Classes seventeen and eighteen: Music and Dance

This is Emily, the one who went to the vet. As I write this, she is recovering from a weekend during which my wife's parents were visiting, bringing along with them their dog, named Puppy. (I bet there's a great story behind that one.) She is fine now, but was not happy.

But enough about the world's awesomest cat, we are talking about music and dance.

Very simply, when one moves from the observance of (seemingly) straightforward performances - straightforward only in terms of a self-evident primary media for data collection - to more complex ones, one needs to expand one's repertoire of media and admit (which is not a big admission) that one needs a variety of media to make sense of it.

Take dance, and ethnochoreography (*sigh*). Photography, ethnography, interview: they would get a flavour of things, but wouldn't it be better to (a) have a medium that allows for both sound and vision recording of homeostatic phenomena (they do: film) and (b) have a medium for communicating movement on the page (they do: dance transcription)?

The lesson that can be learned from this is twofold:

1. the ability to study a phenomena is predicated on the access to a technology to research it properly. Complaining about nineteenth century folklorists' ambivalent attitudes to dance from a twenty-first century perspective is akin to deriding eighteenth century studies of epidemics and the concept of 'bad air': they didn't have microscopes, so cut them some frigging slack.
2. all human performance is complex: no medium exhausts one aspect of it. But the narrowing of focus to one aspect of it can nevertheless be fruitful if one is self-aware of this limiting.

The next aspect that 'separates' contemporary music and dance study - the staked claim domain of ethno- types - is the centrality of participant observation, where you not only observe and interact with the performers, you become one yourself. Only by doing are you really learning.

*hem*

Participant observation - as folklorists understand it - is the basis of all contemporary folklore scholarship. It is the involvement of the self within the community and the slow path of discovering what it is to be a member. When it comes to music and dance, the folkloristic approach is to learn what it is to be, shall we say, an audience. If that involves clapping or singing along, shaking one's ass, whatever, it is fine. But it is not trying to 'be' a tradition bearer. That is - qu'est-ce que c'est la mot juste? ah, oui - hippie liberal white bread suburban bullshit.

With that we take a deep breath and leave the topic for the day.