Some Contributions of Ethnomusicology to the Study of Oral Literature

Some Contributions of Ethnomusicology h 1 . 1 tote Study of Ora Literature by Fredric Lieberman Brown University One of the reasons that the ,,:tudy of music is valuable for other disciplines is because of the particular philosophical situation in which one finds oneself in attempting, as Charles Seeger would put it, to report on one form of communication . by means of another form of communication. Reporting on music communication through the medium of sp eech corrrrnunication states the problem mor e distinctly than when dealing with mixed genres. That is, when using speech to report on a speech genre such as storytelling we are apt to believe that the language of the report is saying something in a direct way that relates to the language of the genre, which is not necessarily tru e-the universes of language may be quite different. But because they both use about the same vocabulary, though perhaps with different meanings, it presents a more complex problem methodologically or epistemologically. It becomes clearer in the purer situation of music versus speech. 1 This is a revised and edited version of an informal presentation delivered orally at the 1973 CHINOPERL conference. In the spirit of CHINOPERL, however, I have tried to avoid recasting it in a literary mold; though unlike the White House transcripts I have freely emended, elided, and even occasionally guessed at inaudible phras es . 127 1. Charles Seeger Charles Seeger has been devoting the past several decades to developing the epistemology of the study of music. What he has said so far is summarized in the article 11 Towards a Unitary Field Theory for Musicology" (1970). The first question that arises Seeger calls the "musicological juncture 11 ; it is a situation that you put yourself in, a choice that you make, when you want to use one means of communication to deal with another. The musician himself insofar as he's being a musician, uses music to communicate music. In order to do this he must have a knowledge of the processes of music cormnunication . Seeger suggests that musicians can communicate through a universe of music knowledge as opposed to speech knowledge. That is, in communicating through music, the rules, grammar, syntax, et cetera, of music are not translated into language and back again by the performer but are simply handled as a separate universe. Seeger defines a musicologist as a person who involves himself in the universe of speech, trying to tell people what's happening in the other universe, creating thereby a difficult epistemological probl~m- Seeger uses the term "world view" to introduce the idea that musicology as a discipline sees the world as set up in a certain way, and that each individual musicologist has a personal variant of this. Then Seeger discards the term "world view 11 and substitutes the term "universe," to be more in line with contemporary philosophy and logic, and talks about a whole series 0£ different universes, in the same sense that we use the term "universe of discourse. 11 There is a universe of music and music knowledge, a universe of speech which 128 essentially consists of all the words we have and the ways we use these words. The "individual universe, 11 is the personal, private universe that every individual has, not totally communicable, but which we try to communicate, sometimes by using elements of the speech universe, sometimes by recourse to elements of the music universe, sometimes by elements of other universes. Seeger posits a universe of culture, different from the individual universe, a sum total of the ways in which people within a society react to and reflect the external world. I'm not going to try to define what each of the universes consists of--that 1 s part of.an entirely different paper·. Seeger simply points out that we can view these as basic universes of thought. Finally, there is the physical universe, the universe of phenomena. Seeger then observes that each of these tmiverses includes all of the others. He demonstrates this with diagrams. (I don't think Seeger makes the point that there's also a universe of diagrams!) But I think it's clear enough...