Ethnomusicology: really it's all practice
The weekend of September 17 marked the first time members of the BBJ team have come together to read papers as a panel at a scholarly conference. It was the annual meeting of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, this year held at The Open University right here in Milton Keynes.
Three members of the research team delivered papers. Mark Doffman developed the concept of ‘temporal power’, discussing rhythmic competence and its implications for the social standing of musicians. Jason Toynbee examined a number of key moments in the history of black jazz musicians in the United Kingdom, locating a number of transformations in the ways that race has been experienced in relation to music. And my own paper examined the social and musical roles enacted and occupied at jam sessions.
I thought the team’s diversity was well displayed, not least methodologically. The papers drew upon historical documents, interviews conducted with musicians, and experiences and encounters at jazz gigs and jam sessions.
* * * * *
Part of my own work on the project, as a longtime jazz fan but not a jazz musician, has involved hands-on experience of the music: sitting down at the piano and banging through standards in the Real Book, getting my head, ears, and hands around jazz harmonies, and trying to improvise around chord changes.
When I get back from a jam session or a concert I’ll work through some of the standards I’ve just heard – this week’s projects have been ‘Billie’s Bounce’ (Charlie Parker), Footprints’ (Wayne Shorter), ‘Giant Steps’ (John Coltrane), and ‘Anthropology’ (Parker again). Good stuff. And arguably this is the most important literature survey I could be doing at the moment. Having a familiarity with the tunes is an essential part of the process of becoming attuned to the moment-to-moment interactions and role-inhabitancies of jazz musicians. It’s also incredibly helpful to have this kind of knowledge when conducting interviews with musicians or interacting in less formal contexts. In any number of respects, it just helps to know the tunes: which forms they use, which ones have eight-bar phrasing all the way through and which ones don’t, which ones make use of familiar structures like the ‘Rhythm’ changes – and of course which ones are difficult and which ones are tough.
This aspect of my own participant observation is entirely characteristic of ethnomusicology and other music-related disciplines and one of the things that makes them unique in the humanities: our scholarly objects tend to be experienced in particularly aural and embodied ways.
Three members of the research team delivered papers. Mark Doffman developed the concept of ‘temporal power’, discussing rhythmic competence and its implications for the social standing of musicians. Jason Toynbee examined a number of key moments in the history of black jazz musicians in the United Kingdom, locating a number of transformations in the ways that race has been experienced in relation to music. And my own paper examined the social and musical roles enacted and occupied at jam sessions.
I thought the team’s diversity was well displayed, not least methodologically. The papers drew upon historical documents, interviews conducted with musicians, and experiences and encounters at jazz gigs and jam sessions.
* * * * *
Part of my own work on the project, as a longtime jazz fan but not a jazz musician, has involved hands-on experience of the music: sitting down at the piano and banging through standards in the Real Book, getting my head, ears, and hands around jazz harmonies, and trying to improvise around chord changes.
When I get back from a jam session or a concert I’ll work through some of the standards I’ve just heard – this week’s projects have been ‘Billie’s Bounce’ (Charlie Parker), Footprints’ (Wayne Shorter), ‘Giant Steps’ (John Coltrane), and ‘Anthropology’ (Parker again). Good stuff. And arguably this is the most important literature survey I could be doing at the moment. Having a familiarity with the tunes is an essential part of the process of becoming attuned to the moment-to-moment interactions and role-inhabitancies of jazz musicians. It’s also incredibly helpful to have this kind of knowledge when conducting interviews with musicians or interacting in less formal contexts. In any number of respects, it just helps to know the tunes: which forms they use, which ones have eight-bar phrasing all the way through and which ones don’t, which ones make use of familiar structures like the ‘Rhythm’ changes – and of course which ones are difficult and which ones are tough.
This aspect of my own participant observation is entirely characteristic of ethnomusicology and other music-related disciplines and one of the things that makes them unique in the humanities: our scholarly objects tend to be experienced in particularly aural and embodied ways.
posted by Jason Toynbee at
2:56 AM
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