Howard Becker - Letter to Charles Seeger, 1989

8/3/2019 Howard Becker - Letter to Charles Seeger, 1989

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Ethnomusicology and Sociology: A Letter to Charles SeegerAuthor(s): Howard S. BeckerSource: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1989), pp. 275-285Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/924398 .Accessed: 07/04/2011 20:55

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276 Ethnomusicology, pring/Summer 989

business (Becker 1963) and since then I've taught he sociology of art fromtime to time and eventually wrote a book on the social organization f the

arts (Becker 1982).That's not to brag-if those are things o brag about-but just o remindyou of where I'm coming from when I report o you an outsider's bserva-tions on ethnomusicology oday and on what my own field of sociologymight have to contribute o it. My observations are based on the mostsuperficial knowledge of your field, and I hope you'll forgive occasional,or even frequent, gaucheries. 've done some home work-I've read all theSeeger Memorial Lectures, tarting with your own, which Don Roberts ndPaul Berliner collected for me, and I've read your papers (Seeger 1977),

and some other ethnomusicological work here and there over the years.But I can't pretend o know much about he field and I certainly on't knowwhat someone who has practiced t professionally nows.

My observations nd thoughts on the contributions sociological ap-proach might make deal with two different areas. In the first place,ethnomusicology, s a field of scholarly ndeavor, has in some ways painteditself nto a corner, heoretically fnot practically. y nsisting n the broadestpossible nterpretation f the idea of studying music n context, t has bravelyaccepted the challenge to do what cannot be done. Sociology might have

something o say about that dilemma, and I will see what I can produce nthe way of sociological hinking hat might be useful to your scholarly heirs.In the second place, and less globally, sociologists (who have their ownvery substantial roblems when they try to study music) have done a littlework that shows the utility of studying music as the result of the collectiveactivity f the people involved n the musical process. I'll report on someof that work and discuss its implications or the ethnomusicological nter-prise.

TRYING TO DO EVERYTHING

All the world's music

One thing sociologists look for when they study such a collective enter-

prise as a scholarly discipline is the way it draws its boundaries. What kindsof claims are made for the field? What is its jurisdiction? What is its compe-tition? How do the claims mesh with the reality and what problems doesthe disparity between the two-there's always a disparity--create?

Lest you think I'm singling ethnomusicology out for special abuse, I'll

point out that my own field, sociology, usually defines its subject matter asthe study of human association or collective action or social structure orsome other such global phenomenon. In fact, sociology, as a practicalacademic discipline, consists of those social phenomena that were left to


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Ethnomusicology and Sociology: A Letter to Charles Seeger 277

be made the objects of study after disciplines that were formed earlier, likeeconomics and political science, took off with the good stuff like markets

and the state. So we sociologists were left with the family, crime and delin-quency, race relations, and the problems of urban life. We have had quitea time ever since trying to make sense of the disparity between the grandiosedefinition and the practical reality of what we do.

An outsider approaching ethnomusicology can't help noticing the am-bitious nature of the enterprise. To start with: all the world's musics. Notonly that but, as the plural implies, all those musics to be treated on theirown terms, not as degenerate forms of "our" music, but each entitled tobe given an equally important place. We can't blame you for that, Charles.

That's been the nature of comparative studies in the arts since the beginning,and comparative musicology has always been omnivorous, collecting instru-ments and sounds and compositions and performances from anywhere a

practitioner could get to with notebook, camera, movie camera, and stateof the art sound recording equipment.

It's true, of course, that this definition of the job is not completelyhonored in the discipline's practice. There seems to be a chronic highbrowprejudice, so that what gets most attention are the art musics of other highcultures, musical traditions that are thought to be as aesthetically worthy as

our own art music tradition. That's an impression I can't document, nothaving put in the library time that would settle the question factually. And,in any event, what seems to bother the discipline as a whole is the obligationto go beyond that kind of parochialism, even if it doesn't get done. That'swhat comes through in the general statements about the field made onceremonial occasions and in textbooks. So I'll continue as thoughethnomusicology really accepts that obligation, even if it doesn't always actas though it does.

Such a view of ethnomusicology's job certainly does make problems.Because it's not really doable, is it, Charles? mean, you can aim at collectingall the music, but then collecting takes precedence over everything else,because there is so much music to collect. Is there to be a principle ofselection? Is there something, anything, we might safely leave out? Howabout children's nursery rhymes? Well, no, we wouldn't want to leave thoseout. They're so important in understanding the socialization of children.And the way children learn music, their "mistakes," he salience of one oranother aspect of music to them, that's all interesting and important. Lookwhat John Blacking (1967) did with such material. (And we can now look,too, at Antoine Hennion's study [1988] of the way French children are taughtmusic in school.)

Can we leave out what isn't "authentic"? t seems that authenticity hasoff and on been a problem for ethnomusicologists, at least some of whom


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278 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1989

used to have that sort of bias, a predilection for what people used to dorather than what they're doing now, a greater interest, let's say, in the

remnants of authentic Polynesian musics than in what Don Ho was singingat a Waikiki hotel. Ethnomusicologists have often wished that peoplewouldn't change that way, that they would keep their music "pure," unadul-terated by the inexorable spread of Western (mostly North American) rockand roll, jazz, and the rest of it. Ethnomusicologists have in that resembledthose naturalists who want to save endangered creatures so that the earth'sgene pool will contain maximal variety.

It's a noble idea, but the world seldom accepts such noble ideas asguides to action. People pick up on the music they like, the music that

seems attractive to them, that represents, however inchoately, what theywant represented, the music that will make a profit for those who do theproducing and distributing, and so on. So it seems wiser, even more practical,if you're interested in the world's musics, to study what people are playingand singing, whatever bastard combination of raw materials it comes from.

But that really opens the door. Should we study what every tavern pianoplayer (the kind I was) plays in all the joints on all the streets in all theworld's cities? No one would have thought it worthwhile to do that 90 yearsago, when a definitive study could have been done, say, of the origins of

ragtime. But don't we wish they had? And had carried that study throughwith the same care and attention that have been devoted to Native Americanmusic? Sure we do.

Should we study, as we might study the similar musical occasions in aMelanesian society, every singing of "Happy Birthday" n the United Statesor, to be a little reasonable, a sample of such singing? And, if not, why not?

I won't prolong the examples because by now the point's clear. We'dlike, in retrospect, to have everything: it all fits the definition and all of itcould be made the object of serious study. But we can't have everything,

for the most obvious practical reasons: we don't have the people to collectit and we wouldn't know what to do with the mass of detail we'd end upwith if we did. It's like oral history that way, isn't it? I mean, the new historians(see McCall and Wittner 1989) have convinced us that everyone's life isimportant, but we can't collect everyone's life and if we did we'd drown inthe detail. And no computerized data base would do any good, because thedrowning will be conceptual as well as mechanical.

Sociology has no simple answer to this problem. A sociological approachmight put it in comparative perspective and note that every global definition

of a field creates such an undoable job, certainly in the social sciences. Asociologist of science and scholarship might note further that the practicalanswers to the unanswerable questions I've been posing-and in fact prac-titioners always have practical, everyday answers-do not come from logicor argument, but are based in solid social facts of organizational resources


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Ethnomusicology nd Sociology: A Letter o Charles Seeger 279

and competition. Ethnomusicology's scope has, I assume (though I haven'tdone the work to justify saying this), been determined by its position in the

academic hierarchy and the resources for research and other scholarlyactivities that makes available. That's a topic ethnomusicologists might wantto confront directly, rather than continuing to debate the proper boundariesof the field, taking as a model the discussions of the effect of anthropology'sposition in the academy on anthropological work in George Marcus's"Ethnographic Writing and Anthropological Careers" (1986) and PaulRabinow's "Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernityin Anthropology" (1986, esp. pp. 253-56).

All the theories

As if having to deal with all the world's musics weren't daunting enough,ethnomusicology makes a serious effort to live up to its slogan of studyingmusic in context, in a way that increases the undoability of the enterprise.I'm inclined to think, Charles, that you might deserve some of the blamefor this, judging by the evidence of your writing and remembering that youwere in on the beginnings.

Look at those diagrams you were so fond of (there's an archetypal

example in Seeger 1977:35). They mandate the study of linguistics, acoustics,history, otology, anthropology, law, religion, sociology, anthropology, psy-chology, and all the other ologies already with us or yet to be invented. AsI read your work, you were obsessed with being comprehensive, with notleaving anything out. If someone knew something about the way people,societies, or the natural world worked, you wanted that knowledge includedin the study of the world's musics. You were, of course, well aware of thetraps in the building of knowledge, all the epistemological and theoreticalbypasses that could lure the unwary off the right course, and you wanted

them dealt with adequately. (No other discipline has been able to deal withthem adequately, so there's no reason to think that ethnomusicology caneither). And then there were all the musical theories, which needed to betaken account of in any comprehensive view of world music.

It's a tall order. No one has filled it. It may in principle be unfillable.Yet the field seems, at least to an outsider, to live under this self-imposedsentence of having to try. That might account for a tone of guilt and self-jus-tification or, alternatively, an optimistic feeling that we're on the way toactually doing it in much of the ethnomusicological writing I read in prep-

aration for this lecture. Timothy Rice's "Toward the Remodelling ofEthnomusicology" (1987) and the extensive commentary that followed itembody what I've been talking about. And Kerman's (1985) review of thefield both reflects its failure to accomplish all it sets out to do and provokesmore such feelings.


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Though no one can satisfactorily meet these specifications, what anethnomusicologist can do is create ad hoc combinations of these specialtiesspecially suited for the study of this or that problem in this or that setting.Some aspects of the context are more salient for us at some times thanothers. At each moment we find certain combinations of ideas and problemsespecially relevant. But not everything!

Donald Campbell's image of the fish-scale model of omniscience(Campbell 1969) might be comforting in this regard. He used to feel badwhen he noticed, pausing at the row of faculty mailboxes in the departmentoffice, that one of his colleagues was getting a journal he wasn't. It madehim feel he wasn't

keeping upwith the field

properly.Then he decided

that his unease was based on an incorrect model of scholarship, one thatinsisted that everyone had to know everything. Instead, he decided, knowl-edge ought to be like the scales on a fish, each one covering a small amount,overlapping with others, but not identical to any of them. So each scholarought to construct an individual combination of specialties and skills, notlike anyone else's, none of them comprehensive; similarly, each specialfield, like ethnomusicology, would be some sort of mixture of such overlap-ping scales. If each scholar, and each field, did that, we might between uscover the whole

thingwithout

anyof us

personallyor

organizationallyhaving to feel bad about leaving things out. They'd be there when we neededthem.

In fact, that's pretty much what people do, don't you think? They justdon't like to admit it; it doesn't sound nice. If we accepted that that's whatwe're really doing, we could rest a lot easier leaving all sorts of things out,secure in the knowledge that somewhere, someone probably knows it andwe can get it when we need it.

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MUSIC MAKING

Being a sociologist, Charles, I have a very limited interest in such mattersas acoustics or the physics of music making. Other sociologists have foundthose phenomena interesting, but they've done that by locating them in thenetwork of collective activity in which music gets made.

One definition of sociology is that it studies how people do thingstogether. That's deceptively simple. Because how people do things togetheris quite complicated, as you of course always knew. I have a vivid memoryof you telling a somewhat bewildered student in Klaus's seminar, who hadmentioned that he might be interested in studying American "country"music, a two hour story of the first recording of that music ever made. Youdescribed the store keeper in whose store the recording was made, andsaid something about the financing and distribution of the records. You


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Etbnomusicology nd Sociology: A Letter o Charles eeger 281

named the musicians and told us something of their careers, enough sothat we could understand how they came to be there, making that recording.

You traced the evolution of the songs they recorded from earlier models.You worked in a short and masterful dissertation on shape note notation,because hymns written in that form were part of the tradition the recordingartists relied on to do what they were doing.

I'm leaving a lot out here, mostly because I don't remember the details.Here's what's important. That impromptu dissertation on the first countrymusic recording embodied the essence of a good sociological analysis. Inthis way: you included all the people and events that contributed to thosefirst recordings being what they were and, in so doing, made it clear that

they were not just the work of the people who were standing in front ofthe microphones, but were equally the work of all those others, right downto the writers of the shape note books, whether they were there in thatMemphis music store or not. I think it was Memphis. I'm sure someonewill straighten me out on that if it's necessary. (Judith McCulloh told me,after I delivered this lecture, that it was really Atlanta. She knew the namesof the people involved too, so you weren't the only one with this kind ofknowledge, Charles.)

That sets the stage for the last thing I want to tell you about. I know

you'll be interested in the work some sociologists of music have done withrespect to the social organization of music. Before I get into that, though,I ought to say something about the sociology of art generally, because whatI'm going to describe isn't exactly what most outsiders, or even a lot ofsociologists, understand by the expression.

For most people, the "sociology of art" points to a discipline asphilosophical as it is sociological, in which the entities in play are societies(conceived as totalities) and art works (conceived more or less in isolation),a discipline devoted to tracing the way art reflects society, the reflectionsbeing found mainly in the congruence ingenious analysts can find betweenlarge cultural themes and the way societies and their subgroups are or-ganized. The discipline, so conceived, has much in common with aesthetics.It's not afraid, as a more anthropologically oriented discipline might properlybe, to make ethnocentric judgments of value, to decide, for instance, thatMozart's compositions are intrinsically better music than African drumming.Adherents of this approach have often, though not always, had a definitepreference for highbrow art and have often looked at the popular arts asexpressions of mass society (which, believe me, Charles, was not a nicename to call anyone).

The sociology of art, so understood, is as much as a branch of literarystudies or art history or musicology, depending on the medium beingdiscussed, as it is of sociology conventionally conceived. The names as-


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sociated with such sociologies of art are Arnold Hauser, Theodor Adorno,Lucien Goldmann, and so on. It's a sociology of art with European roots,

although many of its practitioners are American.That's not the sociology of art I'm talking about, Charles. I have in mind

instead a discipline which is really a subfield of empirical sociology, inwhich the emphasis is on occupational organization, the development andmaintenance of traditions, the training of practitioners, mechanisms of dis-tribution, and audiences and their tastes. The basic imagery in this kind ofsociology is of art as something people do together. Sociologists workingin this mode aren't much interested in "decoding" art works, in finding theworks' secret meanings as reflections of society. They prefer to see those

works as the result of what a lot of people have done jointly. While theimagery of the older sociology of art emphasizes great geniuses workingmore or less in isolation--the studies are of great novelists or composers--the imagery underlying this other version is more likely to be drawn fromone of the collective arts, like filmmaking, where it might even be hard totell who to credit or blame for the work you see. This sociology of art isless interested in genius and in rare works and more interested in jour-neymen and routine work which, of course, most art consists of. You cansee why I admired your description of the first country music recording.

You can study literature sociologically without knowing how to writea novel. You can study film without knowing the details of scriptwriting andfilm editing. People do that by focusing on the subject matter of the worksthey study, analyzing Stendhal, for instance, as an analyst of social mobilityin French society. But, because music doesn't have any obvious content,analysts must talk about it technically. As a result, most sociological researchon music has been done by those few sociologists who are also competentmusicians. Of course, since most sociologists study contemporary industrialsocieties, the sociology of music does not cover the range of societies

ethnomusicology makes its responsibility.An excellent example is Robert Faulkner's extensive research on music

in Hollywood, reported in his books on Hollywood studio musicians (1971)and Hollywood composers (1983). Faulkner hows how the details of musicalcomposition and performance take shape in the context of the social organi-zation of movie making. A score has to be tailored to the film it accompanies.Where the film needs a climax the music must provide it, whether thedevelopment of the musical deas themselves calls for it or not. Of course,a skillful composer will create a score whose musical ogic dictates a climaxwhere the film dictates it, but it doesn't work the other way. Directors andcinematographers o not create visual climaxes to parallel an effect in thescore. Similarly, the score must be written in a hurry, as part of the workto be done once a rough cut of the film exists and everyone is anxious to


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Ethnomusicology nd Sociology: A Letter o Charles Seeger 283

get it out where it can start earning back its cost. And the score must bewritten so that it will satisfy producers and directors who say they want

"something modern,like

Tchaikowskyor Bela Barstock" or who announce

that "Now, since this story is set in France, we should hear lots of Frenchhorns."

When the music is recorded, another set of industrial imperatives comesinto play. Time is definitely money in a recording studio where a 60 pieceorchestra is collecting union scale, and it's money spent on what hardlyanyone in the industry thinks is very important. As a result, the contractorsand leaders who do the hiring look for people who can rehearse a scoreonce and then record it without an error. If a player makes a mistake, even

once, the contractor has plenty of other names, of people who haven't givenhim that cause for worry, in his book. Many, perhaps most, parts can be

played in your sleep. But you may turn the page and find a passage requiringvirtuoso skill; play that once and then record it perfectly too. Such a systembreeds and retains players of super-virtuosity, with nerves and stomachs ofsteel; if they have other musical talents that's fine, but optional.

You might say that Faulkner's work incorporates economics and psycho-logy into a fundamentally sociological analysis of composition and perfor-mance.

A different version of the effects of social organization on the contentand performance of music is seen in Samuel Gilmore's analysis of theorganization of classical music making in New York City, which focuses onthe role of musical conventions in organizing concert activity (Gilmore1987, 1988). New York contains three overlapping worlds of classical music.Midtown consists of the orchestras, chamber groups, and soloists who spe-cialize in the standard repertoire. They all play the same music and masterthe same skills; they differentiate themselves by their virtuosity n performingthese standard tasks. Uptown, on the other hand, is organized to perform

new works, in the tradition of the repertoire but innovative with respect toinstrumental and compositional techniques. Uptown composers are, let'ssay, mildly radical and uptown performers have to know a greater varietyof musical conventions and be ready to learn more new ones than playerswho specialize in the standard repertoire. Downtown composers usuallyplay their own music, music that differs radically from conventional classicalcompositions. The three can be exemplified in the New York Philharmonic,Speculum Musicae, and the Philip Glass ensemble.

Each of these constitutes a world characterized by differing performance

conventions, such that participants in each one already know how to dowhat that world needs done or know how to learn to do it quickly. Thatlets each world support its preferred style of composition and performanceeconomically. The differing modes of organization make possible differing


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kinds of artistic expression, innovation, and creativity. Each kind of artisticexpression, in both composition and performance, is supported by a sytem

of conventions that makes it possible.Gilmore concludes that:

The degree of convention n each subworld nfluences he extent of emphasison virtuosity nd innovation. When concert activity s highly conventionalized,as in Midtown, articipants re constrained o fit their musical deas within avery circumscribed orm. Because musical deas are restricted, he aestheticemphasis is on virtuosity or "doing things well." In contrast, when musicalactivity s not conventionalized, s in Downtown, here are fewer constraintson musical deas. Concert participants ave more eeway o create new musicalideas and the

emphasiss on innovation r

"doing hings differently." ptownlies in the middle, seeking to maintain balance between limited nnovationand virtuosic kills. (Gilmore 1988:217-18)

You might say that Gilmore has shown the social bases of collective innova-tion, and turned what might look like a problem in psychology into one insociology.

Stith Bennett's work (1980) is a lesson for anyone who thinks you haveto learn to play through face-to-face interaction with a teacher, as in so manyof the musical traditions we study, or through participation n a performing

ensemble, as I was always told Gypsies learned to play. He studied the wayyoung rock musicians learn to create music with none of the elaboratecontext described by Gilmore and Faulkner. These novices have only themost attenuated connection to a music world: an electric guitar or bass theindustry has created for them, a stereo system, the records they want tolearn to imitate, and a place where they can make all the noise they wantwithout the neighbors calling the police. They learn by banging away at theinstrument (you'll recognize in these phrases the prejudices of an old jazzplayer) until, through trial and error, they get something that sounds like

the record. They eventually team up with others who have learned to imitatethe same records in the same way. In this way, as Bennett says, a recordingbecomes a score, an alternative way of preserving an idea for study andperformance.

Well, Charles, that's just a taste of what this particular sociological ap-proach provides in the way of questions and answers. I don't say that theyare better questions or answers than another approach might generate. Thepoint, rather, is that one way to deal with the multiple facts and approachesyou always wanted to include is to subordinate them to one particularapproach-as the people whose work I've cited subordinated everything tothe question of collective action-and let them operate as the conditionsunder which whatever you have made the focus occurs.


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Ethnomusicology and Sociology: A Letter to Charles Seeger 285

I don't know if that would satisfy ou. Probably ot. Your mind was toorestless to be content with any solution to a problem, which is why youwere such an

inspiration,and such an

irritation,o

anyonewhose

pathcrossed yours. I'm glad mine did.

Best,

Howie Becker

REFERENCES

Becker, Howard S.1963 Outsiders. Glencoe: Free Press.1982 Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bennett, H. Stith1980 On Becoming a Rock Musician. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Blacking, John1967 Venda Childrens' Songs. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Campbell, Donald T.1969 "Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish-Scale Model of Omniscience." In Inter-

disciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences, ed. M. Sherif. Chicago: Aldine.Clifford, James, and George Marcus

1986 Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.Faulkner, Robert

1971 Hollywood Studio Musicians. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.1983 Music on Demand New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Gilmore, Samuel1987 "Coordination and Convention: The Organization of the Concert World." Symbolic

Interaction 10:209-27.1988 "Schools of Activity and Innovation." Sociological Quarterly 29:203-19.

Hennion, Antoine1988 Comment la musique vient aux enfants: Une anthropologie de 1enseignement mu-

sical. Paris: Anthropos.Kerman, Joseph

1985 Contemplating Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McCall, Michal, and Judith Wittner1989 "The Good News about Life History." In Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies,

ed. H. S. Becker and M. McCall. Forthcoming.Marcus, George E.

1986 "Ethnographic Writing and Anthropological Careers." In Writing Culture, ed. J. Clif-ford and G. Marcus, 262-66. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rabinow, Paul1986 "Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity n Anthropology."

In Writing Culture, ed. J. Clifford and G. Marcus, 234-61. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Rice, Timothy

1987"Toward the

Remodellingof

Ethnomusicology." Ethnomusicology 31:469-88.Seeger, Charles1977 Studies in Musicology: 1935-1975. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Howard Becker - Letter to Charles Seeger, 1989

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