01/07/2021
as a social resource ：
Many cultures use music as a resource to integrate society around common, shared behaviors and values. In this strain of research, ethnomusicologists tend to claim that musical aesthetics and behavioral and cultural ethics are two sides of the same coin. When people are taught, for example, to make what the culture deems good music, they are also enculturated and socialized into ways of being good people and acting appropriately within that society. Sometimes this is done in song texts. For example, an African initiation ceremony may include songs that instruct young adolescents in proper adult behavior. Richard Waterman (1914–71) wrote of the Yirkalla Aborigines
in Australia that throughout his life, the Aboriginal is surrounded by musical events that instruct him about his natural environment and its utilization by man, that teach him his world-view and shape his system of values, and that reinforce his understanding of Aboriginal concepts of status and of his
own role. Sometimes the enculturation occurs in the structures of musical performance. So, for example, if success in hunting depends on coordinated collaboration among the hunters, as it does among the forest-dwelling Aka people of central Africa, then their cooperative, interlocking, polyphonic
singing before, during, and after hunting may prepare them for, and aid them with, that kind of work. School and patriotic songs help individuals feel connected to a social group and make them want to support that group and its values in competition or battle. Group performances, whether of large choral groups, massed bands, or synchronized dancers, enact social solidarity, provide a means for a community to see itself acting in social harmony, and experience itself in sync in an emotionally satisfying, intense, pleasing manner.
Music can also challenge powerful social institutions from positions of structural weakness. It can help to form communities where none have existed before, and to activate change in the underlying cultural assumptions and social structures of a society. For example, during the later years of the
communist period in Bulgaria, the extravagant improvisatory virtuosity of Romani musicians playing modern instruments contrasted with the staid arrangements played by government-sponsored folklore ensembles playing traditional instruments. Those differences in musical style became rallying points for those who opposed the totalitarian government and its draconian policies with respect to Muslim minorities. Music is also a communicative resource in music-filled events that humans have invented to celebrate the progression of life stages and the cycle of seasons. In these cases music fosters communication between members of a society. Among the Suyá Indians of the Amazon basin, for example, each ceremonial musical performance tells the Suyá something about the person who is performing and about the season in which it is performed. The Suyá year is divided into rainy and dry seasons. These seasons are established not by changes in the weather but by changes in the ceremonies performed and the songs that are sung. It is not simply the coming of rain but the singing of rainy season songs that communicates to one and all that the rainy season has begun. Singing also communicates a person’s self-concept of his or her age category: child, adolescent, adult, or old person. A young boy might sing an adult song to signal his evolving sense of self. An aging adult male might begin to sing less forcefully to signal his passage into old age. An older woman, on the other hand, “might retain the sober demeanor characteristic of a younger woman.”
Anthony Seeger concluded that “every ceremony was the opportunity to reaffirm not only what one was (a male and a member of certain groups) but what one believed one was or wanted to be.” In another mode of communication, humans seem to believe nearly everywhere that singing, over and above ordinary speech, is necessary to communicate with gods, ancestors, and spirits. Often each moment of ceremonial liturgies and rituals is accompanied by a specific song or instrumental performance, implying that music has special powers to make the ceremony effective. Music is often the means used to contact the supernatural world and a sign in the natural world that such contact has occurred. African and African-derived spirit-possession ceremonies provide some of the clearest examples. In the religious traditions of vodoun in Haiti, candomblé in Brazil, and santería in Cuba, a pantheon of spirits is called on to possess devotees through dances, costumes, percussion rhythms, and songs particular to each one. In all these traditions a master drummer leads a percussion ensemble playing interlocking, polyrhythmic patterns. When the master drummer senses that a trained devotee is about to go into trance, he plays a particular pattern that helps the spirit enter the mind and body of the possessed. When a social group cannot be heard, for example when it is suppressed by a more powerful group, music often provides members of that group with a noisy, heartfelt way to communicate their feelings, beliefs, and their very existence to another group. And the opposite is just as true. The powerful can use music to control space and push minorities and the powerless literally and figuratively into the periphery. Music is routinely a resource for the identification of social groups, whether the moieties of an Amazonian society, royal lineages in stratified societies, political parties in modern societies, or social categories such as youth and adults, men and women, rich and poor. In these cases music functions as a symbolic identifier of the social group both to its own members and to outsiders. In popular music traditions such as punk or death metal, for example, musicians and fans maintain a strict adherence to a particular aesthetic—both sartorial and musical—that serves to identify them to each other and to delineate who is and who is not a member of the subculture .
thimothy rice ( a short introduction to ethnomusicology )
