The Fiddle’s Voice: Timbre, Musical Learning, and Collaborative Ethnography in Central and Inner Asia

A collaborative ethnography, as described by Douglas Holmes and George Marcus, involves a “deferral to the subjects’ modes of knowing” (Holmes and Marcus 2008: 82), ideally practiced from the first step into the field and carried through the writing stage, an approach underscored by Joanne Rappaport, who advocates for “coproduction of theory” and is echoed by others in this journal (Field 2008; Lassiter 2005; Rappaport 2008). Rappaport writes, “It is precisely the possibility of constructing alternative research agendas outside of the academic orbit and, correspondingly, pursuing alternative forms of analysis, which make collaborative ethnography different from traditional participant observation” (Rappaport 2008: 2). For many of us who started our academic training with the participant observation model, our research approach has evolved over time, becoming more collaborative as we become more comfortable with “vulnerable” ethnographic writing, in which we eschew the techniques “intended to increase the authenticity of our ethnographic accounts and augment our authority as authors” (Lassiter 2005: 120). My own approach to collaborative ethnography emerged gradually during my ethnographic research on Kazakh music in Kazakhstan, China, and western Mongolia (2004–10), and my study of Kazakh aesthetics, particularly timbre, was informed by collaborative work with Kazakh musicians and teachers. In this article I build on the early collaborative ethnographies of others in my discipline by exploring how studying with local musicians (or indeed other masters of performance and expressive culture) allows the development of collaborative discussion of aesthetics and sonic meaning.

Ethnomusicologists, because of their close involvement with other musicians, depending on the research project, sometimes have easier “access” when first conducting fieldwork, though ethnomusicological studies, like those of anthropologists, ultimately involve local “modes of knowing” to wildly varying degrees. In parallel to developments in collaborative anthropology, various “threads” of collaborative work have been present in ethnomusicology for several decades (Lassiter 2005: 17).¹

Because we are generally interested in hearing, producing, and describing sound, ethnomusicologists have long sought ways to involve native musicians and musicologists in discourse about the particular sounds they make. Particularly when studying aspects of aesthetics, as most ethnomusicologists do in some fashion, working collaboratively in musical performance (even at very elementary skill levels) provides a way to hash out ideas about music through sonic (musical), physical (embodied), and verbal means. Providing a nuanced ongoing conversation, continued collaborative performance helps to get at physical and musical manifestations of emotions as well as ideas. Working closely with local musicians in lessons or rehearsals also allows the ethnographer to be the follower, so that the local teacher/musician drives the both the sonic and the theoretical collaboration.

Studies on sound as a focus of collaborative ethnography within the field of ethnomusicology have touched on a wide range of subjects, including aesthetics and ethics; technology, digital media, and the recording industry (Bates 2010; Fiol 2010); embodiment, belief, and philosophy (Keister 2008; Levin and Süzükei 2006); ritual, performativity, and framing (Fiol 2010; Wong 2001); perception and emotion (Perman 2010); and acoustic ecology (Feld 1988; Levin and Süzükei 2006). Early forays into collaborative ethnomusicology included attention to language and native musical terms and a concurrent striving to construct a theory that took into account lifeways, ecology, and social structure. Steven Feld’s now well-known ethnography of the Kaluli’s “lift-up-over sounding” embraced this approach. A major contribution to the field and a profound influence on later scholars, Feld’s 1981 article, which drew a parallel between ecological and sonic aspects of Kaluli performance, paved the way for a growing interest in native conceptions of sound and a burgeoning awareness of acoustic ecology (Feld 1981). Feld ventured further into collaborative territory when he discussed his monograph Sound and Sentiment (1982) with Kaluli members to gain their feedback on his characterization of their music and aesthetic concepts in a process of “dialogic editing” (Feld 1988).

Other ethnomusicological studies that have influenced the collaborative direction of ethnomusicology include Jane Sugarman’s 1997 monograph Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings, which, though perhaps not consciously about collaborative ethnography, represents insightful...