Sounds of Culture

The world is a highly musical place, with cadences common to the heart of humanity.

As anyone who's been there knows, New Orleans' annual Jazzfest--a monumental, three-week production defying belief--offers hundreds of thousands of visitors each spring far more than jazz.

Together with the Festival Internationale de Louisiane, held at the same time in nearby Lafayette, the twin events present a musical bouillabaisse, with aural delights unmatched for variety and bravado anywhere else in the U.S.

With sounds ranging from the contagious zydeco of the Louisiana lowlands to the percussive genius of the Baka pygmies of Cameroon, these festivals are living proof that music has uncanny power for lifting cultural, religious and even political barriers separating peoples of all races, colors and creeds.

The phenomenon is hardly lost on scholars, who in recent decades have turned the study of cross-cultural music into a rigorous academic discipline that often combines elements of anthropology, archaeology, history, religion, sociology and music research. The amalgam is called ethnomusicology, which since about 1950 has been a growing field of research among music scholars worldwide.

For its part, Florida State is among an elite group of universities where the study of ethnomusicology enjoys a high profile. FSU is becoming increasingly recognized for its contributions to a field of research and scholarship that is beginning to assert itself among a host of other internationally oriented disciplines.

"The world isn't such a large place any more," says Dr. Robert L. Smith (Ph.D. FSU), co-founder of FSU's Center for Music of the Americas within the School of Music, a program that emphasizes both the study and the performance of multicultural music. "As more people from other countries come to live here and as we travel and work within other cultures, we must know people. Music is a unique means of communication that can create understanding among diverse people by bridging cultural and ethnic boundaries."

Dr. Timothy Rice, chair of UCLA's long-established ethnomusicology program--says FSU is like many universities that are stepping up an emphasis on ethnomusicology which he feels is largely a consequence of America's increasing interests abroad. Economic and foreign policies link the U.S. with so many other cultures, that to not know as much as possible about other cultures' values, customs and beliefs, is often detrimental or, at the very least, discourteous, he said.

"Although it's a small discipline in the academic firmament, it is important because of our ability to contribute to the new self-consciousness in the United States that we are multi-cultural society," Rice said. "Our roots aren't just in Europe and Western culture, our roots are also in Asia, Africa, Latin America and many other parts of the world."

Musicologists in this country have long since traced the lineages of modern jazz and rock-and-roll, for example, to ancestral roots in Africa, a finding that has important sociological and historical implications. Thanks to global telecommunications, these and other forms of American music are now flavoring--for better or worse--the music of hundreds of countries worldwide. (An American visitor to Tokyo these days can either be entertained or appalled by nightclub acts featuring a line-up of Japanese country music stars wailing incomprehensibly in Stetson hats.)

Conversely, Americans are being exposed to increasing doses of popular music infused with imported sounds--and well-beyond the "Macarena" variety, to be sure. Witness recent sophisticated hybridizations of Caribbean, Latin American, African and Celtic sounds by such Western pop icons as Sting, David Byrne, Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel, along with more exotic blends produced by a host of lesser lights.

Such cross-pollination of musical genres has become so influential across borders in recent years that "world music" is now a recognized (although hard to define) musical genre in its own right. While incorporating musical expressions that have become universally recognized, such music characteristically evokes the distinctive sounds, tempos and rhythms that have identified various cultures for centuries.

At FSU, ethnomusicologists share the fruits of their research with students from a wide spectrum of cultural backgrounds who are learning that music--despite the leavening effects of mass marketing--remains a powerful medium through which they not only can preserve their cultural identities but learn about their heritage as well.

Research conducted in South America over the years by Dr. Dale Olsen (Ph.D. UCLA), and his graduate students demonstrates as much. Olsen, co-founder and now director of the Center for the Music of the Americas, is vice president for the Society for Ethnomusicology, a national organization.

While living in the Japanese community of Brazil's Sao Paulo, Olsen, also a master of a Japanese flute--called shakuhachi--studied the influence of immigration on Japanese music in Brazil.

"Japanese who are born in Brazil still consider themselves Japanese, and the music helps them retain their identity, much the same way music does for people of different backgrounds and cultures here in the United States," Olsen said.

During the past 20 years, Olsen has traveled extensively throughout South America and Japan, writing extenstively on the musical cultures of both countries. His most recent book, Song People of the Rain Forest (1996 University Press of Florida) focuses on the musical traditions of the Warao people of Venezuela, a culture Olsen has studied for two decades. Rain-forest inhabitants of the remote Orinoco River delta, the Warao literally depend on singing and music to maintain their way of life. The Warao's oral traditions, for example, include songs on everything from building canoes to curing snakebites.

"Unlike the songlines of Australian aborigines that follow distinct paths to understand their own creation, the Warao sing to maintain their daily existence," says Olsen. "Being a musician means high status and political leadership."

His findings among the Warao reaffirmed a long-standing canon of ethnomusicology--that one can gain an intimate insight into almost any culture by paying close attention to its music.

"Everything that is important to a culture, whether it be American, European, African, Asian, etc., will be conveyed in that culture's music," he says.

One of Olsen's graduate students, Welson Tremura of Rio Preto, Brazil, studies how the strong social and religious beliefs of his native culture are conveyed through the Brazilian tradition of the folia de reis. The folia is a group of 12 to 15 men who go on a pilgrimage between Christmas and Epiphany. For 10 days, the groups travel from house to house, village to village, singing the story of the birth of Christ. Villagers wait with great anticipation, hoping the folia will bless their house with a visit. Tremura, whose father was a violinist in a folia, has been tracing the tradition's roots for the past three years, keeping record of scores and texts.

As it turns out, music's common association with religion is a phenomenon in itself. In recent years, in fact, the term theomusicology has been coined to describe scholarship that investigates the curiously strong bond between the two. From the shaped-note singing of Appalachian Pentecostals to the throat-singing of Nepalese Buddhist monks, from Gregorian chants to the freedom songs of the Rastafari, religion and music seemingly converge in a timeless language of spirituality.

FSU ethnomusicologist Dr. Michael Bakan (Ph.D. UCLA) and his students have come to appreciate the role religion plays in the extraordinary gamelan music of Bali in Indonesia. The word--which literally means "to hammer"--describes a music form that consists entirely of percussion instruments--drums, gongs and xylophone-like instruments called metallaphones. As further testament that FSU ethnomusicologists not only study music but also make it, Bakan directs the only student gamelan ensemble in the Southeast.

Gamelan gongs resemble bronze pots suspended from a frame and can be played by either four players or by a soloist. The metallophones, bronze keys laid over wooden resonators, are beaten with a mallet held in the right hand. Their reverberation is instantly cut short by the thumb and index finger of the left hand which makes coordination and precision vital. These complex rhythms often are played at astonishing tempos.
Much of the Balinesian music is passed down from generation to generation with little or no notation left behind. Bakan has created for himself a translated form of notation, but like the people of Bali, Bakan's students must learn by rote and imitation--not an easy task.

Despite the difficulty in learning the music, however, most Balinese musicians are passionate about mastering it. The music is strongly attached to their religious beliefs (most Balinese are Hindus) and therefore participating in a gamelan ensemble is something akin to singing in a church choir, but perhaps with much greater reverence. For example, Balinese worshipers believe that gamelan instruments are inhabited by sacred spirits, therefore the act of stepping over them is considered disrespectful and is never allowed. Before rehearsals, flowers are laid at the foot of the Great Gong to invoke the deity's blessing.

"The music tells us a great deal about who the Balinese are and what values they hold important. To know their music is to know them," says Bakan.

Traditionally, one of the driving forces behind ethnomusicology has been to learn as much about the music of various cultures as possible before those cultures disappear. Today, this imperative is felt more keenly than ever by scholars who are witnessing the demise of cultures at an unprecedented pace. For example, Olsen laments the fact that the song culture of the Warao is now threatened with extinction, thanks to the continuing destruction of the culture's native rain forests. With the last load of lumber from the Orinoco delta, so will go the last vestiges of a gentle and kind people.

"That is the tragedy," Olsen said. "This is not music simply as entertainment or big business, but as life itself."

Source: Florida State University Research in Review,  Winter 1996 issue