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Dear Reader,

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I’ve been knee deep in a few learning projects recently.

• A book/ebook/pamphlet/maybe an essay/probably just a bumper sticker at this point about musical learning
• A digital performer’s guide for Unsnared Drum
• An online class
• Charts… many charts!

Thus far, I’ve focused on three broad modes of engagement, at least for western music:

1. Generalized cultural/historical study
2. Some kind prescriptive instruction (a score)
3. Orally transmitted performance practice, both active (how people say to play music) and oblique (contemporaneous accounts of “good” and “bad” musicking).

As with any project based on navel-gazing and not playing music with my friends,I began to overthink, pulling at that loose thread of the sweater until the garment unravels to a few key questions:

• How does one explain how to play a piece of music?
• What does one need to know to play a piece of music?
• How does one explain how to do anything?!
• Does it even matter, when culture lives in ephemeral relationships and not in texts?

These questions are how relationships between groups of people are bounded and fluid, how assumptions and intuitions are built, reinforced, and subverted. But, how are those assumptions created? I felt the need to take a stab at it, so I turned—as one does— to Greek Myths.

Go big or go home!!

Culture is (partially) Created through Mythology

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If you’re like me, you grew up with Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a market hall of Greek/Roman/Norse myths as told through a number of literary lenses. You might also know these stories art history, astronomy, Freudian psychology, pop culture, or battleship names.

In fact, they’re so classic that I asked ChatGPT to take a break from writing music to summarize them:

1. The myth of Prometheus, who, in a daring act of defiance, stole fire from the gods, gifting it to humanity and bestowing upon them the power to use it for their own benefit.
2. The myth of Pandora, whose curious nature led her to open a forbidden box, releasing all the evils of the world, despite warnings from the gods.
3. The myth of Icarus, who, despite his father's warnings, flew too close to the sun and, as a result, experienced a tragic and untimely death.
4. The myth of Echo and Narcissus, whose fateful love was doomed to an unhappy ending due to Narcissus' vanity and Echo's unrequited love.
5. The myth of Sisyphus, who was cursed to an eternity of rolling a large boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down again, repeating this cycle for eternity.

Needless to say, not exactly an Ovid-level writer…

There are MANY more fun ones, of course which explain why Athenians have small butts to the invention of the lyre to (almost) anything in between. Incredible plot points notwithstanding, there’s something else going on here.

These stories (legends?) explain the the natural phenomena around us, ask where humans are from and where they might be going, and preserve historical ideas and events. The value and longevity of these human-centered (some might say……humanist!) stories is their ability to speak to tropes, ideas that the myths reinforce as “universal” rather than specificity of experience.

Some of these foundational ideas might include:

• Love: loyalty, trust, eternal love, the the challenges therein.
• Heroes: achievements of great people, and how their failures show us that we need to live in a society, not above it.
• The Underworld: rituals of death and dying as natural and normative
• Fate: depictions of right and wrong behavior as a guardrail

While few among us might relate to turning into a swan to seduce someone, we might feel a kinship to needing to double check a loved one is in fact with us during a harrowing journey, or to see the eternal punishment wrought upon those who do the “wrong” thing.

Wait a minute, these are morality codes!

Culture is Solidified through Morality

Greek myths are kind of an oral performance practice for our lives. They bind a culture together while giving indications on both how to enhance that culture while articulating what it means to NOT be part of that culture.

The mechanism? Morality.

A few summers ago I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, a captivating look at the seemingly impermeable cultural, political, and social differences which frequently stymie us. (I actually wrote about it on my blog here) Haidt argues that our divisions could be better framed as a differing set of key moral principles.

The main focus of The Righteous Mind are Haidt’s six moral foundations. These frameworks help govern our desire to join groups, to engage in selfish or selfless behavior, and to understand one another. Haidt argues that these foundations are biological, forged from thousands of years of evolutionary “nudges:”

1. Care/harm: Mammalian attachment + ability to feel the pain of others
2. Fairness/cheating: reciprocal altruism, justice, rights, autonomy
3. Loyalty/betrayal: tribalism with shifting coalitions was essential to our development as a species, and seems to be essential for virtues of patriotism, and self-sacrifice for a greater group good.
4. Authority/subversion: Hierarchical social interactions —> leadership, deference to authority, and respect for traditions
5. Sanctity/degradation: Our biological aversion to disgust and contamination becomes notions of living an elevated, less carnal, more noble lifestyle.
6. Liberty/oppression: resentment of the restriction of personal liberty

Why are some people happy in political, social, and economic frameworks that others would consider exploitative, repressive, or unfair? Why do we have so much trouble understanding those with differing political viewpoints? Haidt argues that our differences result from priorities placed on different ratios of moral foundations.

While the essential conceit of The Righteous Mind is to explore the moral foundations theory that Haidt claims can explain why we don’t understand one another politically and culturally, I found the more pertinent question of the book: why do humans group together? What’s the value of joining a group, and how are those groups maintained and pruned?

1. As musicians, we deal frequently in building community around the work we make, honing connections between composers and performers, performers and audiences, and audiences and communities. Thinking about the moral foundations as modes of interactions and engagement can help us form groups which empower their members while understanding and celebrating our differences.
2. That said, communication in music is often within bounded groups. While participatory musical cultures can be powerful vehicles for enculturation, western classical musical cultures tend to leverage enculturation for the sake of heuristics. If player A and player B have similar cultural assumptions (expectations, norms, boundaries) then exchange can be fast, fluid. But, assumptions are dangerous, and we’ve seen the way that oral performance practice vis a vis western art music can become more recalcitrant and rigid over time.

From a Certain Point of View

How do we we get to know the norms of a culture? An emic approach (from Phonemic) investigates insider information: how members of a culture think, their rules for behavior, their morality, told through the perspective of an insider. An etic viewpoint (careful here) looks to describe and explain cultural practices, rituals, or behaviors from the perspective of an outsider, looking to parameters and frameworks that might not be relevant to cultural insiders. Oof. This is problematic for a number of reasons, but a generalized notion that being an insider within a culture allows for a certain type of interaction, where being an outsider can help elucidate other notions of cultural transmission

Most of the time, we discover the norms of a culture and can flexibly take part through experience. But, what if the culture you are interested in learning about is more behind it, impermeable, or so other that you have no sense of its values, its morality?

Wither Participant Observation.

Observation

I dusted off my copy of James Spradley’s ​Participant Observation​, my entrée to the world of ethnography, last summer while organizing my books, but it wasn’t until this week I made it past this AMAZING cover and revisited the text.

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Participant Observation is a manual for ethnographers, an instructional book about getting to know other cultures through that cultures vocabularies, behaviors, and values. I love how Spradley focuses on how learning about a culture on their own terms, divorcing oneself from assumption by following a set of behaviors, his 9 dimensions of descriptive observation, which are designed to remove etic perspectives in favor of the words and behaviors espoused by cultural insiders. From descriptive observations to domain analyses, to taxonomic analyses to highlighting cultural themes, Spradley shows us how to listen to a culture’s vocabulary, to learn how that bounded group makes sense of their world. Sounds pretty helpful at a time when cultural divides are wider than ever.

Just don’t do what I did and do participant observation on your friends and family!

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So What?

This semester I’m teaching a course at Creighton University’s medical campus in Phoenix. We’re looking how participatory musical cultures might model collaboration, teamwork, problem-solving, placemaking and cultural participation while preserving vital rituals. We’re also looking at how drumming might cultivate a moral imagination which engenders the capacity to appreciate and understand the lived experiences of others.

In working with my students at Creighton, I begin by showing a video of Ewe Dance-Drumming: footage taken at a funeral where drummers, dancers, and singers more through a permeable environment. It’s clear there are musical and behavioral norms, that the music moves based on certain principles, and that all are participating according to some ideals. Without any sense of how the boundaries of a cultural space are set or the rules of engagement in a physical or musical space, we struggle to make sense of what we’re experiencing. As we develop first an understanding of the details of the interlocking drumming parts, the meaning of the song texts, and a sense of how the dancing is triggered by the drumming, individual actions come into focus, and we (with time and energy) might understand something about how powerful a ritual this event is. Would be better to participate, but that’s week 2!

But performance practice is a kind of culture, no? In order to learn a piece of music, particularly western classical music, one must have some understanding of the culture from which emerged. Even if your goal as a performer is to bring music to life in a different, an awareness of its original situation is critical, both to situate a work’s unique features and to articulate which parameters might be best foregrounded.

One needs an emic perspective in order to transmit, transpose, transmogrify or transport. Anything less would be structural homology, because the past is a foreign country.​
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P.S.

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Further Reading

It’s not really reading, but I’m excited to share news of Robert Honstein’s new album, Lost and Found, available March 24 on New Focus Recordings. The album features two works developed over 10 years of collaboration with Robert: Down Down Baby, for two performers on one cello, and Lost and Found, for prepared marimba. Looking forward to sharing our video of Lost and Found (filmed in an empty swimming pool in Philadelphia) shortly!

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For an ethnography that I would classify as a “great read,” check out Georgina Born’s Rationalizing Culture, a fascinating look at the culture around modernism and post-modernism at IRCAM. Definitely on the emic side, and I love how Born defines post-modernism in relation to modernism. Particularly noteworthy is her depiction of the “daytime” and “after hours” activities of IRCAM researchers as correlating strongly with the uptown/downtown dynamic brilliantly depicted in Kyle Gann’s Music Downtown.

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