In September, 1964 I returned to the University of Michigan after spending what my junior and senior at the Manhattan School of Music, pursuing violin dreams.
One day in the Michigan Union cafeteria, I noticed an intense fellow reading some book that caught my eye and got me to starting a conversation. It was Bob Sheff, later known as Blue Gene Tyranny, keyboard virtuoso, erudite discographer and intellectual, and a member of the ONCE Festival, the major experimental music movement based in Ann Arbor. Bob is perhaps still best known for bringing Iggy Pop into the local band The Prime Movers, as well as his work with Robert Ashley’s operas.
We became fast friends quickly, spending many hours listening to music. He taught me to value Roy Orbison, Gene Pitney and others I had never heard of and to notice modal and untempered singing in early Motown records. I’m not sure what I traded, but I think we shared German literature and classical music, though I imagine I brought rare early world music recordings from my first seminar in Ethnomusicology with Bill Malm, starting in January of 1965.
Bob brought me into the charmed ONCE crowd, where I became a bit player in what turned out to be an historic moment in American music of the 1960s. Of that more senior crowd, Gordon Mumma became the most lasting friend over the years, but I got to know Bob Ashley and the rest and to appear in some seminal concerts. Sheff and I hosted our own concert at the Ann Arbor Public Library as activists in a kind of minor-league branch of ONCE. It all somehow became historic.
I’m not sure how we got the idea of approaching Michigan’s excellent literary magazine, Generation, to pitch a lengthy two-part article on the American experimental music scene, in Ann Arbor and elsewhere. It was the first-ever such survey and was also my first appearance in print. I can’t believe that I was only 21 and Sheff just 19 when “Music Beyond the Boundaries” appeared. Its innovative format of text flanked and spaced by scores and photographs was cutting-edge modernist for music criticism of the day.
I met Dick Spottswood through a 1976 conference about Ethnic Sound Recordings, the first recognition of the huge volume of 78 rpm records produced in the United States with subcultural content. This opening aligned with the Bicentennial/Carter presidency moment when America moved towards a social and cultural realization of the changing demographic facts created by the 1965 immigration law, which diversified the population. The new term “ethnicity” also served as a response by Euro-Americans to insurgent Black activism and “Black Pride.”
Dick scoured and catalogued the files of the major record labels to scrupulously document content, dates, and who had actually been paid for the sessions. He produced a multi-volume discography of ethnic recording, a milestone in American music studies.
I followed up with Dick as part of my full-scale inquiry into Jewish-American music of the early twentieth century. We noticed a curious fellow with various names and ensemble links called David Medoff, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who sang in different languages under various names for diverse target markets. We staked a claim for comparativism, deliberately cross-cutting the rising ethnic boundaries of American politics and society, to underscore the complexity, ambiguity, and entrepreneurial initiative of commercial music. We also pointed to local marketing in a neighborhood such as New York’s Lower East Side, where Ukrainians and Jews continued the musical contact begun back in Europe.
This essay began as a paper delivered at the first symposium of the Iconography Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music, at The Hague in 1985. Graciously invited by Tilmann Seebass, I found myself among a group of more traditional iconography scholars who worked on the images of the past, while I rather cheekily surveyed the vinyl record jacket covers of American klezmer and polka bands. I had been doing iconography studies for a while, leading to the chapter on the imagery of Jewish-produced sheet music in Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (1982).