(This is the research proposal written for ‘Anthropology Today: Ethnographies and Entanglements around the World’ taught by Prof Mekhala Krishnamurthy.)
The title of this research proposal ‘And we had a talk’ has been borrowed from a beautiful soundtrack from the maestro of Indian Carnatic music Ilyaraja from his 1987 instrumental album ‘How to name it’, which presents a string dialogue between Thiyagraja, a religious musician and composer, and J.S. Bach, the Western classical music composer (Thanks Jayesh!). I think the title is quite appropriate for the work undertaken here because through various ethnographic dialogues with trained musicians, music professionals, music lovers and tech savvy urban people I’m attempting to understand the two broader questions: How do you listen and appreciate music individually and culturally? How do you seem to get transformed by music collectively?
‘For twenty five centuries Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing… Now we must learn to judge a society by its noise.’
Joachim Ernst Berendt, German Music journalist and author of book ‘The world is sound’, suggests that human experience can only be accounted through ‘democracy of the senses.’ The fundamental idea is inadequacy of visual basis in description, analysis and understanding of our social world. Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology and author of book ‘The Craftsman’, says that it’s difficult to separate out our senses, so the sounds produced through the musician’s art are products of his or her sense of touch and feel- ‘lips applied to reed, fingers pushing down on keys or strings.’ The experience of everyday life is increasingly mediated by a multitude of mechanically reproduced sounds. Urban soundscape (a term coined by Canadian composer and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer to denote the natural acoustic environment and human created sound) presents formidable challenges for individuals in letting music and associated technological accessories transform their perception and experience while navigating through urban landscape. This musicalization of society-omnipresence of music in society-has brought a fundamental shift in the way music is perceived, understood and consumed.
Gustav Mahler, Philip Glass, Anotonio Vivaldi, Pt Ravi Shankar, Gundecha brothers, Ustad Sultan Khan, Karsh kale, Anoushka Shankar. I have been listening to music quite actively. Since last few months, I’ve pursued listening-both active and deep-with a single minded dedication and undivided attention. Lately I have also delved myself into paying closer attention to ambient noises-dripping water at shower, rustling of leaves at Sanjay Van, screeching sound of tyre. For me it has become an engaging process that has begun to enrich my emotional and aesthetic sensibility. I have felt quite the same as ‘Sitting on small stools on a concrete floor, they listen like they mean it. ’ Through the two above mentioned involvement, I have often wondered about the boundary between music and noise. And therefore, I was deeply astonished when I came across a sound art project-U.S.O. project– which modifies the ambient noise and sound to create innovative musical compositions. The boundaries between music and noise are socially constructed and historically changing. This trouble I have experienced again and again while living here in Delhi, mindlessly and cautiously waiting for alienate myself from society for a while to experience music. The difficulty lies here in controlling the environment when the possibility to intrude on this carefully managed aesthetic and emotional experience becomes large.
I cannot fight off this thought that the music has its best place within itself and I believe that this makes a certain musical piece capable of getting uniquely experienced when a person with true compassion enfolds it within his heart and shapes it as he desires. This is something that conjoins cognition, experience and culture. This is essentially a study of individual’s perception, reception and transition from individual to cultural and to social at large.
How do you attune yourself to multiple layers of aural texture embedded in the same music, when it doesn’t seem possible to simultaneously segregate and then integrate these layered composition cognitively? How does layered composition come into being physically through creative tensions across various collaborative processes? What are the important considerations that determine your appreciation for a certain piece of music, when the sound and noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse socio-cultural contexts? What makes this collective act of listening to a musical piece transformative, when at an individual level we attempt to discover our own connection? How do you listen and appreciate music individually and culturally? How do you seem to get transformed by music collectively?
The above questions for the benefit of doing ethnographic study gets transformed into the following questions: What are different listening practices in various socio-cultural settings? How does this knowledge about listening practices get communicated across generations? Why do certain musical pieces find its places in certain cultural societies? How does shared experience of musical piece get shaped?
At the basis of our study, there are two questions: the understanding and appreciation of music at an individual and cultural level; the performative and transformative act of engagement at a collective level.
There have been many approaches-musicology, psychology, cognitive sciences, philosophy- towards understanding phenomena of listening and appreciation of music. But every point of entry towards understanding collaborative processes through which an aesthetic experience gets created is and has to be multi-disciplinary, since the psychology and cognitive studies study these phenomena outside social and cultural context due to its lack of specificity. Ethnographic studies consider the first step as enculturation of sound and is not devoid of psychological insights, as Maurice Bloch states‘I would argue that all ethnographers employ, whether they are aware of it or not, general psychological theories as soon as they try to make us understand how the people they study see the world and what motivates them in their actions.’ Children develop their communicative skills by developing and differentiating their listening to specific kind of sounds. Language helps children construct a referential meaning to grasp the meanings embodied in and through sound. Regina Bendix argues, contrary to held views of Greg Urban’s cultural determinism of sensual experience, that the sensual processes facilitated in the process of listening are less subject to immediate social ordering compared to visual and tactile processes. A study of black music, in Paul Gilroy’s book ‘There ain’t no black in the union jack’, rendering and recovering traces of past and present of African diaspora clearly underlines the relationship between the aesthetics and form of the music and the contexts of consumption. This understanding can be beautifully captured in words of Richard Bouman and Joel Sherzer,‘We took it as our task that there is a pattern, there is a systematic coherence, and there is difference in the ways listening is organized from one society to another, and this pattern, this difference are to be discovered ethnographically.’ A similar study is presented in Pandora Hopkins’ book ‘Aural Thinking’, where she observed and analyzed impression of the beat patterns Norwegian hardingfele fiddle pieces in Indian Violin player, Greek lyra musician and American violinist. Bruno Deschenes quite pertinently argues about finding universals in particulars, if the wide-ranging diversity, flexibility and malleability of music-through improvisations and compositions-is ignored.
According to John Cage, American composer and music theorist, the qualification of sounds as noise is not so much related to intrinsic sound properties but our basic attitude towards what we consider to be musical, which are acquired specific to environment. This is best described in his words: ‘Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.’
In recent years, there have been surge in number of musical events worldwide to disrupt technology enabled habitual ways of listening and to provide novel ways of immersing into sensual experiences. The significance of performative and shared aspect of musical experience can be best illustrated through an open public concert ‘hike within sound’(Klangwanderung) by Trio Clarion, a group of three clarinetists based in Vienna, at the Gosaukamm in Dachstein mountains in Jul 1995. There was hardly a clear idea in audience’s mind about how to participate in this unusual experience, quite different from typical concert hall musical experience. Amidst people clambering from one rocky spot to another in quest of tuning continually, people sitting in various positions and postures was clearly an illustration of different ways in people could strive to listen and experience Mozart. As Regina Bendix states ‘There was a constant suffusing of winds, spreading them and leading to unfamiliar cross currents, birds cruised by, rocks slithered away from under the feet of those who had stationed themselves in more precarious places, talks about requests for help with getting better footing to’. Playing outdoor in this scenic elevated position was a. This clearly articulates different aural experiences by musicians themselves and the shared sensory experience of familiar sounds in unfamiliar space by individuals.
The methodology is to perform a multi-site ethnographic study of five sites corresponding to the questions-
- Sree Seetharam Anjeneya Kendra (SSAK) Vedic centre, Trivandrum, Kerala, India; This was established in 1982 with an objective to preserve and propagate the value of Vedas to the present generation. [Listening practices]
- Dhrupad Sansthan, Bhopal,India; This UNESCO accredited institute aims to preserve and promote the rich heritage of Indian classical form Dhrupad through a Guru-Shishya tradition under Gundcha brothers, one of India’s leading exponent of Dhrupad music. [Music appreciation]
- First Nights class, A class on Music at Harvard University by Prof Thomas Kelly. This class is about what it was like to be present at the first performances of five famous pieces of classical music. [Music understanding and varied interpretation due to diversity of class]
- MTV Coke Studio/Unplugged performance, Indian television series featuring live performances; Coke Studio is a confluence of a diverse number of music genres from traditional eastern to modern western, from regional to folk. [Diverse Music and cultural signature]
- Mozart and Strauss Concerts, Shoenbrunn Palace Orangery Vienna, Austria; In Austrian Culture, appreciation of music-classical and otherwise-is deeply valued.In its historic ambience the Shoenbrunn Palace Orchestra performs the most beautiful works of Mozart and Strauss. [Shared music experience]
The above research involves both sociological (the musicians, their roles, their audiences), musicological (the instruments, elements of style,) and cultural aspect. I would like to investigate into various questions by situating myself in the above mentioned places and observing practices, methods and experiencing live performances of certain musical recordings, which lack certain visual dimension, despite its repeatability and portability.The problem, however, is that these understanding might be inaccessible to ethnographic observation. As Roland Barthes says, confronted with music there is poverty of language; we simply don’t have the words to transpose the alchemy of sound.
I understand there are sufficient challenges-informational, ethical, technical- but I believe that this study will be able to attain a fair amount of understanding of the underlying issue and finally to summarize in words of Michael Tilson Thomas, the acclaimed conductor and winner of National Medal of Arts:
You don’t need to worry about knowing anything. If you’re curious, if you’ve capacity for wonder, if you’re alive, you know all you need to know. You can start anywhere. Ramble a bit. Follow traces. Get lost. Be surprised, amused and inspired. All that what, All that how is out there waiting for you to discover its why. To dive in and pass it on.
References:
1. Bloch, Maurice E. F., How we think they think: Anthropological approaches to cognition, memory and literacy, Westview Press, 1998
2. Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, Bauman, Richard and Sherzer, Joel, Cambridge University Press, 1989,
3. Towards an anthropology of music listening, Deschenes, B., International Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 1998
4. Pleasures of the ear, Bendix, Regina
5. Site for soar ears, Bell, Clive, The Wire: Adventures in modern music, 2003.
6. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacque Attali
Know Thyself! 