Ethnomusicological Encounters with Music and Musicians

Essays in Honor of Robert Garfias

Timothy Rice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317140559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Designed as a tribute to Robert Garfias, who has conducted field work in more cultures than any other living ethnomusicologist, this volume explores the originating encounter in field work of ethnomusicologists with the musicians and musical traditions they study. The nineteen contributors provide case studies from nearly every corner of the world, including biographies of important musicians from the Philippines, Turkey, Lapland, and Korea; interviews with, and reports of learning from, musicians from Ireland, Bulgaria, Burma, and India; and analyses of how traditional musicians adapt to the encounter with modernity in Japan, India, China, Turkey, Afghanistan, Morocco, and the United States. The book also provides a window into the history of ethnomusicology since all the contributors have had a relationship with the University of Washington, home to one of the oldest programs in ethnomusicology in the United States. Inspired by the example of Robert Garfias, they are all indefatigable field researchers and among the leading authorities in the world on their particular musical cultures. The contributions illustrate the core similarities in their approach to the discipline of ethnomusicology and at the same time deal with a remarkably wide range of perspectives, themes, issues, and theoretical questions. Readers should find this collection of essays a fascinating, indeed surprising, glimpse into an important aspect of the history of ethnomusicology.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Reflections on the Formation of an Ethnomusicologist

Robert Garfias

The ethnomusicology program at the University of Washington, which this collection of essays celebrates, began under fortuitous circumstances. I was lucky to have been able to play a part in its early stages of development more than 40 years ago. The seeds for the enterprise took root shortly before my arrival in 1962. A group of faculty at the University of Washington with a common interest in Japan submitted a proposal to the Ford Foundation for a five-year project enabling them to inaugurate a Center for Japanese Arts. These faculty members who clustered themselves around this idea had a variety of disciplinary interests in Japan, literature, theater, art and architecture, and the visual arts.

The Ford Foundation responded positively to the idea but made two provisos. One stipulated that the focus of the center be expanded to a Center for Asian Arts and not just one that concentrated on Japan. The second stipulation was that an ethnomusicologist be added to the faculty. The founding faculty group quickly agreed to become the Center for Asian Arts and the College of Art and Sciences of the University of Washington created a new position for an ethnomusicologist, for which, in 1962, I was recruited.

Part of the plan for the new center was to allow the core founding faculty to invite scholars and artists from Japan and other parts of Asia to come to the University of Washington and to serve as visiting artists or visiting scholars. One of the faculty, Professor Richard McKinnon, was most intimately knowledgeable about Japan and was fluent in the Japanese language. At his suggestion Professor Shigeo Kishibe of Tokyo University was invited during the first year as a visiting professor, and his wife, Yori Kishibe, was invited to teach koto. (When she became the head of the Fujii branch of the Yamada tradition of koto playing, she was called Fujii Chiyoga II.) Dr. Kishibe and his wife thus first established the Japanese music part of the center’s activities at the University of Washington.

I arrived in the fall of 1962 to take my place in the newly established regular faculty position in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. Before talking about those early years at Washington it might be useful to put this all into some broader context. If, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, ethnomusicology has not yet become a household word, back in the 1960s it was certainly much less so. If anything it was still considered an odd and interesting subdiscipline of (Western) musicology. Ethnomusicologists were to be found at only a very few institutions of higher education, some still considered themselves comparative musicologists, and the hyphen in the name of the new discipline, ethno-musicology, had yet to be removed (Jaap Kunst 1950 is credited with first naming the discipline in this way).

My own entry into the discipline, like much else that happened in my professional life, came about by chance and without a clear plan. I was born in San Francisco and lived there until I entered graduate school at UCLA in 1956. Both my parents were Mexican immigrants from different parts of Mexico who met and married in the U.S. (Figure 1.1). I grew up speaking Spanish and English at home, in part because my mother was fluently bi-lingual. She came to the U.S. at a very young age and completed elementary and high school here; thus I was able to begin elementary school without any language difficulty.

Figure 1.1 Robert Garfias with parents and sister ca. 1940

My family was not particularly musical, although there was enough music around, mostly radio and records, to make for many musical associations during those early years. My father had taken up the saxophone after arriving from Mexico and had belonged to some sort of orchestra or band in San Francisco, although regrettably I neglected to ask him much about it while he was still alive. My father was from Tehauntepec, Oaxaca, where he was taught in elementary school by Jesuit priests from whom he learned a great number of things, including cabinet making, calligraphy, and cooking. At all these things he excelled, and I remember his excellence in all these skills. Particularly amazing to me were his knife skills in the kitchen. He would have become a professional cabinet maker or carpenter, but he arrived from Mexico in time for the depression, and it was difficult for Mexicans to break into that profession. He had a fine hand in calligraphy and practiced a beautiful old Spanish style of handwriting still seen from time to time in Mexico.

My mother was raised in a catholic convent in San Francisco, and thus her English was fluent and her knowledge of how things worked in this country was good. Neither of my parents talked much about careers or college. In retrospect I believe that my father deliberately avoided teaching me anything about carpentry in hopes that I might choose some other career that would offer more possibility for upward mobility. Alas neither did I master his excellent calligraphy. However, the image of my father cooking on the weekends and on important occasions did leave a lasting impression that has, outside of music, remained a long and fervent passion.

In the early 1940s, when I was about 11 years old and still in elementary school, I made a visit to Mexico for several months with my mother, grandmother, and younger sister. It was a marvelous experience during which I was allowed to wander on my own freely all over Mexico City. It also did much to improve my fluency in Spanish. After returning from Mexico my mother decided that she wanted me to learn to play the guitar. With the help of her older brother they were able to find a teacher. In retrospect I still find it impressive that they sought out a classical guitar teacher. At that time there were very few people who played classical guitar. It was far from the mainstream music world and considered something of an oddity. There were of course no established American music institutions teaching guitar. Interest in the classical guitar outside of Spain and Latin America did not come into the Euro-American mainstream until at least 10 years later.

In junior high school music there was an obligatory choice among chorus, orchestra, or band. The guitar did not connect me to any of these, and I stumbled into band. I was started out on trumpet and then, remembering my father’s saxophone at home, I asked if I could use that. So I began playing my father’s old Martin alto saxophone. With the encouragement of my junior high school band teacher I started jazz improvisation, and I also began to compose. Before long he introduced me to his own theory and composition teacher, and I began taking private theory and composition classes from him while still in junior high school. I began playing jazz and soon joined the Musicians Union. By the time I was in high school, I was playing saxophone, piano, and bass and doing jazz arrangements while at the same time continuing to compose. I had a particular fondness for modern French music. I was especially fascinated by the music of Artur Honegger. I began studying the French language and was soon quite fluent, something which remained with me until the 1970s, when it was confused by my becoming fluent in Romanian. If I thought at all of a future for myself in those days, I would have imagined it either in jazz or as a composer or both. I also had a strong desire to go to Paris to study composition with Honegger.

On reflection something that I thought little of at the time now seems to be perhaps significant. My interests in music during high school were jazz and European classical music, mostly twentieth-century music. My study of the classical guitar had led a bit beyond that into other kinds of Latin music. During the late 1940s radio as a source of listenable music was very limited. Most of what was played was pop music with perhaps one classical music station that played only short selections, never a complete symphony and rarely chamber music. There were no jazz stations, but once in a great while one of the African-American stations that specialized in religious music or Black popular music might play a jazz record.

As I searched across the radio dial for something interesting to listen to, I frequently came across the nightly Cantonese radio program broadcast from Chinatown in San Francisco. I found the music strange and disturbing and quickly moved on. Perhaps because of the challenge of finding anything interesting on the radio I started listening to the Cantonese hour regularly. I remember thinking that there are people listening to this somewhere or it would not be on the air. I remember feeling challenged enough to see if I could make sense of it. Soon I was enjoying the music and even going into Chinatown when there was a Cantonese opera production being staged. So in retrospect, the ethnomusicological spark seems to have started even back in high school.

The first summer out of high school I was hired as a musician playing on one of the President Lines ships going to the Orient. That ship went to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. I was fascinated by all that I saw on that trip and on my return found myself listening to whatever music I could find beyond the West and reading everything I could find. It is important to remember that, in the early 1950s, there were very few non-Western music recordings available anywhere. Books and articles on non-Western music were as yet also very, very few.

I still thought of myself as a composer hoping and dreaming of going to Paris to study with Artur Honegger while continuing to try to make a living playing jazz, which was not really possible. Even the very best jazz musicians found it difficult to find regular work. So I worked at several temporary jobs and then for some two years was back as a regular seaman working in the galley, chopping onions and washing dishes.

At some point during this period I decided that I might go to college and think about becoming a music teacher. I enrolled at San Francisco State in 1953 but almost immediately gave up the idea of music education. I continued to study composition, but I also found anthropology very interesting and so I decided to take that as a major. During those years in college my interest in non-Western music continued and I pursued it as best I could outside of school. I learned of an older Japanese woman in San Francisco who was teaching Japanese koto. I believe that I actually began with the idea of learning something about the instrument in order to use this instrument in my own compositions. But I was soon absorbed in the traditional music itself. I studied the koto for about three years. In my second year of college the composer Harry Partch gave a performance with his ensemble, and I was amazed at the music and with his microtonal system and with the instruments themselves. I joined Harry’s ensemble and continued to play in it until I left San Francisco to enter graduate school.

In perhaps my last year at San Francisco State I learned about the Laboratory of Comparative Musicology at Northwestern University, at the time directed by Richard Waterman. I wrote to Waterman about the possibility of attending Northwestern in that program. As I recall in my own mind I was simply going to Northwestern to pursue the study of non-Western music and, if that was where it was being done, then I decided that I would go there. I had no clear vision of pursuing an academic career, although it should have been clear to anyone that this was the direction in which I was heading. I was only thinking about how I might learn more about this field.

Before actually applying to Northwestern University, by chance also during my last year as an undergraduate, the Dutch ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst came to San Francisco. I had of course read his book, Music in Java (Kunst 1949). I had also read Colin McPhee’s (1946) A House in Bali and his 1949 Musical Quarterly article on Balinese gamelan music and had started a rather long correspondence with him, asking further questions about Balinese music. When Jaap Kunst arrived in San Francisco, I attended all his lectures, and once went out to meet him in Mill Valley near San Francisco, where he was staying with friends. It was Kunst who urged me to go to UCLA, telling me that his student Mantle Hood was now teaching ethnomusicology there, that there was a Javanese gamelan, and that faculty and students all played together in it.

To me at that time, a performing musician who had spent some three years studying Japanese music through playing the koto, the idea of studying a music by playing it was immediately appealing. I dropped the idea of applying to Northwestern University and wrote to Mantle Hood. The following summer of 1956 I entered the graduate program at UCLA The effect on me of that first year at UCLA was momentous when you consider that I had been interested in the discipline for five or six years and now at last there was a place where one could go and study it.

At UCLA there was a graduate seminar in ethnomusicology each semester and an undergraduate course in world music cultures. Mantle Hood firmly believed that ethnomusicology was a subdiscipline of Western musicology, not in the sense of what the Western musicologist was studying but rather that there was only one discipline and ethnomusicology was part of it. To that end he believed the only way to train an ethnomusicologist was by requiring a complete proficiency in Western historical musicology. At UCLA this meant for me that I had to take a full battery of qualifying exams in conducting, basic piano playing, sight singing, score reading at the piano, music analysis, and so forth. These were required before one could proceed to regular graduate status. While Mantle Hood appreciated that I had an undergraduate degree in anthropology and often mentioned it, he, for some reason, did not allow me or any of the other graduate students in ethnomusicology to take courses in anthropology.

I was intensely interested in what each of the ethnomusicology students at UCLA was studying. Some of us would go into the greater Los Angeles area and seek out various cultural and ethnic enclaves. It was at this time that I made my first contact with the large community of Okinawan musicians in the area. Also during the mid-1950s the first recordings that gave a better picture of the various musics of the world were beginning to appear. Alan Lomax’s World Library of Folk and Primitive Music had started to appear on Columbia Records, Hugh Tracey’s African Music Library recordings were now available, and Ducretet-Thompson had released a large anthology of North and South Indian Classical music. Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar had just begun to give concerts in the U.S., and musicians such as these were easily accessible to those few of us who were intensely interested in their music.

I now see this all as part of the increased accessibility of international travel and readily available information that occurred after World War II. It was no longer quite so difficult to travel or to get information about what was going on in other parts of the world, although such travel and accessibility were still much more limited than today. During my first year of graduate study, Mantle Hood asked me what culture of the world I would like to pursue as a focus of my graduate studies. At the time this was a difficult question for me. I wanted to study Chinese music, Indian music, African music, and Indonesian music; in fact, I was ready to go anywhere in the world to which I might be pointed. Mantle Hood suggested that I consider working on Japan since I already had had a good start in studying Japanese music in San Francisco. However, he had two ideas which affected my path of study. One did much to define the channels through which I was to pursue my study: for the sake of the ethnomusicology program he was trying to create at UCLA, he wanted to have ensembles from different countries. The other idea was that each of us was strongly encouraged to find something like mode, raga, pathet, or makam in the music we were studying. He suggested that I study gagaku in Japan since this tradition had a large and varied ensemble. I was fascinated by the few recordings and live performances that I had heard of gagaku, and so I readily agreed.

During my second year at UCLA, and before going to Japan, Mantle Hood went to Java for a year to carry out research, and I suggested that the music department invite Professor Shigeo Kishibe from Tokyo University as a visiting professor. Kishibe had written on music at the Tang Dynasty court, and this had a direct bearing on the origins of gagaku in Japan. Kishibe’s arrival was a great aid to my preparation for study in Japan. Furthermore, since he came with his wife, Yori, I was able to continue to study the koto and to write a graduate paper on Yamada ryu (school) koto music. Kishibe had in his possession a very unusual undated eighteenth-century gagaku manuscript. Someone, perhaps wishing to understand this music better, had created a score notation of the three wind instruments and the two string instruments of gagaku written side by side, something that was very unusual in Japan. I took this opportunity to use my analysis of this manuscript as the basis for my master’s thesis in 1958. At the same time, with the help of musicians from the local Tenrikyo church in Los Angeles, I started a gagaku ensemble at UCLA made up of staff and students, including the architect Frank Gehry, then studying at U.S.C.

In 1958 with the aid of a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship I went to Japan to begin a three-year period of study. Professor Kishibe had also introduced me to a group in Japan that played and taught gagaku. While the gagaku tradition was primarily continued by the musicians of the Imperial Palace Music Department, a few Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple musicians also played this music, still considered rare and unusual in Japan generally. The group to which I was introduced, the Ono Gagaku Kai, met at a local Shinto shrine, where the musicians came to learn and to play together. The instructors for the group were all musicians from the Imperial Palace Music Department (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Robert Garfias in Tokyo in 1958

By extraordinary effort and some considerable luck, the International House in Tokyo succeeded in having me admitted to the Imperial Household Agency as a student in the Music Department. This had never happened before nor has it ever happened since to the best of my knowledge. Miraculously, I was admitted and, while the pretext was to allow me to study in the palace, it also allowed me regular entry into the Imperial Palace so that I could attend all performances and rehearsals in the palace music department.

During the second year of my stay in Japan, with the vision and energy of Lincoln Kirstein of the New York City Ballet, the gagaku musicians were invited to perform at the U.N. by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. With this invitation in hand Kirstein proposed a performance tour of the U.S. for the court musicians. The Imperial Household Agency asked me to join the musicians on this tour as an interpreter, and for this purpose I was officially made an attaché of the Imperial Board of Ceremonies. In the course of the performance tour of the U.S. I got to know each of the 23 musicians very well, and this close contact with each of the palace musicians was of immense value to me in the final stages of my research in Japan.

Upon my return to UCLA after study in Japan I concentrated on the preparation of my research while at the same time participating in the seminars in ethnomusicology and playing in the performance groups. In addition to the gagaku ensemble that I continued to direct, there were two Ghanaian drummers in residence, the result of contacts that Hood had made during his stay in Ghana. There were also two Balinese musicians and so there was much activity in the area of Balinese gamelan. During the same time Colin McPhee was invited to UCLA as a visiting faculty member, and so after years of correspondence I at last met him and joined his seminar on the old style of Balinese music.

I must confess honestly that even as I was writing up my doctoral dissertation I was not particularly thinking about what came next, which is to say about securing a teaching position in an academic institution. It was intimated, not directly but by hearsay, that I might be invited to stay on at UCLA, which to me at the time only seemed like a continuation of what I had been doing. In retrospect Mantle Hood was indeed asking me to do a number things that helped to lighten his burden, such as taking over the teaching of some of the courses.

When the new position in ethnomusicology was opened at the University of Washington as part of the new Center for Asian Arts, Mantle Hood submitted my name and gave me strong support. I went directly from being a lecturer at UCLA, not yet having completed the dissertation, to becomin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Reflections on the Formation of an Ethnomusicologist
• Part I Encountering Musicians
• Part II Encountering Music
• Bibliography
• Index