A Look Inside the House of Records: An Interview with Dr. David Gracon

Interviewed by Samuel Lamontagne

Trailer for "Walls of Sound"

Full movie here.

1. Walls of Sound: A Look Inside The House of Records (2012) is a documentary you made about a record store in Eugene, Oregon. Can you introduce the documentary and its general perspective?

Sure, I’ll pull from some of the promotional information I constructed when putting the film out. This provides a concise context.

Walls of Sound — A Look Inside the House of Records (2012/63 min.) is a feature length documentary video that explores the House of Records, a brick and mortar independent record store based in Eugene, Oregon.  The store has been in operation since 1972 and it currently struggles to exist in the midst of digital downloading (both legal and illegal) and the practices of corporate retailers (in terms of corporate big-box and online stores and their selling practices). It also struggles against forces of nature (the roof being impaled by a giant tree, fire and flooding etc.) and thieves. The video is an ethnographic study that combines interviews with the owner and employees and various customers of the store. Their stories and observations are often imbued with a quirky sense of humor, biting intelligence and a deep admiration for the store and its culture. The video addresses the cultural significance and various folkloric narratives of the store on a number of levels. It explores how the store provides cultural diversity and alternative media, as they cater to the musical fringes and a broad range of musical styles not widely available at other retail outlets. It is argued the store is akin to a “library” and acts as an archive of obscure and out-of-print music, where the store-workers share their musical expertise with the customers (and vice versa). The video also addresses the importance of the vernacular (or handmade) design of the physical space (the store is situated in an old house) and tangible musical artifacts, especially the “resurgence” of vinyl records. Lastly, it addresses the importance of face-to-face interaction as the store acts as a community gathering space between the store-workers, customers and local music scenes — one that is ostensibly anti-corporate, fiercely local and subcultural in scope.

2. You wrote your Ph.D. dissertation on independent record stores (Exiled Records and Over-the-Counter-Culture — A Cultural Political Economic Analysis of the Independent Record Store) - what inspired you to switch to this visual medium and make a documentary film?

I came into my doctoral program at the University of Oregon already with a documentary filmmaking background. However, at the time I felt that I was done with filmmaking, and wanted to pursue traditional writing and research instead. During my coursework, I took a qualitative research methods class and for an assignment we conducted field interviews. So I interviewed the folks at The House of Records and recorded them on video. I really didn’t think at the time this would go beyond a class project and learning exercise. When I showed the clips to the class, the response was very positive and it seemed people wanted to see and learn more about this record store subculture. It also helped that the people I interviewed are total characters. They are very funny and they have a very sophisticated and critical view of culture.  After all, this was Eugene, Oregon. All of these essential ingredients were right for a documentary film. So I continued filming the store and interviewing people related to the store as a class project.

The folks at the store were really the ones who encouraged me to push the project further into a larger documentary film. Without this encouragement, the project probably would have died with the ending of the course.  

I see the dissertation and the documentary as two separate projects. Of course, there is overlap between the two. They inform each other. However, a documentary film can do and say so much more than a written dissertation ever can. For example, the folks in the film are lovable oddballs and this comes off much more clearly and directly than explaining that as a pull quote in a written dissertation. For example, sarcasm reads very differently in video form. They tell funny jokes (the workers at Best Buy are referred to as “ass clowns” etc.), they swear a lot, and generally observe culture through this very countercultural lens. They are very intensely into alternative and independent music culture and this passion translates much better on screen than in written academic form. By far. The visual images can better speak for themselves. The people, their non-verbal cues and quirky mannerisms, the tone of their voice etc. At the end of the day, people will watch a documentary film. There is an audience for this work. And I took the film on tour and screened it all over the country. I don’t think as many people would show up to a tour of my written dissertation, which is simply an academic requirement for a very limited audience. In some ways, the documentary is a visual version of the dissertation, but it is much more playful and entertaining. But also critically oriented.  

It is also important to note the dissertation was completed first. I had accumulated all the raw documentary footage as a doctoral student, and some of this was used as data in the dissertation. But I didn’t edit and finalize the documentary until I was a faculty member at Eastern Illinois University after I graduated. This was largely because of time restrictions. I had to get the dissertation done in order to graduate. So the film itself wasn’t part of my actual dissertation, but I did show video clips during my defense and various quotes were used as data. Just to clarify.

3. Did your Ph.D. dissertation influence the way you made the film?

Yes. However, the dissertation was much more expansive as I did fieldwork in many stores in Portland, Eugene and San Francisco. I also talked with labels, distributors, big-box stores and artists to obtain a more complete picture of how the industrial system of music retail worked at the time. I also went into much depth in terms of the political economy of the music industry, and how various economic forces and practices impact, often negatively, independent record stores. The documentary is a case study of The House of Records in Eugene. So by developing a deeper understanding of political economy of media through the dissertation, I was able to ask stronger questions during the interviews that effectively got at how the whole system of music distribution, retail and consumption worked. The ideas of critical political economy are certainly in the film, however, these concepts are not labeled as such as I didn’t want the film to be an academic piece, but rather a project screened by a larger audience. I wanted my father, who never went to college to be able to enjoy the film. And he did. And that was important to me.  

But reading all the related literature and writing the dissertation certainly helped me create a conceptual and theoretical foundation for the documentary that is very critical of how the music industry works. However, the video conveys this in a more compelling and entertaining way.  

4. More particularly, was the documentary a way to transfer the research issues you dealt with in the dissertation to film? Or perhaps, was it a way for you to deal with different research issues that hadn’t been touched on in the dissertation?

Well, as noted above, the documentary is really a case study of one particular store with a very rich and unique history, The House of Records. The dissertation is much more expansive and layered in political economy as I already noted. By doing a case study with the film, I was able to go into much more depth with one particular store. We get to know the folks in the film in much more detail as opposed to several pull quotes in the dissertation as data. They are essentially faceless in the dissertation. There are also narrative hooks in the documentary such as a ghost story (apparently the store is haunted); the idea that the employees are like a family which has more of a poetic feel, rather than a kind of academic inquiry that is kind of dry and impersonal. I wanted the film to feel deeply humanizing. However, I felt forced to write that way in the dissertation because of academic conventions.  It is like jumping through hoops. As far as describing the unique and vernacular aesthetics of the store (posters, records on the walls, the wooden floors, the handmade shelving etc.) it was much more effective to show this in video form. It is one thing to describe that visually in a dissertation. It is another to simply let the visuals speak for themselves through images and sound. Video is much more effective as a visual format.

5. Why did you choose House of Records as a subject? What was particular about it?

Well, my favorite record store in my hometown of Buffalo, NY, Home of the Hits, closed right around the time I started filming the qualitative interviews at The House of Records in 2006. I liked that they were both situated in old houses as a metaphor, and at the time many brick and mortar stores were going out of business. Home of the Hits really altered my life as a teenager as I got into punk and indie music. That was transformative. I later sold my zine there. It was a game changer and quite possibly one of the biggest influences in my life. So when the store closed, it really impacted me. Like the loss of a cultural limb. The House of Records in Eugene had a similar vibe and lengthy history. It is without a doubt the best record store in Eugene, and one of my favorites in the world, actually. It has a particular smell, look and feel that is very homey. The workers are extremely funny and intelligent with many years of experience and dedication. Using this store was a no brainer. At the time there was not much being done academically or in documentary form on independent record stores. It was an ideal topic of inquiry because nobody was really doing it. I was really passionate about the subject matter. It was compelling, and I was able to sustain this personal investment in the project for several years because it mattered to me.

6. Amid the transformations in the past 20 years in the cultural industries and the changing ways in which media have been commercialized, what does the documentary tell us about how an independent record store not only operates but also what it represents in contemporary society?

With the physical stores that are still around in 2019, I think there are many details in the film that still hold true. Like the social importance of simply talking and gathering with other people. Forming relationships and fostering local music scenes by stocking local product, show posters and zines. Learning from others about music culture and history are all healthy things, and this is still done in indie stores. The novelty of stumbling upon things in a store, like the music they are playing, or flipping through bins and coming across something new or unique.  Live bands or artists performing live in stores is still a novel experience. Just the importance of being in a physical space. I think these things are all healthy culturally. They are humanizing however, they are often still male dominated spaces. So it is important to note that such stores are not humanizing to all.

But we also see vinyl as a fetish object, much more now than in 2006 when I shot this footage. I feel records have gotten to be too expensive and like a boutique item for people with money and disposable income. This kind of media exclusivity I can do without. We can also see this globally where record collectors/buyers from the US and Japan are basically pillaging developing countries like Jamaica, Cuba and Colombia. These tourists are buying up their cheap vinyl “gold,” and selling it for a profit in their own developed countries. This to me is a fairly gross form of cultural imperialism and I find it strange that a record store in Seattle has a better vinyl selection of ska, reggae and dub than Kingston. This situation would make for an interesting dissertation or documentary.                

7. Did you take care of every aspect of the production process? Interviews, filming, editing, post-production, distribution?  Or did you have other people involved? If so what was the collaboration process like? What are some of the difficulties you experienced?

This project was completely DIY. I shot everything myself. It took me a year to edit the feature length film. I designed the DVD and authored it. I put together the packaging by hand. I took it on tour. I distribute it in stores and it has been affiliated with Microcosm Publishing. I sometimes still get orders for the film and mail them off myself. I submitted the text to many film festivals. I made a related webpage. I did all the PR. I did collaborate with an amazing artist, Dena Zilber, as she made the drawings for the DVD cover and related posters. I knew she understood the aesthetic and culture of indie stores, so she was an ideal fit for the art design and packaging. We had to go back and forth many times to be on the same page with the final results, but I think her design worked out very nicely. So this whole approach was very punk rock and DIY.        

In terms of difficulties, this is a lot to take on for one person. DIY projects are very labor intensive and time consuming, but I think it paid off in the end. The film screened widely and it helped me secure tenure. The folks from The House of Records liked the final result and it is an important historical record of their business. But you likely won’t make much money. But I also like having creative control of the process and not having to compromise.  But nowadays, I am much more interested in collaboration and sharing the workload with others for my sanity. And it can be more efficient in terms of time.

8. How was the documentary received by the people at House of Records? How important their feedback was to you?

I premiered the film in Oregon at the Bijou, an indie theater in Eugene. Most of the employees and a number of the customers attended the nearly packed screening. After the film ended, the employees and myself conducted a lively Q/A with the audience about the film and the social importance of The House of Records. Instead of merely screening the film, I thought it was important to have a dialog with the Eugene community about the issues addressed in the film, mainly, keeping such stores in business by actively supporting them. After the discussion the local band Heavenly Oceans performed in the screening room (their music is also on the soundtrack of the film). It was a very festive mood and by far my favorite screening of Walls of Sound. I sold many copies of the DVD that night and even signed some copies of the poster. It was pretty cool. I felt the overall reaction from the workers was very positive and supportive.  Everyone was very happy. They knew I put many hours into this project and was dedicated to telling the story of their business. One worker was a bit concerned about how the editing was out of chronological order, but this is simply the nature of documentary filmmaking. That really can’t be helped.

Whenever I visit Eugene, I always stop in The House of Records and it’s like a homecoming.  They are my friends. And it’s fantastic to see they still sell copies of the documentary as it is prominently displayed on their counter. It is special how we helped each other. This film supports their store and they will always have this historical document. It very much helped my career as an academic and media maker as well. I think this was accomplished because of trust in each other.

9. As writing is the hegemonic medium in academia, do you think there is a heuristic potential in using other media than writing? In Walls of Sound for example, did you find that the film medium allowed you to articulate ideas, or demonstrate particular arguments in ways that weren’t not possible through writing? What does researching through film feels like? What do you think of the general marginal position given to non-written works in academia?

I think you are correct here that academia values written work more than media texts such as a documentary. This of course can vary by discipline. I think part of the problem is that when you’re being evaluated or reviewed annually, the people in charge of this have no digital media or production background and they don’t realize how time and labor intensive it all is. To edit a feature length documentary project is the equivalent of a book project to me. Or they don’t understand the value of where the work has been screened as they don’t have this background.  So you really have to spell this out in your tenure narratives. So this can be problematic, but I think it all worked out and this documentary project helped me get tenure as my department values creative projects. But not all departments operate this way, and I am at a teaching oriented institution.

If I am going to spend a tremendous amount of time making a project, I want people to see and experience it. I think it is substantially easier to get a larger audience of people to watch a documentary film than read an academic article or book that has a tiny niche audience. Having tenure makes this attitude easier to pull off.  

Like all institutions, universities are slow to evolve and adapt with the times. And this obsession with written texts seems wildly outdated and extremely limited in terms of knowledge more generally. But luckily I am in an environment where creative works are accepted. In the end, I think academia needs to be more inclusive and accepting of digital media works as a valid form of cultural production. Let’s evolve already.      

10. What’s next? What are your upcoming projects?

For my next documentary project, I will go to Ukraine and document various underground music scenes ranging from punk, indie, metal and electronic music subcultures. I’m also currently a co-editor of an edited collection called Music and Death — Interdisciplinary Readings and Perspectives that is in the works. I also have several essays on punk and pedagogy in the pipeline, as well as a historical essay on the political economy of iTunes. I would love to eventually write a book on the critical history of music retail, as I feel that is a blind-spot in the literature. Perhaps in the future. When I have a free moment. Which may be never.        

David Gracon is an associate professor of critical media studies and digital media production at Eastern Illinois University.  His research/creative projects and teaching interests include cultural studies, film studies, media literacy, alternative media, DIY cultural production, punk studies, the political economy of communication, documentary and experimental media production. He is also the programmer and host of Hallways Microcinema based in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.  For the 2017/2018 academic year, he was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar teaching media studies at Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. He is a native of Buffalo, NY and has been invested in post-punk, indie, experimental music scenes, zine communities and college radio; as well as activist orientated experimental film, video and documentary communities and collectives since the mid 90’s.

Whether it’s through the media and entertainment industries or academia, Los Angeles hip-hop has been under close scrutiny for over two decades. Far from drying up, the history of L.A. hip-hop seems to expand as the myth builds and the interest for it grows. The more you search the more you find - and in the wake of the blockbuster Straight Outta Compton (2015), more and more stories and details about the city’s hip-hop past are being discovered and told. In many ways this is what the upcoming Roadium Mixtape Documixery attempts to do. Focusing on the unsung contribution of Steve Yano, his record stand at the Roadium swap meet and the mixtape series that he was putting out, the documentary explores the pre-N.W.A era of L.A. hip-hop.

Dr. Dre’s career started long before N.W.A, as a member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. Dr. Dre as well as DJ Tony A. Da Wizard made mixtapes for Steve Yano who dubbed and distributed them at the Roadium swap meet. Those mixtapes included songs not yet played by the radio and thus helped push forward hip-hop sounds in L.A. Those mixtapes featured many freestyle raps from artists such as Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre and Hi-C, who would go on to become some of the biggest names in hip-hop.

As the music industry was morphing into large conglomerates by the mid-1980s, music became mostly commercialized through wide retail chains. At the time when hip-hop was perceived as a passing fad, local retailers such as Yano’s record stand functioned as outlets for the burgeoning L.A. hip-hop scene.  

As it concentrates on the Roadium we can also expect the documentary to shed light on the cultural significance of swap meets for people of color in working class communities. Myriad insider stories should also be featured such as how Steve Yano introduced Eazy-E and Dr. Dre to one another during a three way phone call.

Directed by Tony A, as one of the DJs who worked closely with Yano and made mixtapes for him, the documentary features numerous figures of L.A. hip-hop such as Warren G, Alonzo Williams, Sir Jinx, Kid Frost, Arabian Prince, DJ Rhettmatic, AMG, Hi-C, Tony A himself and many more.

Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound, Edited by Christine Guillebaud. New-York/Oxon: Routledge, 2017. [239 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-1-138-80127-1].

(Each paper is referenced with the author’s name and the geographical location of its research subject)

Mostly written by scholars from French research centers, the eleven articles of the volume Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound, edited by Christine Guillebaud, are intended as a contribution of anthropology to the interdisciplinary studies of sound.

Interdisciplinarity is the key notion in this publication, both in terms of the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors (anthropology, ethnology, sociology, geography, ethnomusicology and acoustics), and in terms of the range of their past and present research. An interdisciplinary angle seems particularly relevant in that the diverse articles investigate socialization states and processes through the prism of sound. Long overlooked by social sciences, sound has gained scholarly consideration in the last thirty years, both as a source of disturbance in modern societies and for its central role in social agency. In that perspective, ambient sound can be considered as part of a sensory environment not simply experienced but perhaps endured by people, and also used by them as a space where they can produce meaning through sound in shifting ways. Sound environments are also where one shapes her/his listening in relation to gaining her/his own subjectivity. Thus, as this book is “primarily devoted to understanding the sensory modalities of the production of sound environment decrypting the range of local knowledge and the imaginaries they inspire in a given group or society” (Guillebaud, p. 2), listening appears as the other key notion. In the introduction, Guillebaud presents and critiques the “Four ways of listening” introduced by French composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer in the 1960s, which was later extended by Michel Chion. Rather than this overly rigid and semantic typology, she prefers Henry Torgue's, which includes the notion of agency and links listening and understanding of sounds to the listener's social situation and ability to act in society. Listening thus becomes the moment of taking information about one’s human/non-human environment. It constitutes the individual as a subject at the same time as it informs oneself about the subjectivity of others. Each of the four parts of this volume addresses one particular aspect of the relationship between a listener and one’s sound environment as part of the social environment.

The first part, Listening into Others, explores the topic of the existence of the self through the production of one’s own sounds and the reception of the sounds of others. Listening to another is generally a way to discern their values or social identifications through their sonic production. Conversely, producing sound is also a means to exhibit one’s own self to others. Furthermore, sound, voice or music are means to engage in commercial or diplomatic relationships with people from unknown and misunderstood cultures (Anne Damon-Guillot, Ancient Ethiopia), to dominate them or to affirm one’s social self against oppressive social structures (Tripta Chandola, slums in Delhi India). Sound can also be used by individuals or social groups to create and appropriate a sound environment devoted to particular ways of communicating alongside particular social relations (Olivier Féraud, Naples, Italy).   

The next part is titled Sound Displays and Social Effects. It addresses sound strategies (solicitations and various sounds) used to capture attention and control crowds in two different types of overpopulated spaces: bus station (Guillebaud, Trichur, Kerala, India) and train stations (Pierre Manea, Tokyo, Japan). Guillebaud focuses on sonic skills and techniques (pitched sound, corporeal attitudes of the tickets collectors, uses of voice…) used to capture the attention of others in a context of intense commercial and sonic competition. Through a comparative angle across time and space, Manea analyzes the strategies for reporting the arrival, boarding and departure phases of trains in stations where train traffic is threatened by any chaotic behavior of overflowing crowds.

The third part, Sound Identity and Locality, explores how sound is attached to a place and its inhabitants through the diachronic study of four urban and peri-urban fields. By investigating the historical evolution of the classification of sound as “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” within the “acoustic communities” of Dollar (a Scottish village), Heikki Uimonen considers the particular soundscapes they lived in through time. In Cairo (Egypt), Vincent Battesti focuses on how dwellers listen to the city and identify its spaces through sound, according to their “social sound structures,” but also by the way each of them listens regarding their own social situation. Iñigo Sánchez considers sound as a means and marker for urban evolution. His article examines the effects of the urban renewal of a popular area of Lisbon on its soundscapes, and finally on its inhabitants’ living standards. Claire Guiu extends her perspective to the whole city of Barcelona (Spain), where she studies the production of sonic territories shaped by particular norms and imaginaries. She concludes that the city and its spaces are places for the expression and the confrontation of sensory ideologies.

The last part, Sound Art and Anthropology, contains two articles on an uncertain categorization of sound, between noise and music, found in two experimental artistic practices. Jean-Claude Depaule addresses sound poetry through a historical perspective. Vincent Rioux intertwines the history of a Parisian suburb with one of its footbridge. He further considers the testimony of the suburb’s inhabitants to analyze an experimental music and dance performance, intended as a tribute to a footbridge just before its demolition.

The volume ends on an afterword by Jean-Paul Thibaud, who uses this concluding space to reflect on French research on sound environments in society. Although it doesn’t contain any academic breakthroughs, the wide range of fieldworks (firmly illustrated by video and audio files available online) and methods makes it a recommended reading for anyone interested in the social effects of sound. More specifically, the diversity of methods - mobilizing participant observation, interpretation of historical texts, statistics, listening walks, field recordings (including the experimental and promising “Mics in ear” method by Battesti and Nicolas Puig) - used both in diachronic and synchronic perspectives, establishes this volume as an inspiring toolbox for future works. An “anthropology of ambient sound” remains to be accomplished, as the book’s title implies by the word “toward,” and it can be an important resource for scholars as well as for the listener to shape her/his own subjectivity.  This could be a potential answer to the question asked by Thibaud in closing the volume: “could the anthropology of ambient sound simply be another means of listening to ambiances?" (p. 231).  

Jonathan Thomas is a Ph.D. candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (CRAL). His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Prof. Esteban Buch, focuses on the cultural history of political records in France during the 1930s. He wrote three peer-reviewed articles: “Jean-Marie Le Pen et la SERP : le disque de musique au service d’une pratique politique” (Volume!, 2017), “Militer en chantant, sous l’œil de la police parisienne des années 1930 : une exploration du fonctionnement politique du chant” (Transposition, 2018), “De la musique pour le peuple : une proposition d’analyse des disques folkloriques du Chant du Monde” (Analitica, 2018).

One of the many rewarding aspects of exploring Indonesian jazz communities is my relationship with the members of Warta Jazz, an Indonesian jazz news source and website. What began as an organization to produce a monthly physical news bulletin in 1996 with the aim to socialize jazz in Yogyakarta, grew into an ecosystem^[1] centered on jazz with festivals, workshops, archives, movie screenings, and educational events. As part of my participation in this ecosystem, I attended and took photos of the Java Jazz Festival 2019 held at the Jakarta International Expo in the northern Kemayoran subdistrict of Jakarta from March 1–3. This festival is a major annual highlight for the Indonesian jazz community and this year featured seventy-five Indonesian artists along with thirty-six international acts. The festival draws a largely Indonesian audience, although many foreigners, usually those working in Indonesia or nearby countries like Singapore, also attend. While official numbers have not yet been released, in previous years the audience was around 115,000 for this three-day festival.^[2] Many people in the jazz community have been generally positive about the direction of the festival citing a concentrated effort by festival founder Peter Gontha, a well-known businessman and former Indonesian ambassador to Poland, and his daughter Dewi Gontha, who has guided the event’s programing for the past several years, to make the event more jazz focused. 

The idea of making the event “more jazz” is a critical theme throughout the Indonesian jazz community. In previous years, many have criticized the festival for ignoring the local jazz community in favor of popular music acts to attract larger crowds, causing some community members to boycott. During the festival, I often heard from audience members, performers, and organizers that the Java Jazz Festival “isn’t all jazz,” recapitulating the matter. Despite this concern, many Indonesian jazz musicians, organizers, archivists, and educators do attend every year and often present new works at this large-scale media event. The debate of “more jazz” focuses on how the word jazz is defined in and by the Indonesian community, a debate common to almost every jazz community. The varied positions in this debate seek to define the place of jazz in Indonesian society, signaling issues of authenticity and authority. How these positions are delineated and who has the authority to do the delineating reflects more about the classifiers than anything that became clear or strict demarcations for the Indonesian jazz community as a whole.

What this festival made evident was that Indonesian jazz musicians were hungry to hear international jazz performers live. Since jazz is a genre where individual performances and liveness are respected, this festival provides the major opportunity for Indonesian musicians to hear international jazz musicians outside of recorded formats. Most of the Indonesian musicians I spoke with were excited to hear international musicians like Gretchen Parlato, Robert Glasper and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah with super group R+R=Now, and GoGo Penguin. I, conversely, was completely stunned by the magnitude and quality of Indonesian musicians, even though I have been attending jazz events in Indonesia for over two years now. The Indonesian jazz musicians performed in a range of styles, from straight-ahead, modern (often meaning commercial), ethnik^[3] (drawing up a variety of traditional Indonesian musics), and contemporary (often meaning experimental). These styles, just like the word "jazz," quickly became blurred as Real Book chops informed contemporary collaborations, and ensembles with traditional instruments belted out pop hits. Popular music ensembles added horn sections, extended solos, and outstanding players to make their music “more jazz.”

Three Diverse Groups

While an abundance of ensembles are worthy of attention, for this Notes From the Field account I will focus on three groups that caught my attention during my coverage for Warta Jazz: Anteng Kitiran, Indro Hardjodikoro, and simakdialog. The first group, Anteng Kitiran, is a Yogyakarta based ensemble featuring Eko Yuliantoro (violin), Krisna Pradipta Tompo (keyboard/piano), Gagah Pacutantra (drums), and Harly Yoga Pradana (bass).

The group’s compositions combine pelog and slendro tunings from Central Javanese gamelan with jazz modes and scales as well as hints of Western classical music training resulting in refreshing new sounds. The group is not fully dominated by any of these traditions, as violionist Eko Yuliantoro moves between kroncong^[4] inspired legato while self-consciously infusing Central Javanese aesthetics and danceable grooves that feel both modern and refined.

The group has only recently formed and has yet to formally release an album, but their compositions display the influence of the Yogyakarta jazz community associations from the Jazz Mben Senen and Ngayogjazz communities. Their mixture of traditional sounds and commercial aesthetics is similar to the well-known Yogyakarta group Kua Ethnika, who also blend traditional instruments like Yogyanese bonang^[5] with a funk section consisting of bass, drum set, and guitar. Kua Ethnika’s blending allows for both tunings to exist simultaneously and has resulted in what Purwanta Ipung, their bonang and multi percussionist, has called rasa baru (new flavor/feeling) (Ipung 2018).

The second group is Indro Hardjodikoro and his festival ensemble, which featured drummer Elizer Robby, pianist Edwin Putro, and guitarist Yankjay Nugraha. Hardjodikoro is a longtime bassist in the Indonesian jazz community, playing in groups like Trisum, Halmahera, and simakdialog, as well as several projects with Erwin Gutawa and Tohpati. At Java Jazz, he presented songs from his new album Light On, which was released at the festival. Songs on the album feel lighter and sweeter than some of his other fusion projects, although his ensemble interpreted the songs with more festival-friendly grooves. While one would think Indro would be content showcasing his latest release, he premiered an upcoming project with Sruti Respati, a kroncong singer from Central Java. Their project locates jazz in the Indonesian patriotic, kroncong, film, and popular songs from the 1940s-1950s, even though those songs and genres were not labeled that way. Indro and Sruti performed a number of compositions by Ismail Marzuki^[6] (the composer of many of Indonesia’s popular and patriotic songs from the 1930s-50s) and “Nurlela” by Bing Slamet, a pop star who was active from the late 1940s until the early 1970s.

Indro and Sruti demonstrate how jazz has been a part of the Indonesian popular music repertoire for quite a while. Their project begins to unpack some of the complexities in Indonesian popular music history as many of artists from the 1950s and 1960s had a complicated relationship with the word "jazz." While many of the songs from this era have sonically recognizable jazz aesthetics, the word "jazz" does not appear in most of their descriptions. Rather, the songs are labeled as other genres such as hiburan, irama lenso, or pop. It will be exciting to follow this project’s development, as Indro and Sruti continue to locate jazz in Indonesian patriotic songs, kroncong, and pop, and further highlight the connections of these earlier genres with the contemporary jazz community.

simakdialog

The last section of this piece is devoted to a slightly longer reflection on the group simakdialog, who officially premiered their new 2019 album GONG at the festival.^[7] The story behind GONG is heartbreaking yet characterized with brilliant compositions and a spirited recording. The composer, pianist, and core of simakdialog — Riza Arshad — died in January of 2017 after only recording three of the album’s seven tracks. The thorough liner notes contain the full story of how this recording was carefully reconstructed from lost and jumbled data and completed with the help of Arshad’s pupil and inventive pianist, Sri Hanuraga (often shortened to Aga) along with support from Roullandi Siregar of Arsip Jazz Indonesia (The Indonesian Jazz Archive). The tracks Arshad recorded, such as the opening track “GONG 1,” reveal the depth of the connection between the piano trio of Arshad, bassist Rudy Zulkarnaen, and Sundanese kendang percussionist Cucu Kurina that then connects with Mian Tiara's particular and delicate vocals. Their aural bond, cultivated through listening and their long-term commitment to each other, allows them to intimately respond to each other, and foster a uniquely collaborative sonic space accentuated by their distinctive instrumentation.

Arshad’s compositions breathe life into a new musical language, blending jazz piano vocabulary with Sundanese music. All the melodic and harmonic material for each of the GONG (1-4) compositions is generated from the overtone series of different sized gongs.^[8] One of these overtone series is explicitly stated in the opening phrase of "GONG 1," played by the piano:

Also heard in this video:

Arshad’s composition and solos in “GONG 1” often leave out many chord tones, allowing the progressions to be simultaneously interpreted along multiple lines. The piano solos also contain clusters of tones with several neighbor pitches, for example the solo in "GONG 1" (performed by Arshad) and the solo in "GONG 3" (performed by Aga), which craft a blurred quality. With their clashing fundamentals as well as simultaneously ringing overtone series, the pitches invoke something of the inbetween, perhaps an illusion of microtonality. The ability to connote other tuning systems on the piano through these clashing intervallic relationships pushes the instrument and ensemble into different modes and helps invoke new feelings. This is the sonic example of Arshad’s goal to synthesize jazz piano trio vocabulary with Sundanese music, which Aga artfully describes in the liner notes. “As early as 2002 he [Arshad] started using Sundanese kendang as a part of rhythm section for simakDialog’s album Trance Mission. He may not be the first to come up with the idea to use Sundanese kendang as a rhythm section in a jazz ensemble, but he had a bigger vision than his contemporaries in this regard” (Hanuraga 2019). This fusion of traditions can be heard elsewhere on the album including the downward runs during Aga’s piano solo in "GONG 3" and the gaps and pauses in Kurina’s concluding kendang solo in “GONG 1.” These performances make space, silence, and the inbetween an integral part of the sound.

This space created by the members of simakdialog follows in the tradition of Mile Davis’s second quintet, with a focus on intense intragroup listening and group improvisation based on bonded personal and musical journeys. The group listening tradition of Davis’s quintet can similarly be heard in the later ensembles of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and John McLaughlin. This group listening space cannot be attained simply by training but requires training together and committing to both the project and the players, something increasingly rare in the digitized, fast paced music industry.

Simakdialog uses their discussions and diligent acts of listening to themselves and to other communities to foster their sound and cultivate their philosophy. Their name is a portmanteau: simak (Indonesian for attentive listening) with dia (Indonesian for her/him), lo (Betawi for you), and gue (Betawi for I).^[9] In other words, the name means listening and discourse between her/him, you, and me. The group has for a long time been on the cutting edge of the contemporary Indonesian jazz community, pushing and creating new spaces through their rare drive to promote intercultural collaboration. Beyond combining new instrumentations, Arshad’s contribution to understand and incorporate Sundanese musical idioms into jazz composition has set a new standard for the Indonesian jazz community.

The release of GONG seemed to be one of the significant events at the Java Jazz Festival 2019, when Wartajazz.com founder Agus Setiawan Basuni updated his WhatsApp status to ‘Jazz Dia_lo^Gue’ a few weeks before Java Jazz 2019 festival. Roullandi Siregar from Arsip Jazz Indonesia — who helped simakdialog compile their recordings, support their tours, and produce GONG — also described this performance as one of the main events of Java Jazz 2019. Unfortunately, he could not get a desirable group photo during their performance on the barricaded stage, so we took a conciliatory photo with the promotional photo outside the venue instead.  

The Java Jazz Festival 2019, the 15th edition, helped present many of the current projects from Indonesian jazz community, from ventures that utilize their history in the present, those drawing on multiple traditions, and those forging new frontiers. This festival, with its high-ticket price, still demonstrates how jazz remains within an upper-class milieu. But this is no longer the only major festival in Indonesia, with many other events throughout the year such as Ngayogjazz, Ubud Village Jazz Festival, and Jazz Gunung providing other high-profile opportunities for Indonesia musicians. These other festivals along with the backgrounds and goals of the Indonesian jazz musicians and event organizers demonstrate how jazz has gradually become socialized within a larger Indonesian community.

While I highlighted the Indonesian jazz groups in this piece, I'd like to emphasize that this festival was also very much a commercial pop festival that hosted a band like the international rock group Toto as one of its headliners. A majority of the audience seemed just as interested in instagram-worthy photo opportunities (see the cover photo of this post) as in the various national and international popular music acts. This placement of “real” jazz within popular music events is common in Indonesian festivals as promoters negotiate financial needs with aesthetic choices. While the “real” jazz acts often seek to distance themselves from pop, if one looks at historical examples such as Ismail Marzuki, one realizes that these styles have not always been so far apart.

References

Basuni, Agus Setiawan. 2017. “Dunia Jazz Indonesia berduka, pianis Riza Arshad wafat.” WartaJazz.com. Accessed April 19, 2019. http://www.wartajazz.com/news/2017/01/17/dunia-jazz-indonesia-berduka-pianis-riza-arshad-wafat.

Hanuraga, Sri. 2019. [Liner notes]. In GONG [CD]. Jakarta: demajors.

Indonesian Badan Ekonomi Kreatif Republik Indonesia. Recana Strategis Badan Ekonomi Kreatif Tahun 2015-2019. By Triawan Munaf. Released September 5th, 2017. Accessed April 19, 2019. http://ppid.bekraf.go.id/storage/file/VSJXle0xjBO3pUI.pdf.

“Jumlah Penonton Java Jazz 2005-2013”. twitter.com. Accessed March 21, 2013.

McGraw, Andrew. 2012. “The Ambivalent Freedoms of Indonesian Jazz.” Jazz Perspectives 6(3):273-310.

simakdialog. GONG. Demajors Independent Music Industry. 2019, Compact Disc.

Interviews

Ipung, Purwanta. 2018. Interviewed by author. Bantul, Special Region of Yogyakarta, November 13, 2018.

Introduction

In the city of Tamale, northern Ghana, Dagbani language popular music can be heard in taxis, on people’s mobile phones, and in the central market. Unlike more traditional popular music industries, where recording artists gain direct notoriety for their work, many Dagbani popular musicians have historically worked behind the scenes, composing and recording songs for the local Dagbani film industry.[i] Beginning in the early 1990s, Dagbani popular singers were commissioned by filmmakers to write and record songs for local films. After the songs were composed and recorded, they were passed on to actors, who lip-synced these songs in the films. In this post, I provide a brief history of the Dagbani film music industry in Tamale. Throughout, I consider the role that playback singers play in shaping both popular music and film culture in the region, and further explore their process for composing and performing diegetic film songs. 

Many scholars have detailed the interconnectivity of dance, music, and theatre in West Africa. Scholarly work in this realm includes Hélène Neveu Kringelbach’s work on dance and theatre in Senegal (2013), as well as Karin Barber (2003), Catherine Cole (2001), and John Collins’ (1994; 1997) respective works on the relationship between music, dance, and theatre in Nigeria and Ghana. In what follows, I similarly engage with the interconnectivity of music and film in northern Ghana, where the disciplinary boundaries between media/film studies and music are porous.

Diegetic Film Songs in Northern Ghana

Diegetic song segments have been a part of the Dagbani film industry since it began in the early 1990s. Similar to the playback singers of the Hindi film industry, a handful of trained vocalists recorded the majority of songs for Dagbani films. By the late 1990s, nearly all recorded music albums circulating in Tamale were compilations of songs from Dagbani films (Yamusah 2013:79). Why did filmmakers in Tamale gravitate towards the use of diegetic songs in their films, and what led to the creation of the playback singer role in the Dagbani film industry?

The history of diegetic film songs in northern Ghana begins with the popularity of Hindi film songs in the city during the postcolonial period. Hindi films first arrived in Tamale with the introduction of cinema in the late 1950s. Cinemas were built by Lebanese businessmen with support of the first president, Kwame Nkrumah.[ii] While both American and Hindi language films were accessible to film distributors, Hindi films were more popular, as the Islamicate iconography embedded in older Hindi films resonated with Tamale’s majority Muslim audiences. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Hindi films grew in popularity, to the point that some musicians in town named themselves after popular Hindi film actors, and set new Dagbani lyrics to Hindi film melodies.

The popularity of foreign diegetic film songs is important when considering the early development of locally produced film music in Tamale. During the 1980s, inexpensive audio-visual recording technologies arrived in Ghana, including cassette tape recorders and camcorders, that made it possible for young entrepreneurs to produce their own popular movies. Young entrepreneurial filmmakers in Ghana subsequently worked to make movies that met the (perceived) expectations and desires of their audiences (Garritano 2013:62; Meyer 2004:93). They drew upon structures from foreign films that resonated with their viewing public, while also making sure to include plot lines and imagery that spoke to the lived experiences of their audiences, in languages that viewers understood. In Tamale, this meant that many early Dagbani language films mirrored the already popular format of Hindi films, including their use of diegetic music throughout. At the same time, these locally produced videos catered to Dagbamba audiences: videos were filmed at identifiable locations in Tamale, considered themes and issues that resonated with viewers, and were made in the major language, Dagbani.

The Role of the Playback Singer

Just like in Hindi films, popular vocalists in Tamale are commissioned to record songs in the studio, that are then lip-synced by the actor on set. In this section, I look more closely at the creation of the playback singer role in Tamale. What is the purpose of having a playback singer, and what were some of the reasons for adopting this structure in the Dagbani film industry? 

In Hindi cinema, the role of the playback singer developed out of a need for a consistent standard of singing. While early Hindi film songs were sung by actors with little vocal training, later films were sung by trained vocalists, who could handle more technically complex pieces (Arnold 1991:48-49). As older Hindi film songs conveyed intense feelings in larger-than-life ways, trained vocalists were also able to amplify emotion and affect through their voice, mirroring the emotion felt by the film character (Morcom 2007:15; 2010:149; Ganti 2008:294). As song segments also arise during emotionally intense moments in Dagbani films, Tamale’s playback singers similarly use vocal techniques including vibrato, crooning, breathiness, and rhythmic lags to mirror the emotion of the characters in Dagbani films.[iii] As one Dagbani playback singer explained to me, playback singers perform in such a way that audiences “do not need to hear the words to feel the melody.”[iv] While the role of the playback singer in Tamale is similar to the role of playback singers in Hindi films, there is one key difference between the two: while Hindi film songs are composed by a music director in conversation with the film director (Morcom 2007:29-30), playback singers in Tamale are expected to compose the music, write the lyrics, and perform the film song in the studio. 

The Process of Making a Diegetic Film Song in Tamale

In what follows, I explore the process of commissioning, composing, producing, and filming a diegetic film song in Tamale. This section is based on an ethnographic example from my fieldwork in 2016, where I followed playback singer Memunatu Laadi through the process of making the film song “Nduma Nyεni Ka N Suhira” (God, you’re the one I’m pleading with), for the 2017 film N’Zim (My Blood).

One of the most sought after playback singers in Tamale is Memunatu Laadi. As one filmmaker put it: “she’s like our own Lata Mangeshkar.” Laadi spends her time selling DVDs at her shop in town, and almost daily, filmmakers come to her shop to commission new songs for their films. One day while I was visiting Laadi, a filmmaker came to commission a song. First, he explained the overall plot of his film, titled N’Zim, and the required content for the song-segment. N’Zim is about a man from a village who leaves his lover to find work in the city. In the city, he becomes wealthy and marries an urban woman. Twenty years later, he becomes very sick, and needs a blood transfusion, only to find he has a rare blood type. Luckily his maid has his blood type, and provides a blood transfusion in hospital. This act of kindness makes the man’s urban wife jealous, and she fires the maid. The maid runs off to her home in a nearby village, but the man chases after her to thank her. He finally reaches her in the village, and when he enters the maid’s home he finds his former lover. He learns that his lover became pregnant before he left twenty years ago, and realises his maid is actually his daughter. The film song being commissioned is sung by the maid while she is running home, crying profusely and praying to God to alleviate her poverty. 

In Tamale, playback singers sometimes compose their own melodies, and other times parody existing popular melodies. After the director left the shop, Laadi began brainstorming possible melodies she could parody. She brought out a DVD titled “Bollywood Hits of the 1970s” and flicked through each music video until she found the melody she had in mind: “Main Shayar to Nahin,” from the 1973 Hindi film Bobby. Laadi explained that she wanted a sorrowful song, and that this particular melody fit well. The sorrow Laadi hears is one of romantic loss and forbidden love, as the 1973 version explores the longing of lovers separated by class. Songs of lost romantic love are often used by Dagbani singers when composing a song about a character’s desire for closeness with God, playing on a metaphoric analogy between romantic and divine love. 

Figure 1: Listening to "Main Shayar To Nahin" in Memunatu Laadi's shop in July, 2016. Photo by author.

Once Laadi chose her melody, she began writing accompanying lyrics. In this scene, the character limps to a bus station with a burnt hand and a broken shoe, homeless in the city and resolved to return to her mother in the village. She dreams of a more stable life, and appeals to God for help. Laadi wrote lyrics to fit the content of the scene, and when finished, she sang the song in its entirety in Dagbani, which translates as follows: 

God, only you know the thing that resembles me

The suffering I’m suffering is because of poverty

God, why have you created me a poor person? 

Is it that one day when I meet you, 

I will eat and be satisfied in this world? 

Bless me, and I will also get what I want in this world

Everybody should pray to God, so that he will give you your own 

A few weeks later, Laadi went to the recording studio with the film director for the recording of the film song. Both Laadi and the sound engineer listened to the original version of “Main Shayar to Nahin,” noting the instrumental accompaniment and rhythm. The sound engineer used a keyboard and synthesizer to replicate the backing track, which he created through downloadable synthesizer applications:

Making the backing track for the film song in September, 2016.

Laadi then went to record her vocals: she sang closely into the microphone in order to make her vocal wavering and breathiness audible. Otherwise known as crooning, this vocal technique sounds “intensely emotional” (McCracken 1999:372).With the advent of the microphone in the mid-twentieth century, crooning emerged in various contexts around the world, including in the United States in the 1920s (McCracken 1999:372), in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s (Stokes 2009:65), and in India in the 1930s and 1940s, beginning with renowned playback singer Kundal Lal Saigal (Beaster-Jones 2014:32). In Tamale, this vocal style is referred to as “shaking the voice” and is important in signalling the emotional vulnerability of the film character. For example, one prominent filmmaker explained to be that singers need to shake their voice in order to “get some feeling there, to have emotion in your voice.”[v]

Figure 2: From Left to Right: filmmaker, actor, and two videographers walk towards their film site. Photo by author.

Several weeks after Laadi’s song was produced in the studio, the director, videographers, and actress collected at a nearby site to film the scene. Dressed in costume, the actor lip-synced to an accompanying MP3 radio speaker. While lip-syncing, she produced a stream of tears for several hours, so that videographers could capture the scene from multiple angles. Several months later, the film was available on DVD in Tamale’s local markets.

Film Scene for “Nduma nyεni ka n suhira” (God, you’re the one I’m pleading with).

Figure 3: DVD cover for N'Zim (My Blood) (2017).

Conclusion

In this post, I have explored the making of a film music industry in northern Ghana, and detailed the process of commissioning, composing, and recording diegetic music for Dagbani films. The study of film music is not only relevant to the northern Ghanaian context. For example, there is a long-standing and much larger Hausa film music industry in northern Nigeria, and there has yet to have been a musicological study of this scene.[vi] It is likely that there are similar diegetic film music scenes developing in other regions of West Africa as well. In an increasingly mediated world, film music is an important genre of study, as youth in Tamale and elsewhere access popular music through the films and television they watch each day. Films thus play an integral role in the production and consumption of popular music. In return, music composers are adapting their music to fit within new and ever-changing mediated formats.

References

Adamu, Abdalla Uba. 2008. “The Influence of Hindi Film Music on Hausa Videofilm Soundtrack music.” In Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Cinema, edited by M. Slobin, 152-176. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Adamu, Abdalla. 2007a. “Currying Favour: Eastern Media Influences and the Hausa Video Film.” Film International 5 (4): 77-89.

Adamu, Abdalla. 2007b. “Transnational Influences and National Appropriations: The influence of Hindi Film Music on Muslim Hausa Popular and Religious Music.” Conference of Music in the World of Islam, 1-25.

Arnold, Alison. 1991. “Hindi Filmī Gīt: On the History of Commercial Indian Popular Music.” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Barber, Karin. 2003. The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Beaster-Jones, Jayson. 2014. Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cole, Catherine M. 2001. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Collins, John. 1997. “The Jaguar Jokers and Orphan Do Not Glance.” In West African Popular Theatre, edited by Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard, 56-92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Collins, John. 1994. “The Ghanaian Concert Party: African Popular Entertainment at the Cross Roads.” PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo.

Ganti, Tejaswini. 2008. “‘And Yet my Heart is Still Indian’ The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianizaiton of Hollywood.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, 281-300. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Garritano, Carmela. 2013. African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Krings, Matthias. 2015. African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McCracken, Allison. 1999. “‘God’s Gift to us Girls’: Crooning, Gender, and the Re-Creation of American Popular Song, 1928-1933.” American Music 17 (4): 365-395.

Meyer, Birgit. 2004. “'Praise the Lord’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.” American Ethnologist 31 (1): 92-110.

Morcom, Anna. 2010. “The Music and Musicality of Bollywood.” In The Sound of Musicals, edited by Steven Cohan, 141-151. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Morcom, Anna. 2007. Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène. 2013. Dance Circles: Movement, Morality, and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal. Oxford: Berghahn.

Phyfferoen, Dominik. 2012. “Hiplife: The Location, Organization and Structure of the Local Urban Pop Industry in Tamale.” In Hidden Cities: Understanding Urban Popcultures, 237-247, edited by Leonard R. Koos. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford United Kingdom.

Stokes, Martin. 2009. “ʻAbd al-Halim's Microphone.” In Music and the play of power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, edited by Laudan Nooshin, 55-73. London: Routledge. 

Yamusah, Mohammed Sheriff. 2013. “A Critical Study of the Music Industry in Tamale.” Master’s Dissertation, University of Ghana.

Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age, edited by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018, hd, 375 pp. + index. ISBN: 1-5275-0393-3 

Reviewed by Victor Roudometof / University of Cyprus

Based on two conferences, this volume brings together the work of a diverse group of musicologists and music theorists. While Poland is overrepresented, contributors also come from Norway, Estonia, Austria, Italy and France. The volume’s focus on glocalization is timely and relevant, especially in light of recent publications (Roudometof 2016). Glocalization is a concept that enables researchers to go beyond the simplistic opposition between global and local and to explore the creation of new cultural fusions in a multitude of different areas of social life. In its many related social functions, music serves as a nexus where one can observe the interactions among different constituencies that are continuously involved in an on-going production and renegotiation of a multitude of social and cultural meanings. The volume displays remarkable thematic coherence, which allows the editors to use the material presented within individual chapters in order to build broader theoretical arguments. In its conception and execution, this volume is a noteworthy effort to insert the problematic of glocalization into the disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology.  

As the editors state in their introduction, the book’s topic is twofold: while it concerns the “glocalization in music,” it also involves considerations of the “glocalization on music,” which entails the examination of the ways in which globalization has affected the changing interpretations of music, especially in terms of aesthetics. The volume is divided into three parts: Part One consists of five chapters engaged in mostly theoretical perspectives on glocality and music; Part Two consists of four chapters addressing the problematic of music composition in conditions of digitality; Part Three consists of three chapters addressing glocalization in non-European contexts; and Part Four is focused on glocalized music professions, but it also includes the editors’ concluding chapter, where they spell out their own theoretical model of music glocalization. 

In Part One, Herbert’s chapter is by far the most theoretically focused discussion. The author advances the notion of being “glocalimbodied” (2018:6), a neologism that combines “glocal” with “limbo” in order to make sense of an unbalanced condition attributed to glocal forces as well as the necessity of situating the body within the newfound condition of personalized branding strategies. Of the other chapters, one should mention Moraczewski’s analysis of the consequences of sound recording on musical performance over the last 150 years, suggesting that cultures might have shifted from a condition of orality to a condition of post-orality. Also, Kozel’s chapter features a sophisticated argument about the significance and re-appropriation of myths, as well as globalization’s own status as a contemporary myth. 

In Parts Two and Three, most chapters involve discussions of musical hybridity in several different contexts. In the non-European cases examined in detail in Part Three, there are some insightful anthropological musings—such as the global-local linkages and cultural shifts observed in the music of West Sumatra as well as the re-deployment of the didjeridu, an instrument of indigenous Australian peoples, into new formats and cultural contexts far removed from its original uses. These cases highlight the significance of re-appropriation and re-contextualization of music, musical instruments, and performances, which is a theme that runs throughout the volume’s chapters. In Part Four, these themes are explored further through an analysis of the careers of various European composers, an anthropological study of the varied repertoires of street musicians, and a discussion of the glocalized nature of Italian opera. 

Part Four’s concluding chapter, authored by the volume’s editors, outlines the editors’ own theoretical model of glocalization. Their model relies on the material analyzed in the previous chapters, and the editors are quite correct in pointing out that several of the volume’s chapters employ strategies elsewhere described as falling under the rubric of glocal methods (Roudometof 2016). The editors’ synthesis of the volume’s research is highly original and represents a good point of departure for thinking further about the uses of glocalization in musicology. It is in this concluding chapter that explicit consideration is given to the themes of heritage and innovation. One cannot fail but notice that these terms are part of the volume’s subtitle, whereby readers might have the reasonable expectation that these concepts would have played a more visible role within the majority of individual chapters. 

Given the strong presence of Polish authors among the volume’s list of contributors it is hardly surprising that the editors’ approach (but also the approaches of some individual authors) appear to have been decisively influenced by Bauman’s (2013) approach to glocalization. That might be a double-edged sword, though, for Bauman’s approach is far from neutral: he has compared glocalization to forced cohabitation, implicitly suggesting that it is a rather “unnatural” phenomenon of our times. That sort of attitude, which I have described as “negative glocalism,” makes it harder for academics to approach glocalization in an unbiased fashion. 

As a social scientist, I have read this volume with great interest, which was somewhat diminished once discussion within individual chapters settled into the specifics. Perhaps that is my own fault: my grasp of several topics is not that of a musicologist or ethnomusicologist, and music scholars might have a radically different sensibility. Still, I believe it is fair to say that the volume is decisively shaped by concerns specific to musicology as such. In terms of articulating a more trans-disciplinary stance, the volume might be a missed opportunity. The reader gets the impression that work was rigorously pursued within the scope of the discipline itself and whatever connections were established with research done outside the discipline’s boundaries is either incorporated in a post hoc fashion or it is dealt with as inspiration for the development of theoretical models that remain highly specific to musicology as such. The more sociological or anthropological problematic (which usually involves considerations on the themes of youth culture, trans-local music cultures, glocal meaning construction in reference to racial, ethnic, or other subaltern groups, and so on) is far less visible – although Part Three is a brilliant effort to explicitly address such concerns. But regardless of these aforementioned reservations (which themselves could be charged with the sin of disciplinarity), the volume’s problematic should be seen on par with similar trans-disciplinary efforts to use the notions of globalization and glocalization onto fields seemingly far removed from the social sciences (for example the case of archaeology, see Hodos 2019). Therefore, this volume is a praiseworthy effort, but of course it does not exhaust the topic; I believe there is still a considerable untapped potential that future research might be able to capitalize upon. 

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2013. “Glocalization and Hybridity.” Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 1: 1-5.

Hodos, Tamar. 2019. The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization. London: Routledge.

Roudometof, Victor. 2016. Glocalization: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

Since the invention of the “Telharmonium,” an electric organ developed by Thaddeus Cahill in 1897, the interest and scientific efforts of manipulating sound via electronics has evolved exponentially. Other early instruments, such as the theremin (1920; Theo Theremin) and ondes Martenot (1928; Maurice Martenot), have contributed to popularizing the use of electronics in music. Synthesizer pioneers such as Robert Moog and Don Buchla have modernized the way people create and experience music. Today, the addition of computers, MIDI keyboards, and music software have pushed musical evolution to unimagined heights and have provided an infinite amount of creative possibilities.

The aforementioned technology has paved the way for influential artists and genres of music to exist. One of the most unique forces to come from these developments is the electronic music scene of Iran. Musicians such as Alireza Mashayekhi (b.1940) and Dariush Dolat-Shahi (b.1947) have been among the first Iranians to embrace and compose electronic music. Fast forward to 2019 and Iran, specifically the capital city of Tehran, has arguably become one of the main hubs for electronic music in this part of the world.

Thanks to the vision of Ata Ebtekar, AKA Sote, and the perseverance of the other artists of SET Experimental Art Events pushing the envelope of contemporary electronic music, Iran has certainly become a great example of what can happen when we work together as a unit. This essay looks at the effects of diaspora on electronic musicians from Iran, and how these musicians have navigated governmental censorship to make their voices heard. Though diaspora has many negative effects on people and cultures, a silver lining might be found in those who learn new things and bring different ideas back to the homes they once left behind. For those musicians who did not leave Iran, though censorship challenges the intrinsic right to explore one’s identity, they have developed ways to subvert and challenge the system from within. In both cases, music is the vehicle that they have used to communicate their messages.

Diaspora in the Digital Age

Ata Ebtekar (AKA Sote) was born in Tehran, Iran, but grew up in Hamburg, Germany and later in San Francisco, California (he and his family left Iran after the Iranian Revolution of 1979). He is best known for his electronic compositions and for creating the ever expanding SET Experimental Art Events, a festival that started as a showcase for modern Iranian electronic artists. The SET collective has become fairly successful since its first public performance in 2015 at the Entezami Museum in Tehran, Iran. In 2017, the Berlin based CTM Festival commissioned SET’s Fear, Anger, Love show, which gave Ebtekar and his roster the necessary resources to thrive independently as artists (CTM also commissioned SETxCTM in 2018 and Persistence in 2019).

Achieving this success was not an easy feat to accomplish. In 2005, Ebtekar went back to Iran to expose people to experimental electronic music, but was unsuccessful due to strict governmental policies regulating the arts. In 2013 he returned once again and found that many artists were beginning to thrive- likely due to the unprovocative nature of the styles of music he was looking for. He started working with many of the artists and created the four day long SETFEST. Although this was done without government aid or state sponsorship, he did receive the nod from the government and city hall to hold the festival. One of the primary reasons that the government and city hall were more lenient in allowing SETFEST to take place was because of the nature of the music. The music was heavily experimental, noisy, and ambient driven, so there was not much room for dancing, therefore there was little room for sexual tensions to arise between individuals (something the government sought to prevent). Ebtekar was also including many Persian influences in his music, and although the past saw heavy restrictions on instruments and music native to Iran (the setar for instance), these instruments were now regarded by the government with pride and provided a sense of national identity.

Although he received the go-ahead from the government to hold the show, there was a financial component to SETFEST that could have inhibited Ebtekar from putting on the festival. In Iran, very little funding is put into experimental art forms - most money for the arts is reserved for genres that are more financially rewarding. I conducted an interview with Nima Aghiani from the duo 9T Antiope (one of the musical groups that Ebtekar works with), in which he commented on the funding difficulties that go along with hosting an experimental music festival:

    Nima Aghiani 

When talking about SETFEST in his 2017 interview with FACT Magazine, Ebtekar said, “in a country where youth culture has been heavily restricted for so long, it’s significant when a cultural form such as this has an opportunity to reach a wider audience.”2  Ebtekar has one thing that sets himself apart from some of his peers: he is a product of diaspora. Living in Germany and the United States exposed Ebtekar to opportunities and extracurricular interests that he may not have been able to access in Iran. In particular, he was able to freely discover music, perform his own music, and with access to high-speed internet and uncensored content, research on specific topics became more accessible. In turn, he was able to bring much of the outside information to artists in Iran who may not have had access to certain media sharing websites, such as YouTube. Facebook and Instagram.

Ebtekar was not the only musician in the SET collective who was living outside of Iran. Nima Aghiani was born in Iran but moved to Paris, France, where he had more freedom to pursue his musical interests. In our interview, I asked if living outside of Iran changed the way that he learned (musically or academically). He said, “the only thing that might have had an impact are the numerous live shows I’ve attended since I’ve moved abroad, and honestly the higher speed of the internet in comparison does make a difference.” The significance of this lays within the power that consistent exposure has in a nurturing environment. In Iran, there is a huge problem with internet censorship. Websites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google are blocked, in addition to sites like international news stations, websites aimed at minority groups, and human rights organizations.3 Having access to these types of websites helps fuel personal discovery and forge online communities, and without this access existing in today’s society as an artist can be difficult.

Sote (Standing to the right behind the laptop)

Navigating Censorship Through Musical Surrealism

All of this is not to say that those who are displaced from their homeland become more enlightened simply by being out of reach of an oppressive government: it is much more complex than that. Humans are naturally inquisitive and history is decorated with people who voice their opinions no matter what consequences may arise. In fact, censorship and opposition can cause musicians to innovate from within. In her paper, "Surrealism and Some Strategies of Avoidance of Censorship in Iranian Art," Aida Foroutan (2017) makes a point about surrealism being a factor in navigating censorship:

“Surrealist approaches and techniques offer the artist an extensive palate of opportunities to evade and confuse the censor but, perhaps more importantly, they also convey an attitude of contempt of authoritarianism.”4

In the case of Ebtekar and those involved with the SET collective, they have been able to do this both musically and conceptually. Siavash Amini, another artist from the collective, explored the collective unconscious in his 2017 albums TAR.5 The collective unconscious is a term that was coined by Carl Jung and refers to human experience which is universal and hereditary (love or creation, for example). Amini wanted to communicate his emotional states and convey them via sonic, musical structures. Most artists are aware that music is interpreted differently by each individual who comes across their music. However, we all experience similar emotions whether they are exact, or somewhere on a spectrum. Through song titles like "A Dream’s Frozen Reflection" and "The Dust We Breathe," and intense and ominous music structure, Amini gives life to the collective unconscious of a country that has been oppressed by its own government for decades.

Amini’s album FORAS (Latin for “outside”) is another way that he is subverting censorship with his music. This album also deals with the collective unconscious, but considers suffrage in relation to space instead of pure emotional relatedness. In other words, he is exploring the transition of events, and what happens in between waiting and what comes after.6 For example, a significant event can take place and the aftermath can be either instantaneous or take time; however, there are the moments in between which cause hope, despair and frustration. Living under strict government limitations, like those in Iran, can leave people feeling powerless. Songs like "Aporia" (meaning an irresolvable contradiction) and "First Came Their Shadows" express the constant cycle of hope, despair and frustrations that can arise during these uncertain waiting periods.

Another example is Ata Ebtekar’s latest album Parallel Persia, which in his words “deals with the illusion and creation of an artificial hyperreal culture manipulated and controlled by an imperious agency somewhere within all galaxies.”7 In other words, he is criticizing the internet as appearing as a safe haven for the Iranian people. Yes, the internet has given people a platform to express themselves to a wider audience, however, what is posted can be censored or even used against a person in order to persecute them. He calls the pieces on the album “apocryphal” (meaning of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true) and the titles certainly support this claim. "Pipe Dreams" and "Atomic Hypocrisy," are both good examples of an underlying message which corresponds to current events. Dreams of freedom, peace, and harmony, and the easing of the political tensions between the state and people are both big themes within the arena of Iranian politics.

Nima Aghiani and Sara Shamloo (from the duo 9T Antiope), are a great example of using surrealism to voice their political and personal opinions. Their most recent album Noceboexplores the idea of location, absence of space, death, the bland nature of optimism and governmental isolation.8 In their 2019 interview with Vice they wrote, “It's a choice, to reflect the world as it is: brutal, unjust, and angry…Our personal experiences within that world as well tend to be not far from its truth.”9 What they are referring to in this quote is the difficulty of existing in a world with an identity that is unshakable. They talk about the difficulty they had with being from Iran and how it instantaneously causes difficulty in traveling, getting visas, and simply existing in a world dominated by the gatekeepers within an oppressive government. The title of the album Nocebo refers to the nocebo effect, in which negative expectations lead to negative outcomes.10 To 9T Antiope, governmental isolation creates this dynamic.

9T Antiope

What all of these artists have in common is that music is the vehicle they use to express themselves. When listening to their pieces, the emotional components in the abstractedness of the of the music are not exactly obvious, but like a language, once learned it becomes easier to decipher the meaning within with their styles of music. These artists did not directly express their discontent with the Iranian government, or any government for that matter. However, by analyzing the titles and concepts behind their works these messages can be found. This is not to say that these artists are not proud of their heritage, but that, like many people around the world, they desire to improve the state of life in their homeland.

Biography

Cameron Caceres is a bassist and composer pursuing his bachelors in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His goal is to question the boundaries of music, specifically in the electronic realm and bring modern styles to the academic table.

References

Amini, Siavash. 2018. SIAVASH AMINI - FORAS. 07 September. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://hallowground.bandcamp.com/album/siavash-amini-foras.

Foroutan, Aida. 2017. "Surrealism and Some Strategies of Avoidance of Censorship in Iranian Art." In Holy Wealth: Accounting for This World and The Next in Religious Belief and Practice: Festschriftfor JohnR. Hinnells, edited by Hintze Almut and Williams Alan, 57-70. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnzwv.12.

2019. "Iran Country Report." Freedom House. 11 February. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2018/iran.

Joyce, Coiln. 2019. "9T Antiope's Brutal New Album Sees the World as It Is." Vice. 14 February. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j57jpp/9t-antiope-nocebo-interview-stream.

Planès, Sara, Céline Villier, and Michel Mallaret. 2016. "The Nocebo Effect of Drugs." Pharmacology Research & Perspectives. 17 March. Accessed June 19, 2019. https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804316/.

Sote. 2019. Parallel Persia [DIAG054]. 26 April. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://sote-sound.bandcamp.com/album/parallel-persia-diag054.

Interviews

Aghiani, Nima. 2019. Interviewed by author. June 18, 2019.

Amini, Siavash. 2019. Interview by Hignell-Tully & Daniel Alexander. Toneshift.net. May 27, 2019. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini/

References

• 1. Aghiani, Nima, interviewed by Cameron Caceres, June 18th, 2019.
• 2. Warwick, Oli. “Sote is Helping Iran’s Experimental Electronic Music Scene Become a Powerful, Cultural Force.” Fact Magazine. London, England: 2017.
• 3. Iran Report. February 11, 2019. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2018/iran.
• 4. Foroutan, Aida. "Surrealism and Some Strategies of Avoidance of Censorship in Iranian Art." 4 In Holy Wealth: Accounting for This World and The Next in Religious Belief and Practice: Festschrift for John R. Hinnells, edited by Hintze Almut and Williams Alan, 57-70. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnzwv.12.
• 5. Hignell-Tully, Daniel Alexander. "Interview with Siavash Amini." Toneshift.net. May 27, 2019. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini/
• 6."SIAVASH AMINI - FORAS, by Siavash Amini." Hallow Ground. September 07, 2018. 6 Accessed June 19, 2019. https://hallowground.bandcamp.com/album/siavash-amini-foras.
• 7."Parallel Persia [DIAG054], by Sote." Sote Sound. April 26, 2019. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://sote-sound.bandcamp.com/album/parallel-persia-diag054.
• 8. Joyce, Coiln. "9T Antiope's Brutal New Album Sees the World as It Is." Vice. February 14, 2019. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j57jpp/9t-antiope-nocebo- interview-stream.
• 9. Ibid.
• 10. Planès, Sara, Céline Villier, and Michel Mallaret. "The Nocebo Effect of Drugs." Pharmacology Research & Perspectives. March 17, 2016. Accessed June 19, 2019. https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804316/.

Ethnomusicology Review is now accepting submissions for Volume 23, scheduled for publication in Fall 2020. Started as Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology (PRE) in 1984, Ethnomusicology Review is an annual peer-reviewed journal managed by UCLA graduate students and a faculty advisory board. Our online format allows authors to rethink how they use media to present their argument and data, moving beyond the constraints of print journals. We encourage submissions that make use of video, audio, color photographs, and interactive media. 

Articles are original essays of no more than 8000 words on topics related to musical practice, and will be subject to an extensive review process prior to publication. They are expected to extend current theoretical and/or methodological approaches to the study of music, broadly conceived, and may be written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Articles explicitely engaging with contemporary ethnomusicological scholarship are particularly encouraged. Essays in languages other than English will be considered for publication, provided that qualified reviewers are available, but authors are encouraged to include an abstract written in English.

*The submission deadline is March 23, 2020.*

Full guidelines for submission:
ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/submission-guidelines

Figure 1.“Drawing of an Argentine gaucho playing his guitar”. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under CC.

Introduction

There are few times that an entire genre can be identified as wholly exemplifying a socio-historical identity while maintaining an accessible style for the masses. The nacionalismo musical (musical nationalism) that burst onto the scene during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Argentina is precisely this type of genre. It is a curious mixture of poetry and song together with socio-political commentary proffered by gaucho characters shared via the reflections and lamentations of their payador peers, both of whom wandered the outskirts of society (literally and figuratively). This essay proposes that nacionalismo musical was a crucial component for the Argentine identity-formation process and that it occupies a dual role in the literary and musical worlds. Due to the popular styles that it pulls from—payador rural and urban ballads and gaucho poetry­—nacionalismo musical has achieved a much greater degree of accessibility, and thus, longevity within the Argentine imagination and cultural spheres.

This essay discusses how gauchesca themes and image were leveraged within Argentine popular culture for calculated purposes, namely to aid in the delineation of an Argentine identity at a time when those in power felt threatened by what they perceived as frenetic energy and disjointed efforts as a result of rapid change as the eighteenth century turned over to the nineteenth. I will begin by briefly establishing who the gaucho and payador were and highlight why in a late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Argentine context they became so popular in the imaginations of the people regardless of class. I will then demonstrate that while gaucho prose predominantly belongs to the field of literature, it also conforms exceedingly well to nacionalismo musical in how it combined with gaucho-centric ballads to ultimately act as oratory devices of dissent and as a vehicle to educate and pass on information to the masses.

Gaucho and Payador Balladry

The gaucho have long held court in the Argentine cultural imagination. Possessing a legacy of grit dating back to the Colonial period, they pioneered the mass expanse of pampas (plains) spanning Uruguay and Argentina readying it for settlement (Pinnell 1984:243). Early gauchos who settled the plains were the musical benefactors of the European instruments brought to the New World by colonizers and missionaries. It is no accident that the sole instrument associated with the gaucho (the guitar) is also the one that was the most common among missionaries and conquistadores of the time.[1] While perhaps not social equals, the gaucho, missionary, and colonizer social groups would have certainly crossed paths.

Over time it became the business of guitar-playing musician gauchos, or payadores, to roam and entertain other gauchos at moments of leisure by either singing songs that they had memorized or, when challenged, to make up new ones on the spot in a type of freestyling ballad competition (Pinnell 1984: 246-247). In fact, it is this later practice that would become the “tour de force of the gaucho balladeers…Two singers would match their skills by improvising alternate verses without losing a single beat on their guitars. Each verse had to connect in content with the one before it, and the singer who faltered or broke tempo was the loser” (Pinnell 1984: 248). 

It was the individualism, self-reliance, and superior equestrian skills cultivated during settlement efforts that later gauchos to have a defining role in the 1819 War of Independence when Argentina liberated itself from the Spanish grasp (Umphrey 1918:144). The transition to total autonomy was not easy for the newly independent nation, and again it was the gaucho who fought during the decades of civil wars that followed independence. As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, a relative stability was achieved as Argentina burgeoned with industrialization and mass urban (im)migration. It was during this period that the gaucho were re-positioned in the Argentine cultural imagination from a doggedly hands-on figure to one very much ousted to the margins as he contemptuously stood against the modernization that encroached, indeed threatened, the pastoral life that he treasured.

Still, the gaucho’s chided position as lawless, nomadic, trouble-brewing gamblers shifted yet again early in the twentieth century as the learned elite seized the figure to serve as a rallying emblem to represent ideals of Argentina as a nation (self-sufficient and rebellious) and Argentines as a people (tenacious) (Umphrey 1918; Pinnell 1984). This is also when payador balladeers shifted from the countryside to the city. While early and mid-nineteenth century payadores performed for rural crowds, burgeoning urban metropoles such as Buenos Aires became perfect venues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In relocating, the urban payador became “ambassadors of a gaucho culture [that] appeared so authentic that when…elite composers sought to give Argentine classical music a national [authentic] edge, they unwittingly turned to the reworked songs of the urban payadores as genuine folk music” (Bockelman 2011: 593). 

Co-Opting the Gaucho Identity

In examining the musical propaganda potential of the gaucho, an important gauchesca duality emerges: the notion that though a gaucho’s life is “savage like”, and the idea that his “luxury is liberty” (Sarmiento 1961:52). Crudity is a trait that the gaucho inherited honestly very early during pampa settlement due to the “absence of towns…not settl[ing] in groups, clustered round a church or village…but in isolated families, living often far out of reach of one another…practically the sole inhabitants” (Cunninghame Graham 1924:288). It was the result of these circumstances that the gaucho became “adept at capturing horses for himself…He learned to attend to many of his affairs on horseback—even fishing and cooking…there were neither churches nor schools, nor other establishments in which to socialize” (Pinnell 1984:244). Liberty was luxury indeed as the gaucho was his own overlord from inception.

For decades, Argentina had grappled with the consequences and challenges of liberation from Spain. The gaucho became the unfortunate reminder of old ways that “one hoped to destroy and replace” as the foundling nation propelled itself toward yet to be determined new identifiers (Roggiano and Straub 1974:39). Yet, transitioning to a period of industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration brought with it a nostalgia, or rather a gussied up reinterpreted version of these “old ways”, prompting a call to reclaim and reposition the gaucho of yesteryear as representative of a type of Argentine purity that was being lost with the influx of technologies and newcomers. Songs about the gaucho essentially became the way that people “made sense of contradictions in their culture” at a time when conflicts such as “masters and serfs, exploiters and the exploited, rich and poor, learned and uneducated, foreigners and natives” were persistent and irreconcilable (Taylor 1997:217; Roggiano and Straub 1974:38-39). The gaucho embodied this by simultaneously occupying a societal space of rejection and veneration.

Such cultural duality—­forsaken yet cherished, coarse yet fashionable, lawless yet role model­—and the manner in which these themes were leveraged in cultural and socio-political spheres is what makes the Argentine nacionalismo musical, so imbued with the gauchesca genre, effective as a tool to aid in the process of national identity formation, to dissent, and to educate. Because of how well nacionalismo musical absorbed traits of such a variety of social sects and economic and education levels, there were few who did not find at least some aspect (some “spin”) of the gaucho in which they saw themselves reflected. 

Reconstructing de Gaucho

Vulgar and rustic style of speech is a distinctive trait of the gaucho genre. It would be logical to assume that since gauchos were nomadic Argentine country folk of the pampa, prideful yet penniless, that the writing style simply reflected the words (and education level) of the authors. Given the preponderance of illiteracy among these cowboy wanderers, this is more than likely not the case. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the words were more often written by educated and urban poets who enjoyed a lifestyle completely different from that of their muses. These men of “high literary ability” were often involved in politics and participated in society, something that moved them further away from the gaucho reality—a self-respecting gaucho would never have been invited to partake or collaborate in the politics of his time (Umphrey 1918:147). It was not uncommon for these writers to collect works first authored by payadores to seek “material for their own poetic compositions” about the gaucho that they would then publish, giving a permanent niche for the “versified moralizings” and musicalized storytelling that would subsequently be “handed down from generation to generation” (Umphrey 1918:147-149).

Debating appropriation is not the objective here, suffice to say that by adopting payador material and launching it into a more erudite spheres some think that these poets preserved a genre that otherwise would have been lost. That without these “great men of letters” extolling the “spirit and style of the payador” and the “gaucho’s heroism,” the “words and music,” and oral tradition would perhaps not have survived the period of rapid change that ushered in the 1900s (Pinnell 1984:251).

Urbanite poets knowingly selected one of the most polarizing social sects to make come alive the socio-political concerns and discontent that was brewing in Argentina during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In their eyes, gauchos made the perfect intermediary between the supposed civilized and uncivilized worlds. They could manipulate the personal stories, situations, conflicts, treatment, and discourses of the gauchos in order to politicize their existence and use them as tools to facilitate the “emergence of patriotic dialogue” in a way that other social groups or cultural personalities could not (Ludmer 1996:608). For example, as a presidential candidate, Juan Domingo Perón would often “pepper his political speeches with phrases culled from popular old gauchesque poems…giving him an ability to communicate to working-class audiences that his rivals lacked” (Bockelman 2011:578). While Perón himself certainly did not make the gaucho“fashionable”, he did know how to “rework” it in new and compelling ways that socially and politically very much worked in his favor (Bockelman 2011:578).

Manipulation of the gaucho also lent itself to moralizing endeavors. When the famed epic poem Martín Fierro (perhaps the most famous representative of the genre) concludes by “taking leave of [the] hero at the frontier with the hope that someday he might return”, the result was a surge in novels, plays, and song sequels that glorified the more criminal components of the gaucho character (Umphrey 1918:154). Having the hero ride off into the sunset left the vulnerable audience to muse on its own about what Fierro’s (and other gaucho peers) future might look like, and the debauched world that they created reflected the social, political, and economic uncertainties of the time. Gangster gaucho storylines were an exceedingly negative sociological influence so much so that the author of Martín Fierro, José Hernández, took up his pen to write a sequel titled La Vuelta de Martín Fierro“in which the outlaw, now peaceful and law abiding, returns to take his place in the new life of the campo”, renouncing his bad boy bandido ways (Umphrey 1918:155). 

Nacionalismo Musical

It is difficult to dispute the widely held notion that gauchos played an extremely important role in the development of an Argentine nationality. While a gaucho rejected society, he was also jilted and cherished by it. The educated class that co-opted the gaucho and consciously gave him a refurbished socio-political voice and cultural image is also the one that would not allow him to enjoy a true participatory role in society or politics unless he was filtered through a more refined gaze and he served a purpose for their socio-political needs. Fierro and his fictional gaucho peers must have been aware of this since they preserved their divine right to seek independence, live according to their own agency, and to break laws that they felt to be ridiculous, inappropriate or most importantly, inapplicable to their situation. It is not just the decision to live on the margins and to take a particularly social-moral stance against the government that cultivates a sense of mystery around the gaucho persona by the end of the nineteenth century but also the seeming permission to do so granted by the lumpenbourgeoisie.

The musicality of gaucho prose contributed to two very crucial aspects of its successful distribution: it made poetry more attractive so that it would fit into the mainstream, and it made it much more accessible to a variety of different social demographics. As Bockelman explains:

The typical payador songbook was thirty-two pages long and consisted of multiple lyrics organized around a common urban theme or the life of a popular gaucho…In their focus on legendary rural stories and contemporary urban curiosities, they more closely resembled nineteenth-century American dime novels--only in this case the narratives were rendered in song verse, not prose (2011:583).

Putting written words to song results in the message becoming understandable to anyone, regardless of education level or social status. With a melodious accompaniment “now the interpretation is guided by the musical context” (Figueredo 2002:308), meaning that even the illiterate masses could be exposed to stories about the gauchos and follow along with their exploits. The common man and woman did not need to share written versions of such tales but could sing the words to spread them far and wide. The lives and adventures, policies and opinions, rejection and independence that punctuated a gaucho life were things that undoubtedly would have had an impact on those in seriously dire situations, desperate, worried, or who felt confused, angry, or simply fed up with the socio-political reality in which they lived. It gave the impression that the poems, with their catchy rhythms easily set to music, were of the people and for the people while at the same time totally relevant to national concerns and events.

Gaucho poetry coupled with payador balladry essentially oralized and popularized a new euphonious aural genre. Figueredo believes that a political-social crisis generates the perfect environment for music and poetry to interact (2002:299), a stance supported by Plesch who believes that gaucho poetry became exemplar of “musical nationalism” in action (2009:242). Particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when politics and society strained under the immense pressure of nationalistic growing pains, these particular niches of prose were tapped as perfect partners to accompany the fabrication of a sense of “Argentineness” (Plesch 2009:243). We see this in play during the 1880s when the image (or rather the marketing of it) of the gaucho and his “badly strung and out of tune” instrument morphed to become emblematic of Argentine guitar and singing styles. Once an embarrassment, the gaucho is now peaceful, noble even, as he strums on the declared guitarra nacional (national guitar) (Plesch 2009: 244).[2] In the cultural imagination of the time it was perhaps not too far of a leap to imagine this balladeer as dashingly macho and gentlemanly to boot. The gaucho’s metamorphosis from a position of civilization-opposing and barbarous “Other” to the “quintessence of all things Argentine” occurs in part by shifting mediums from the elite-oriented genre of poetry to a more encompassing musical one.

And so, at the end of the nineteenth century, as Argentine composers heeded the call to throw their hat in the ring to craft an Argentine (musical) identity that would complement other modes of “Argentineness” being pushed, they “stylized, homogenized, and reorganized” elements from gaucho poetry and the payador tradition resulting in a particular Argentinian brand of nacionalismo musical, the first cannon of modern Argentina in which the gaucho (and his patriotism) were a main fixture (Plesch 2009:247). By writing a song in verses that can be easily divided, the prose could become personal or political mantras. Experiencing the poem in a musical form “arouses other senses for interpretation and reception ... the auditory, the tactile, the kinetic, as well as the visual, are involved. Essentially, what we see with the gaucho genre is how the musicalizing of poetry transforms the text-audience-participant relationship.

Musical Narratives: the Transmission of Knowledge, Propaganda, and Dissent

The strategy to use gaucho poetry and payador balladry illustrates how collective dialogue and information dissemination does not have to be limited to newspapers, pamphlets, or booklets. To use the combination of popular writing with popular music styles as a new distribution technique ensured that whatever socio-political or moral message of the moment reached a wider audience. As Plesch so aptly points out, “constructing a nation involves a considerable amount of political and ideological manipulations” (2009:246). Knowingly and pointedly crafting symbols that are marketed to represent supposedly shared values help to both “reinforce feelings of belonging” and to “internalize a collective identity”, even when a duality as opposing as civilization versus barbarism (an extremely Argentine trope) is present (Plesch 2009:246).

An example of this in action is how the gaucho was so effectively used to “otherize” a different social sect: immigrants. Previously, it was the gaucho who was accused of drunken lawlessness, fornication, and other ills but discomfort with the mass influx of foreigners evoked panic among elite who felt that a “cultural incoherence” was cancerous to the “Argentineness” so carefully being crafted. These traits were thus reaffixed to the immigrant class, a political move executed by way of a cultural tool (music). For decades after it was the immigrant’s burden to be the “new site of barbarism…made responsible for the perceived fragmentation of the culture, debasement of the language, and loss of traditional values”, all things previously ascribed to the gaucho (Plesch 2009:246).

Just as the gaucho found comfort in his music so can the listener. A significant connection develops by listening to the gaucho as he laments, bemoans, or celebrates. Consider the following excerpt: Con la guitarra en la mano Ni las moscas se me arriman, Nadie me pone el pie encima, (Hernández 2004:9). Here, our gaucho character suggests that his music (voice, lyrics and song) are his greatest weapons against the annoying and relentless moscas (flies). It could be that the flies and overall scene that he describes are as they literally seem. That one’s guitar and music protect against the boredom and filthiness of the rural and homeless life. But even more likely is that the “flies” are the socio-political figures that try to control or force him to do something he does not want, or to live a life that is not what he wanted to live (figures such as the army, the government, the upper class, etc.) As long as he continues to sing, that is to keep proclaiming his truth, it cannot bring him closer or harm him; music is his greatest protection and security against adversity.

If we consider nacionalismo musical not just as a device to educate and persuade but also to dissent, it is possible that during the nineteenth century the dissemination of more anarchistic gaucho tunes was not entirely safe due to intense agitation and repression. Yet censorship along with the use of fear and force would not have diminished the need for artistic expression to narrate current events according to a more counterculture take as well. As Figueredo says, “the socio-political challenges and ideological questioning that predominate in society... influence not only the creation of the phenomenon but also the way it is expressed” (2002:302).

Conclusion

A vagabond cowboy, the gaucho is representative of fundamental aspects of national and individual Argentine identity. He cannot be defined as merely a spineless deserter who had abandoned society but rather must also be understood as the most patriotic figure due to his independent and extremely individual position in the face of intense repression and submission to the hands of the government and the bourgeoisie. For these reasons the gaucho became the voice and image of internal conflicts of a nation that was grappling with rapid industrialization, immigration, and urbanization Writers, poets, composers and the like (who occupied positions in which they could exert social and cultural influence) seized the payador style and the gaucho character to be used for their own nation-building and identity-forming interests. Nacionalismo musical has become one of the most iconic genres of national and political discourse in Argentina vis-à-vis gaucho representations that simultaneously criminalize and glorify life on the margins, by virtue of functioning as a literary device with a strong foothold in poetry and a musical genre with mass appeal.

Bibliography

Bockelman, Brian. “Between the Gaucho and the Tango: Popular Songs and the Shifting Landscape of Modern Argentine Identity, 1895-1915.” The American Historical Review 116(3): 577-601.

Hernández, José. 2004. Martin Fierro. Buenos Aires: Stockcero.

Ludmer, Josefina. 1996. “The Gaucho Genre”. In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: Discovery to Modernism, edited by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, 608-631. New York: Cambridge UP.

Figueredo, María L. 2002. “El eterno retorno entre la poesía y el canto popular: Uruguay, 1960-1985.” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 26(1/2): 299-321.

Pinnell, Richard. 1984. “The Guitarist-Singer of Pre-1900 Gaucho Literature.” Latin American Music Review/Revista de Música Latinoamericana 5(2): 243-262.

Plesch, Melanie. 2009. “The Topos of the Guitar in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Argentina.” The Musical Quarterly 92(3/4): 242-278.

Roggiano, Alfredo A. and William J. Straub. 1974. “Personal Destiny and National Destiny in Martin Fierro.” In Latin American Literary Review 3(5): 37-49.

As the managing editor of the Sounding Board, I would like to say: happy new year! We are excited to continue to provide a platform for a variety of voices from throughout the world of ethnomusicology in 2020. Over the last few months, we've gone through a few staff changes, and so the new editorial team is listed below. If you're thinking about submitting to the Sounding Board, please review the submission guidelines here. 

Sounding Board Managing Editor: Lucas Avidan (lavidan@ucla.edu)

Book Reviews: Max Nikol (maxnikol@ucla.edu)

From the Archives: Maureen Russell (mrussell@arts.ucla.edu)

Bring the Noise: Alec Norkey (anorkey28@g.ucla.edu)

Historical Perspectives: Edwin Porras (edwinopo@ucla.edu)

Crossing Borders: Andrea Decker (andecker08@gmail.com)

Space is the Place: Alfredo Rivera (outclass90291@ucla.edu)

A Look Inside the House of Records: An Interview with Dr. David Gracon

Interviewed by Samuel Lamontagne

Trailer for "Walls of Sound"

Full movie here.

1. Walls of Sound: A Look Inside The House of Records (2012) is a documentary you made about a record store in Eugene, Oregon. Can you introduce the documentary and its general perspective?

Sure, I’ll pull from some of the promotional information I constructed when putting the film out. This provides a concise context.

Walls of Sound — A Look Inside the House of Records (2012/63 min.) is a feature length documentary video that explores the House of Records, a brick and mortar independent record store based in Eugene, Oregon.  The store has been in operation since 1972 and it currently struggles to exist in the midst of digital downloading (both legal and illegal) and the practices of corporate retailers (in terms of corporate big-box and online stores and their selling practices). It also struggles against forces of nature (the roof being impaled by a giant tree, fire and flooding etc.) and thieves. The video is an ethnographic study that combines interviews with the owner and employees and various customers of the store. Their stories and observations are often imbued with a quirky sense of humor, biting intelligence and a deep admiration for the store and its culture. The video addresses the cultural significance and various folkloric narratives of the store on a number of levels. It explores how the store provides cultural diversity and alternative media, as they cater to the musical fringes and a broad range of musical styles not widely available at other retail outlets. It is argued the store is akin to a “library” and acts as an archive of obscure and out-of-print music, where the store-workers share their musical expertise with the customers (and vice versa). The video also addresses the importance of the vernacular (or handmade) design of the physical space (the store is situated in an old house) and tangible musical artifacts, especially the “resurgence” of vinyl records. Lastly, it addresses the importance of face-to-face interaction as the store acts as a community gathering space between the store-workers, customers and local music scenes — one that is ostensibly anti-corporate, fiercely local and subcultural in scope.

2. You wrote your Ph.D. dissertation on independent record stores (Exiled Records and Over-the-Counter-Culture — A Cultural Political Economic Analysis of the Independent Record Store) - what inspired you to switch to this visual medium and make a documentary film?

I came into my doctoral program at the University of Oregon already with a documentary filmmaking background. However, at the time I felt that I was done with filmmaking, and wanted to pursue traditional writing and research instead. During my coursework, I took a qualitative research methods class and for an assignment we conducted field interviews. So I interviewed the folks at The House of Records and recorded them on video. I really didn’t think at the time this would go beyond a class project and learning exercise. When I showed the clips to the class, the response was very positive and it seemed people wanted to see and learn more about this record store subculture. It also helped that the people I interviewed are total characters. They are very funny and they have a very sophisticated and critical view of culture.  After all, this was Eugene, Oregon. All of these essential ingredients were right for a documentary film. So I continued filming the store and interviewing people related to the store as a class project.

The folks at the store were really the ones who encouraged me to push the project further into a larger documentary film. Without this encouragement, the project probably would have died with the ending of the course.  

I see the dissertation and the documentary as two separate projects. Of course, there is overlap between the two. They inform each other. However, a documentary film can do and say so much more than a written dissertation ever can. For example, the folks in the film are lovable oddballs and this comes off much more clearly and directly than explaining that as a pull quote in a written dissertation. For example, sarcasm reads very differently in video form. They tell funny jokes (the workers at Best Buy are referred to as “ass clowns” etc.), they swear a lot, and generally observe culture through this very countercultural lens. They are very intensely into alternative and independent music culture and this passion translates much better on screen than in written academic form. By far. The visual images can better speak for themselves. The people, their non-verbal cues and quirky mannerisms, the tone of their voice etc. At the end of the day, people will watch a documentary film. There is an audience for this work. And I took the film on tour and screened it all over the country. I don’t think as many people would show up to a tour of my written dissertation, which is simply an academic requirement for a very limited audience. In some ways, the documentary is a visual version of the dissertation, but it is much more playful and entertaining. But also critically oriented.  

It is also important to note the dissertation was completed first. I had accumulated all the raw documentary footage as a doctoral student, and some of this was used as data in the dissertation. But I didn’t edit and finalize the documentary until I was a faculty member at Eastern Illinois University after I graduated. This was largely because of time restrictions. I had to get the dissertation done in order to graduate. So the film itself wasn’t part of my actual dissertation, but I did show video clips during my defense and various quotes were used as data. Just to clarify.

3. Did your Ph.D. dissertation influence the way you made the film?

Yes. However, the dissertation was much more expansive as I did fieldwork in many stores in Portland, Eugene and San Francisco. I also talked with labels, distributors, big-box stores and artists to obtain a more complete picture of how the industrial system of music retail worked at the time. I also went into much depth in terms of the political economy of the music industry, and how various economic forces and practices impact, often negatively, independent record stores. The documentary is a case study of The House of Records in Eugene. So by developing a deeper understanding of political economy of media through the dissertation, I was able to ask stronger questions during the interviews that effectively got at how the whole system of music distribution, retail and consumption worked. The ideas of critical political economy are certainly in the film, however, these concepts are not labeled as such as I didn’t want the film to be an academic piece, but rather a project screened by a larger audience. I wanted my father, who never went to college to be able to enjoy the film. And he did. And that was important to me.  

But reading all the related literature and writing the dissertation certainly helped me create a conceptual and theoretical foundation for the documentary that is very critical of how the music industry works. However, the video conveys this in a more compelling and entertaining way.  

4. More particularly, was the documentary a way to transfer the research issues you dealt with in the dissertation to film? Or perhaps, was it a way for you to deal with different research issues that hadn’t been touched on in the dissertation?

Well, as noted above, the documentary is really a case study of one particular store with a very rich and unique history, The House of Records. The dissertation is much more expansive and layered in political economy as I already noted. By doing a case study with the film, I was able to go into much more depth with one particular store. We get to know the folks in the film in much more detail as opposed to several pull quotes in the dissertation as data. They are essentially faceless in the dissertation. There are also narrative hooks in the documentary such as a ghost story (apparently the store is haunted); the idea that the employees are like a family which has more of a poetic feel, rather than a kind of academic inquiry that is kind of dry and impersonal. I wanted the film to feel deeply humanizing. However, I felt forced to write that way in the dissertation because of academic conventions.  It is like jumping through hoops. As far as describing the unique and vernacular aesthetics of the store (posters, records on the walls, the wooden floors, the handmade shelving etc.) it was much more effective to show this in video form. It is one thing to describe that visually in a dissertation. It is another to simply let the visuals speak for themselves through images and sound. Video is much more effective as a visual format.

5. Why did you choose House of Records as a subject? What was particular about it?

Well, my favorite record store in my hometown of Buffalo, NY, Home of the Hits, closed right around the time I started filming the qualitative interviews at The House of Records in 2006. I liked that they were both situated in old houses as a metaphor, and at the time many brick and mortar stores were going out of business. Home of the Hits really altered my life as a teenager as I got into punk and indie music. That was transformative. I later sold my zine there. It was a game changer and quite possibly one of the biggest influences in my life. So when the store closed, it really impacted me. Like the loss of a cultural limb. The House of Records in Eugene had a similar vibe and lengthy history. It is without a doubt the best record store in Eugene, and one of my favorites in the world, actually. It has a particular smell, look and feel that is very homey. The workers are extremely funny and intelligent with many years of experience and dedication. Using this store was a no brainer. At the time there was not much being done academically or in documentary form on independent record stores. It was an ideal topic of inquiry because nobody was really doing it. I was really passionate about the subject matter. It was compelling, and I was able to sustain this personal investment in the project for several years because it mattered to me.

6. Amid the transformations in the past 20 years in the cultural industries and the changing ways in which media have been commercialized, what does the documentary tell us about how an independent record store not only operates but also what it represents in contemporary society?

With the physical stores that are still around in 2019, I think there are many details in the film that still hold true. Like the social importance of simply talking and gathering with other people. Forming relationships and fostering local music scenes by stocking local product, show posters and zines. Learning from others about music culture and history are all healthy things, and this is still done in indie stores. The novelty of stumbling upon things in a store, like the music they are playing, or flipping through bins and coming across something new or unique.  Live bands or artists performing live in stores is still a novel experience. Just the importance of being in a physical space. I think these things are all healthy culturally. They are humanizing however, they are often still male dominated spaces. So it is important to note that such stores are not humanizing to all.

But we also see vinyl as a fetish object, much more now than in 2006 when I shot this footage. I feel records have gotten to be too expensive and like a boutique item for people with money and disposable income. This kind of media exclusivity I can do without. We can also see this globally where record collectors/buyers from the US and Japan are basically pillaging developing countries like Jamaica, Cuba and Colombia. These tourists are buying up their cheap vinyl “gold,” and selling it for a profit in their own developed countries. This to me is a fairly gross form of cultural imperialism and I find it strange that a record store in Seattle has a better vinyl selection of ska, reggae and dub than Kingston. This situation would make for an interesting dissertation or documentary.                

7. Did you take care of every aspect of the production process? Interviews, filming, editing, post-production, distribution?  Or did you have other people involved? If so what was the collaboration process like? What are some of the difficulties you experienced?

This project was completely DIY. I shot everything myself. It took me a year to edit the feature length film. I designed the DVD and authored it. I put together the packaging by hand. I took it on tour. I distribute it in stores and it has been affiliated with Microcosm Publishing. I sometimes still get orders for the film and mail them off myself. I submitted the text to many film festivals. I made a related webpage. I did all the PR. I did collaborate with an amazing artist, Dena Zilber, as she made the drawings for the DVD cover and related posters. I knew she understood the aesthetic and culture of indie stores, so she was an ideal fit for the art design and packaging. We had to go back and forth many times to be on the same page with the final results, but I think her design worked out very nicely. So this whole approach was very punk rock and DIY.        

In terms of difficulties, this is a lot to take on for one person. DIY projects are very labor intensive and time consuming, but I think it paid off in the end. The film screened widely and it helped me secure tenure. The folks from The House of Records liked the final result and it is an important historical record of their business. But you likely won’t make much money. But I also like having creative control of the process and not having to compromise.  But nowadays, I am much more interested in collaboration and sharing the workload with others for my sanity. And it can be more efficient in terms of time.

8. How was the documentary received by the people at House of Records? How important their feedback was to you?

I premiered the film in Oregon at the Bijou, an indie theater in Eugene. Most of the employees and a number of the customers attended the nearly packed screening. After the film ended, the employees and myself conducted a lively Q/A with the audience about the film and the social importance of The House of Records. Instead of merely screening the film, I thought it was important to have a dialog with the Eugene community about the issues addressed in the film, mainly, keeping such stores in business by actively supporting them. After the discussion the local band Heavenly Oceans performed in the screening room (their music is also on the soundtrack of the film). It was a very festive mood and by far my favorite screening of Walls of Sound. I sold many copies of the DVD that night and even signed some copies of the poster. It was pretty cool. I felt the overall reaction from the workers was very positive and supportive.  Everyone was very happy. They knew I put many hours into this project and was dedicated to telling the story of their business. One worker was a bit concerned about how the editing was out of chronological order, but this is simply the nature of documentary filmmaking. That really can’t be helped.

Whenever I visit Eugene, I always stop in The House of Records and it’s like a homecoming.  They are my friends. And it’s fantastic to see they still sell copies of the documentary as it is prominently displayed on their counter. It is special how we helped each other. This film supports their store and they will always have this historical document. It very much helped my career as an academic and media maker as well. I think this was accomplished because of trust in each other.

9. As writing is the hegemonic medium in academia, do you think there is a heuristic potential in using other media than writing? In Walls of Sound for example, did you find that the film medium allowed you to articulate ideas, or demonstrate particular arguments in ways that weren’t not possible through writing? What does researching through film feels like? What do you think of the general marginal position given to non-written works in academia?

I think you are correct here that academia values written work more than media texts such as a documentary. This of course can vary by discipline. I think part of the problem is that when you’re being evaluated or reviewed annually, the people in charge of this have no digital media or production background and they don’t realize how time and labor intensive it all is. To edit a feature length documentary project is the equivalent of a book project to me. Or they don’t understand the value of where the work has been screened as they don’t have this background.  So you really have to spell this out in your tenure narratives. So this can be problematic, but I think it all worked out and this documentary project helped me get tenure as my department values creative projects. But not all departments operate this way, and I am at a teaching oriented institution.

If I am going to spend a tremendous amount of time making a project, I want people to see and experience it. I think it is substantially easier to get a larger audience of people to watch a documentary film than read an academic article or book that has a tiny niche audience. Having tenure makes this attitude easier to pull off.  

Like all institutions, universities are slow to evolve and adapt with the times. And this obsession with written texts seems wildly outdated and extremely limited in terms of knowledge more generally. But luckily I am in an environment where creative works are accepted. In the end, I think academia needs to be more inclusive and accepting of digital media works as a valid form of cultural production. Let’s evolve already.      

10. What’s next? What are your upcoming projects?

For my next documentary project, I will go to Ukraine and document various underground music scenes ranging from punk, indie, metal and electronic music subcultures. I’m also currently a co-editor of an edited collection called Music and Death — Interdisciplinary Readings and Perspectives that is in the works. I also have several essays on punk and pedagogy in the pipeline, as well as a historical essay on the political economy of iTunes. I would love to eventually write a book on the critical history of music retail, as I feel that is a blind-spot in the literature. Perhaps in the future. When I have a free moment. Which may be never.        

David Gracon is an associate professor of critical media studies and digital media production at Eastern Illinois University.  His research/creative projects and teaching interests include cultural studies, film studies, media literacy, alternative media, DIY cultural production, punk studies, the political economy of communication, documentary and experimental media production. He is also the programmer and host of Hallways Microcinema based in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.  For the 2017/2018 academic year, he was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar teaching media studies at Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. He is a native of Buffalo, NY and has been invested in post-punk, indie, experimental music scenes, zine communities and college radio; as well as activist orientated experimental film, video and documentary communities and collectives since the mid 90’s.

Samuel Lamontagne is a Ph.D student in Ethnomusicology at UCLA.

Whether it’s through the media and entertainment industries or academia, Los Angeles hip-hop has been under close scrutiny for over two decades. Far from drying up, the history of L.A. hip-hop seems to expand as the myth builds and the interest for it grows. The more you search the more you find - and in the wake of the blockbuster Straight Outta Compton (2015), more and more stories and details about the city’s hip-hop past are being discovered and told. In many ways this is what the upcoming Roadium Mixtape Documixery attempts to do. Focusing on the unsung contribution of Steve Yano, his record stand at the Roadium swap meet and the mixtape series that he was putting out, the documentary explores the pre-N.W.A era of L.A. hip-hop.

Dr. Dre’s career started long before N.W.A, as a member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. Dr. Dre as well as DJ Tony A. Da Wizard made mixtapes for Steve Yano who dubbed and distributed them at the Roadium swap meet. Those mixtapes included songs not yet played by the radio and thus helped push forward hip-hop sounds in L.A. Those mixtapes featured many freestyle raps from artists such as Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre and Hi-C, who would go on to become some of the biggest names in hip-hop.

As the music industry was morphing into large conglomerates by the mid-1980s, music became mostly commercialized through wide retail chains. At the time when hip-hop was perceived as a passing fad, local retailers such as Yano’s record stand functioned as outlets for the burgeoning L.A. hip-hop scene.  

As it concentrates on the Roadium we can also expect the documentary to shed light on the cultural significance of swap meets for people of color in working class communities. Myriad insider stories should also be featured such as how Steve Yano introduced Eazy-E and Dr. Dre to one another during a three way phone call.

Directed by Tony A, as one of the DJs who worked closely with Yano and made mixtapes for him, the documentary features numerous figures of L.A. hip-hop such as Warren G, Alonzo Williams, Sir Jinx, Kid Frost, Arabian Prince, DJ Rhettmatic, AMG, Hi-C, Tony A himself and many more.

Samuel Lamontagne is a Ph.D student in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His research focuses on hip-hop in the particular context of Los Angeles.

Introduction

In the city of Tamale, northern Ghana, Dagbani language popular music can be heard in taxis, on people’s mobile phones, and in the central market. Unlike more traditional popular music industries, where recording artists gain direct notoriety for their work, many Dagbani popular musicians have historically worked behind the scenes, composing and recording songs for the local Dagbani film industry.[i] Beginning in the early 1990s, Dagbani popular singers were commissioned by filmmakers to write and record songs for local films. After the songs were composed and recorded, they were passed on to actors, who lip-synced these songs in the films. In this post, I provide a brief history of the Dagbani film music industry in Tamale. Throughout, I consider the role that playback singers play in shaping both popular music and film culture in the region, and further explore their process for composing and performing diegetic film songs. 

Many scholars have detailed the interconnectivity of dance, music, and theatre in West Africa. Scholarly work in this realm includes Hélène Neveu Kringelbach’s work on dance and theatre in Senegal (2013), as well as Karin Barber (2003), Catherine Cole (2001), and John Collins’ (1994; 1997) respective works on the relationship between music, dance, and theatre in Nigeria and Ghana. In what follows, I similarly engage with the interconnectivity of music and film in northern Ghana, where the disciplinary boundaries between media/film studies and music are porous.

Diegetic Film Songs in Northern Ghana

Diegetic song segments have been a part of the Dagbani film industry since it began in the early 1990s. Similar to the playback singers of the Hindi film industry, a handful of trained vocalists recorded the majority of songs for Dagbani films. By the late 1990s, nearly all recorded music albums circulating in Tamale were compilations of songs from Dagbani films (Yamusah 2013:79). Why did filmmakers in Tamale gravitate towards the use of diegetic songs in their films, and what led to the creation of the playback singer role in the Dagbani film industry?

The history of diegetic film songs in northern Ghana begins with the popularity of Hindi film songs in the city during the postcolonial period. Hindi films first arrived in Tamale with the introduction of cinema in the late 1950s. Cinemas were built by Lebanese businessmen with support of the first president, Kwame Nkrumah.[ii] While both American and Hindi language films were accessible to film distributors, Hindi films were more popular, as the Islamicate iconography embedded in older Hindi films resonated with Tamale’s majority Muslim audiences. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Hindi films grew in popularity, to the point that some musicians in town named themselves after popular Hindi film actors, and set new Dagbani lyrics to Hindi film melodies.

The popularity of foreign diegetic film songs is important when considering the early development of locally produced film music in Tamale. During the 1980s, inexpensive audio-visual recording technologies arrived in Ghana, including cassette tape recorders and camcorders, that made it possible for young entrepreneurs to produce their own popular movies. Young entrepreneurial filmmakers in Ghana subsequently worked to make movies that met the (perceived) expectations and desires of their audiences (Garritano 2013:62; Meyer 2004:93). They drew upon structures from foreign films that resonated with their viewing public, while also making sure to include plot lines and imagery that spoke to the lived experiences of their audiences, in languages that viewers understood. In Tamale, this meant that many early Dagbani language films mirrored the already popular format of Hindi films, including their use of diegetic music throughout. At the same time, these locally produced videos catered to Dagbamba audiences: videos were filmed at identifiable locations in Tamale, considered themes and issues that resonated with viewers, and were made in the major language, Dagbani.

The Role of the Playback Singer

Just like in Hindi films, popular vocalists in Tamale are commissioned to record songs in the studio, that are then lip-synced by the actor on set. In this section, I look more closely at the creation of the playback singer role in Tamale. What is the purpose of having a playback singer, and what were some of the reasons for adopting this structure in the Dagbani film industry? 

In Hindi cinema, the role of the playback singer developed out of a need for a consistent standard of singing. While early Hindi film songs were sung by actors with little vocal training, later films were sung by trained vocalists, who could handle more technically complex pieces (Arnold 1991:48-49). As older Hindi film songs conveyed intense feelings in larger-than-life ways, trained vocalists were also able to amplify emotion and affect through their voice, mirroring the emotion felt by the film character (Morcom 2007:15; 2010:149; Ganti 2008:294). As song segments also arise during emotionally intense moments in Dagbani films, Tamale’s playback singers similarly use vocal techniques including vibrato, crooning, breathiness, and rhythmic lags to mirror the emotion of the characters in Dagbani films.[iii] As one Dagbani playback singer explained to me, playback singers perform in such a way that audiences “do not need to hear the words to feel the melody.”[iv] While the role of the playback singer in Tamale is similar to the role of playback singers in Hindi films, there is one key difference between the two: while Hindi film songs are composed by a music director in conversation with the film director (Morcom 2007:29-30), playback singers in Tamale are expected to compose the music, write the lyrics, and perform the film song in the studio. 

The Process of Making a Diegetic Film Song in Tamale

In what follows, I explore the process of commissioning, composing, producing, and filming a diegetic film song in Tamale. This section is based on an ethnographic example from my fieldwork in 2016, where I followed playback singer Memunatu Laadi through the process of making the film song “Nduma Nyεni Ka N Suhira” (God, you’re the one I’m pleading with), for the 2017 film N’Zim (My Blood).

One of the most sought after playback singers in Tamale is Memunatu Laadi. As one filmmaker put it: “she’s like our own Lata Mangeshkar.” Laadi spends her time selling DVDs at her shop in town, and almost daily, filmmakers come to her shop to commission new songs for their films. One day while I was visiting Laadi, a filmmaker came to commission a song. First, he explained the overall plot of his film, titled N’Zim, and the required content for the song-segment. N’Zim is about a man from a village who leaves his lover to find work in the city. In the city, he becomes wealthy and marries an urban woman. Twenty years later, he becomes very sick, and needs a blood transfusion, only to find he has a rare blood type. Luckily his maid has his blood type, and provides a blood transfusion in hospital. This act of kindness makes the man’s urban wife jealous, and she fires the maid. The maid runs off to her home in a nearby village, but the man chases after her to thank her. He finally reaches her in the village, and when he enters the maid’s home he finds his former lover. He learns that his lover became pregnant before he left twenty years ago, and realises his maid is actually his daughter. The film song being commissioned is sung by the maid while she is running home, crying profusely and praying to God to alleviate her poverty. 

In Tamale, playback singers sometimes compose their own melodies, and other times parody existing popular melodies. After the director left the shop, Laadi began brainstorming possible melodies she could parody. She brought out a DVD titled “Bollywood Hits of the 1970s” and flicked through each music video until she found the melody she had in mind: “Main Shayar to Nahin,” from the 1973 Hindi film Bobby. Laadi explained that she wanted a sorrowful song, and that this particular melody fit well. The sorrow Laadi hears is one of romantic loss and forbidden love, as the 1973 version explores the longing of lovers separated by class. Songs of lost romantic love are often used by Dagbani singers when composing a song about a character’s desire for closeness with God, playing on a metaphoric analogy between romantic and divine love. 

Figure 1: Listening to "Main Shayar To Nahin" in Memunatu Laadi's shop in July, 2016. Photo by author.

Once Laadi chose her melody, she began writing accompanying lyrics. In this scene, the character limps to a bus station with a burnt hand and a broken shoe, homeless in the city and resolved to return to her mother in the village. She dreams of a more stable life, and appeals to God for help. Laadi wrote lyrics to fit the content of the scene, and when finished, she sang the song in its entirety in Dagbani, which translates as follows: 

God, only you know the thing that resembles me

The suffering I’m suffering is because of poverty

God, why have you created me a poor person? 

Is it that one day when I meet you, 

I will eat and be satisfied in this world? 

Bless me, and I will also get what I want in this world

Everybody should pray to God, so that he will give you your own 

A few weeks later, Laadi went to the recording studio with the film director for the recording of the film song. Both Laadi and the sound engineer listened to the original version of “Main Shayar to Nahin,” noting the instrumental accompaniment and rhythm. The sound engineer used a keyboard and synthesizer to replicate the backing track, which he created through downloadable synthesizer applications:

Making the backing track for the film song in September, 2016.

Laadi then went to record her vocals: she sang closely into the microphone in order to make her vocal wavering and breathiness audible. Otherwise known as crooning, this vocal technique sounds “intensely emotional” (McCracken 1999:372).With the advent of the microphone in the mid-twentieth century, crooning emerged in various contexts around the world, including in the United States in the 1920s (McCracken 1999:372), in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s (Stokes 2009:65), and in India in the 1930s and 1940s, beginning with renowned playback singer Kundal Lal Saigal (Beaster-Jones 2014:32). In Tamale, this vocal style is referred to as “shaking the voice” and is important in signalling the emotional vulnerability of the film character. For example, one prominent filmmaker explained to me that singers need to shake their voice in order to “get some feeling there, to have emotion in your voice.”[v]

Figure 2: From Left to Right: filmmaker, actor, and two videographers walk towards their film site. Photo by author.

Several weeks after Laadi’s song was produced in the studio, the director, videographers, and actress collected at a nearby site to film the scene. Dressed in costume, the actor lip-synced to an accompanying MP3 radio speaker. While lip-syncing, she produced a stream of tears for several hours, so that videographers could capture the scene from multiple angles. Several months later, the film was available on DVD in Tamale’s local markets.

Film Scene for “Nduma nyεni ka n suhira” (God, you’re the one I’m pleading with).

Figure 3: DVD cover for N'Zim (My Blood) (2017).

Conclusion

In this post, I have explored the making of a film music industry in northern Ghana, and detailed the process of commissioning, composing, and recording diegetic music for Dagbani films. The study of film music is not only relevant to the northern Ghanaian context. For example, there is a long-standing and much larger Hausa film music industry in northern Nigeria, and there has yet to have been a musicological study of this scene.[vi] It is likely that there are similar diegetic film music scenes developing in other regions of West Africa as well. In an increasingly mediated world, film music is an important genre of study, as youth in Tamale and elsewhere access popular music through the films and television they watch each day. Films thus play an integral role in the production and consumption of popular music. In return, music composers are adapting their music to fit within new and ever-changing mediated formats.

References

Adamu, Abdalla Uba. 2008. “The Influence of Hindi Film Music on Hausa Videofilm Soundtrack music.” In Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Cinema, edited by M. Slobin, 152-176. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Adamu, Abdalla. 2007a. “Currying Favour: Eastern Media Influences and the Hausa Video Film.” Film International 5 (4): 77-89.

Adamu, Abdalla. 2007b. “Transnational Influences and National Appropriations: The influence of Hindi Film Music on Muslim Hausa Popular and Religious Music.” Conference of Music in the World of Islam, 1-25.

Arnold, Alison. 1991. “Hindi Filmī Gīt: On the History of Commercial Indian Popular Music.” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Barber, Karin. 2003. The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Beaster-Jones, Jayson. 2014. Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cole, Catherine M. 2001. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Collins, John. 1997. “The Jaguar Jokers and Orphan Do Not Glance.” In West African Popular Theatre, edited by Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard, 56-92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Collins, John. 1994. “The Ghanaian Concert Party: African Popular Entertainment at the Cross Roads.” PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo.

Ganti, Tejaswini. 2008. “‘And Yet my Heart is Still Indian’ The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianizaiton of Hollywood.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, 281-300. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Garritano, Carmela. 2013. African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Krings, Matthias. 2015. African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McCracken, Allison. 1999. “‘God’s Gift to us Girls’: Crooning, Gender, and the Re-Creation of American Popular Song, 1928-1933.” American Music 17 (4): 365-395.

Meyer, Birgit. 2004. “'Praise the Lord’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.” American Ethnologist 31 (1): 92-110.

Morcom, Anna. 2010. “The Music and Musicality of Bollywood.” In The Sound of Musicals, edited by Steven Cohan, 141-151. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Morcom, Anna. 2007. Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène. 2013. Dance Circles: Movement, Morality, and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal. Oxford: Berghahn.

Phyfferoen, Dominik. 2012. “Hiplife: The Location, Organization and Structure of the Local Urban Pop Industry in Tamale.” In Hidden Cities: Understanding Urban Popcultures, 237-247, edited by Leonard R. Koos. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford United Kingdom.

Stokes, Martin. 2009. “ʻAbd al-Halim's Microphone.” In Music and the play of power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, edited by Laudan Nooshin, 55-73. London: Routledge. 

Yamusah, Mohammed Sheriff. 2013. “A Critical Study of the Music Industry in Tamale.” Master’s Dissertation, University of Ghana.

Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound, Edited by Christine Guillebaud. New-York/Oxon: Routledge, 2017. [239 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-1-138-80127-1].

(Each paper is referenced with the author’s name and the geographical location of its research subject)

Mostly written by scholars from French research centers, the eleven articles of the volume Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound, edited by Christine Guillebaud, are intended as a contribution of anthropology to the interdisciplinary studies of sound.

Interdisciplinarity is the key notion in this publication, both in terms of the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors (anthropology, ethnology, sociology, geography, ethnomusicology and acoustics), and in terms of the range of their past and present research. An interdisciplinary angle seems particularly relevant in that the diverse articles investigate socialization states and processes through the prism of sound. Long overlooked by social sciences, sound has gained scholarly consideration in the last thirty years, both as a source of disturbance in modern societies and for its central role in social agency. In that perspective, ambient sound can be considered as part of a sensory environment not simply experienced but perhaps endured by people, and also used by them as a space where they can produce meaning through sound in shifting ways. Sound environments are also where one shapes her/his listening in relation to gaining her/his own subjectivity. Thus, as this book is “primarily devoted to understanding the sensory modalities of the production of sound environment decrypting the range of local knowledge and the imaginaries they inspire in a given group or society” (Guillebaud, p. 2), listening appears as the other key notion. In the introduction, Guillebaud presents and critiques the “Four ways of listening” introduced by French composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer in the 1960s, which was later extended by Michel Chion. Rather than this overly rigid and semantic typology, she prefers Henry Torgue's, which includes the notion of agency and links listening and understanding of sounds to the listener's social situation and ability to act in society. Listening thus becomes the moment of taking information about one’s human/non-human environment. It constitutes the individual as a subject at the same time as it informs oneself about the subjectivity of others. Each of the four parts of this volume addresses one particular aspect of the relationship between a listener and one’s sound environment as part of the social environment.

The first part, Listening into Others, explores the topic of the existence of the self through the production of one’s own sounds and the reception of the sounds of others. Listening to another is generally a way to discern their values or social identifications through their sonic production. Conversely, producing sound is also a means to exhibit one’s own self to others. Furthermore, sound, voice or music are means to engage in commercial or diplomatic relationships with people from unknown and misunderstood cultures (Anne Damon-Guillot, Ancient Ethiopia), to dominate them or to affirm one’s social self against oppressive social structures (Tripta Chandola, slums in Delhi India). Sound can also be used by individuals or social groups to create and appropriate a sound environment devoted to particular ways of communicating alongside particular social relations (Olivier Féraud, Naples, Italy).   

The next part is titled Sound Displays and Social Effects. It addresses sound strategies (solicitations and various sounds) used to capture attention and control crowds in two different types of overpopulated spaces: bus station (Guillebaud, Trichur, Kerala, India) and train stations (Pierre Manea, Tokyo, Japan). Guillebaud focuses on sonic skills and techniques (pitched sound, corporeal attitudes of the tickets collectors, uses of voice…) used to capture the attention of others in a context of intense commercial and sonic competition. Through a comparative angle across time and space, Manea analyzes the strategies for reporting the arrival, boarding and departure phases of trains in stations where train traffic is threatened by any chaotic behavior of overflowing crowds.

The third part, Sound Identity and Locality, explores how sound is attached to a place and its inhabitants through the diachronic study of four urban and peri-urban fields. By investigating the historical evolution of the classification of sound as “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” within the “acoustic communities” of Dollar (a Scottish village), Heikki Uimonen considers the particular soundscapes they lived in through time. In Cairo (Egypt), Vincent Battesti focuses on how dwellers listen to the city and identify its spaces through sound, according to their “social sound structures,” but also by the way each of them listens regarding their own social situation. Iñigo Sánchez considers sound as a means and marker for urban evolution. His article examines the effects of the urban renewal of a popular area of Lisbon on its soundscapes, and finally on its inhabitants’ living standards. Claire Guiu extends her perspective to the whole city of Barcelona (Spain), where she studies the production of sonic territories shaped by particular norms and imaginaries. She concludes that the city and its spaces are places for the expression and the confrontation of sensory ideologies.

The last part, Sound Art and Anthropology, contains two articles on an uncertain categorization of sound, between noise and music, found in two experimental artistic practices. Jean-Claude Depaule addresses sound poetry through a historical perspective. Vincent Rioux intertwines the history of a Parisian suburb with one of its footbridge. He further considers the testimony of the suburb’s inhabitants to analyze an experimental music and dance performance, intended as a tribute to a footbridge just before its demolition.

The volume ends on an afterword by Jean-Paul Thibaud, who uses this concluding space to reflect on French research on sound environments in society. Although it doesn’t contain any academic breakthroughs, the wide range of fieldworks (firmly illustrated by video and audio files available online) and methods makes it a recommended reading for anyone interested in the social effects of sound. More specifically, the diversity of methods - mobilizing participant observation, interpretation of historical texts, statistics, listening walks, field recordings (including the experimental and promising “Mics in ear” method by Battesti and Nicolas Puig) - used both in diachronic and synchronic perspectives, establishes this volume as an inspiring toolbox for future works. An “anthropology of ambient sound” remains to be accomplished, as the book’s title implies by the word “toward,” and it can be an important resource for scholars as well as for the listener to shape her/his own subjectivity.  This could be a potential answer to the question asked by Thibaud in closing the volume: “could the anthropology of ambient sound simply be another means of listening to ambiances?" (p. 231).  

Jonathan Thomas is a Ph.D. candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (CRAL). His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Prof. Esteban Buch, focuses on the cultural history of political records in France during the 1930s. He wrote three peer-reviewed articles: “Jean-Marie Le Pen et la SERP : le disque de musique au service d’une pratique politique” (Volume!, 2017), “Militer en chantant, sous l’œil de la police parisienne des années 1930 : une exploration du fonctionnement politique du chant” (Transposition, 2018), “De la musique pour le peuple : une proposition d’analyse des disques folkloriques du Chant du Monde” (Analitica, 2018).

One of the rewarding aspects of exploring Indonesian jazz communities is my relationship with members of Warta Jazz, an Indonesian jazz news source and website. What began as an organization to produce a monthly physical news bulletin in 1996 with the aim to socialize jazz in Yogyakarta, grew into an ecosystem^[1] centered on jazz with festivals, workshops, archives, movie screenings, and educational events. As part of my participation in this ecosystem, I attended and took photos of the Java Jazz Festival 2019 held at the Jakarta International Expo in the northern Kemayoran subdistrict of Jakarta from March 1–3. This festival is a major annual highlight for the Indonesian jazz community and this year featured seventy-five Indonesian artists along with thirty-six international acts. The festival draws a largely Indonesian audience, although many foreigners, usually those working in Indonesia or nearby countries like Singapore, also attend. While official numbers have not yet been released, in previous years the audience was around 115,000 for this three-day festival.^[2] Many people in the jazz community have been generally positive about the direction of the festival citing a concentrated effort by festival founder Peter Gontha, a well-known businessman and former Indonesian ambassador to Poland, and his daughter Dewi Gontha, who has guided the event’s programing for the past several years, to make the event more jazz focused. 

The idea of making the event “more jazz” is a critical theme throughout the Indonesian jazz community. In previous years, many have criticized the festival for ignoring the local jazz community in favor of popular music acts to attract larger crowds, causing some community members to boycott. During the festival, I often heard from audience members, performers, and organizers that the Java Jazz Festival “isn’t all jazz,” recapitulating the matter. Despite this concern, many Indonesian jazz musicians, organizers, archivists, and educators do attend every year and often present new works at this large-scale media event. The debate of “more jazz” focuses on how the word jazz is defined in and by the Indonesian community, a debate common to almost every jazz community. The varied positions in this debate seek to define the place of jazz in Indonesian society, signaling issues of authenticity and authority. How these positions are delineated and who has the authority to do the delineating reflects more about the classifiers than anything that became clear or strict demarcations for the Indonesian jazz community as a whole.

What this festival made evident was that Indonesian jazz musicians were hungry to hear international jazz performers live. Since jazz is a genre where individual performances and liveness are respected, this festival provides the major opportunity for Indonesian musicians to hear international jazz musicians outside of recorded formats. Most of the Indonesian musicians I spoke with were excited to hear international musicians like Gretchen Parlato, Robert Glasper and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah with super group R+R=Now, and GoGo Penguin. I, conversely, was completely stunned by the magnitude and quality of Indonesian musicians, even though I have been attending jazz events in Indonesia for over two years now. The Indonesian jazz musicians performed in a range of styles, from straight-ahead, modern (often meaning commercial), ethnik^[3] (drawing up a variety of traditional Indonesian musics), and contemporary (often meaning experimental). These styles, just like the word "jazz," quickly became blurred as Real Book chops informed contemporary collaborations, and ensembles with traditional instruments belted out pop hits. Popular music ensembles added horn sections, extended solos, and outstanding players to make their music “more jazz.”

Three Diverse Groups

While an abundance of ensembles are worthy of attention, for this Notes From the Field account I will focus on three groups that caught my attention during my coverage for Warta Jazz: Anteng Kitiran, Indro Hardjodikoro, and simakdialog. The first group, Anteng Kitiran, is a Yogyakarta based ensemble featuring Eko Yuliantoro (violin), Krisna Pradipta Tompo (keyboard/piano), Gagah Pacutantra (drums), and Harly Yoga Pradana (bass).

The group’s compositions combine pelog and slendro tunings from Central Javanese gamelan with jazz modes and scales as well as hints of Western classical music training resulting in refreshing new sounds. The group is not fully dominated by any of these traditions, as violionist Eko Yuliantoro moves between kroncong^[4] inspired legato while self-consciously infusing Central Javanese aesthetics and danceable grooves that feel both modern and refined.

The group has only recently formed and has yet to formally release an album, but their compositions display the influence of the Yogyakarta jazz community associations from the Jazz Mben Senen and Ngayogjazz communities. Their mixture of traditional sounds and commercial aesthetics is similar to the well-known Yogyakarta group Kua Ethnika, who also blend traditional instruments like Yogyanese bonang^[5] with a funk section consisting of bass, drum set, and guitar. Kua Ethnika’s blending allows for both tunings to exist simultaneously and has resulted in what Purwanta Ipung, their bonang and multi percussionist, has called rasa baru (new flavor/feeling) (Ipung 2018).

The second group is Indro Hardjodikoro and his festival ensemble, which featured drummer Elizer Robby, pianist Edwin Putro, and guitarist Yankjay Nugraha. Hardjodikoro is a longtime bassist in the Indonesian jazz community, playing in groups like Trisum, Halmahera, and simakdialog, as well as several projects with Erwin Gutawa and Tohpati. At Java Jazz, he presented songs from his new album Light On, which was released at the festival. Songs on the album feel lighter and sweeter than some of his other fusion projects, although his ensemble interpreted the songs with more festival-friendly grooves. While one would think Indro would be content showcasing his latest release, he premiered an upcoming project with Sruti Respati, a kroncong singer from Central Java. Their project locates jazz in the Indonesian patriotic, kroncong, film, and popular songs from the 1940s-1950s, even though those songs and genres were not labeled that way. Indro and Sruti performed a number of compositions by Ismail Marzuki^[6] (the composer of many of Indonesia’s popular and patriotic songs from the 1930s-50s) and “Nurlela” by Bing Slamet, a pop star who was active from the late 1940s until the early 1970s.

Indro and Sruti demonstrate how jazz has been a part of the Indonesian popular music repertoire for quite a while. Their project begins to unpack some of the complexities in Indonesian popular music history as many of artists from the 1950s and 1960s had a complicated relationship with the word "jazz." While many of the songs from this era have sonically recognizable jazz aesthetics, the word "jazz" does not appear in most of their descriptions. Rather, the songs are labeled as other genres such as hiburan, irama lenso, or pop. It will be exciting to follow this project’s development, as Indro and Sruti continue to locate jazz in Indonesian patriotic songs, kroncong, and pop, and further highlight the connections of these earlier genres with the contemporary jazz community.

simakdialog

The last section of this piece is devoted to a slightly longer reflection on the group simakdialog, who officially premiered their new 2019 album GONG at the festival.^[7] The story behind GONG is heartbreaking yet characterized with brilliant compositions and a spirited recording. The composer, pianist, and core of simakdialog — Riza Arshad — died in January of 2017 after only recording three of the album’s seven tracks. The thorough liner notes contain the full story of how this recording was carefully reconstructed from lost and jumbled data and completed with the help of Arshad’s pupil and inventive pianist, Sri Hanuraga (often shortened to Aga) along with support from Roullandi Siregar of Arsip Jazz Indonesia (The Indonesian Jazz Archive). The tracks Arshad recorded, such as the opening track “GONG 1,” reveal the depth of the connection between the piano trio of Arshad, bassist Rudy Zulkarnaen, and Sundanese kendang percussionist Cucu Kurina that then connects with Mian Tiara's particular and delicate vocals. Their aural bond, cultivated through listening and their long-term commitment to each other, allows them to intimately respond to each other, and foster a uniquely collaborative sonic space accentuated by their distinctive instrumentation.

Arshad’s compositions breathe life into a new musical language, blending jazz piano vocabulary with Sundanese music. All the melodic and harmonic material for each of the GONG (1-4) compositions is generated from the overtone series of different sized gongs.^[8] One of these overtone series is explicitly stated in the opening phrase of "GONG 1," played by the piano:

Also heard in this video:

Arshad’s composition and solos in “GONG 1” often leave out many chord tones, allowing the progressions to be simultaneously interpreted along multiple lines. The piano solos also contain clusters of tones with several neighbor pitches, for example the solo in "GONG 1" (performed by Arshad) and the solo in "GONG 3" (performed by Aga), which craft a blurred quality. With their clashing fundamentals as well as simultaneously ringing overtone series, the pitches invoke something of the inbetween, perhaps an illusion of microtonality. The ability to connote other tuning systems on the piano through these clashing intervallic relationships pushes the instrument and ensemble into different modes and helps invoke new feelings. This is the sonic example of Arshad’s goal to synthesize jazz piano trio vocabulary with Sundanese music, which Aga artfully describes in the liner notes. “As early as 2002 he [Arshad] started using Sundanese kendang as a part of rhythm section for simakDialog’s album Trance Mission. He may not be the first to come up with the idea to use Sundanese kendang as a rhythm section in a jazz ensemble, but he had a bigger vision than his contemporaries in this regard” (Hanuraga 2019). This fusion of traditions can be heard elsewhere on the album including the downward runs during Aga’s piano solo in "GONG 3" and the gaps and pauses in Kurina’s concluding kendang solo in “GONG 1.” These performances make space, silence, and the inbetween an integral part of the sound.

This space created by the members of simakdialog follows in the tradition of Mile Davis’s second quintet, with a focus on intense intragroup listening and group improvisation based on bonded personal and musical journeys. The group listening tradition of Davis’s quintet can similarly be heard in the later ensembles of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and John McLaughlin. This group listening space cannot be attained simply by training but requires training together and committing to both the project and the players, something increasingly rare in the digitized, fast paced music industry.

Simakdialog uses their discussions and diligent acts of listening to themselves and to other communities to foster their sound and cultivate their philosophy. Their name is a portmanteau: simak (Indonesian for attentive listening) with dia (Indonesian for her/him), lo (Betawi for you), and gue (Betawi for I).^[9] In other words, the name means listening and discourse between her/him, you, and me. The group has for a long time been on the cutting edge of the contemporary Indonesian jazz community, pushing and creating new spaces through their rare drive to promote intercultural collaboration. Beyond combining new instrumentations, Arshad’s contribution to understand and incorporate Sundanese musical idioms into jazz composition has set a new standard for the Indonesian jazz community.

The release of GONG seemed to be one of the significant events at the Java Jazz Festival 2019, when Wartajazz.com founder Agus Setiawan Basuni updated his WhatsApp status to ‘Jazz Dia_lo^Gue’ a few weeks before Java Jazz 2019 festival. Roullandi Siregar from Arsip Jazz Indonesia — who helped simakdialog compile their recordings, support their tours, and produce GONG — also described this performance as one of the main events of Java Jazz 2019. Unfortunately, he could not get a desirable group photo during their performance on the barricaded stage, so we took a conciliatory photo with the promotional photo outside the venue instead.  

The Java Jazz Festival 2019, the 15th edition, helped present many of the current projects from Indonesian jazz community, from ventures that utilize their history in the present, those drawing on multiple traditions, and those forging new frontiers. This festival, with its high-ticket price, still demonstrates how jazz remains within an upper-class milieu. But this is no longer the only major festival in Indonesia, with many other events throughout the year such as Ngayogjazz, Ubud Village Jazz Festival, and Jazz Gunung providing other high-profile opportunities for Indonesia musicians. These other festivals along with the backgrounds and goals of the Indonesian jazz musicians and event organizers demonstrate how jazz has gradually become socialized within a larger Indonesian community.

While I highlighted the Indonesian jazz groups in this piece, I'd like to emphasize that this festival was also very much a commercial pop festival that hosted a band like the international rock group Toto as one of its headliners. A majority of the audience seemed just as interested in instagram-worthy photo opportunities as in the various national and international popular music acts. This placement of “real” jazz within popular music events is common in Indonesian festivals as promoters negotiate financial needs with aesthetic choices. While the “real” jazz acts often seek to distance themselves from pop, if one looks at historical examples such as Ismail Marzuki, one realizes that these styles have not always been so far apart.

References

Basuni, Agus Setiawan. 2017. “Dunia Jazz Indonesia berduka, pianis Riza Arshad wafat.” WartaJazz.com. Accessed April 19, 2019. http://www.wartajazz.com/news/2017/01/17/dunia-jazz-indonesia-berduka-pianis-riza-arshad-wafat.

Hanuraga, Sri. 2019. [Liner notes]. In GONG [CD]. Jakarta: demajors.

Indonesian Badan Ekonomi Kreatif Republik Indonesia. Recana Strategis Badan Ekonomi Kreatif Tahun 2015-2019. By Triawan Munaf. Released September 5th, 2017. Accessed April 19, 2019. http://ppid.bekraf.go.id/storage/file/VSJXle0xjBO3pUI.pdf.

“Jumlah Penonton Java Jazz 2005-2013”. twitter.com. Accessed March 21, 2013.

McGraw, Andrew. 2012. “The Ambivalent Freedoms of Indonesian Jazz.” Jazz Perspectives 6(3):273-310.

simakdialog. GONG. Demajors Independent Music Industry. 2019, Compact Disc.

Interviews

Ipung, Purwanta. 2018. Interviewed by author. Bantul, Special Region of Yogyakarta, November 13, 2018.

Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age, edited by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018, hd, 375 pp. + index. ISBN: 1-5275-0393-3 

Reviewed by Victor Roudometof / University of Cyprus

Based on two conferences, this volume brings together the work of a diverse group of musicologists and music theorists. While Poland is overrepresented, contributors also come from Norway, Estonia, Austria, Italy and France. The volume’s focus on glocalization is timely and relevant, especially in light of recent publications (Roudometof 2016). Glocalization is a concept that enables researchers to go beyond the simplistic opposition between global and local and to explore the creation of new cultural fusions in a multitude of different areas of social life. In its many related social functions, music serves as a nexus where one can observe the interactions among different constituencies that are continuously involved in an on-going production and renegotiation of a multitude of social and cultural meanings. The volume displays remarkable thematic coherence, which allows the editors to use the material presented within individual chapters in order to build broader theoretical arguments. In its conception and execution, this volume is a noteworthy effort to insert the problematic of glocalization into the disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology.  

As the editors state in their introduction, the book’s topic is twofold: while it concerns the “glocalization in music,” it also involves considerations of the “glocalization on music,” which entails the examination of the ways in which globalization has affected the changing interpretations of music, especially in terms of aesthetics. The volume is divided into three parts: Part One consists of five chapters engaged in mostly theoretical perspectives on glocality and music; Part Two consists of four chapters addressing the problematic of music composition in conditions of digitality; Part Three consists of three chapters addressing glocalization in non-European contexts; and Part Four is focused on glocalized music professions, but it also includes the editors’ concluding chapter, where they spell out their own theoretical model of music glocalization. 

In Part One, Herbert’s chapter is by far the most theoretically focused discussion. The author advances the notion of being “glocalimbodied” (2018:6), a neologism that combines “glocal” with “limbo” in order to make sense of an unbalanced condition attributed to glocal forces as well as the necessity of situating the body within the newfound condition of personalized branding strategies. Of the other chapters, one should mention Moraczewski’s analysis of the consequences of sound recording on musical performance over the last 150 years, suggesting that cultures might have shifted from a condition of orality to a condition of post-orality. Also, Kozel’s chapter features a sophisticated argument about the significance and re-appropriation of myths, as well as globalization’s own status as a contemporary myth. 

In Parts Two and Three, most chapters involve discussions of musical hybridity in several different contexts. In the non-European cases examined in detail in Part Three, there are some insightful anthropological musings—such as the global-local linkages and cultural shifts observed in the music of West Sumatra as well as the re-deployment of the didjeridu, an instrument of indigenous Australian peoples, into new formats and cultural contexts far removed from its original uses. These cases highlight the significance of re-appropriation and re-contextualization of music, musical instruments, and performances, which is a theme that runs throughout the volume’s chapters. In Part Four, these themes are explored further through an analysis of the careers of various European composers, an anthropological study of the varied repertoires of street musicians, and a discussion of the glocalized nature of Italian opera. 

Part Four’s concluding chapter, authored by the volume’s editors, outlines the editors’ own theoretical model of glocalization. Their model relies on the material analyzed in the previous chapters, and the editors are quite correct in pointing out that several of the volume’s chapters employ strategies elsewhere described as falling under the rubric of glocal methods (Roudometof 2016). The editors’ synthesis of the volume’s research is highly original and represents a good point of departure for thinking further about the uses of glocalization in musicology. It is in this concluding chapter that explicit consideration is given to the themes of heritage and innovation. One cannot fail but notice that these terms are part of the volume’s subtitle, whereby readers might have the reasonable expectation that these concepts would have played a more visible role within the majority of individual chapters. 

Given the strong presence of Polish authors among the volume’s list of contributors it is hardly surprising that the editors’ approach (but also the approaches of some individual authors) appear to have been decisively influenced by Bauman’s (2013) approach to glocalization. That might be a double-edged sword, though, for Bauman’s approach is far from neutral: he has compared glocalization to forced cohabitation, implicitly suggesting that it is a rather “unnatural” phenomenon of our times. That sort of attitude, which I have described as “negative glocalism,” makes it harder for academics to approach glocalization in an unbiased fashion. 

As a social scientist, I have read this volume with great interest, which was somewhat diminished once discussion within individual chapters settled into the specifics. Perhaps that is my own fault: my grasp of several topics is not that of a musicologist or ethnomusicologist, and music scholars might have a radically different sensibility. Still, I believe it is fair to say that the volume is decisively shaped by concerns specific to musicology as such. In terms of articulating a more trans-disciplinary stance, the volume might be a missed opportunity. The reader gets the impression that work was rigorously pursued within the scope of the discipline itself and whatever connections were established with research done outside the discipline’s boundaries is either incorporated in a post hoc fashion or it is dealt with as inspiration for the development of theoretical models that remain highly specific to musicology as such. The more sociological or anthropological problematic (which usually involves considerations on the themes of youth culture, trans-local music cultures, glocal meaning construction in reference to racial, ethnic, or other subaltern groups, and so on) is far less visible – although Part Three is a brilliant effort to explicitly address such concerns. But regardless of these aforementioned reservations (which themselves could be charged with the sin of disciplinarity), the volume’s problematic should be seen on par with similar trans-disciplinary efforts to use the notions of globalization and glocalization onto fields seemingly far removed from the social sciences (for example the case of archaeology, see Hodos 2019). Therefore, this volume is a praiseworthy effort, but of course it does not exhaust the topic; I believe there is still a considerable untapped potential that future research might be able to capitalize upon. 

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2013. “Glocalization and Hybridity.” Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 1: 1-5.

Hodos, Tamar. 2019. The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization. London: Routledge.

Roudometof, Victor. 2016. Glocalization: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

Ethnomusicology Review is now accepting submissions for Volume 23, scheduled for publication in Fall 2020. Started as Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology (PRE) in 1984, Ethnomusicology Review is an annual peer-reviewed journal managed by UCLA graduate students and a faculty advisory board. Our online format allows authors to rethink how they use media to present their argument and data, moving beyond the constraints of print journals. We encourage submissions that make use of video, audio, color photographs, and interactive media. 

Articles are original essays of no more than 8000 words on topics related to musical practice, and will be subject to an extensive review process prior to publication. They are expected to extend current theoretical and/or methodological approaches to the study of music, broadly conceived, and may be written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Articles explicitely engaging with contemporary ethnomusicological scholarship are particularly encouraged. Essays in languages other than English will be considered for publication, provided that qualified reviewers are available, but authors are encouraged to include an abstract written in English.

*The submission deadline is March 23, 2020.*

Full guidelines for submission:
ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/submission-guidelines