ethnography
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On Ken Dryden’s “The Game”
When my brother and I were kids, we spent a lot of time playing ball hockey in the driveway, taking shots at one another with a fluorescent orange “sting” ball that really did sting when it was frozen from the cold and hitting you in the face. One of our always followed conventions of the Continue reading
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Insect Thrumming As Deep Music: On David Rothenberg’s “Bug Music”
“One sound can be enough if it repeats enough enough enough times so the meaning becomes subservient to the sound”–David Rothenberg, Bug Music (114) There is a powerful idea behind David Rothenberg’s spirited recent book, Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm And Noise, which is this: listening to the rhythmic and buzzing sounds of Continue reading
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On Teaching Music: Visiting A Friend’s College And Elementary School Classrooms
A few weeks ago I traveled to Boston to visit my friend Fred at his college and elementary school music classes. Fred is an ethnomusicologist, musician, and craftsman (primarily an instrument builder) who spends his mornings teaching college students and his afternoons teaching kids at a Montessori elementary and middle school. Teaching the two different Continue reading
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Intangible Things: On Victor L. Wooten’s “The Music Lesson”
New Age : “an eclectic group of cultural attitudes arising in late 20th century Western society that are adapted from those of a variety of ancient and modern cultures, that emphasize beliefs (as reincarnation, holism, pantheism, and occultism) outside the mainstream, and that advance alternative approaches to spirituality, right living, and health” Victor L. Wooten’s Continue reading
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On Perception, Presence, And The Creative Process: John Berger’s “Bento’s Sketchbook”
“I’m taking my time, as if I had all the time in the world. I do have all the time in the world.” – John Berger John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook (2011) is a meditation on the connections between seeing, feeling, and drawing, and how these connections shape how we perceive and make sense of the Continue reading
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On Blowing Zen: Finding An Authentic Life
“Listening is the gateway to liberation.” – On Blowing Zen In his book Blowing Zen: Finding An Authentic Life (HJ Kramer, 2000), Englishman Ray Brooks tells a story about discovering the shakuhachi flute while living abroad in Japan with his wife, finding a series of shakuhachi master teachers with whom to study, and finally, through dedicated practice and direction, becoming Continue reading
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On The Beyond Digital Morocco Project
Over the past few weeks I discussed two examples of sound collecting in West Africa. The first was the Digging 4 Gold project, the second was the Music From Saharan Cellphones project. While these projects are not without their problems–foremost among which is the question of whether or not any of recorded musicians will ever Continue reading
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C.Wright Mills: On Intellectual Craftsmanship
“Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same time for comprehensiveness.” – C. Wright Mills Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962) was an American sociologist best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination (which is still in print). For me, one remarkable aspect of the book is its Appendix, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” Here Mills Continue reading
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Feedback On African Feedback
In 2004, Italian composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti traveled to villages in Mali and Burkina Faso and asked villagers to listen to recordings of Western experimental, minimal, electronic, and improvised music. As they listened through headphones to randomly selected pieces, Bosetti recorded their real-time reactions–“comments, breaths, attempts to imitate what was heard”–with a stereo microphone. Continue reading
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Ordinary Affects and The Ethnography of Everyday Experience
If you are interested in ethnography, a remarkable study that might interest you is Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (Duke U. Press, 2007). Stewart is an anthropologist who teaches at the U of Texas, Austin, and her book is finely tuned ethnographic study of everyday life–her life, in fact. One aim of the book is to render Continue reading
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