Accessing the Sonic and the Social: An Evaluation of Methodological Shifts in the Ethnography of Performance
(MPhil Submission Lent 2012)
3500 Words
In his 2001 article 'Between
Process and Product', Nicholas Cook comments on a recent paradigm
shift in musicological literature away from the textuality of the
score and towards performance. Since the mid-eighties there has been
a growing attention to performance within scholarship; the
landscape of literature on
performance before this point has been described by Jonathan Dunsby
as 'fluid' and 'fragmentary' (Rink: 1996: 253).
Within the study of music, Cook
identifies the growth of interest as a response to tensions in the
musicological field, namely, Goehr's challenge to the autonomy of the
concept of the Western 'musical work' through a delineation of the
problems inherent within its ontological status, and the New
Musicology's recognition of the importance of discussing music in
terms of its social context, but their ineffective attempts to locate
it within the score through hermeneutic analysis. The shift can also
be seen against the backdrop of the larger 'performative turn' within
the humanities and social sciences more generally; the work of
Richard Schechner, along with others such as Butler and Goffman
establishing 'performance studies' as a discipline in its own right.
Performance studies call for a
greater attention to phenomena as a processes, rather than
texts or objects, and Cook's article serves as a call to arms in the
development of a musicology of performance, for fuller, more detailed
explanations of it as both a social and sonic process.
Ethnomusicology, which has predominantly devoted itself to the study
of other cultures – which have often been remote, previously
undocumented, illiterate, or without a system of notation – is a
discipline that has constantly been forced to engage with music and
culture as a process rather than a text.
However, this is not to say
that ethnomusicological scholarship has provided an easily
identifiable process-based methodological archetype, which
musicologists can now hope to utilize. On the contrary, despite their
close engagement with the act of performance itself, previous
ethnomusicological scholarship has often taken an analytical
approach, utilizing the musical process for the formation of a text
through the act of transcription. Transcriptions which too often
attempt to totalize the experience of the individual musicians making
up the ensemble and abstract 'music' away from the social processes
in which it is embedded, creating a new reified text (Cook 1999:
261).
It is not the mere difference
between process of music making and the text produced that is the
problem. As Dunsby states, the event and its documentation are not
the same and never can be (Dunsby 1996: 97); one cannot hope to
capture music – a present, performed experience, a 'living art'
existing only in time – in verbal discourse (or indeed, notation)
because of the unbridgeable epistemological gulf between the two
(Rink 1996: 256). The problem, within certain types of scholarly
methods including transcription is that they merely translate the
performative experience, rather than explaining it.
Therefore, the aim of this
essay is to evaluate certain key publications within the
ethnomusicological literature, with an emphasis on methodology,
acknowledging their contributions but also pointing out the ways in
which they could take further steps to achieve a fusion between
process and product – not one which transcends the boundaries of
language or analysis: such a coalescence is unobtainable – but one
that attempts to get closer to the musical event in both its social
and sonic dimensions.
As a result of the shift of
emphasis, many of these publications broaden the scope of
musicological research has been extended to include document
pedagogy, rehearsal, performance and the linguistic and gestural
communication instrumental playing included within these practices. I
shall delineate points whereby further scholarship would be
beneficial where relevant.
In her 2001 article 'Towards an
Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging
Disciplines and Musical Worlds', Kay Kaufman Shelemay advocates an
approach which accounts for the social function of musical
performance through ethnographic methods which give access to the
study and experience of musical act and sound (2001: 3)
The article takes certain
issues, central to the functioning of the Boston Early Music Movement
– including distinctions between amateurism and professionalism,
specialist performers and ensembles, uses of particular instruments,
musical values and performance practices – and works small details
into larger themes, situating them in a broad social context.
However, although Shelemay paints an extensive and detailed picture
of the movement as a whole, her use of ethnographic methods can be
seen as falling short of her original aim – to access the
experience of musical act and sound. Although she uses interview
techniques to gain information about the meaning of the musical act
to certain performers, the reflections she documents largely embody
general points about musical style, (i.e. a reflection on what it
might mean to be musically 'authentic') and do not talk directly
about the musical act.
The one exception within the
article illuminates musical phenomena which scholarship needs to
address: “John was filling in the harmonies, but he was also
inventing a third voice a lot of the time... there was some real
invention going on in the keyboard playing, which doesn't get talked
about much” (2001: 10) This quotation illuminates that clearly, if
we are to understand music making in its experiential dimension, we
need to extend ethnographic techniques to attempt to get closer to
it: to explain the process and not just describe it.
In his seminal publication
Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Paul
Berliner undertakes this very task, using an ethnographic approach to
explain the act of jazz improvisation in social and sonic terms.
Whereas previous literature on jazz had often misrepresented the
practice, 'mystifying' the act of improvisation and misrepresenting
and marginalizing musicians through critical outsider perspectives
which failed to see the music on its own terms (1994: 6), Berliner's
ethnographic technique brings him closer to an emic perspective on
the process of improvisation. He weaves together his informant's
reflections on what they think they do during performance together
with his own observations in order to de-mystify the processes Jazz
musicians go through in order to develop the ability to improvise,
confirming Dunsby's assertion that musicians “do not usually work
in some sort of unreflecting trance”; instead they “think hard”
(1996: 9). By encouraging reflection on the musician's practical and
pedagogical engagements, Berliner elucidates the manner in which
players gradually build up a vocabulary of harmonic gestures, which
can be utilized in performance with increasing dexterity to create a
'dialogue' with other musicians. Berliner explains the relationship
between improvised and pre-composed components of the artists'
knowledge as cyclical: the improvised exploration of individual pitch
combinations produces new vocabulary patterns which, when memorized,
are transformed into pre-composed materials. When the soloist
retrieves them in performance, however, they serve as improvisational
elements that reintegrate in unique ways in the construction of
phrases.
Berliner illustrates examples
of these materials though transcriptions, ranging from basic building
blocks for fashioning individual parts to extended group
performances. Although Berliner provides us with the theoretical
framework through which to understand the transcriptions in the main
text of the book, there is definitely more scope for a fuller
integration of musical text and the performer's reflection on the
processes happening. Berliner states that the transcriptions are
intended as guides for readers who may wish to immerse themselves in
the original recordings (1994: 12). However, although the recordings
are noted to be of important pedagogical value to Berliner's
informants, a set of transcriptions which document the 'great' jazz
standards – Booker Little, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker amongst
others – misses an opportunity to fully explain the repertoire from
the perspective of those who perform it. In the latter transcriptions
showing improvised group interplay, Berliner uses the picture of
improvisation he has built up in the previous chapters in order to
discuss the recording. However, although his detailed analysis gives
us an insight into the music, it is predominantly descriptive rather
than explanatory. Given that Berliner obtained some of the
improvisational variants on the traditional repertoire through
conversation with his informants, and learned the intricacies of jazz
improvisation directly from the musicians themselves, performing and
recording with a group he had organized (1994: 5) it is surprising
that Berliner did not think it appropriate to record and transcribe
various groups in practice, and use the method of the interview to
present an explanation of stylistic choices and which tied details to
larger theoretical frameworks he outlines: Part 2 of the book.
Berliner's account is
outstanding in its extensive scope and the rigor with which it
contextualizes the jazz tradition within wider cultural practices,
and its seminal insights into jazz improvisation as a process.
However, in terms of the objective I outline in my introduction,
there is opportunity for development. For a greater synthesis to be
reached, a higher degree of specificity is needed – reflections
need to be made, pertaining to both social and sonic elements in
relation to particular events, which can be displayed through musical
notation and backed up by audio recordings, pertaining to Nicholas
Cook's observation in Between Process and Product, that a “musicology
of performance really demands the integration of sound, word, and
image achievable through current hypermedia technology (2001: 29).
A perspective which embraces
hypermedia technology, in order to document a successfully integrated
account of music as a process, is Amanda Bayley's 2011 article
'Ethnographic Research into Contemporary String Quartet Rehearsal'.
Bayley utilizes an audio recording of a rehearsal, concert
performances, a filmed performance and photography, alongside the
more traditional methods of interviews, questionnaires, observations
in order to present a picture of the interactive and collaborative
processes which take place between a composer and performers of his
work. It documents the progress of Micheal Finnissy's Second String
Quartet, from composition, through the rehearsal and performance
process with the Kreutzer Quartet, and finally, to reflections on
performance (2011: 386).
Although Bayley has broader
research concerns, she states her primary objective is to discover
more about how professional musicians structure their rehearsal time,
and why they approach Finnissy’s piece in a particular way. Taking
the audio recording of the rehearsal, Bayley uses a quantitative
method to examine how much rehearsal time is spent on particular
activities. She uses the 5 main categories taken from Davidson's and
Good's (2002) examination of the social and musical co-ordination
between members of a student string quartet in rehearsal and
performance: social conversation, non-verbal social interaction,
musical conversations, non-verbal musical interactions and musical
interactions. Due to the predominance of the conversation, she breaks
this down further, into more specific areas.
However, the problems inherent
in such a method undermine its apparent precision. One issue, which
Bayley recognises, is the level of simplification of the event that
such a process entails when distinguishing between overlapping
categories. For example, one conversation may have two objectives,
such as solving a problem relating to technique and notation or to
sound quality and technique. Furthermore, talking and playing often
merge in rehearsal: if an instrument is utilized to produce sound
within the conversation about another point, then should it be
reclassified as musicking? Bayley points to an inherent
methodological weakness when she admits that where musical and/or
verbal interactions overlap or collide, the categorisation has been
made according to what was most audible (2011: 396).
Most importantly, in terms of
the research objectives, is that this type of analysis fails to
explain music as a process. Bayley notes some of these quantitative
analyses also fail to show the swift transitions between humour or
chit-chat and playing; which points were made by whom, who was being
directive, and interplay between musicians changed in the course of
the rehearsal. As Bayley herself states: a graphic representation of
data is a useful way of gaining a sense of the proportion of various
elements that make up the rehearsal but has limited value because it
fails to show how the rehearsal progressed (2011: 398) Moreover,
although it may be useful to show that more time was spent doing
certain activities, this is not a direct reflection of their
importance.
However, extremely illuminating
insights into the rehearsal process were made by qualitative
analysis:
The first issue regards the
function of metaphor in communicating the composer's sonic
preferences to the performers: At the beginning of the rehearsal
Finnissy chose metaphors such as ‘sort of saltier’, ‘frothier’
and ‘like spiders crawling’ to help describe the nature of the
sound he wanted. In a later interview, he explained that such
metaphors were not fixed, but that they emerged in relation to the
sound that the musicians were already making. Bayley places this in a
larger theoretical framework by pointing to Feld’s observation that
metaphors categorize musical experiences in relation to similar or
dissimilar experiences, to place an item or event in meaningful
social space through ongoing interpretive moves. These moves do not
fix or freeze a single meaning; meaning is emergent and changeable in
relation to various combinations of moves made by specifically
situated speakers (2011: 403).
However, although this
theoretical framework gives insight, it does not provide us with an
insider perspective, which may help explain the process of 'emergent
meanings' in more specific terms. Although her research includes
scripts of dialogue in the rehearsal process, and notes from a
conversation with Finnissy, the perspectives of the performers are
not interwoven into the main fabric of the article, but consigned to
a detached section at the end. The documentation gained (a
questionnaire, completed a month after the filmed performance) could
not have been worked into a broader explanation, since the four
players give differing and contradictory responses. In answer to the
question ‘Are there important elements of the composition that
Michael clarified in rehearsal which were not evident from the
notation or other markings in the score? Please give details’,
there was no consistent answer between players: two replied yes; two
replied no. However, the specific responses conveyed different
interpretations of similar themes, showing that given a more dialogic
methodology, progress towards an insider's account of the process
could have been attained. Heyde and Trandafilovski differed on
whether they had understood Finnissy's metaphors to describe sound,
or character and expression, and Sheppard Skærved’s negative
response was ‘all of the important details are apparent; all that
Michael did was to show that they were in front of us'. These
comments suggest that there is a deeper discussion here to be had on
the relationship between the score, sound, language and communication
(2011: 406).
Another illuminating insight is
provided through a discussion Bayley documents on coordination and
movement: Finnissy’s compositional is (for lack of a better term)
semi-indeterminate – a degree of freedom is composed into the parts
for the explicit function of varying vertical alignment on each
iteration as well as transitions between different sections of the
piece. Towards the end of the rehearsal, Finnissy commented that he
felt that the players had become too coordinated with the viola and
cello parts, and that it was not producing the right effect. Finnissy
wanted them to create “a feeling of initially not really being
within reach, as if an unattainable plateau that they’re on and
you’re desperate to reach it.” Once the players knew how the
parts worked together, they had to find a way of ‘unlearning’
that knowledge, resisting the urge for highly co-ordinated playing to
attain a controlled ‘un-coordination’, a style of performance
determined by the composer’s intention for the character of the
piece.
Bayley claims she was aware of
the implications of the loss of visual information, but felt it
important to only use audio in order not to impede or affect the
rehearsal process. However, the lack of data on movement and gesture
prevents her from working towards a theory of the nonverbal methods
of communication, which would elucidate the way in which this
co-ordination and un-coordination might take place.
Visual information is also of
crucial importance to the discussion of Finnissy's metaphors, partly
because the taped concert performance reveals that Finnissy
consistently uses gestures as he talks to accentuate and refine his
meaning, but also since the production of sound is dependent on the
process of movement and thoroughly aggregated with the notions of
'expression' and 'character'. In fact, as I stated above, through the
rehearsal process, Heyde took Finnissy's comments to pertain
predominantly to expression and character rather than sound. Whilst
much work has been written on the distinctions between the terms in
abstract philosophical terms, a discussion of what they have meant in
pragmatic terms, as 'discourse frames' for instrumentalists
negotiating a rehearsal has not been fully documented.
Hence, although Bailey uses
hypermedia documentation which Cook suggests can help us bridge the
gap between process and product, she does not go far enough in
seeking to relate the individual forms of collected data (the taped
rehearsal, the filmed concert performance, the interview and the
questionnaire) to one another. However, to rectify this I am not
suggesting that Bailey should merely take her analytical approach
further in positing interrelations – such an approach may induce
dangerous level of abstract theorizing. I am positing we take an
approach that places informants nearer to the center of the research,
and encourages a dialogue through a method called video playback,
predominantly used within music psychology.
In their
forthcoming article “Exploring creativity in musical performance
through lesson observation with video-recall interviews”, James,
Wise and Rink (from hereon in referred to as James) utilize video
analysis, to document specific moments of 'creativity' within the
pedagogical engagement between teacher and student. Lessons are
filmed and the footage is used as a memory prompt and participants
are invited to talk in depth about their experiences. James contends
this has the potential both to allow insights into their experiences
that could not be gained from viewing the footage alone, and to
facilitate participants’ conscious access to processes that they
may not often think about or articulate, thereby “building an
effective bridge between research and practice” (forthcoming:
2).
The video-recall method is not
without its problems. Firstly, as Bayley feared in her research,
there is a chance that the presence of a camera will cause
participants to act in a manner slightly different they would have
done otherwise, however, this can be reduced by getting used to being
on film. Secondly, although the use of video lessens participant's
likelihood of forgetting details, misremembering, or interpreting
things differently than reflection without video data might induce,
seeing the lesson from a different angle and after a period of time,
however short, introduces an inevitable element of interpretation in
hindsight, and it is therefore possible participants can confuse
revelations they have through reflection with revelations they had at
the time (forthcoming: 26). However, a reflexive manner which
does not make participants feel that they have to offer explanations
to fit analytical categories demanded by the researcher and an acute
scholarly look at the data which may identify erroneous comments,
such problems can be minimized.
James's methodology gave the
participants control over the research process, initially asking
participants to select excerpts of tape they felt were important to
the creative process. The advantage of this method is that it that it
creates a directed but flexible structure which can cater for new
questions and issues that emerge through the research process – the
importance of which is demonstrated to be important by Bayley's
research, and the unexpected impetus on metaphor and gesture.
Therefore, I propose that in
future ethnographic research, the video-recall method should be
utilized if relevant to create a bridge between product and process
through discourse. Traditional ethnographic fieldwork methods such as
the interview and the questionnaire will remain highly important for
the initial observation issues which may become central to research
and for collecting data to provide a cultural context for the
research. However, a more detailed focus on the experience of music
should use video recall both with musicians individually - to enable
them to express their insights to the researcher away from the social
pressures of the ensemble – and in a group context to enable
participants to work towards a mutual understanding of the
terminology used, and to avoid the incompatible conceptions of
terminology found in Bailey's questionnaire approach, which prevents
the construction of a more extensive conceptual framework. Results
from individual interviews and group interviews should be compared
and contrasted, with the possibility of re-interview either in a
group or on an individual basis as a control method to ensure that
terminology is being used consistently, and that group politics are
not prohibiting reflection.
It
will be necessary for researchers to undertake preparatory work in
order to define research questions about the exact object of their
study, and to refine the full methodological approach accordingly,
yet they should be prepared for other research questions to emerge
and aware that changing procedures to cater for these may produce
more illuminating research. Research can perhaps best be presented in
an essay format, with whichever supporting documentation is
appropriate - scores, lead sheets, rehearsal charts, etc. - but
access to full documentation of the recorded performances (or other)
should be presented alongside to allow readers to contextualise
academic observations. The written documentation should make specific
references to the points in the video that are being discussed,
either expressed in time, or with the possibility of larger-scale
synthesis through computer programming. Imperative in research
conducted with a significant focus on sound is that the quality of
audiovisual data is as high as is possible, to ensure that
reflections on sound quality are not misguided.
In conclusion,
performance itself and its documentation may always be separated by
Dunsby’s ‘epistemological gulf’, and performance practice may
inevitably continue to be conditioned to a varying degree by a number
of binaries, including performer and audience, creator and reactor,
and subject and analyst. Yet the best way for scholarship to proceed
is through an understanding of these differences not as dichotomies,
but as positions of proximity and distance. This notion is made more
lucid by Dunsby's assertion, that in performance there are no “pure
doers” (1996: 49); language is constantly present as an inner
monologue throughout our experience of music as both listeners and
performers. Indeed, as Karol Berger states, “The hermeneutic
element cannot be wholly banished from the arena of performance;
there is no such thing as pure experience, uncontaminated by
interpretation” (Berger 2005: 501) Therefore, the video-recall
method is not only an attempt at 'translating' their sensual
actions and feelings into words, (although undoubtedly this might
form part the method); it is a report or 'second reflection' on
thoughts, words, that they experienced at the same time as
sensation and action.
In sum: by understanding music
as a process, rather than as a product, and by taking an ethnographic
approach which places musicians' emic perspectives at the centre of
research in the aforementioned ways, we may gain a more complete
understanding of music in its sonic and social terms.
Words: 3815
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Bayley, Amanda, 'Ethnographic
Research into Contemporary String Quartet Rehearsal', Ethnomusicology
Forum, Vol. 20 No. 3, (2011) pp. 385-411
Berger, Karol, Musicology
According to Don Giovanni, or: Should We Get Drastic?
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Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 490-501
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and Evereist eds., (Oxford: 1999)
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