Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music
by Anna Lomax Wood (Music 780.89 Woo)
John Lomax was one of the earliest
song collectors and musicologists, a folklorist who saw an opportunity for us
to preserve traditional forms of music by recording them for future reference.
His son Alan Lomax continued and expanded this work to include as much of the
world as possible, and helped to put these recordings in safe places like the
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, as well as helping to
produce many commercially-available recordings so that the general public could
hear what he and his father were preserving.
Once you’ve collected as much music
as John and Alan Lomax, and we’re talking about many thousands of songs between
the two of them, it stands to reason that you’re going to need some methods to
compare, categorize, and just generally try to understand the relationships
between musical traditions from around the world. What commonalities can be
found? What makes particular traditions unique? As one of the first people to
have so many recordings from so many places at his fingertips for
consideration, Alan began developing his own systems for comparing musical
styles, developing a list of qualities for comparison that he eventually
started calling “cantometrics,” or the measurement of songs. He first published
his “Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music” in 1976.
Alan’s daughter Anna Lomax Wood has
continued the work of her father and grandfather. She took over as director of
the Association for Cultural Equity founded by her father, and continued to
help develop his vision of multimedia archives of folk traditions from around
the world, to be accessible for everyone. Alan’s concept of a “global jukebox”
was brought to fruition by Anna, and she has continued to create commercial
recordings from the Lomax archives. Through her decades of experience with
these materials, she has now updated Alan’s book on cantometrics. The result is
called Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music,
and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
In her editor’s note, Wood
discusses the significance of the material in this volume: she has completely
rewritten Alan’s “Cantometrics” book from 1976 — this is a new book for a new
century. The overall analysis system remains the same, but Wood’s rewriting of
the subject helps to keep the material relevant for contemporary audiences.
Five additional musical studies are added to this book, which had previously
gone unpublished, and they add a lot of value to the overall goal of musical
analysis. Cantometrics itself focuses almost completely on the use of the human
voice in music, and some of these additional studies add “Personnel &
Orchestra,” “Urban Strain,” and “Social Factors” as tools to further
investigate music. Two of the unpublished studies, “Phonotactics” and
“Minutage,” add more detail to the analysis of vocal music, too.
But perhaps the most important
updated element related to this book are musical examples themselves. For the
average reader, this will all be interesting enough on paper, but applying it
to recorded musical examples makes understanding all of this far easier and
more rewarding. You will find a link in the book to a page of recordings used
in the original “Cantometrics” publication, which has also been expanded to
include lots of contemporary examples as well. When you click on the links to
individual songs on that page, you’ll be taken to the Global Jukebox, where you
can listen while examining a wealth of information related to each song. This
ends up working as an excellent introduction to the Global Jukebox, which is
itself a stunning interactive exhibit of music throughout time and place.
Through the Global Jukebox, you can also access a 5-part course based on the Songs of Earth book, which helps to bring all of
these concepts together even more. Ultimately, this is one of those rare books
that comes prepared to take you through its own pages and then even further
into multimedia self-guided learning. Whether you’re just curious about all of
this stuff, or you find yourself compelled to learn everything you can about
it, you’ll find a path through “Songs of Earth” that will meet your needs.
Returning to the book, knowing that
cantometrics will help us to find both distinctive and shared qualities among
forms of music, cantometric data is put into use early in the text to trace the
development of American pop music. Through this analysis, some of the
constituent parts of cantometrics are gradually introduced, such as looking at
relative “cohesiveness,” “inclusivity,” overlapping or interlocking parts,
tonal blend, rhythmic coordination, repetition, energy, tempos, volume, pitch
ranges, melodic phrases, vocal effects and articulations, and so on. Looking at
all of the attributes in music from around the world and in pop music itself,
it becomes clear that there are many commonalities between American pop music
and Afro-diasporic and European settlers in America. One can further drill down
and look at commonalities within subgenres of music from many places and within
many eras, revealing a different perspective for looking through music history
by looking at traits of music itself.
After this, we get into a more
technical section about how to code cantometric measurements, considering
dozens of variables about the music or the group making it. This is followed by
the Songs of Earth Course, in which readers get to try out applying these
principles to a bunch of music themselves. This is the same material found on
the Global Jukebox website, which is also referenced in the book. As mentioned
before, if one chooses to try out the course, it’s a self-guided experience.
The book estimates that going through all of the materials will take about 40
hours altogether, split up however might be convenient for readers. And you
don’t need to hold onto this book just for that part—this section is fairly
small and the text is also included on the Global Jukebox site.
Parts 2 and 3 of the book go into
the previously-unpublished areas that supplement the basic cantometric
framework with additional considerations. After these, there is a section that
reveals some broad findings that seem reasonable based on cantometric
measurements, some of which were surprising to me. Precise enunciation is more
common in large societies with powerful governments, for example, while
smaller, less authoritarian societies also seem to have less formal enunciation
in their songs. It’s important to note, though, that the value of these cantrometric
findings tends to be more big-picture and more about commonalities. If you want
to learn more about the specifics of a given musical culture, your best bet is
still a deep dive directly into their music, perhaps supplemented with
cantometrics for context. This section is followed by a short chapter regarding
criticisms of cantometrics, and recent approaches that have been incorporated
into ethnomusicology research that can help to reveal the true complexities of
cultures over time. Research like this is always difficult because culture is
always dynamic, always evolving and responding to changes in circumstances,
while research that looks at longer-term trends must average things out and
make them look more static than they really were.
The final portion of the main body
of the text comes from Alan Lomax himself, an essay called “An Appeal for
Cultural Equity.” If the stakes regarding preservation and celebration of all
of this musical diversity weren’t clear yet, Lomax lays them out plainly here:
modern life is homogenizing the world. Small pockets of unique cultures around
the world are dying out, and with them go their languages, their music, their
poetry, their art, their dances, and we are all poorer for it. Ultimately he
goes beyond music here, arguing for the protection and active support of unique
cultural artifacts and living cultures everywhere. He mentions Nashville as a
case study in the support of unique cultures: the city became the music hotspot
it remains today by broadcasting the unique local music flavors of its area on
its radio stations, which of course grew into a massive tradition of music
loved by people around the world since then. So support local music, and the
idea of local music everywhere!
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish
to try Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World by John F.
Szwed, America Over the Water by Shirley Collins or Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper
Midwest, 1937-1946 by James P. Leary.)
( Wikipedia entry on Anna Lomax
Wood )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Librarary
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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