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 Five additional musical studies are added to this book, which had previously gone unpublished, and they add a lot of value to the overall goal of musical analysis.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?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment