Over time, you find your temperament leads you to particular perspectives, methods, and theoretical outlook in fieldwork and writing. Maybe because I was brought up in a multilingual context with a strong historical sense of family origins in a major multicultural city and was taken at age ten to live in Europe for a year, or simply because I’m Jewish, I’ve always tended towards the comparative.
I’ve included a number of articles here, but others could be cross-referenced from different headings on this topic.
This was a bold attempt at interdisciplinary communication from an ethnomusicologist to the emerging field of sociolinguistics, and I was delighted that they accepted it. It has much of the argument and some of the examples I later deployed in the Micromusics project (Subcultural Sounds , eventually).
“A great many of the world’s folksongs have been, and still are, sung by multilingual singers. I have tried to show how subtly multilingual singers handle their linguistic resources; they seem to use them as a factor for creative choice.”
This appeal to agency--how individuals deploy their cultural resources--became a rallying-cry of my comparative writing, as opposed to the more totalizing approaches in some of the 1970s-1990s literature.
The field encouraged me to become a summarizer and suggester. I wrote two articles for the Yearbook for Traditional Music, one surveying a conference in Visby, Sweden and the other a symposium I organized at Wesleyan on issues of multiculturalism and multiplicity. Using metaphors to suggest methodologies, these pieces spoke to the liveliness of ethnomusicology as it moved forward into an ever more complicated world of social engineering, local subcultural agency, and commercial exploitation of musical resources. As I said, “We need many-sided models to match the musical multiplicity which is outpacing our discourse, and this short essay is meant only as a suggestive intervention…The turnover of terms will keep us busier than usual as the twenty-first century comes into its own.”
Looking back, it seems that instead of generating our own terminology, we accelerated our habit of taking terms and jargon from the interdisciplinary discourses of the day. I commented on this situation in remarks that closed out a day-long consideration of theory in ethnomusicology organized by Tim Rice at UCLA on the occasion of his retirement. Surveying the variety of theoretical approaches I had taken over the years, I ended this way:
Is there a theory there? I doubt it. I think each phase of our personal engagement with musical contexts suggests its own management. I often tell students to let the data speak to them rather than tell it how to behave. Maybe that’s a theory of ethnomusicology after all.
As if that didn’t sound skeptical enough, I added an improvised closing peroration. Having heard people all day referencing this “turn” and that “turn” as guides for ethnomusicology, I offered the metaphor of the sunflower, that spends all day turning its head toward the sun. I said I hoped our field stopped being a sunflower and instead provide illumination of its own for others to absorb.
I did a review of recent trends in ethnomusicology for a German publication in 2011. It summarizes the first decade of the twenty-first century, describing some trends that have continued, but many which have declined, supporting my view that we follow new fads and tend to veer off what might have been our own internal pathways. So there’s nothing on sound studies, or post-human studies, though applied ethnomusicology carries on. Diaspora seems to be now replaced by refugee and migration issues, which doesn’t quite overlap. Film studies hasn’t taken off as much as I would have hoped, as new streaming services, video games, etc. have risen in importance. But no point my summarizing all this in 2021 when it will shift again soon enough.
Another comparative commission came my way through a request to summarize a conference on Sacred Music directed by Philip Bohlman and Jeffers Engelhardt. I thought it useful to add my closing remarks here as another example of comparativism but also of my playing with terminology. “Oscillation” came to me, so I saddled it up and gave it a run.
I took a completely different approach to comparativism in response to an invitation to a symposium to honor the memory of Hayden White, a seminal thinker who was also a close friend. Hayden’s work is philosophically and historically dense, so I was rather intimidated at how to respond from my outsider position as an ethnomusicologist, when everyone else would doubtless reflect the professional toolbox and terminology of the journal History & Theory that Hayden founded and which sponsored the event. I came up with something both personal and analytical that completely lacked any musical content, reflecting my long-term interest on the implications of photography I had just done another version of this non-musical, paper for a new journal of ideas and re-purposed the approach by adding hopefully apt references to Hayden’s work. Alas, the symposium was canceled due to Covid-19 and the paper remains unpublished.
To round out comparativism, I’ve added a piece commissioned by CDIME, an international music education organization. It’s a survey of “the Wesleyan way,” the unique history and approach of the department I taught in from 1971-2016. Guided by a founding vision of two visionary educators, Richard K. Winslow and David McAllester, Wesleyan has since 1962 offered an integrated view of music as research, study, performance, and composition due to our privileged position as an entirely autonomous Music Department at a liberal arts college that gave us a graduate program supported by an outsized number of faculty lines. This is not exactly “comparativism,” since every music tradition is treated equally and on its own terms, though cross-referencing comes naturally in the spirit of open collaborative exploration of music, broadly considered.