration is basic to advancing any area of study. In a similar spirit, in 1971 I took on a brochure-sized fledgling journal called Asian Music at the request of Willard Rhodes, a largely-forgotten member of the four founders of SEM. What a project for a beginning Assistant Professor, with zero institutional support and only typewriters and letters as ways to produce issues! But I’m please that the journal has survived and thrived. I was able to bring attention to neglected topics through special issues and far-flung contributors not in the American mainstream.
Always interested in broadening the discourse, around 1998 I invented a monograph series, American Musicspheres, at Oxford University Press with the encouragement of editor Maribeth Payne. I was impatient with American music studies, which only took up “black and white” issues, and pretty narrowly at that, disregarding the churning volatility of the music culture of the United States, so interactive with the source lands of its immigrants and its neighbors. Maribeth advised me to write the first book in the series as a model, so as I was working on the klezmer movement, I turned out Fiddler on the Move in short order. The series continues now, in the early 2020s, with over twenty diverse titles, but we have barely scratched the surface of the deep and churning life of music in the United States.
I tended always to turn towards seeing how small musical systems interact with the general social structures and with each other. In 1990, I wrote “Micromusics of the West,” which became Subcultural Sounds as a broad summary statement. Surprisingly, since I didn’t really know how the essay would shape up when I started, it became a classic, for which I remain grateful. Often you write something you value and feel as if you’ve dropped a stone down a well – you listen for the impact, but perhaps you never hear it, until decades later someone says how much they were affected by one work or another or you see a citation that brings you back to what you were thinking long ago.
After 2000, I started to gather my thoughts on film music and in 2013 turned my thoughts to my hometown of Detroit, a retrospective move that comes with age and has become fashionable. It’s curious that despite the beating that subjectivity took after Writing Culture in 1986, there’s less of a problem now articulating a very personal vision while presenting data or history.
Finally, I have been deeply influenced by my many colleagues and students over 45 years at Wesleyan, a unique, somewhat utopian space of musical interaction and learning. It all started with getting to know David McAllester, a fascinating figure who became a fast friend. I constantly bumped into other ways of thinking, such as Sumarsam’s intervention in gamelan studies, or the string of impressive analytical studies of Carnatic music that I oversaw while advising figures like Viswanathan and Jon Higgins. You can read my account of the local atmosphere in an essay in the Comparative Topics section, “The Wesleyan Way.”
Even with its current doubts and hesitations, ethnomusicology remains a vital force in public and academic discourse. I’m pleased to have been able to observe and help shape its first decades of flowering in the United States.