The use of ethnography. On the Contribution of Ethnomusicology to Popular Music Studies

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Gerd Grupe (Ed.) Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies

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Grazer Beiträge zur Ethnomusikologie herausgegeben von Gerd Grupe

Band 25 Die Grazer Beiträge zur Ethnomusikologie sind die Fortsetzung der Reihe Musikethnologische Sammelbände 1 – 21, begründet von Wolfgang Suppan, zuletzt herausgegeben von Gerd Grupe

Institut für Ethnomusikologie Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz

Graz Studies in Ethnomusicology Series Editor: Gerd Grupe

Vol. 25 The Graz Studies in Ethnomusicology are the continuation of the series Musikethnologische Sammelbände vol. 1 – 21, founded by Wolfgang Suppan and edited by Gerd Grupe

Institute of Ethnomusicology University of Music and Performing Arts Graz

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GERD GRUPE (Ed.)

Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies

Shaker Verlag Aachen 2013

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Gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz und der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung Abt. Wissenschaft und Gesundheit

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar.

© Copyright Shaker Verlag 2013 Alle Rechte, auch das des auszugsweisen Nachdruckes, der auszugsweisen oder vollständigen Wiedergabe, der Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen und der Übersetzung vorbehalten. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-8440-2389-3 ISSN 1867-4682 Cover photos: left: Shantel concert at p.p.c. Graz, © Malik Sharif right: Mohsen Sharifian (bagpipe) and Pouya Nikpour (keyboard), © Saeid Abdollahi

Shaker Verlag GmbH • Postfach 101818 • D-52018 Aachen Telefon: 02407 / 9596-0 • Telefax: 02407 / 9596-9 Internet: www.shaker.de • eMail: [email protected]

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Contents Gerd Grupe Introduction. Popular Musics: A Challenge for Ethnomusicology? ..................................... 1 Regine Allgayer-Kaufmann ‘Popular Music’ versus ‘Art’ and ‘Ethno’. Consequences for Musical Analysis ..................................................................................... 27 Raymond Ammann String Bands in Vanuatu: Pop or Ethno? ...................................................... 39 Klaus-Peter Brenner The Mbira/Chimurenga Transformation of “Dangurangu” – A Music-Analytical Case Study from Zimbabwe at the Intersection of Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Research ....................................... 53 Anja Brunner Xylophone Music on Electric Guitars: Beti Popular Music in the 1970s ... 147 Dietmar Elflein Popular Actor-Networks – “You’ve got the Power” .................................. 167 Nils Grosch Notes Regarding the Ethnification of Commercialized Cultures................ 189 Julio Mendívil The Use of Ethnography. On the Contribution of Ethnomusicology to Popular Music Studies ............................................................................ 197 Andreas Meyer Reflexive Creativity – Transculturation, R&B and the Dawn of Metal ..... 221 Babak Nikzat Constructing Identity in Music: Adapting bandari in Iranian Pop Music .. 237 Malik Sharif On Ethnomusicology, Ethnography, and Popular Music Audiences .......... 265 Contributors to this Volume............................................................................. 291

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The Use of Ethnography. On the Contribution of Ethnomusicology to Popular Music Studies Introduction For those of us who understand ethnomusicology as the study of music as culture and define it through the methods applied, and not through its research objects, the question if popular music is a genuine research field for ethnomusicologists has long since become superfluous. After more than 20 years of ethnomusicological approaches to popular music, it may be more appropriate to discuss which theoretical and methodological impulses ethnomusicology can offer popular music studies. It is of course not my intention to teach anyone how he or she should conduct the study of popular music. However, I would like to show that ethnomusicology can offer very productive solutions to some of the problems that popular music studies are currently dealing with. Specifically I will argue that ethnomusicology’s cultural relativism and ethnographic methods constitute productive alternatives to two kinds of research, which I consider hegemonic but problematic in popular music studies. First of which are studies based on the Critical Theory of the so-called Frankfurt School and second are those studies oriented towards a semiology of music. Both types are characterized by their hermeneutic approaches. To a lesser extent I will refer to scholar-fan approaches, which I consider interesting but insufficient. Even if I appreciate the participatory aspects of these approaches, they become problematic when scholar-fan researchers start idealizing their research objects. In order to discuss all three traditions in popular music studies I will look at two musical genres that I have focused on as ethnomusicologist: the German Schlager and the Brazilian música sertaneja, both very popular genres in Germany and Brazil but discredited concerning their cultural capital. On the basis of my own research I will show that the ethnographic methods bear the potential to look past and overcome the prejudicial descriptions of Schlager and música sertaneja, in so far as they allow us to access the emic categories of

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those who produce, distribute and consume these musics. In doing so, I will demonstrate that ethnographic methods can contribute to a better understanding of these genres as social phenomena. Ethnomusicologists have been prone to tend towards a discourse of justification every time we abandon our habitual territory – the study of socalled traditional music cultures – and venture towards research on commercially produced musical genres, or to lament the problems that ethnographic work is confronted with when it takes place in urban environments. None of this is my intention. Instead, I will support the hypothesis that popular music studies have enriched reflectivity in ethnomusicology and have taken us further to focus on aspects of musical production and consumption that we have excluded from or neglected in our studies. In this sense this paper has two purposes: 1) to illustrate the potential of ethnography for the study of Western or non-Western popular music and 2) to demonstrate that popular music studies have improved current ethnomusicology.

Ethnography and popular music studies Ethnography is the collection of cultural data in situ. Its method par excellence is fieldwork involving participant observation. Both became indispensable to anthropology in the early 20th century, when Bronislaw Malinowski displaced the philologically orientated “armchair paradigm”. Fieldwork and participant observation involve the collection of data through interacting with the living members of a society or cultural groups and participating in their everyday life. After World War II, fieldwork also became a central method in ethnomusicology (Merriam 1964). Since that time, fieldwork involves the musical or non-musical participation in music related events of the cultural groups being studied in order to observe, record and describe them (Baumann 1981:12). Whilst musical practices as “sound” and “behavior” can be heard or observed directly in the field – or through the media –, ethnomusicologists can access the musical concepts and values of a music culture only through language. This means that when ethnomusicologists want to investigate informants’ feelings, thoughts or interpretations concerning their musical activities, they have to meet and interrogate them adequately. Verbal communication with the informants is a central aspect for acquiring, processing and interpreting cultural information.

The Use of Ethnography

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Popular music studies emerged from a philosophical or philological tradition. Theodor W. Adorno introduced popular music in the academic world through his foundational text “On Popular Music” (1990 [1941]), initiating a new research field in music studies. But in spite of his numerous and significant contributions to the study of popular music, Adorno adopted a skeptical attitude towards empirical research (Adorno 1992:266). He usually put himself into the shoes of the consumers, trying to detect what they feel or think when consuming popular music. In his classic book Bruits: Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique, Jacques Attali also describes music consumption as a passive act and consumers as “naïf dupes” of an aggressive capitalistic music industry (1977: 219). Like Adorno, Attali’s assumptions were not based on any kind of empirical data. Both paradigmatic works were not based on direct verbal communication between observers and observed, but on the unilateral view of the researcher, who seemed to know better than the informants themselves how they consume music. It is exactly this aspect that I consider problematic. Popular music studies received input from musicological traditions in the work of Philip Tagg, one of the pioneers of the academic analyses of pop music. Tagg noticed in the early 1980s that insights into socioeconomic, subcultural and psycho-social aspects of music abounded in popular music studies, but that they said very little “about the nature of […] music itself” (1982:41) and tried to correct this. Accordingly, Tagg presented a holistic model for the analysis of popular music, which localizes, describes and explains musical parameters like time, melody, tonality, texture, dynamic aspects, and orchestration (ibid.:47-48) in order to interpret them as cultural codes and disclose a veiled primary intention of the composer. A good example of Tagg’s approach is his analysis of Abba’s hit “Fernando”. Here Tagg connected musical codes like the flutes of the intro and the minor scale during the stanzas with the Andes, and the snare drum of the first stanza with the struggle for freedom (ibid.:61). I don’t want to deny that the composers Anderson and Ulvaeus tried to evoke the association with the Andes or the fight for freedom in Latin America, but I do not see any reason to think that consumers listening to the song have the same associations as the song’s authors – unless they were specifically told about the authors’ intentions. Although Tagg recognized that codes are always inter-subjective and that interpretation is always influenced by context, he interprets the song without any verification by its producers and consumers and he alone decides what that music means. Of course, the analysis of musical structures is a very important

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aspect for the study of popular music, but analysis cannot replace the perspective of those that consume the music. A third input to popular music studies came from British cultural studies. Through significant studies like Profane Culture by Paul Willis (1978) and Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige (1979), cultural studies extended the field of popular music studies, introducing important terms like class, gender, and subculture to the analysis. But the most relevant input was probably their use of ethnographic methods for research. It is Richard Middleton who best represents this turn in popular music studies. In order to strengthen the use of interpretation in popular music studies, he proposed a “participant listening” at the beginning of the 1990s, where the researcher learns the emic decodification of sounds, immersing him- or herself in the music scene studied. Middleton coined the term scholar-fan and inspired studies wherein “the analyst can double as ‘informant’ from within the culture […] and as ‘critical outsider’, cross-checking the information against schemas drawing on a wider body of musical data” (1993:180). Middleton’s vision was a call for participation and for ethnography. In the 1990s, excellent works like Running with the Devil by Robert Walser (1993), Rap Music and the Politics of Identity by Adam Krims (2000) or Rocking the Classics: Progressive Rock and the Counterculture by Edward Macan (1997), among others showed the enormous potential of ethnographies for the study of popular music. Unfortunately, scholar-fan studies sometimes lead to an uncritical academic justification of personal musical taste, as the example of Peter Manuel demonstrates, who depreciated a sort of ghazal as “commercial kitsch” (Manuel 1993:102). This clearly cannot be the goal of popular music studies. The boom of ethnographies in popular music studies coincided with the height of ethnographies of popular music in ethnomusicology (cf. Waterman 1990; Manuel 1991, 1993; Erlmann 1991; Guilbault 1993). Although this turn meant that popular music became a genuine ethnomusicological research object, ethnographies of popular music remain rare (cf. Cohen 1993:27; Berger 2008:66; Holt 2008:41). The split between ethnography and popular music studies could be traced back to the fact that popular music researchers are commonly not trained in ethnographic methods and that ethnomusicologists, who are trained in this field, commonly fear choosing popular music as a research object, because being an urban phenomenon, it represents a challenge to those that usually deal with music at a micro and not at a macro level (Cohen


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1993:127). Nevertheless ethnography is necessary for popular music studies. Sara Cohen states: “An ethnographic approach to the study of popular music, involving direct observation of people, their social networks, interactions and discourses, and participation in their day-to-day activities, rituals, rehearsals and performances, would encourage researchers to experience different relationship, views, values, and aesthetics, or to view familiar contexts from an alternative perspective. This exercise could increase self-awareness and challenge preconceived notions or ‘ungrounded’ assumptions […] Hence ethnography could increase our knowledge of the details of popular music processes and practices.” (Cohen 1993:135)

Hence only ethnography grants us access to the categories and values of the people, which produce and consume the music we study. Only through these methods can we access their emic interpretations. Berger argued that in order to understand peoples’ interpretations of music and life, ethnographers have to understand the experiences of their informants on their own terms, and that for this reason they have to share their musical experiences and their social life as richly as possible (Berger 2008:73). That leads me to my next point: the role of cultural relativism in ethnographies and its importance for popular music studies.

Cultural relativism and popular music studies Middleton (1993:180) and Berger (2008:66) speak about a description of the musical experiences of the informants in the informants’ own terms. Following Malinowski’s dictate, anthropologists always aim at finding the “native point of view”. This attitude has enormous epistemological implications. When we accept that there are many native viewpoints, we also recognize that cultural practices do not have intrinsic values. Instead, they are always the result of cultural or social experiences. Accordingly, values are not universal; they can vary from one culture to another. Cultural relativists state that a culture can only be interpreted and judged in its own terms. In this sense cultural relativism is a counterpart of ethnocentrism, the act of judging a foreign culture solely by the values and believes of the own cultural or social group (Petermann 2004:651). If each culture develops its own values and its own explanations of life, then each music culture also develops its own concepts of music and its own aesthetic and

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technical criteria in order to determine what music is and what is considered good or beautiful music. As Merriam says: “Every music system is predicated upon a series of concepts which integrate music into the activities of the society at large and define and place it as a phenomenon of life among other phenomena. These are the concepts which underlie the practice and the performance of music, the production of music sound. Many of them are not verbalized directly, though some are, and thus they must be approached through analytical evaluation based upon an understanding of the folk evaluation” [an emic perspective; J.M.]. (Merriam 1964:63)

Accordingly, our job as ethnomusicologists is not to assess the music we study by our own criteria, but by the emic criteria of the people who produce und consume that music, in order to explain it in their own terms. Thus cultural relativism is a central aspect of the ethnomusicological research, as it allows the transmission of foreign musical knowledge into our society, and in doing so supports cross-cultural mediation. For a long time musicology’s canon excluded popular musics because of their supposed musical simplicity, allocating their scientific analysis to other disciplines such as sociology or cultural studies (Tagg 1982:38; Bohlman 1993:429-43). Cultural relativism is not a matter of course in popular music studies, even if current musicology wrestles with that canon (Brooks 1982:17; McClary & Walser 1990:280). Adorno grounded a tradition of cultural critique which judges music according to its complexity and its structural innovation, discrediting popular music genres as regressive and purely commercial (Adorno 2003:35). Since then, ideological critiques of music are a common issue in popular music studies. Reading the abundant literature, one gets the impression that many musicologists do not criticize the canon, but rather aim for the inclusion of the musics they research into exactly this canon. A good example for such a research is Andreas Hinners’ 2011 book Progressive Rock: Musik zwischen Kunstanspruch und Kommerz (Progressive Rock: Music between Art and Commerce). Here the author tries to demonstrate throughout the book that progressive rock as music genre is superior to other kinds of popular musics like pop or what he rashly calls “mainstream”, because of its harmonic complexity and virtuosity (Hinners 2011:162). I don’t hesitate to affirm that progressive rock hits are normally more complex and virtuosic than the I-IV-V-songs by, let us say, Creedence Clearwater Revival or The Rolling Stones. Yet I believe that


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neither harmonic nor instrumental complexities are universal criteria for the valorization of music. In addition, these categories are absolutely unimportant for the fans of these groups. Hinners’ work shows clearly the risks of scholar-fan studies and that the universalization of one particular criterion for the judgment of music can lead to discrimination. Thomas Turino said that one of the social functions of ethnomusicology is to learn and to teach different ways of conceptualizing the world, so that we have more models for thinking and acting (2008:226). Ethnology, as Clifford Geertz said, plays an important role in reminding us that one's convictions should not lead us to auto-complacency and that the world may be interpreted in manifold and different ways (cf. Geertz 1984:275). I think the ultimate claim of our discipline is to defend the cultural diversity and thereby counteract the ethnocentrism and discrimination in all its expressions. In this sense ethnomusicology can have the political function of demanding and promoting tolerance as well as understanding between different cultures and social groups. Hence ethnomusicology can contribute to reinforcing a cultural relativistic point of view in popular music studies. In order to illustrate this I will discuss the advantage of ethnographic methods in popular music studies, drawing on my own experiences in the field.

The German Schlager and German popular music studies The German Schlager is a romantic and melodic genre that is quite successful in the German speaking world but has a very low social status. The genre had been studied by sociologists, linguists and even by musicologists, who have always regarded it as a purely commercial and minimalistic music, a “foolish music for foolish people”. Before I started my research Schlager had never been studied from an ethnomusicological point of view. Led by the dream of every ethnologist to study an uncharted group, I did my first ethnography of Schlager music in 2001. In my circle of friends Schlager was regarded as politically suspicious music for “grannies.” Interestingly, although most people around me told me that they did not like Schlager music, I noticed that most of them could sing the songs by heart. In order to introduce myself to the Schlager world I began working at a record company that produced Schlager music among other things, where I visited concerts and recording sessions for TV shows;

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interviewed performers, producers and consumers; visited internet sites and regularly participated in discussions in forums trying to understand how this “foolish music” was consumed every weekend by approximately 8 million people in the German speaking countries (Mendívil 2008a). I also read scholarly books about Schlager music and noticed that most of them were heavily influenced by cultural critique theory. Adorno had condemned the genre as a simple mass product of the cultural industry (Adorno 1992:49) and other philologically oriented researchers have since obsessively demonstrated that Schlager music promotes the acceptance of capitalism (Kayser 1975:20-22) or that it even provides support for brutal dictatorships in Latin America (Dietrich 2000:227). All of these statements were only empirically based upon no more than the imagination or the prejudice of the authors who formulated them.

Figure 1: Judith & Mel evocating the springtime and romantic love in Rust, 2004


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The ethnography of Schlager was not simple. When I started my research, I realized that my informants regarded me more as a political or economic refugee than as an ethnomusicological researcher. I had inadvertently inverted the roles in the ethnology and as a non-Western ethnomusicologist, turned the Germans into “my Indians”. This is the reason why a part of my work focused on the epistemological problems of otherness and the consequences, or rather the problems of “studying up,” as Laura Nader called it (Nader 1974:302-307). How to build the otherness of “normal” people even if these people are “foolishly” normal? I adopted what Fischer and Marcus called “the critical strategy of defamiliarization” (Marcus & Fischer 1999:137). Thus, describing the practices of consumers and producers of Schlager with ethnological jargon, I managed to distance myself from the “intellectual” German point of view and showed that behind these apparently foolish musical practices, there are deep cultural beliefs like the German idea of Heimat, the idea of a utopian world in opposition to the modernization of Western society. I also found out that the Schlager community carries out a conservative rebellion against what Anthony Giddens called the reflexivity of radical modernity: the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character (Giddens 1990:38). In this sense the German Schlager represents an oppositional position against today’s German liberal democracy by singing about an idyllic and lost German past (Mendívil 2008a:254). One of the most important findings of my Schlager approach was to discover that the researchers not only describe but also create the social status of their research objects. I found out that the scholars dissociate themselves from Schlager and discriminate against it as a cultural product in order to define themselves as intellectuals and cosmopolitans (Mendívil 2008a:145). This abstract proposition is evident in many commonly negative statements on German Schlager in the academic discourse. Comparing French chanson with Schlager, a German researcher says: “We have to dissociate chanson from Schlager. Schlager music as typical commodity of the entertainment industry aims at the acceptance of the mass, to the taste of which it voluntarily adjusts itself, whereas for the chanson artistic veracity and honesty of

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the message are more important than any ingratiation.” (Worbs 1963:15; translation J.M.)1

Comparing Schlager with rock music, another scholar concludes: “The lyrics of beat songs are definitely more authentic than the Schlager lyrics. While the latter are produced in a schematic way and then given to the interprets, most beat lyrics are written directly by the group performing or by a manager friend […] Not only the literary quality of lyrics is criterion of the distinction, but above all the [cultural] consciousness expressed in these lyrics.” (Baacke 1970:159; translation J.M.)2

These quotations seem to be objective and scientific, and they are. But they are ideological statements, too. Researchers here function as producers and distributors of values and meanings, and place the music they study in a particular position of the German social field (Bourdieu 1988:10). Representing Schlager music as a less “artistic” and “cultural” music by applying dichotomies like art/commerce or authentic/artificial, which do not exist in the world of Schlager, researchers move other popular genres into more “artistic” and more “authentic” positions of the social field, attributing low cultural capital to Schlager (see figure 2).

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“Vom Schlager zu trennen ist das Chanson. Zielt der Schlager als typische Ware der Amüsierindustrie auf das Einverständnis der Masse, deren fragwürdigen Geschmack er sich bereitwillig anpaßt, so ist dem Chanson an künstlerischer Wahrhaftigkeit, an Ehrlichkeit der Aussage mehr gelegen als an jeder Anbiederung“ (Worbs 1963:15). 2

“Der Beat-Text hat eine entschieden größere Authentizität als der Schlager: Während dessen Text schematisch produziert und dann einem Interpreten übergeben wird, stammen die meisten Beat-Texte entweder direkt von der Gruppe, die sie vorträgt, oder von einem befreundeten Manager [...] Nicht die sprachliche Qualität allein ist ein Kriterium der Unterscheidung, sondern vor allem das [kulturelle] Bewusstsein, das sich in diesen Texten ausspricht“ (Baacke 1970:159).


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Figure 2: The social field of Schlager (after Mendívil 2008:147)

My ethnographic work on Schlager music showed me that neither producers nor consumers of German Schlager are foolish people without musical taste, but instead conscious agents who produce, consume and transmit acquired cultural symbols through particular musical codes, which I have associated with the German conservatism (Mendívil 2008:256-260). Of all people, it was I, a Peruvian ethnomusicologist in Germany, who reminded the German scholars that they were part of the social field in which cultural values of music were discussed and decided, that the Schlager people were as worthy of tolerance as the societies that we study as ethnomusicologists in Africa, Asia or Latin America, and for which we legitimately claim respect.

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Figure 3: Stefanie Hertel & Stefan Mross with Biedermeier scenery

A cultural relativistic attitude in popular music studies is not only essential in Germany. The use of ethnography can also be very productive for the study of a Brazilian musical genre: música sertaneja, which is almost unknown to the Western world.

Música sertaneja and Brazilian popular music studies Holt convincingly demonstrated that American popular music studies have constructed an ethnocentric narrative by including or rather excluding particular genres in their research agenda (Holt 2008:44). Brazilian studies on popular music constitute a similar case. Music genres or movements like samba, bossa nova or tropicalismo have gained a well-deserved international recognition as complex genres and have occupied an important place in the academic discourse


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about Brazilian popular music. However, as Lucas points out there are other musics besides the well-known genres from the Brazilian metropolis (Lucas 2012:1). The so-called música sertaneja is one of these forgotten genres. I did not hear about música sertaneja until 2003, when I accompanied my wife, the German ethnologist Jana Jahnke, on her fieldwork in Brazil, where she was researching the influences of environmental transformations on the population of the Mâta Atlântica, near the interior, the inland, of São Paulo. At this time I thought, I would have a deeper look into samba music or bossa nova, but it turned out to be different. We settled in a little town called Caucaia do Alto, 60 km from São Paulo city. The people there did not listen to samba or bossa nova but they listened to música sertaneja. And música sertaneja was on all the time. I suddenly was confronted with this kind of music which reminded me in many ways of the Schlager music I researched in Germany. I did what probably every ethnomusicologist would have done in such a situation: I began to research the music that surrounded me. I visited the bairros (districts) Capelinha, dos Grilos, and Carmo Mesias, near Caucaia, in order to socialize with the musicians of these communities, who played amateur cover versions of sertaneja radio hits in local events. My impressions here refer to this experience (Mendívil 2008b). What is música sertaneja? The term denotes a kind of Brazilian music, which claims to musically represent the sertão, the arid region of Central Brazil. In Brazilian collective imagination the sertão is more than a geographic territory and expresses an idealized cultural space related to wilderness and bucolic life (ibid.:1). Although the musicians sustain a romantic discourse of belonging to nature and rural life, música sertaneja is above all an urban genre. Reily names it the Brazilian counterpart of American country music. According to her, the genre is not musically defined by its rhythmic patterns but by a performance style involving duplas (duos) singing in parallel thirds accompanied by viola, the Brazilian guitar with four double cords (Reily 1992:337). Whereas the older subject of sertaneja songs was the archaic life style of the people from the sertão, today the most common topic of the genre is romantic love.

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Figure 4: Dupla Toninho e Alexander from Bairro dos Grilos (photo: Alessandra de Lima)

As I have pointed out, popular music scholars define themselves by selecting their research objects. Accordingly, it was not a surprise to me that literature on música sertaneja was scarce. In the existing literature música sertaneja is commonly described in contrast to other kinds of music from the sertão: música caipira. Like sertaneja, música caipira is also defined by a performance style involving duplas (duos) singing in parallel thirds accompanied by viola. Nevertheless música caipira is regarded to be the authentic traditional music of the region. This discursively constructed dichotomy of música caipira/música sertaneja expresses other dichotomies like urban/rural, traditional/modern, national/foreign and above all the dichotomy authentic/commercial (Mendívil 2008b; Reily 1992, see figure 5). As in the case of German Schlager music, a pioneer of Brazilian popular music studies initiated the negative reception of música sertaneja. In the 1970s José Ramos Tinhorão disqualified the genre with


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a categorical aphorism: “If música caipira is the butter”, he said, “then the música sertaneja is the margarine” (quot. by Mungaini 2001:22).

música caipira

música sertaneja

rural

urban

traditional

commercial

archaic

modern

authentic

artificial

national-sounding (caipira culture)

foreign-sounding (pop culture)

Figure 5: Dichotomization música caipira/música sertaneja

Tinhorão’s dictate started a discourse that has influenced many scholars. In order to show this dichotomic view, I have reproduced two paragraphs by Waldenyr Caldas, one of the most representative authors on música sertaneja. Caldas says: “There is an enormous depth between música sertaneja and música caipira. Although the later falls back on any formal elements of the former, there is nothing else what can connect both. Whilst música sertaneja has an alienating function for its massive audience, separating it from the concrete reality as an instrument of the cultural industry, the música caipira still preserves more or less the function to avoid the social disintegration of the caipira people…” (1979:145; translation J.M.)3

Twenty years later he states: “Finally it is important to emphasize that the current música sertaneja has nothing to do with the rural life, with the country or with the sertão. Its audience is thoroughly 3

“Há uma lacuna muito grande entre música sertaneja e música caipira. Apesar de a primeira ter utilizado determinados elementos estéticos formais da segunda, hoje, em nada mais elas se identificam. Enquanto a música sertaneja tem, hoje, uma função alienante para o seu grande público, distanciando-o da sua realidade concreta, através do uso que a indústria cultural dele faz, a música caipira, bem o mal, ainda possui una função de evitar a desagregação social do caipira...” (Caldas 1979:145).

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urban […] From the sertão only the name remains […] música sertaneja comes from producers and interprets with modest cultural and technological resources […] Composer and singer of musica sertaneja produce for the mass of people without education.” (Caldas 1999:77-78; translation J.M.)4

I have to admit that this idea is perpetuated by interpreters of música caipira, who tend to claim that their music is national-sounding and authentic, while música sertaneja is only an artificial and commercial international-sounding variation of it. During the year I lived in Caucaia, I noticed that famous caipira musicians like Renato Teixeira, Inezita Barroso or Pena Branca tried to stress their difference from sertanejos, while sertanejos musicians were always recording classical songs of música caipira, even though they viewed caipira music as a separate music scene. While these cover versions were commonly interpreted by caipira musicians to be a commercial strategy of sertanejos to achieve rapid success, sertanejos referred to these versions as a bond to older musical traditions of the sertão. Surprisingly, both, musicians and the audience in Caucaia and in the surrounding bairros did not regard either music as antagonistic, but simply considered them different expressions of the regional music culture. There are really many parallels between both styles (see fig. 6). In agreement with the tenor of works by Nepumocenos (1999) and Ulhôa (1999), they tried to build an historical link between both styles by underlining the similarities in their historical developments. In this sense the consumption of música sertaneja does not exclude the consumption of música caipira. On the contrary, younger generations turned to the early música caipira because of the cover versions by successful contemporary sertanejo artists like Chitaõzinho e Xororó, Zezé Di Camargo & Luciano, Leonardo and others. Furthermore local musicians perform both repertoires. Is música sertaneja opposed to música caipira? One musician from Grilos (see fig. 7) responded in an informal interview, “both musics are the same, but not identical”.

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“É preciso, finalmente, acrescentar o seguinte: a música sertaneja de hoje não tem mais nada a ver com o meio rural, com o interior nem com o sertão. Seu público está indistintamente localizado no meio urbano [...] De sertaneja mesmo, sobrou apenas o nome. [...] a música sertaneja é produzida por compositores e artistas de recursos técnicos e culturais limitados. [...] Os compositores e cantores sertanejos dirigem sua música para uma certa população muito grande e de baixa escolaridade.” (Caldas 1999:77-78).


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música caipira

música sertaneja

urban origin

urban origin

medial transmitted

medial transmitted

integrates foreign elements

integrates foreign elements

(Paraguay, Mexico)

(Paraguay, Mexico or pop culture)

authentic

authentic

Figure 6: música caipira and música sertaneja according to musicians and consumers from the interior of São Paulo

Figure 7: Toninho: “both musics are the same, but not identical” (photo: Jana Jahnke).

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I want to emphasize that these are the ethnographic and cultural relativistic works (Reily 1992; Dent 2005; Ulhôa 1999) which questioned the negative narrative of música sertaneja. In accordance with my field impressions, they also showed that the rural population of Brazil regards música sertaneja not as a purely commercial product contributing to alienation, but instead regard it as a genuinely popular music genre of the sertão. Expressing particular points of view, philologically oriented works have constructed a distorted image of musica sertaneja. Ethnographic oriented works on the other hand show that this music plays a fundamental role in the consolidation of a rural identity in the Brazilian sertão.

Conclusion Taking into account approaches to German Schlager and to Brazilian música sertaneja I have shown that ethnography can represent a valuable contribution to popular music studies. Through the application of ethnographic methods we can observe the emic categories of the people whose musics we study. Through participant observation and interviews we can get access to the musical or the music related experiences of our informants, and can understand them through our own experience (Cohen 1993; Berger 2008). In this sense, participation enables us to describe the music we observe taking into account the indigenous concepts of its producers and consumers; it enables us to avoid ideological falsification or romantic representations of that music. Ethnography has always played an important role as cultural critique in our society, fighting ethnocentrism, intolerance and discrimination. Confronted with the musical values of the external or internal others, the ethnographer or the ethnomusicologist becomes aware that their musical values are culture-specific, historically determined and by no means universal truths. In doing so ethnographers contribute not only to cross-cultural understanding but reflect their own society and acquire what William Brooks has termed a taste for tastelessness (Brooks 1982:18). Therefore popular music studies need ethnographies and ethnomusicological inputs. So far, I have insisted on the necessity of integrating ethnomusicological methods into the study of popular music. Now, I want to stress that also ethnomusicology itself has been enriched by adopting lessons of popular music


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studies. Studies of popular music have confronted ethnomusicologists with contemporary musical practices and the consequences of demographic, political, and technological revolutions (Mendívil 2011). Terms like deterritorialization, postcolonialism, and globalization have unleashed a wave of reflection of our own conceptual tools that we as ethnomusicologists use to research local or global musics (Lysloff 2003; Cooley et al. 2008; Mendívil 2008a; Wood 2008). This has evoked a broader sense of fieldwork and participant observation. As Giddens pointed out, the dislocation of space from place and the separation of space from time have transformed our social relations radically, causing them to become phantasmagoric. According to him, the increase of virtual processes forming our day-to-day life have produced “faceless” social relations, which no longer require social connections grounded in circumstances of co-presence (cf. Giddens 1999:80). Accordingly, fieldwork has been extended, because the relationships between musicians and audiences have been extended. Today, music practices can be both face-to-face and “faceless” activities. They remain centripetal and can be described as “facework” (Giddens 1990:80) when researchers attend live performances, concerts, autograph sessions or do face-toface interviews, but they become centrifugal and faceless when researchers are exposed to the performances at home, either through radio broadcasts, telecast performances, virtual concerts, discussions in internet forums, etc., in short by doing what I called armchair fieldwork (Mendívil 2008a:81-82). All this has modified our understanding of popular music and our understanding of the local musics we commonly studied, leading us to reconsider our musicological practices in relation to political, demographic and identitary implications (Mendívil 2011). If popular music studies have enriched ethnomusicology in different ways, I am sure that ethnomusicology can also contribute to popular music studies by developing new ethnographic strategies, defending cultural or subcultural diversity and fighting against normative discourses of discrimination and intolerance. In “The Use of Diversity” Clifford Geertz pointed out that the job of ethnography is “to provide narratives and scenarios […] which make us visible to ourselves by representing us and everyone else as cast into the midst of a world full of irremovable strangenesses” (Geertz 1986:271). The use of ethnography in popular music studies can and must contribute to provide narratives and scenarios which make us visible to ourselves by representing all kinds of music without prejudices and discriminating valorizations.

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The use of ethnography. On the Contribution of Ethnomusicology to Popular Music Studies

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