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Lee Haring - Review of Anna Lomax Wood, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music

Lee Haring - Review of Anna Lomax Wood, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music


Photograph of women dancing in dresses

Once, at a meeting of ethnomusicologists, I played some tapes of singing I’d recorded from Kamba singers in Kenya a few years before. In commenting, I used concepts I learned from Alan Lomax. Afterward, a helpful colleague explained to me that these were not accepted notions in his field. Though he dissuaded me from presenting papers about music ever again, I continued to follow Alan’s work until it got out of my reach. Now his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, director of the Association for Cultural Equity (www.culturalequity.org), defends and updates his system for coding features of song performance around the world. Her account of the history of Cantometrics (Lomax 1976), the audacious contributions to it from interested scholars, and new advances by co-authors Stella Silbert, Karen Claman, Kiki Smith-Archiapatti, and Violet Baron, all confirm Lomax’s pre-eminent position as both fieldworker and theorist. Alan’s totalizing reach was inseparable from his insistence on authenticity and local authority. Indeed, beyond an improved Cantometrics lies the Grand Theory American folklorists are thought to lack (Haring 2016). Her book, both admirable and formidable, augurs a future for all folklore studies.

Despite her title, the central object of study is singing, i.e., performance. First she summarizes the “broad, culturally balanced method of musical description and analysis” (3) that her father developed with colleagues Conrad Arensberg and Victor Grauer. They set up descriptive features from 1,800 songs around the world to be “coded” by listeners. (Now, extensive online examples can be found at www.culturalequity.org/songs-of-earth/musical-examples.) “Lomax...hoped that the dissemination of this perspective would help to bring about greater recognition and appreciation of the aesthetic values of all people” (3).

Chapter 2 clarifies Cantometrics by applying its concepts to the heterogeneity of American popular music; readers will recognize the examples. Then comes the how-to-do-it book (chapters 3 and 4), a self-teaching course. The reader becomes a novice researcher, learning how to code features of song performance. These chapters, with the detailed appendices (pages 383-404), could be a separate publication, if not for the need to show other audiences where the system stands today. Hence the rest of the book, which implies that research henceforward will take in both past and future. Honor, for instance, is paid to the classic Sachs-Hornbostel system of instrument classification (not handy for non-musicologist readers). Future directions show in chapters 11 and 12.

Chapter 5, “The Urban Strain,” returning to American popular music, adds fifteen performance features to those in the coding sheet in the self-teacher. Chapter 6, “Personnel and Orchestra,” presents a revised coding sheet for ensembles. Two chapters by Stella Silbert (chapters 7 and 8) bring Cantometrics closer to folklorists’ studies of performance. Chapter 7, titled “Minutage: Phrasing and Breath Management in Singing,” based on research in 1966-1972, applies the concerns and methods cross-culturally to “time structure in song.” The most obvious and most individualized regulator of time structure is breathing. So Minutage adds a new coding sheet to the existing ones (pages 274-299). Chapter 8, “Phonotactics,” adds another dimension, the study of vowel and consonant patterns. Vowel patterns are correlated with gender roles, and consonant patterns with degrees of socioeconomic complexity, leading to two possible confirmations: (1) “Consonant frequencies shift in relation to technological sophistication and socioeconomic complexity.” (2) Gender roles and sexual mores correlate with shifts in vowel articulation (312-313). Correlations like these will inspire distrust among scholars whose training and interests, indeed their concept of their field, direct them to avoid such generalizations. But those correlations open Lomax’s comparative ethnomusicology to ethnolinguistic research. American folklorists can be more trusting: some of us recall Kenneth Goldstein’s rallying cry, “Folklore is the only truly interdisciplinary field!”

Alan Lomax’s initial correlations between music and society have shown promise, have been seriously criticized by some, and now are improved at the hands of others. So the chapters of Part III point to the future. Respecting the positive additions to Cantometrics, Anna Lomax Wood sees even severe criticisms as means towards reviving the study. One chapter proposes broadening music education with six learning strategies from the online course; young people may be expected to develop research topics of their own. Another chapter reports on a use of “contemporary [2017] statistical methods to replicate the clustering analysis done fifty years ago.” Thereby cultures around the world were grouped together on the basis of their musical styles (pages 330-348). Chapter 12 opens a dialogue with critics, to correct misunderstandings and welcome new approaches like the alternative methods and data developed by Patrick E. Savage.

Ethnomusicologists in the 1960s-70s had a right to expect new findings to be couched in the language they were trained in. If Lomax’s data and analyses then didn’t match their expectations, the reformulations by Savage, long-time collaborator Victor Grauer, and others now promise a bright future. Indeed, some of the most potent information in this book arrives only in the four appendices and the lists of sources. The major tool for “exploring, learning and research” is what Lomax charmingly christened The Global Jukebox (www.theglobaljukebox.org) an extensive database of “the expressive arts as cultural phenomena” that anyone can listen to. The present corpus numbers some 6,000 songs.

To end the book, Alan Lomax has the last word. His classic “Appeal for Cultural Equity” (1972) still calls for “greater recognition and appreciation of the aesthetic values of all people” (3). How will an improved Cantometrics facilitate that? Is it possible for listeners (whoever we are) to stand outside all of the world’s singing and let go of our cultural assumptions as we listen? That detached commitment is what this book calls for. What is required to make the study, the accumulation of knowledge and hypotheses about it, possible? Can the hypothesis that some musical variables will be found in all cultures be fully confirmed? Can such a project go forward as an interdisciplinary, international collaboration, organized in a decentered way? The history of UNESCO’s program of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity is not encouraging. Few folk music enthusiasts will be attracted to “technical” ways of thinking about what they love. Specialists shown in this book, and others, will have to continue perfecting the data and revising Alan Lomax’s hypotheses, and then bring out their conclusions in language the world will understand. The magnitude of such an enormous project is visible in Songs of Earth, as is Alan Lomax’s overwhelming optimism about it. Anna Lomax Wood shares that optimism: “You do not have the right to put your recordings in a drawer and forget about them” (328).

Works Cited

Alan Lomax. 1976. Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music. Berkeley: University of California Extension Media Center.

Lee Haring, ed., 2016. Grand Theory in Folkloristics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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[Review length: 1121 words • Review posted on November 22, 2024]