Bibliography

Question 1

Blacking, John. 1992 “Ethnomusicology.” In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, edited by Richard Bauman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 86-91.

Answer 1

• Music is humanly organized sound
• Composition as an inescapable part of musical performance. There is no way for a performer to simply “play what is written”, because every act of music production is a new creation.

Question 2

Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. pp. 1-18.

Answer 2

• Musicking - any kind of activity that is associated with musical performance, involve formal performance as well as rehearsal, producing sound as well as simply experiencing sound, composing, dancing etc. Focus is on the human relationships involved in the creation of sound.

Question 3

Nettl, Bruno. 2005. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Answer 3

1. music in culture.
2. a comparative and relativistic perspective.
3. the use of fieldwork.
4. all of the musical manifestations of a society.

Musics are not mutually intelligible, but they are more mutually intelligible than languages.
If you are proficient in one music, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be proficient in another.
• Style: The phonology of music “The typical procedures used in music-making, the building blocks of pitch, note, rhythm, phrase, the accepted timbre, and singing styles; in other words, in terms of their grammar and syntax” (54).
• Content: Words or concepts in a language “Themes, motifs, lines, tunes” (54).

Question 4

Herndon, Marcia. 1992 “Song.” In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, edited by Richard Bauman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 159-166.

Answer 4

Both speech and song utterances have a fundamental and formants
• Speech emphasizes the formants
• Song emphasizes the fundamental

Question 5

Sklar, Deidre. 1991. “On Dance Ethnography.” Dance Research Journal 23(1):6-10.

Answer 5

• People moving in patterned ways - highly stylized and codified movement, part of an aesthetic frame
• Embodied cultural knowledge
• Culture makes meaning through dance.
• Participation helps understand what others are experiencing.
• Important to understand why you choose a research subject, so you can understand why you understand phenomena in the way you do.

Question 6

Kindell, Gloria E. 1996. “Ethnopoetics: Finding poetry.” Notes on Literature in Use and Language Programs 50:31–46.

Answer 6

• “Prose tends to describe emotions directly; poetry evokes them” (41)
• “The emotive power is at least equal to the cognitive content of the message” (43).

Question 7

Kapp, Dieter B. 1987. “Paniya Riddles.” Asian Folklore Studies 46:87-98.

Answer 7

• Classify riddles by the topics, such as god, man, animals, plants, and things.
• Classifiy riddles based on comparisons.
• Further classify riddles, based on what is being compared to subject of the category.

Question 8

Schechner, Richard. 1993. “Drama Performance” In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments edited by Richard Bauman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 272-281.

Answer 8

Dialogue is not essential to theater. In many cultures, mise-en-scene (staged actions) are more important to the overall meaning of the performance than the spoken or sung text.

Question 9

Hatcher, J. 1996. The Art & Craft of Playwriting. Cincinnati, OH: Story Press.

Answer 9

Drama is the reproduction of actions performed by people. These actions recreate former actions, or create a world of possible actions.

Question 10

Smith, Diane Pamela. 2007. “Visual Art and Orality.” Dharma Deepika: a South Asian journal of missiological research. January 2007. Myapore, Madras: Deepika Educational Trust.

Answer 10

• Visual art communicates well with oral learners and can often enrich oral performances, especially of Bible stories
• In order to stimulate lasting change, it is very important that audiences actually see themselves in the art.

Question 11

Plate, Brent S. 2002. Religion, art & visual culture: A cross-cultural primer. New York: Palgrave, pages 19-24, 125-130, 145-152.

Answer 11

• Vision is a biochemical process as the eyes and nerves transmit information to the brain
• Seeing is what makes vision meaningful. In the transfer from light, to chemicals, to electrical signals, between the eye and the mind, a meaningful image of the world is produced.

Question 12

Fuglesang, Andreas. 1982. About understanding: ideas and observations on cross-cultural communication. Sweden: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.

Answer 12

People have to learn to read pictures, just as they learn to read the pages in a book.

Question 13

Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Answer 13

• “Restored behaviors” are marked, framed, and separate which makes it possible to transmit as well as change them, while allowing the behavior to retain a unique identity.
• “Something ‘is’ a performance when historical and social context, convention, usage, and tradition say it is.” But he also states that from his kind of performance theory “every action is a performance.”
• There are advantages to analyzing any event, action, and behavior “as” performance, no matter what your formal definition of performance is.
• Ritual and play are both important, because they “lead people into a ‘second reality,’ separate from ordinary life.”
• Rituals are ordinary behaviors that are somehow exaggerated and frozen. They also make use of materials. Human rituals also mark the calendar and mark life phase changes.
• Social drama and aesthetic performance both influence each other. For instance, the pig kill enactment in Papua New Guinea.
• Rituals often are liminal and facilitate transformation or transportation.

Question 14

Shelemay, Kay. 2008. “The Ethnomusicologist, Ethnographic Method, and the Transmission of Tradition.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford: Oxford University

Answer 14

This chapter considers the ethnical implications of ethnomusicological research, and contrasts the values of a community with the values the western-music-trained ethnomusicologist might bring to their field. Shelemay would like us to consider the impact we have on communities and individual with whom we spend time, as much of the ethical discussion has only centered on the relationships established during fieldwork (144). She describes some of her interactions with a Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn over the past 10 years to give case studies and illustrations to demonstrate some of the ethical complexities of how ethnographic research is done.