The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival 9780199765034, 0199765030

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T H E OX F O R D HA N D B O O K  O F

M U SIC R E V I VA L

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

MUSIC REVIVAL Edited by

CAROLINE BITHELL and

JUNIPER HILL

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University  of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New  York Auckland  Cape Town  Dar es Salaam  Hong Kong  Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices  in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University  Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America  by Oxford University  Press 198 Madison Avenue, New  York, NY  10016

© Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored  in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the  prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by  law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent  to  the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address  above. You must not circulate this work in any other  form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford handbook of music revival / edited by Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–976503–4 (hardcover : alk. paper)  1.  Music—History and criticism. I.  Bithell, Caroline, 1957- editor of compilation.  II.  Hill, Juniper, editor of compilation. ML160.O96 2014 780.9—dc23 2013047204

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free  paper

Contents

List of Contributors About the Companion Website

ix xi

PA RT I   TOWA R D S M U LT I P L E T H E OR I E S OF M U SIC R E V I VA L 1. An Introduction to Music Revival as Concept, Cultural Process, and Medium of Change Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell 2. Traditional Music, Heritage Music Owe Ronström 3. An Expanded Theory for Revivals as Cosmopolitan Participatory Music Making  Tamara Livingston

3 43

60

PA RT I I   S C HOL A R S A N D C OL L E C TOR S A S R E V I VA L  AG E N T S 4. Antiquarian Nostalgia and the Institutionalization of Early Music John Haines

73

5. A Folklorist’s Exploration of the Revival Metaphor Neil V. Rosenberg

94

6. A Participant-Documentarian in the American Instrumental Folk Music Revival Alan Jabbour

116

vi  Contents

PA RT I I I   I N TA N G I B L E C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E , P R E SE RVAT ION , A N D  P OL IC Y 7. Reviving Korean Identity through Intangible Cultural Heritage Keith Howard 8. Music Revival, Ca Trù Ontologies, and Intangible Cultural Heritage in Vietnam Barley Norton

135

160

9. The Hungarian Dance House Movement and Revival of Transylvanian String Band Music 182 Colin Quigley

PA RT I V   NAT IONA L R E NA I S S A N C E A N D P O STC OL ON IA L F U T U R E S 10. National Purity and Postcolonial Hybridity in India’s Kathak Dance Revival Margaret E. Walker

205

11. Choreographic Revival, Elite Nationalism, and Postcolonial Appropriation in Senegal Hélène Neveu Kringelbach

228

12. Revived Musical Practices within Uzbekistan’s Evolving National Project Tanya Merchant

252

13. Two Revivalist Moments in Iranian Classical Music  Laudan Nooshin 14. Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity through Music Revival Victoria Lindsay Levine

277

300

PA RT V   R E C OV E RY F ROM WA R , DI S A S T E R , A N D C U LT U R A L DE VA S TAT ION 15. Revivalist Articulations of Traditional Music in War and Postwar Croatia Naila Ceribašić

325

Contents  vii

16. Cultural Rescue and Musical Revival among the Nicaraguan Garifuna Annemarie Gallaugher

350

17. Toward a Methodology for Research into the Revival of Musical Life after War, Natural Disaster, Bans on all Music, or Neglect Margaret Kartomi

372

PA RT V I   I N N OVAT ION S A N D T R A N SF OR M AT ION S 18. Innovation and Cultural Activism through the Reimagined Pasts of Finnish Music Revivals Juniper Hill

393

19. Revival Currents and Innovation on the Path from Protest Bossa to Tropicália Denise Milstein

418

20. Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition? Paula J. Conlon 21. Toward an Application of Globalization Paradigms to Modern Folk Music Revivals Britta Sweers

442

466

PA RT V I I   F E ST I VA L S , M A R K E T I N G , A N D  M E DIA 22. Contemporary English Folk Music and the Folk Industry Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter 23. Ivana Kupala (St. John’s Eve) Revivals as Metaphors of Sexual Morality, Fertility, and Contemporary Ukrainian Femininity Adriana Helbig 24. Trailing Images and Culture Branding in Post-Renaissance Hawai‘i Jane Freeman Moulin

489

510 530

25. Grassroots Revitalization of North American and Western European Instrumental Music Traditions from Fiddlers Associations to Cyberspace 551 Richard Blaustein

viii  Contents

PA RT V I I I   DIA SP OR A A N D T H E G L OBA L V I L L AG E 26. Georgian Polyphony and its Journeys from National Revival to Global Heritage Caroline Bithell 27. Irish Music Revivals Through Generations of Diaspora  Sean Williams

573 598

28. Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance in Iran and in the American Diaspora Anthony Shay

618

29. Musical Remembrance, Exile, and the Remaking of South African Jazz (1960–1979) Carol Ann Muller

644

30. Re-flections  Mark Slobin

666

Index 

673

List of Contributors

Caroline Bithell, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of Manchester, UK Richard Blaustein, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology and Adjunct Professor of Bluegrass, Old Time and Country Music, Eastern Tennessee State University, USA Naila Ceribašić, Research Advisor, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia Paula J. Conlon, Patricia Deisenroth Presidential Professor, School of Music, University of Oklahoma, USA Annemarie Gallaugher, Instructor, Pre-Graduate Preparation Program, English Language Institute, York University, Toronto, Canada John Haines, Professor of Music and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, Canada Adriana Helbig, Assistant Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh, USA Juniper Hill, Lecturer, School of Music and Theatre, University College Cork, Ireland, and Research Associate, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, UK Keith Howard, Professor of Music, SOAS, University of London, UK Alan Jabbour, Founding Director (retired), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA Margaret Kartomi, Professor of Music, Monash University, Australia Simon Keegan-Phipps, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Department of Music, University of Sheffield, UK Victoria Lindsay Levine, Professor of Music, Colorado College, USA Tamara Livingston, Director of the Department of Archives and Records Management and Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Kennesaw State University, USA Tanya Merchant, Assistant Professor of Music, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA Denise Milstein, Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, USA

x   List of Contributors Jane Freeman Moulin, Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, Hawai‘i, USA Carol Ann Muller, Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania, USA Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Senior Research Associate, African Studies Centre, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Laudan Nooshin, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Centre for Music Studies, City University, UK Barley Norton, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Colin Quigley, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland Owe Ronström, Professor of Ethnology, Gotland University, Sweden Neil V. Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus, Department of Folklore, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada Anthony Shay, Associate Professor of Dance, Pomona College, USA Mark Slobin, Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music, Wesleyan University, USA Britta Sweers, Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Music, Co-Director of the Institute for Musicology, and Director of the Center for Cultural Studies, University of Bern, Switzerland Margaret E. Walker, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada Sean Williams, Professor of Ethnomusicology, Irish Studies, and Asian Studies, Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, USA Trish Winter, Senior Lecturer in Film, University of Sunderland, UK

About the Companion Website

www.oup.com/us/ohmr Username: Music2 Password: Book4416 Readers are invited to visit the companion website to The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival where they will find a wealth of complementary material. A wide selection of audio and video tracks and additional illustrations exemplify concepts and traditions discussed in the individual chapters. These are cued in the text with the icons and and can be found in a password-protected area of the website labeled Resources. Additionally, some authors have compiled further reading lists, discographies, annotated webographies, and other materials for readers who wish to explore the topic further or to supplement use of the book for teaching purposes. These can also be found on the website.

T H E OX F O R D HA N D B O O K  O F

M U SIC R E V I VA L

PA R T I

TOWA R D S M U LT I P L E T H E OR I E S OF M U SIC R E V I VA L

C HA P T E R  1

AN INTRODUCTION TO M U S I C R E V I VA L A S C O N C E P T, C U LT U R A L P R O C E S S , A N D M E D I U M O F  C HA N G E J U N I PE R H I L L A N D C A ROL I N E BI T H E L L

Acts of revival, restoration, and renewal have been influential forces shaping and transforming musical landscapes and experiences across diverse times and places. In this volume, we set out to examine the many faces and impacts of musical revival from a contemporary and global perspective. We offer a combination of theoretical essays and ethnographic case studies, many of which present new research on folk, traditional, indigenous, roots, world, and early music scenes in a variety of post-industrial, post-colonial, and post-war contexts. Supported by the insights and perspectives offered by a cohort of thirty contributors, we aim to (a) review and expand existing revival theories and explore new avenues for understanding revival processes; (b) examine music revival as a crucial cultural process for constructing meaning and effecting socio-cultural change; (c) consider the potential of post-revival as a theoretical concept and propose new paradigms for analyzing the transformative dimensions and contemporary ramifications of revival movements; and (d) reveal the extent to which the legacy of revivalist visions continues to shape our musical and social worlds.

The Significances of Revival A music revival comprises an effort to perform and promote music that is valued as old or historical and is usually perceived to be threatened or moribund. Generally speaking, revival efforts engage a number of intertwined processes and issues. First, revivals are almost always motivated by dissatisfaction with some aspect of the present and a desire

4   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell to effect some sort of cultural change. Revival agents usually have agendas specific to their socio-cultural or political contexts and in this sense may also be regarded as activists. Second, identifying musical elements and practices as old, historical, or traditional, and determining their value, often involves selecting from or reinterpreting history and establishing new or revised historical narratives (a process implicating scholars as well as performers and promoters). Third, transferring musical elements from the past to the present (or from one cultural group perceived as preserving lifeways that are in direct continuity with the past to a cultural group that perceives itself as being more modern) entails a decontextualization and a recontextualization—or what Owe Ronström (1996 and this volume) refers to as shifts. Such recontextualization may be temporal, geographical, and/or social; the social shifts discussed in this volume include appropriations across class, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and political persuasion. In the process of recontextualization, various transformations may take place. Fourth, the elements of activism and recontextualization inherent in revivals necessitate the establishing of legitimacy, in order to persuade others to accept the musical and cultural changes being promoted and to allow the appropriating group to be perceived as legitimate culture-bearers. The act of legitimization frequently relies upon invocations of authenticity. Fifth, revivals often spur the development of new methods and infrastructures for transmitting, promoting, and disseminating the revived music, which may involve festivals, competitions, educational institutions, organizations, government policies, recording and distribution companies, and so on. Finally, if successful, revival efforts may result in the establishment of new subcultures and affinity groups or may become part of mainstream culture; we designate this phase as “post-revival” in order to highlight the profound and long-term impacts that revivals may have on music, society, and culture. These six themes—activism and the desire for change, the valuation and reinterpretation of history, recontextualization and transformation, legitimacy and authenticity, transmission and dissemination, and post-revival outgrowths and ramifications—are the core themes running throughout the chapters in this collection. Each is discussed in more detail in later sections of this introductory chapter. The intentional act of reviving, restoring, and reimagining the past for purposes of the present has been a recurring and important cultural phenomenon across cultures and eras. Revival as a label, however, is contentious, and several of the contributing authors to this volume challenge its appropriateness or modify the more normative assumptions on which it rests. Mark Slobin’s earlier observations still capture some of the prevailing criticisms: To revive means to bring back to life, and clearly this is not what we’re talking about. In the first place, I don’t think expressive culture really dies; you’d have to think of culture as a straight-line evolution to believe that, and I don’t. I think of it more as a spiral, changing, but dipping back along the way. (1983: 37)

While in many cases “revival” may be an inappropriate descriptor in its literal sense of “resuscitation” or “resurrection,” the concept nonetheless places an important emphasis on revivalists’ perceptions and their desire to engage with the past. In this

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  5

volume, then, we employ the term as a type of shorthand to encompass a range of more nuanced processes, some of which were suggested by Slobin (1983), namely regeneration, renaissance, revitalization, rediscovery, reshaping, re-interpretation, re-focusing, re-assessment, re-articulation. To these we might add reclamation, recovery, rescue, recuperation, restitution, restoration, renovation, reinvention, re-implementation, reactivation, re-traditionalization, re-indigenization, re-appropriation, resumption, resurgence, recycling, reproduction, revision, and re-creation. As the ubiquitous “re” prefix suggests, what these processes share is a fundamental motivation to draw upon the past and/or to intensify some aspect of the present. Ralph Linton’s earlier definition of a nativistic movement as “any conscious, organized attempt on the part of a society’s members to revive or perpetuate selected aspects of its culture” (1943: 230, emphasis added) offers another way of sidestepping an overly literal focus on revival. In its extended sense, revival may also be seen as continuity—a deliberate effort to retain or keep alive as opposed to literally bringing back from the dead—or as the act of making visible that which has been hidden. Slobin continues his reservations about “revival”: Second, it’s clear to many trained observers that even when people seem to be reviving things, that is, exhuming them and breathing life into them, what they get is something new. (1983: 37)

The many case studies in this volume confirm that each instance of supposed revival results in some sort of transformation or innovation, whether it be a new musical style, new methods of transmission and performance, new functions and meanings, or even a new music (sub)culture. In paying attention to these transformations, we shift the emphasis from the past to the present and future and, in the process, further refine our understanding of revival and its ramifications. It is in this spirit that Ronström (this volume) emphasizes revival as a form of cultural production. Milstein, meanwhile, proposes that viewing revival as a “current” allows us to extend our enquiries to “musical movements that engage in revivalist activities without producing formal revivals” (this volume).

Revival Scholarship and Scholar-Revivalists The history of the contentious concept of revival is closely connected to the (often underplayed) history of the involvement of scholars in revival processes and the changing intellectual trends that influenced them. The Oxford English Dictionary (third edition) indicates that the metaphorical application of revival to artistic and cultural practices (dating from 1587) predates both the use of the term in its literal sense of “restoration or return to life” (1608) and its use in association with religious activities (1702). According

6   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell to John Haines (this volume), we owe this earlier metaphorical usage to the activities of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century antiquarians—the earliest revivalists to debut in this volume—who attempted to resurrect and restore ancient music from antiquity (sometimes attempting to demonstrate—if not invent—connections between their local histories and what they perceived as the great ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome). After antiquarianism, the scholarly disciplines most engaged in music revival work were folklore, followed by ethnomusicology and musicology, with some important input from anthropology and history. Two major intellectual trends of the nineteenth century would spur on scholars-cum-revivalists for generations. The first was the theory (or myth) of cultural evolution, with its emphasis on folklore as survivals of ancient practices among the peasants. The second was romantic nationalism—promulgated by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803)—with its belief that folk poetry and customs reflect the soul of the nation. Together, these led to the collection of folk music and other cultural artefacts and practices across many cultures, and to their promotion as the pure/authentic/historical/traditional/ancient cultural expressions of a nation, region, or ethnic group. Nationalistic agendas, concepts of cultural evolution, and fears that modernization would lead to a cultural grey-out—prevailing intellectual trends for much of the nineteenth century and in some cases into the mid-twentieth century—led many folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and collectors to seek out and prioritize musical items that they viewed as culturally “pure” and old, avoiding those “contaminated” by the influence of foreign, urban, or modern culture (see, for example, Child 1861, Sharp 1907 and 1917, and Lomax 1968). These collectors and scholars played a tremendously influential role in selectively identifying music as folk/traditional/ancient, selectively valuing certain forms of musical expression according to their own aesthetics and agendas, selectively determining criteria for authenticity, and selectively canonizing and promoting historical music for public dissemination and education. Particularly in Western Europe and North America, late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century folklorists thereby played an important role in laying the groundwork for many folk revivals (for examples, see Haines, Hill, Keegan-Phipps and Winter, and Sweers, this volume). And yet, at the same time, folklorists often dismissed and devalued revival processes and revival cultures as inauthentic and therefore unworthy of academic study or governmental funding, with clear demarcations being drawn between so-called revivalists and traditional folk artists, source musicians, or primary culture-bearers (see Conlon, Jabbour, Rosenberg, and Shay, this volume, as well as Rosenberg 1991 and Titon 1993). This delegitimizing of revival culture is best epitomized by folklorist Richard M. Dorson’s (1950) distinction between folklore and “fakelore”—a term that is still occasionally employed in the early twenty-first century by scholars who wish to distinguish between what they perceive to be authentic and inauthentic folk music. Meanwhile, in the field of anthropology, Anthony Wallace (1956) proposed a seminal theory of revitalization movements, of which he considered revival movements to be one subset. Influenced by structuralist-functionalist paradigms, he viewed revitalization movements as the means for a cultural system responding to stress to bring

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  7

about necessary changes (which may be inspired by the past, and/or borrowed from other cultures or invented anew) in order to reach a “new steady state.” Many aspects of Wallace’s theory remain applicable, including his emphasis on revitalization movements as “deliberate, conscious, organized efforts by members of a society to create a more satisfying culture” (279) and his critical awareness that “avowedly revival movements are never entirely what they claim to be, for the image of the ancient culture to be revived is distorted by historical ignorance and by the presence of imported and innovative elements” (276). Where Wallace’s theory falls short, in retrospect, is in his functionalist view of culture as a holistic organism-like system, which fails to account for the formation of the myriad subcultures and transnational affinity groups that have increasingly characterized revival cultures from the 1960s onwards. Changing trends in academia very gradually acquiesced in accepting revival as a legitimate subject of study. Scholars in the field of folklore and, more particularly, the newer field of ethnomusicology (itself increasingly influenced by anthropology, as reflected in the title of Merriam’s seminal work, The Anthropology of Music [1964]) began to focus less on the collection of authentic texts and more on cultural processes and contexts. The study of popular culture gradually became more respected. Philip Bohlman’s The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988) and Mark Slobin’s Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (1993) served to validate contemporary manifestations of folk and traditional music in the Western world as legitimate objects for investigation alongside the living traditions of more distant cultures that had long been the prime territory of ethnomusicology. As self-reflexive and subjective scholarship gained prominence, and as former revivalists from the folk booms of the 1960s achieved secure academic positions, several revivalist-scholars wrote about their own first-hand experiences (see, e.g., Rosenberg 1993, and Jabbour, Rosenberg, and Shay, this volume). A groundbreaking work by historians was influential in refocusing the scholarly lens on the traditions of modern society. Closely related to the concept of revivals, Hobsbawm proposed the concept of “invented tradition,” which was applied to deconstructing the nationalist rituals of modern nation-states. Asserting that “ ‘traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented” (1983: 1), Hobsbawm argued that, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of ‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.1 (Ibid.: 2)

Frequently cited in literature on cultural phenomena that would fall under our definition of music revival, the discourse on invented traditions reflects a broader intellectual trend towards deconstructionism and cultural criticism ascending in the 1980s and 1990s (perhaps spurred on by postmodern disillusionment with grand narratives and the fall from grace of absolute truths, now decentered by the postcolonial multiplicity of previously subaltern voices). Charles Briggs went on to present an important critique

8   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell of scholars who, in employing analyses of invented traditions, delegitimize culturally meaningful practices by pointing out historical discontinuities. Holding “the power to confer a sense of historical presence on some forms and withhold it from others,” scholars of invented tradition thus become “arbiters of cultural genuineness, akin to the way that folklorists claimed the authority to distinguish the traditional from the modern— or . . . ‘folklore’ from ‘fakelore’ ” (Briggs 1996: 460). These reservations notwithstanding, deconstructing the invented histories of revived traditions is still a vital tool in understanding revival processes and concomitant plays of power. The latter half of the twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in scholarship on music revivals. Matching the trend towards particularism in post-Cantometrics ethnomusicology,2 most of these publications chronicle and interpret, through ethnographic or historical methods, the revivals of specific music cultures.3 Important theoretical groundwork was laid in two collections of essays, Transforming Tradition on the North American folk music revivals of the 1950s and 1960s (Rosenberg 1993) and a special issue of the World of Music journal entitled “Folk Music Revival in Europe” (Fujie 1996). Both volumes exemplify, in their respective case studies, how the process of reviving a tradition leads to transformations, how tensions arise between preservation and innovation, and how authenticity is invoked and manipulated. As many of the contributing authors to Transforming Tradition were themselves participants in revival activities, they offer important insights into the role of scholars and public folklorists as revival agents. (Four authors from these collections, Blaustein, Jabbour, Ronström, and Rosenberg, add further reflections in this volume.) Offering a more critical stance on revival agents, Benjamin Filene (2000) reveals the crucial, but often hidden, role that middlemen and cultural brokers play in manipulating academia, government institutions, and the music industry—the modern power structures for disseminating revivalist ideology.4 A seminal theoretical model on music revivals was presented by Tamara Livingston (1999). Synthesizing the existing literature on European and American folk and early music revivals, and drawing from her own research on choro revival in Brazil, Livingston defined revivals as “social movements which strive to ‘restore’ a musical system believed to be disappearing or completely relegated to the past for the benefit of contemporary society” (66). She emphasized the activist nature of revivals, asserting that Revivalists position themselves in opposition to aspects of the contemporary cultural mainstream, align themselves with a particular historical lineage, and offer a cultural alternative in which legitimacy is grounded in reference to authenticity and historical fidelity. (Ibid.)

She also offered a recipe of ingredients common to most revival movements, including core catalysts, original sources, an ideology and discourse, a community of followers, organized activities, and supporting industries (ibid.: 69). Her model—which she reviews and reflects upon in her contribution to the present collection—has provided a useful frame of reference for many of the authors in this volume.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  9

Rethinking Revival in the Twenty-first Century Central to our motivation in planning this volume was the desire to fill gaps that we perceived in the existing literature and expand the general theoretical discourse on music revivals. These gaps, and the opportunities to forge new pathways that they opened up, became particularly apparent to us when we participated in the 38th World Congress of the International Council for Traditional Music in Sheffield, England, in 2005, for which one of the themes was “Reviving, Reconstructing, and Revitalizing Music and Dance.” Most prominent among the areas we felt were ripe for further exploration were the theorizing of authenticity, the documentation and explication of recontextualization processes, and, in particular, the conceptualization of post-revival, together with more detailed research into the ongoing impacts that are the legacy of revival movements. We were also aware of a wealth of fascinating and original work on contemporary trends that were not articulated in terms of revival but might nonetheless offer productive insights if viewed through the revival lens. Revivalist ideologies in North America and Western Europe may have tended, as Livingston suggests, to be “constructed on certain modes of thinking and structuring of experience that are shared by middle class people in consumer-capitalist and socialist societies” (1999: 66), but this is only part of the story. One of our objectives has been to explore the nature of ideologies of renewal and reclamation in other parts of the world, constructed in the language of different philosophical and ontological lineages. The most obvious limitation of the extant English language literature on music revivals is, of course, its geographical coverage. The vast majority of work has focused on Western Europe and North America, with a smaller body of work on Eastern Europe and Latin America.5 The present volume attempts to rectify this imbalance with chapters on the Middle East (Nooshin, Shay), Central Asia (Merchant), South Asia (Walker), Southeast Asia (Howard, Norton), Indonesia (Kartomi), the Pacific (Moulin), Latin America (Gallaugher, Milstein), Africa (Muller, Neveau Kringelbach), and indigenous North America (Conlon, Levine). As part of the project of extending the revival concept to fit a broader variety of socio-cultural contexts, many of these authors offer their own definitions and interpretations. In seeking to cast the revival net wider, we have embraced phenomena that may not have been defined in emic terms as revival movements, but nonetheless entail processes of retrieval, reconstruction, and recontextualization of the past to serve present purposes. In this sense, Livington’s model, with its emphasis on the oppositional character of revivals, might best be viewed not as definitive but rather as one metaphor (“revival as social movement”) among others. Alternative metaphors pursued by some of our contributors include revival as cultural rescue (Gallaugher), revival as therapy for trauma and recovery from the devastation of war or disaster (Ceribašić, Kartomi), and revival as assertion of indigenous culture following the lifting of former colonial oppression (Bithell, Conlon, Helbig, Levine, Neveu Kringelbach, Norton). Many of our chapters further refocus the revival lens on technological, economic, and institutional phenomena that have increasingly impacted the way revived musics

10   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell are experienced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These include, for example, the prominent part now played by commercial media (Moulin), the Internet (Blaustein), festivals (Helbig, Keegan-Phipps and Winter), academies (Hill, Merchant), national governments (Howard, Neveau Kringelbach), and UNESCO’s policies regarding Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Bithell, Norton). We also expand revival theories in our encompassing of global trajectories, from diaspora and exile (Muller, Williams) to trans-ethnic and transnational affinities (Bithell, Conlon, Shay). In the following sections, we discuss a set of themes and issues that remain crucial to our understanding of all of these variegated manifestations of revival.

Motivations: Revival as Activism We may assume that musicians and other agents of revival always have a reason for wanting to perform, promote, or disseminate music from the past. While it is possible that this motive may be aesthetic, in the majority of cases there are clear (if sometimes unspoken) agendas linked to contemporary social, cultural, and/or political circumstances.6 The activist nature of revival efforts has been acknowledged as one of the defining characteristics of revivals throughout the history of their documentation, from Wallace’s recognition of revitalization movements as deliberate, organized efforts by dissatisfied members of a society under stress to construct a more satisfying cultural habitat (1956: 265), to Livingston’s identification of the main purpose of revivals as being to improve existing culture and/or serve as an alternative to mainstream society (1999: 68).7 Ronström (this volume) goes so far as to proclaim that revivals are “a missionary and a visionary phenomenon: there are revivals not because there has been a past, but because there is a future to come.” This missionizing quality is reflected in the fact that many revivals are driven by impassioned and committed individuals—Wallace’s “charismatic leaders” and Ronström’s “burning souls.” The pivotal role played by such figures is evident in many of the case studies that follow (see, e.g., Bithell, Conlon, Hill, Levine, Milstein, Nooshin). Reflecting on revival activity around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we suggest four general motivational categories (allowing that any given revival movement may have motives from more than one category). The first is related to a dissatisfaction with aspects of the modern world, variously expressed as anti-modernization, anti-industrialization, anti-urbanization, anti-secularization, anti-technology, anti-commercialization, anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism, anti-mass media, or anti-institutionalization. Modernity—that place where, as Marx put it, “all that is solid melts into air”8—may be viewed as a distortion or deviation from the “natural” path, leading not to new horizons of unlimited opportunity but to alienation and confusion. Revivalist rhetoric in these cases may, for example, bemoan the depersonalization, ethical or moral degradation, or existential meaninglessness of contemporary

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  11

society. Representations of the past—often romanticized, sometimes imaginary, and always selective—frequently evoke positive images of community-oriented interpersonal relationships, unmediated and noncommercial musical expression, pre-modern simplicity or innocence, pastoral tranquility, or the nobility of the peasant (for examples, see Haines, Helbig, this volume, Linn 1994: 116–179, and Boissevain 1992). In such revivals, it is not uncommon to see revivalist activities that prioritize participatory music-making, face-to-face interaction, community building, self-expression, and/or creativity. These kinds of activities may also prove attractive to classically trained musicians who welcome the opportunity to be free of the stylistic constraints of the classical orthodoxy and its often authoritarian, competitive ethos. The second broad category in this generalizing typology of revival motivations is the bolstering of the identity of an ethnic group, minority group, or nation, which is often coupled with a distancing from, or othering of, foreign ethnic or cultural elements. The primary socio-historical contexts for these motives are instances of nation-building, independence struggles and newly independent states, anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial aftermath, and civil rights and minority pride movements. Identity-bolstering motives may also be linked to xenophobia, reactionary stances against immigration, or perceived threats from foreign influences, including imperialism, Westernization, or globalization. On one hand, exalting the professedly ancient heritage of a specific ethnic group or nation may be a strategy for demonstrating, to oneself and the international community, the worthiness and validity of the group. The classic example of this is the plethora of narrative sung poetry that, during the period of heightened European nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was compiled from peasants or historical sources, edited, and promoted with implicit or direct comparisons to the exalted Homeric poetry of ancient Greece (see Hill, this volume, and Wilson 1973). Bithell, Howard, and Norton (this volume) demonstrate the continuation of such processes of establishing international recognition of cultural value through the appointment of artistic practices and artefacts to UNESCO’s lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage. On the other hand, revivals may be motivated by the desire to restore some sort of ethnic purity or demarcation, as exemplified in this volume’s chapters on war-torn Croatia (Ceribašić) and the disputed ethnic ownership of Transylvanian traditions (Quigley). Both ancientness and ethnic purity or cultural uniqueness are often emphasized in revivals in newly independent nations, as evidenced in postcolonial India (Walker) and post-Soviet states such as Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Georgia, and Latvia (see Merchant, Helbig, Bithell, and Sweers, respectively). Continuing associations of folk music with ethnic purity demonstrate how the legacy of eighteenth-century romantic nationalist myths of folk music as the soul of a nation continue to shape twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideology. The third general type of motive for revival efforts is political. Revival activities have been employed for both left-wing and right-wing purposes, by both governments and protesters. The best documented cases have been grass-roots revivals in North America in the service of socialist, communist, labor, and civil rights

12   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell movements (see, e.g., Cohen 2002, Denisoff 1971, Eyerman and Jamison 1998, Filene 2000, Lieberman 1995, Reuss and Reuss 2000, and Weissman 2005); other work has focused on state-sponsored socialism and communism in Eastern Europe (see Buchanan 2006, Olson 2004, Porter 1997, Rice 1994, and Slobin 1996). In some cases, traditional music is invoked simultaneously by both the ruling regime and its contesters (see Howard, this volume). The fourth motive is a practical response to natural or human disasters, as a result of which musical and other cultural practices have been torn away rather than abandoned or evolved. Such was the case in Afghanistan, for example, following the years of violent repression by the Taliban and in Cambodia following the ravages wrought by the Khmer Rouge, both of which resulted not only in certain forms of musical expression being suppressed but in musicians themselves being imprisoned, deported, or killed. Natural disasters—such as the tsunami that devastated coastal areas across South Asia in 2004 or the earthquake in Haiti in 2010—have likewise caused the deaths of many leading artists and teachers, the destruction of cultural infrastructures, and the displacement of whole communities. In such situations, the revival of musical and other artistic practices has played a vital role in both individual and collective recovery (see Ceribašić and Kartomi, this volume). Why, then, is music from the past an effective means of activism? The answer lies in part in the recognition that the past is not only a source of inspiration, but also a source of legitimacy (or occasionally healing). As Hobsbawm asserts, “what [tradition] does is to give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history” (1983: 2). If the activist efforts of revivalists are successful, they may then lead to new subcultures or alterations to the mainstream, as discussed later in this chapter. Next, however, we turn to a more general consideration of the significance of history and its representation.

The Mobilization of the Past and the Selective Use of History Revivals, by definition, depend on some kind of relationship with the past. Most often they seek to reintroduce forgotten, abandoned, neglected, suppressed, or otherwise interrupted practices from the past into the present. They may also stem from a desire to restore the integrity of present practices that are seen to have lost some defining aspect of their original form or meaning. The past, however, far from being clear-cut, is a notoriously slippery entity whose invocation involves both conscious practical choices and strategic rhetorical maneuvers. Trends in the representation, mobilization, and contestation of the past have been widely theorized by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. As part of the postmodern turn, exponents of what became known

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  13

as post-processual or interpretative archaeology embraced a notion of the past as subjective, fragmented, malleable, multidimensional, and multivalent (see, e.g., Hodder et al 1995, and Ucko 1995). Conceived in these terms, the past offers what musicologist John Butt has referred to as “an infinity of different worlds” (2002: 17), together with a treasure-trove of cultural symbols that may be adapted to many different uses and functions in the present. Here we wish to highlight three themes in the deconstruction of the past: the ideologically contingent and selective nature of received (or imagined) histories, the symbolic potential of the past, and the dynamic tensions to which competing interpretations of the past may give rise. Different perceptions of history may shape both the rhetoric and actions of revivalists. Jabbour (this volume) observes that “people often see the past as more stable and unchanging, and the present as more dynamic and changing,” imagining history as linear progress, like a jet plane taking off. In contrast, Jabbour posits, if we view history as cyclical, oscillating, and meandering, then revivals may be viewed as a natural part of culture’s ebb and flow. A somewhat parallel view is common amongst some Native American peoples who, as described by Levine (this volume), consider history to be cyclical and view what we have defined as revival processes as the periods of sleep and wakefulness that cultural expressions naturally undergo. Regardless of their meta-views of the nature of history, revivalists are typically united by their adherence to a “received history” (Boyes 1993: xi). Stories about the past are rarely heard first-hand. They are most often passed down and, in the process, undergo a series of refinements: corrections are made and new errors introduced, facts are forgotten and elaborations added, inconvenient details are erased and rough edges smoothed off. The gaps left by memory and documentation (which by their nature can never be complete) are filled in by educated guesses, assumptions, and imaginative leaps. The “history” that results is highly selective—at best a partial truth—and continues to be molded by its interpreters, but it is this version of the past that then becomes part of the collective memory.9 Burt Feintuch even suggests that we might view revivals themselves as forms of memory, “loaded with the ambiguities that memory presents” (2006: 14). Revivalists, then, are active agents in reinterpreting, modifying, and forging new histories. The Past in Music, a special issue of the journal Ethnomusicology Forum, was inspired by the guiding principle that “musical practices in the present are shaped not only by past experience but also by ideas, feelings and beliefs about the past” (Bithell 2006: 4). Its contributors built on the notion of the past as symbolic resource in exploring the ways in which music can be harnessed not only to invoke but also to transform the past.10 The act of reimagining or reinventing the past assumes particular prominence in the case of revival initiatives with a strongly countercultural character that look to the past to compensate for the shortcomings of the present as described in the previous section. Music genres associated with a supposedly simpler, purer way of life untainted by “progress” become a doorway into this quasi-mythic past-as-refuge. Transported into the present, the revived elements—like those of the nativistic movements described by Linton— serve as “symbols of a period when the society was free or, in retrospect, happy or great”

14   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell (1943: 233). Revivalists, then, are concerned not simply with “the music itself ” but also— or even more—with the projected values and partly imagined lifestyles they associate with it. In setting out to regain Paradise, revivalists embrace the music of the past as an act of “non-violent resistance” to modernity (DeTurk and Poulin 1967: 22)—a perspective that chimes with Svetlana Boym’s theoriziation of nostalgia as not only a longing for lost dreams or for times and places that have slipped beyond our reach but also a “rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” (2001: xv). The attraction of the past, then, rests not so much on what it was actually like, in a literal sense, but on what it has come to represent and how it may be used to justify action in the present. As Ronström expresses it: Revival is only partly about ‘what once was’. More importantly, it is about ‘what is’ and ‘what is to come’.. . . In essence revival is a process of traditionalisation that goes on in the present, to create symbolic ties to the past, for reasons of the future. (1996: 18)

Several of the case studies in this volume illustrate the ways in which the past is selectively employed, manipulated, and at times even fabricated to add legitimacy to choices made in the present, to challenge established orthodoxies, or to dispute claims to particular histories or traditions (see especially Hill and Walker). In some instances, revival performances may be more convincing to contemporary audiences for being based on imaginary histories (see Shay, this volume, and Taruskin 1982). Indeed, Lowenthal proposes that “heritage the world over not only tolerates but thrives on and even requires historical error” (1998: 132; see also Norton, this volume). Of course, not all revivalists are converts to postmodernism and metaphor. Some believe that they know what the past was really like and seek to replicate past practices as accurately as possible. They might base their reconstructions on surviving memoirs or iconographic evidence whose accuracy or legitimacy goes unchallenged, seeing the precision of the reproduction as a measure of authenticity. Those who adopt this more fundamentalist and essentializing stance may come into conflict with those who take up a comparatively progressive position that allows for a more creative refashioning and that acknowledges the part played by present need. Niall Mackinnon’s distinction between reviving and re-enacting is helpful here. A re-enactment requires “a suspension of the present, allowing the past to be entered into, but in a bounded sense,” whereas in the case of revival (as Mackinnon defines it) the past is entered in a more symbolic way that “allows continuity through a process of artistic evolution” (1993: 7). As communication systems, markets, and modern transport systems have brought ever more distant parts of the planet within reach, world music—or other people’s folk music—has to some extent replaced autochthonous folk traditions in offering an alternative to the mainstream. Nostalgia for a more wholesome time and place may now be projected onto someone else’s present rather than one’s own past, and the desire to take refuge in a simpler, purer world may now be fulfilled by stepping sideways into contemporary societies elsewhere in the world rather than backwards into a less than tangible past (see Bithell and Williams, this volume, and Laušević 2007). This sideways

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  15

step corresponds to Wallace’s second “choice of identification”—importation—which he envisages as a parallel choice available to revitalization initiatives alongside revival with its retrospective orientation. Both strategies may be seen to share, however, a similar psychological underpinning. Importation may also result not merely in a one-way borrowing but in mutual exchange or collaboration, in which case it may give rise to the kinds of musical production that we depict as belonging to the post-revival stage.

Recontextualization and Transformation Some degree of recontextualization, whether intentional or circumstantial, is inherent in the very concept of revival. Ronström (this volume) suggests that we conceptualize revival processes “as shifts between different historic, geographic, social, and cultural contexts, between the individual and collective, private and public, informal and formal, and between different mythical geographies.” “Shift” is useful in furnishing us with a comparatively neutral, depoliticized concept that is suggestive as much of a natural process as of individual intention or institutional strategy. Strictly speaking, recontextualization takes place each time a song, tune, dance, or story passes to a new exponent (even if it is often masked by a conceptualization of the performer as a faceless conduit of tradition, perhaps exacerbated by a lack of recognition of the crucial role of individual variation in many oral traditions). In other cases, the act of recontextualization is more blatant or dramatic, and it is shifts of this order that most concern us here. Let us begin by considering the revivalists themselves. As many commentators have observed, revivals are often set in motion by individuals or clearly defined groups who are partial outsiders to the chosen tradition rather than core culture-bearers. Hence the much-remarked paradox at the heart of the North American folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s, whereby young, white, middle-class, educated city-dwellers championed and appropriated for themselves the cultural practices of older, black as well as white, working class, illiterate farmhands, miners, and industrial workers. Examples from this volume include Native American musicians switching from Western band and jazz music to the traditional Native flute (Conlon), conservatory students brought up in Western classical music becoming Finnish folk musicians (Hill), British choirs learning to sing Georgian polyphony (Bithell), Americans adopting Irish and Iranian traditions (Williams, Shay), and revivalists re-infusing their own lost traditions with material from neighboring regions or tribes (Quigley, Levine). Even if they come from the same region, ethnicity, and class, the first generation of performers of a revived tradition are usually relative outsiders in the sense of having been raised in different musical idioms and environments before adopting the revived tradition. Shifts such as these have sometimes led to the line being drawn between “genuine” inheritors of a tradition and “revivalists” (as described earlier in this chapter). New converts inevitably adapt the music they discover to their own stylistic preferences and performance conventions, at times unconsciously. In some cases, they purposely strive to “improve”

16   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell the tradition (a practice common especially in romantic nationalist and Soviet revival efforts). Some incorporate further influences from other sources, resulting in new hybrid styles, for which Ellen Stekert (1966) proposed the label “new aesthetic.”11 What is most interesting about these shifts, from a critical perspective, is not the question of legitimacy as much as the reasons why they happen, what they reveal about broader psycho-social processes, and what part they play in the subsequent directions taken by spin-off and roots-based popular music genres. Dividing lines between traditionalists and revivalists, or insiders and outsiders, have a pernicious quality and should not be taken at face value. As many of the case studies gathered here show, the reality is often closer to a continuum than to two sides of a coin. This becomes especially clear when we consider the contemporary generation, where many of those who are successful on the global music scene—armed with a diary packed full of concert and festival dates, and with strings of albums and awards to their credit— are the children or grandchildren of those who were counted among the “true” guardians and inheritors of the art form and rarely strayed far from home. These younger pioneers may, at some point on their journey, have helped to drive a revival movement. At the same time, they themselves grew up “in the tradition” and we may even find the voices of their younger selves in archival collections of ethnographic field recordings. Where they differ from their forebears is in the opportunities that were available to them: The world itself had changed.12 The notion of a continuum, meanwhile, is suggestive of a quasi-evolutionary process that might be construed as a straight line leading from past to future and this, too, is misleading. Often, as many of our case studies illustrate, different individual identities, stances toward tradition, and ways of being with music co-exist (see especially the chapters by Conlon and Milstein). In some cases, we see the same musicians behaving in different ways in different contexts and maintaining seemingly divergent styles and repertoires in parallel. In others, we see different individuals or lineages drawing from the same musical well but operating in different contexts, or interpreting and taking forward the same traditions in different ways, and some of these pathways may be contemporaneous from the outset. Of relevance here is Max Peter Baumann’s model, which distinguishes between “those who define folk music traditions within the concepts of purism (with a tendency towards stabilizing or even regressive preservation) and of syncretism (with a tendency towards reinventing the past by emancipatory creation to the point of breaking the local and regional frontiers)” (1996: 80). These definitions clearly relate to other differences, such as in the positions adopted with regard to the interpretation of the past on the one hand and the role of the artist on the other. Here we might most readily think in terms of a spectrum with its suggestion of gradations between two extreme positions, or alternatively—as we move closer to the notion of post-revival— sectors of a circle where the shared point of reference is the seed, or question, at the center but where there is no attempt to establish a hierarchy in the diversity of responses. Let us now turn our attention to the environment in which a genre or practice targeted for revival is performed. In the folk music revival archetype, one of the first acts of recontextualization is often a shift from the fireside, barn, village square, or other

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  17

intimate location where friends and neighbors gather to make music and dance, to the concert stage, where the performer is clearly distinguished from the rest of the company, who are now assigned to the role of audience. This shift from—to adopt Thomas Turino’s (2008) terminology—participatory to presentational performance has many ramifications. It demands a degree of organization: a date is set, the event is publicized, and tickets are sold. The performance thus becomes a transaction: money changes hands and expectations are set up. This in turn might inspire some adjustments on the part of the performer. Instrumental accompaniment may be added to songs that are more often sung a cappella. Intervals may be standardized so as to make the music sound more “in tune” to the modern ear. As performers become more accomplished, they may be eager to push the boundaries beyond traditional standards of artistry. As a next step, an artist may start to receive invitations to perform further afield and thus may assume a new role as cultural ambassador. In appearing at festivals, he or she may be exposed to different kinds of music and have the opportunity to exchange tunes, stylistic approaches, and ideas about the meaning of tradition and the role of the performer. Some of these influences will be taken back to the home culture, where they will appear as innovations— perhaps framed positively as inspired advances or, more negatively, as departures from the tradition. All of this is part of a gradual process of professionalization, institutionalization, commercialization, and commodification. Artists who continue on this path and become ever more cosmopolitan in their outlook may be accused of moving away from their roots or of selling out to fame and fortune. Performers themselves are often keenly aware of the tensions accompanying such a trajectory and struggle to find their own balance between faithfulness to, respect for, or continuity with “the tradition” and their right to pursue their own creative paths as autonomous artists. Some have argued that all traditions start somewhere, and there is no reason why what today seems like a new departure should not become the tradition of tomorrow. Here we may note Eyerman and Jamison’s proposal (referencing Rosenberg 1993) that “what is at work in periods of recombination or transformation is both more creative than revival and less creative than invention.. . . Musical traditions are . . . made, and remade, in processes of mobilization” (1998: 38–39). At the same time, transformations wrought through revival efforts may open up alternative artistic pathways that provide opportunities for creativity not available in other idioms. Mackinnon’s category of re-enactment is again relevant here. Many of those who identify as traditional musicians would themselves argue that they are not aiming to, and should not be expected to, reproduce their music or dance exactly as it was at some putative point in the past. If this were the goal, then the result (this argument continues) would be nothing more than a museum piece. The notion that a tradition is fixed is in any case a fallacy. A tradition is always in movement and for something to continue as part of a healthy, living tradition it has to correspond with the needs and concerns of its own time. This rationale holds even greater sway if the performers in question are seeking to enlarge their audience or convert more followers to their cause. They may be promoting a form or practice that is marked as ancient, and the accompanying

18   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell discourse may be rife with references to history and the past, but the product itself has to appear both relevant and palatable. In some cases, the argument that music has to change in order to survive might appear as little more than a rhetorical ploy to justify innovations that might otherwise be cast as more radical departures, but rhetoric is also what interests us here. Meanwhile, in some contexts (including the new Grammy Award categories, drastically modified in 2012), “roots” now serves as a catchall label embracing what may once have been juxtaposed as traditional and contemporary, or authentic and revivalist, and to some extent erases—albeit controversially—the thorny distinctions between them. In other types of revivals, recontextualizations may follow different paths. In the process of reviving classical music and dance traditions, a (semi-)professional art form patronized by a small elite may be made available for the masses (see Nooshin, this volume). Sacred traditions may be transplanted from temples to secular institutions (see Walker, this volume). A professionalized, commercialized recorded music may be transformed through revival into a participatory folk tradition, as happened in the bluegrass revival (see Rosenberg 1985). In the process of these various repositionings, many transformations take place: in aesthetic norms and tastes, in the relationship between performer and audience, in the creative dialogue between the performer and the musical raw materials, in the aspirations of the individual artist, in performance contexts and locations, in the functions and meanings attached to the music and its performance, and in broader rationalizations about the place of music in society and the nature of tradition in the modern world. The theme of revival as transformation surfaces often in the literature: see, for example, Burt Feintuch’s chapter “Musical Revival as Musical Transformation” that provided the inspiration for the title of the collection Transforming Tradition (1993). In some ways, the “trans” prefix—transition, translation, transubstantiation, transportation, transformation—is helpful in letting us off the “re” hook (see Slobin, this volume) and giving us more positive endorsement to face forwards rather than backwards. Transformation is often linked conceptually with innovation while innovation continues to be juxtaposed to tradition, as suggested by the titles Transforming Folk: Innovation and Tradition in English Folk-rock Music (Burns 2012) and Indigenous Popular Music in North America:  Continuations and Innovations (Neuenfeldt 2002). Innovation is nonetheless worthy of investigation in its own right. Milstein (this volume) suggests that “revival currents, as distinguished from movements, open avenues for innovation rather than recycling practices or re-creating a fictitious past.” Yet recycling pre-existing material in new ways—one of the most fundamental creative techniques (see Boden 2004 and Lessig 2004, 2008)—is a common means for the renewal of music cultures. Innovation processes that directly manipulate historical material, or that more loosely draw inspiration from imagined pasts, are fundamental components of revival (see especially Conlon and Hill, this volume). Such transformations may relate to the musical fabric—the music itself—or may be at the level of new uses and functions, new contexts and meanings, new cultural infrastructures, new markets and means of dissemination. Of course, some aspects may be renewed while others stay the same or

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  19

even revert to an earlier form, and critical observers may be more alert to these nuances than those closer to the tradition’s epicenter (see Sweers, this volume). Other dynamics are at work in diasporic situations where musical practices in the new homeland may be preserved in a form closer to how the tradition used to be in the world that was left behind. While the geographical displacement may be monumental, the temporal displacement may be on an entirely different scale. Time may be slowed down in comparison with the homeland, such that more “ancient” practices are preserved in the new location while, in the original location, the tradition has moved on. Perhaps the most important point to underline here is that transformations are never monolithic: They are not a neatly choreographed affair where everyone moves in the same direction at the same time.

Authenticity, Authority, and Legitimacy As recontextualizations engender transformations in sound, practice, and context, the new generation of performers (whether technically “outsiders” or not) are left vulnerable to having their right to be bearers and innovators of a tradition questioned. There are numerous examples of scholars, government policy-makers, and even revival artists themselves doubting or denying the legitimacy of revivalists and their music. As discussed above, folklore scholarship has a long history of dismissing revivalists. In musicological discourse, debates about authenticity in the early music revival have been extremely heated, particularly regarding with what authority modern performers interpret historical music, as exemplified in Taruskin’s article “The Authenticity Movement Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory, Literalist and Dehumanizing” (1984) (see also Leech-Wilkinson 2002, Morrow 1978, and Waitzman 1980).13 In relation to government policies, specific notions of authenticity may be employed to judge which types of musicians are deemed worthy of recognition and support as National Heritage Fellows or Living Human Treasures and which are not (see Conlon, Howard, and Jabbour, this volume, and Titon 1993). Some revival artists may feel themselves unauthorized and censor their own creativity. Others may feel frustrated, defensive, or defiant in the face of others’ judgments of their authenticity (see Shay, this volume). Thus, establishing authenticity is often a crucial act if revival artists are to gain acceptance and respect for themselves and their music. In instances in which revivalists are striving to achieve an activist agenda or to establish a viable alternative to the mainstream, conferring authenticity can also be a useful strategy for obtaining support and acceptance for change. In such cases, the evocation of the past may help to disguise change and innovation as conservativism and preservation (see, for example, Hill, Shay, and Walker, this volume). In nearly every instance of revival, then, authenticity is invoked, and frequently hotly contested. Often, however, artists and scholars alike have been guilty of conflating the definition of authenticity with the idealized criteria used to establish authenticity. As

20   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell Weisethaunet and Lindberg observe, while authenticity may be perceived by academics as a quality ascribed to representations, most others take it literally as an essence inherent in an object (2010: 465–466). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms authentic and authenticity invoke a sense of genuineness, “being true in substance,” and “being what it professes to be in terms of origin or authorship.” Additionally, and significantly, they also carry the meanings of being authoritative, valid, and “of established credit,” as well as being “entitled to acceptance or belief,” and, in the original 1340 usage, “entitled to obedience or respect.” In sum, the label “authentic” expresses a triple meaning: genuine, authoritative, and deserving of our credence. Successfully and convincingly wielding this label thus has the potential to confer power and legitimacy. The process of establishing authenticity begins with the highly selective and subjective identification of particular aspects or elements in a music-culture, followed by the decision that they should be perpetuated and the assertion of their value. These selections become ideals, models to strive towards, measures of assessment, and the criteria for establishing authenticity. In revivals, these idealized criteria are often historical—though history may be reinterpreted, imagined, or selectively focused in order to emphasize criteria that resonate with contemporary interests. In popular music or the visual arts, other more contemporary criteria, such as authorship or self-expression, may be more highly regarded. The agents who determine the criteria for authenticity may be scholars and collectors, producers and promoters, artists, or fans; conflicting assertions of authenticity amongst different parties are not uncommon (see Hill, Merchant, Shay, and Walker, this volume).14 The types of criteria upon which authenticity hinges vary widely according to cultural and historical context. The selection of ideals reflects shifting technology, political motives, and general intellectual leanings.15 Nevertheless, we have observed broad trends in what may be categorized as (1) product-oriented criteria, (2) person-oriented criteria, and (3) process-oriented criteria. Product-oriented criteria encompass physical objects such as manuscripts, ephemeral objects such as songs, and sound products in both recordings and live performances. In notated traditions that venerate music as text, revival movements may prioritize repertoire and focus on composers’ sketches and certain editions as authoritative. In orally transmitted traditions, the documentation of melodies and song lyrics into written notation before the advent of recording technology led to a high valuation of melodies and texts that were perceived to be the most traditional (epitomized in Anglo scholarship by the obsession with Child ballads). Increasing availability of audio recordings facilitated a focus on idealized sounds, such as timbre, accents, ornamentation, and other elements referred to as style, as well as production-related sounds, such as acoustic and unprocessed sound (see Rosenberg 1993: 12–13 and Feintuch 1993). The emphasis on period instruments, temperament, and intonation in the historically informed performance movement in Western art music also exemplifies sound product as authenticity criterion. Person-oriented criteria comprise the traits of source musicians or communities, performers, and/or creators. One common trend is to idealize persons hailing from remote

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  21

regions that are believed to have been isolated from some of the conditions that caused cultural change in the revivalists’ population centers (e.g., industrialization, religious conversion, political revolutions, or economic development).16 Such cases discussed in this volume include Hungarian revivalists appropriating music from Romanian Transylvania (Quigley), Finnish revivalists collecting material from Russian Karelia (Hill), and French scholars researching songs in Québec (Haines). Age and education are other person-oriented criteria, employed especially by collectors in seeking out source musicians (see Sharp 1917 and Lord 1960, who both valued songs collected from older illiterate singers). The most problematic and potentially insidious person-oriented criterion for authenticity is ethnicity, which stems largely from the blood-and-soil variety of nationalism. This is particularly relevant in revivals of folk music—not surprisingly, as the term folk (or Volk) was coined by Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose widely disseminated propaganda about folksongs as the soul of a nation still influences the significance of folk music around the world. However, it may also be employed in other idioms, such as jazz. A prime illustration in this volume is Merchant’s exposition of her informants’ belief that tradition is in the blood and that proficiency in Uzbek music is correlated with having Uzbek bloodlines. A key contemporary arena in which person-oriented criteria are employed is in the contentious authentication of who owns tradition. Such debates often pivot between the aim to protect the heritage of certain ethnocultural groups (especially indigenous ones) from exploitation versus the desire for artists around the world to have access to traditional material in the public domain, regardless of their ethnic heritage, and not have their creativity limited by intellectual property restrictions (Brown 2003; see also McCann 2001, Mills 1996, and Zemp 1996). Communal ownership of a shared tradition may be relatively clear for an intimate and participatory music culture such as the Suya in the Amazon basin (Seeger 1992). However, when the concept of communal ownership is extended from localized networks of physically interactive and interrelated people to the imagined community of the nation, then there is a danger that the primary criterion for determining the authority of a tradition holder may be his or her ethnicity or nationality. As Brown (2003) warns, one group’s urge to claim ownership of cultural goods may well obscure the creole nature of the goods themselves and deny similar rights to other groups that share the goods’ collective history of creation and stewardship. This situation has created tense arguments in Hungary and Romania over the purity and ownership of musical heritage from ethnically diverse Transylvania (see Quigley, this volume). Issues become even more complicated when individuals shift their ethnic identification (Gallaugher, this volume) or when the ethnocultural boundaries of the group are extended or contracted into different configurations (see Hill 2007). Much emic discourse about authenticity emphasizes purity, and in particular ethnic purity. These ideals are especially prominent in the initial stages of postcolonial, post-independence, and postwar situations, as demonstrated here by chapters on India (Walker), Ukraine (Helbig), Uzbekistan (Merchant), and Vietnam (Norton). The use of ethnic criteria in establishing and contesting claims to particular musical genres or

22   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell instruments came to the fore particularly strongly in the context of the Balkan wars of the 1990s (see Longinović 2000, Pettan 1998, and Ceribašić, this volume). In the process of claiming ethnic purity, however, intercultural influences are frequently underplayed (see Helbig, Norton, and Walker). Conversely, a small but growing trend has been to herald hybridity as a criterion of authenticity (see Gallaugher and Levine, this volume, and Taylor 2007).17 Meanwhile, in cases in which musicians participate in the performance of traditions originating from other ethnic groups, these ethnic “outsiders” must find other ways of asserting their authority as performers (see Bithell, Conlon, and Williams, this volume). If the essentializing tendencies of person-oriented authentication are at their most extreme in the case of ethnicity, similar processes of authentication may also apply to other criteria, and here, too, they are laden with unequal power dynamics. Several chapters in this collection illustrate the continuation of different plays of power, whether in relation to gender inequalities (Conlon, Helbig, and Walker), racism and xenophobia (Blaustein and Ceribašić), or class inequalities (Blaustein, Howard, and Walker). Yet by the end of the twentieth century, attitudes towards notions of purity and authenticity had shifted—albeit not globally—as certain restrictions imposed in the name of tradition could now, from the perspective of civil or human rights, be framed as discriminatory: sexist, racist, elitist, or imperialist. The desire to respect a people’s culture balanced by the need to protect human rights have led to significant tensions, which, though rarely motivated by specifically musical concerns, have colored the climate in which public cultural displays take place. This has, in some cases, lent a different kind of legitimacy to those seeking to break through local restrictions. While many of the person-oriented criteria discussed thus far are group centered, another important stream centers on the individual. Establishing individual authorship is one of the most important grounds for authentication in the art world (for example, establishing whether a particular painting really was painted by Van Gogh). Lineage may be another important means for individual artists to establish their authenticity (see Walker, this volume). Meanwhile, in Western art music, performers, conductors, and editors often vie to establish authority by invoking the composer’s intentions—which Taruskin sees as another means of asserting personal authority (1992: 317). A third commonly invoked category of authenticity criteria is process-oriented. This category includes transmission, creation, and reception. Historically, great emphasis has been placed on the circumstances of transmission for establishing the authenticity of both source musicians and revivalist performers and this continues to carry significant weight in many circles. Depending on the cultural context, oral transmission and guru-apprentice relationships have often been considered more valid than learning via books or institutions. (This value system is sometimes used to authenticate scholar-performers within the field of ethnomusicology—for example, in assessing how ethnomusicologists achieve their “bimusical” credentials.) Institutionalized transmission has been relatively underplayed and understudied in ethnomusicological literature to date. In this volume, case studies by Hill, Merchant, and Quigley reveal some of the

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  23

authentication strategies employed by academy musicians and institutions (see also Keegan-Phipps 2007). Creative processes seem to have become a more highly valued index of authenticity since the latter third of the twentieth century, particularly in Western contexts. A general shift from product-oriented to creative process-oriented criteria may have been influenced by several factors. Albert Lord’s (1960) groundbreaking work on oral composition encouraged folklore and classics scholars to focus on traditional creative processes around the world (see the journal Oral Tradition and, e.g., Pihl 1994 and Titon 1994). Since many folklore scholars were also engaged as agents of revival, this intellectual trend influenced revival activities as well (see Hill, this volume). Political protest song movements, such as those in the United States and in Latin America in the 1960s, foregrounded the composition of topical songs in folk-inspired styles in response to current events. Though later developing into less overtly political singer-songwriter genres, the emphasis on writing songs in response to life experiences has in many cases remained, and iconic role models such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Victor Jara, and Silvio Rodríguez continue to be revered and emulated. Furthermore, Weisethaunet and Lindberg (2010) suggest that literature on the blues as an expression of deeply felt emotions influenced the development of expressing one’s feelings as an important marker of authenticity in rock discourse. As many later revival generations were raised with rock as a part of their mainstream cultural environment, this valuation of personal expression has been carried back over into folk and traditional music. Valuing creative process may entail concerted efforts to learn traditional musical vocabulary, forms, and syntax so that revivalist performers can compose and improvise in a traditional style, as in Ronström’s (1998) description of the Swedish folk revival. It may entail the invention of a new method for the systematic generation of professedly traditional music, as in the development of the radif in Iran (Nooshin, this volume). Or it may be embraced in a more abstract valuation of individual and artistic expression, as in the Finnish ideal of embodying the creative folk spirit and synthesizing all of one’s influences (both traditional and otherwise) into personal creations (Hill, this volume). Such emphasis on, and valuation of, musical process usually allows for greater degrees of individuality, artistic freedom, and innovation. Revival activities oriented more towards innovation and creativity may be perceived by some as being less traditional or pure, as depicted in Baumann’s (1996) model of purism versus syncretism as contrasting revival approaches. In effect, this is a case of conflicting authenticity criteria. Innovation, if pursued according to certain criteria, may be argued to be just as traditional and authentic as faithful replications of historical pieces. Indeed, in instances in which shifts have occurred from product-oriented to process-oriented approaches, the new generation of revivalists often attempt to delegitimize the earlier revivalists’ authenticity markers: Ronström’s description of this process in Sweden, for example, critiques earlier revivalists who “merely reproduce the collective leftovers stored in museums and archives” (1998: 40–41; see also Hill and Merchant, this volume, and Filene 2000:  183–232). Under other circumstances, as Livingston (1999: 80–81) notes, innovation may be an indicator that the revival has moved into a

24   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell post-revival phase and historical authenticity is no longer an overriding concern. These trends chime with Feintuch’s suggestion that “it works better to think of tradition as a territory of the imagination rather than as a standard for some notion of authenticity” (2006: 9). The reception process is described by Ronström (this volume) as “the authenticity of the consumer”: “The authentic is the experience, the taste, or the emotion. What is true is what feels true, a position explored by the growing experience industry.” To this we might add Weisethaunet and Lindberg’s (2010) depiction of the “authenticity of experience” as a fan’s ability to identify with someone else’s musical expression or see themselves in a new light by listening to a piece of music. Here we focus more on the consumer’s judgement of the performance and/or the performer. This layer of authenticity exists in a realm apart from the performer’s understanding of authenticity. To some extent, it depends on expectation—an expectation that may be ill-informed, based on mythology, inherited prejudice, or manipulated by market forces. At its most mundane level it may focus on visible signs and symbols such as costume and, in the case of “folk” performances, baskets, floral wreaths, pitchforks, guns, or other such accoutrements. (See Shay, this volume, for examples of Orientalist expectations influencing Iranian artists; for more on the importance of visual symbols, see Helbig, Moulin, and Sweers, this volume.) The mismatch between consumer expectation and artistic intention (or contemporary reality) has been especially remarked upon with regard to world music artists from the African continent, who have often found themselves accused by Western audiences of inauthenticity for their failure to match an antiquated, colonial-flavored, and ultimately racist imagining of Africa as “primitive,” “natural,” and in other ways pre-modern—sometimes marked by a proliferation of drums and grass skirts. Timothy Taylor (1997) has used the term “strategic inauthenticity” to describe the stances adopted by artists such as Angélique Kidjo and Youssou N’Dour, who have insisted on their right to appear, and make music, as autonomous, creative artists and as citizens of a modern, cosmopolitan world. This stance relates to a broader discourse often adopted by artists at the more innovative end of the spectrum who speak of authenticity in terms of being true to one’s own creative impulse, one’s own life experience, and the concerns of one’s own age or era. The conservatism or prejudices of some world music audiences notwithstanding, the international stage has been an important space for artists to create and explore away from the scrutiny and authenticity criteria of the home community.

Transmission, Dissemination, and Promotion In order for a music revival to be successful, revivalists must publicize their selected tradition to new audiences and enable new performers to learn. The inevitable recontextualizations of traditions undergoing revival, whether temporal, geographical, or

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  25

social, often lead to radical changes in the nature of transmission and dissemination. In folk music revivals, a fundamental shift frequently occurs from in-person, informal oral transmission to more deliberate, formalized, and often standardized methods, usually supported by new infrastructures. In almost all cases hereditary modes of transmission have to be modified because those of the revivalist generation have not grown up in the tradition and therefore need to be initiated in a way that allows them to bypass more organic, lifelong processes of acculturation and apprenticeship. New teaching and learning methods have to be found, especially if revival musicians do not have access to a community of primary culture-bearers or source practitioners. In some cases, this may be because the last generation of guardians of the tradition in its original habitat has already passed away or because artists and teachers have been lost as a result of war or natural disaster. In considering transmission processes, Ronström’s equation of revival to an act of translation suggests helpful perspectives. A translator does not set out to substantially change the original text, yet the new text he or she produces is rarely a literal, word-for-word translation: In order to make sense to the target reader, it has to involve some degree of reinterpretation informed by knowledge of the cultural context in which it will be received. In recent thinking in the field of literary translation, a distinction has been made between “cultural transfer” as a one-way activity (akin, perhaps, to transplantation) and “cultural transmission” as a reciprocal process that emphasizes the mediatory and pioneering role of the transmitter.18 In the case of revivals, transmitters always play a crucial role, whether the students with whom they are working are from a foreign culture or simply from a different social class or age set. Revivalists who have consciously learnt a tradition after being introduced to it later in life, as opposed to having been born into it, may be well positioned to undertake the role of transmitter, which, in addition to musicianship, demands a facility for pedagogical communication and the ability to explain the tradition to outsiders or newcomers. Source musicians may offer the best role models but they are not necessarily the best teachers and translators. Proactive dissemination, via a range of media, may be required either to help draw in and train new converts or to bring the musical output of revivalists to a wider audience. In addition to the revivalists themselves, stakeholders may come to include record companies, music publishers, festival and tour organizers, and archives. Changes in the wider word have also influenced modes of dissemination. Many latter-day revival cultures have been strongly impacted by the spread of new media and technologies, the emergence of the world music industry, and trends in heritage conservation and cultural tourism. The earliest method used by revivalist-collectors to disseminate their work and provide learning materials was to publish collections of musical notation, for example in national songbooks. In the process of rendering orally transmitted music into notation changes were inevitably introduced. Some of these changes have been the unconscious results of mishearing, the inadequacy of notation in capturing all dimensions of a performance, and the isolation and decontextualization of small segments of music from a larger whole. Other changes have been deliberate as collectors “corrected” texts and

26   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell melodies to fit their own aesthetics or adapted them in ways that made them more suitable (in their eyes) for popular consumption. In order to encourage the widespread performance of the songs and tunes they collected revivalists have been known to simplify melodies by omitting ornamentation and variation, force them into standard time signatures and tonalities, and add what they perceived as more modern accompaniment. Such compromises often helped make the material more accessible to newcomers to the tradition, in some instances allowing it to spread like wildfire as acolytes eagerly added the latest new item to their personal repertoire (as in the case of the American publication Sing Out! whose circulation reached tens of thousands in the early 1960s). As technologies developed, learning materials were made available in a variety of new media, beginning with audio recordings. While learning from audio recordings may reduce the changes brought about by the subjective process of transcription and the limitations of notation, and may be considered by some to be a form of oral transmission, it nevertheless introduces changes in transmission. The fact that learners are likely to listen to the same version of a piece over and over, for example, may lead to a loss of variation and a degree of standardization and homogenization. The publication of revival materials in print and recorded forms has usually occurred alongside a new performance culture supported by dedicated infrastructures, such as record labels, folk clubs, and festivals. Record companies, distributors, and festivals that may have started out as grassroots initiatives have often become part of an established industry now firmly embedded in a capitalist economy and driven by other agendas (financial, regulatory, etc.). Promotion of the product itself is often accompanied by the dissemination of a discourse and rhetoric, via CD liner notes, concert programs, websites, and reviews, and this is one means by which received histories gain wider currency and claims to legitimacy are reinforced (see Conlon and Moulin, this volume). Some forms of promotion, such as competitions, may introduce further changes in performance practice via the rules they enforce (see Goertzen 1997). Festivals and folk clubs have been important sites for newcomers to hear and meet their role models in person, as well as for networking and community building in general (see Blaustein and Quigley, this volume). Festivals also offer unprecedented opportunities for artists and promoters to showcase their products, and have been especially significant in bringing revived repertoires to the attention of ever more diverse audiences, including tourists (see Keegan-Phipps and Winter, this volume). Rebranding contemporary interpretations of folk music as world music, folk-rock, post-folk, nu-folk, or other trendier labels may extend their appeal to home audiences whose habitual comfort zone may be rock, jazz, indie singer-songwriter, or mainstream popular music, as well as to new international audiences for world music. Large festivals with multiple stages also allow for cross-programming and for casual encounters, on the part of festival-goers, with styles of music that they would not deliberately seek out.19 Opportunities for “foreign” enthusiasts to learn to perform music or dance from outside their own culture have also become more widespread. These include the

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  27

participatory taster workshops included in many festival programs, intensive summer schools (often in the country of origin), and weekly classes in the student’s own locality. Such cross-cultural transmission calls for teaching styles to be adapted to the new context and in some cases special teaching methodologies have been developed explicitly for non-native learners (see Bithell, Conlon, Shay, and Williams, this volume, and Solís 2004). Other key locations for the transmission and dissemination of traditions-in-revival have been national institutions, including conservatoires. In many cases, the institutional support of previously marginalized idioms has been part of a broader official project to reconfigure national identity and history, following either independence from a former colonial power or radical regime change (see Merchant, Neveu Kringelbach, and Nooshin, this volume). In other cases (particularly in socialist and socialist-democratic countries), the adoption of a revived tradition into state-supported academies has been tied to a populist or socialist-oriented democratization of music culture by accommodating the “music of the people” in prestigious cultural spaces previously reserved for elite Western art music. In addition to training new generations of professional musicians and music teachers, the process of institutionalization has substantial impacts, which, to summarize briefly, may include professionalization, artification, standardization, homogenization, an imposition of Western art music pedagogy and values, the development of traditional music theories, status changes, the creation of new hierarchies, and the intensification and dissemination of certain value systems and ideological agendas.20 At the governmental level, policies of international bodies such as UNESCO have exerted increasing influence on national strategies for cultural promotion. Since 2001, traditional forms of expression from all parts of the world have been added to UNESCO’s masterpiece proclamations and listings of intangible cultural heritage. In order to become a party to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, a state must commit itself “to take the necessary measures to ensure the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage present in its territory” by compiling inventories and documentation, and by “endeavour[ing] to ensure the widest possible participation of those that create, maintain and transmit the heritage, and to involve them actively in its management” (UNESCO 2003). The many ramifications of UNESCO’s interventions and related state policies are explored in the chapters by Bithell, Howard, and Norton. In the twenty-first century, the Internet  also serves as an important platform for both the dissemination of teaching materials and the creation of new networks, whose members may exchange materials and experiences, and even perform together, without ever meeting face-to-face (see Blaustein, this volume). At this level, revival continues to thrive as a grassroots, bottom-up activity but its community is more likely to take the form of a scattered, transnational affinity group than a local collective or national subculture. This kind of community also partakes of the nature of diaspora—another feature of the postcolonial world that has assumed ever-greater prominence as a theoretical tool as well as an existential reality (see, e.g., Gandhi 1998).

28   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell

The Post-revival Turn: Revival Legacies The kinds of shifts—recontextualizations, transformations, and innovations—summarized thus far inevitably introduce changes to a tradition and may result in a music or dance practice initially selected for revival evolving to a point where it has become something new that now enjoys an independent existence, free of its once symbiotic connection to a particular social, political, or aesthetic cause. The motivation behind the original revival impulse may in any case have lost much of its potency as the core revivalists have either achieved their objectives or moved on—whether to other causes or to new identities as independent performing artists in the commercial entertainment world. Spin-off traditions may also evolve in different directions as some of the original revivalists, or the next generation to whom they pass the baton, seek to break free from the restrictions imposed by the purist arm of the revival and develop practices more apropos to their own contemporary reality. Regardless of how progressive these changes may be, aspects of the revivalist discourse and value system nonetheless continue to carry influence (for examples, see Ceribašić, Conlon, Howard, and Milstein, this volume). In other instances, the revived practices may undergo less radical shifts as they gradually settle into something akin to Wallace’s (1956) “new steady state” (preceded, in Wallace’s model for religious revitalization movements, by phases of “adaptation,” “transformation,” and “routinization”), and this may involve their adoption by the mainstream. They might undergo a process of classicalization or gentrification, in the course of which they are accommodated to the dominant musical discourse, or they might become “hip” in the eyes of a younger generation for whom retro is progressive. Alternatively, they may retain a more niche identity apart from the mainstream but with their future seemingly secure in the hands of a new subculture or affinity group. (For examples of various “new steady states,” see Blaustein, Hill, Jabbour, and Quigley, this volume.) As they evolve, these revived traditions may become less bound to demands for legitimacy and stringent rules governing authenticity: compromises may be made or anxieties relaxed as broader horizons are glimpsed. The identities assumed by leading exponents may also change—for example, from cultural militant to cultural ambassador or creative artist. Some commentators have referred to these developments in terms of a breakdown of the original revival. Ellen Koskoff, for instance, suggests that all revivals go through a period of boom and bust before they break down completely (2005: 69). Livingston also speaks in terms of “breakdown” in describing how the tension between preservation and conservation on one hand and creativity and innovation on the other can lead to a splintering of the revival community into fundamentalist and progressive factions. Is such breakdown inevitable and does it in fact equate to demise? If so, what fills the space that the revival vacates? Conversely, might a revival ever be said to be “never-ending,” as the title of Michael Scully’s (2008) book would have it? The new wave of resurgence in

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  29

English folk music in the early twenty-first century was hailed by some as a third revival. Does this suggest a cycle that will simply go on and on, until we reach a tenth, a fiftieth, or a hundredth revival? Both Jabbour and Levine (this volume) explain revival phenomena as a recurring, cyclical process that is part of the natural ebb and flow of culture. Certainly the myriad manifestations of revival described in these collected essays demonstrate the universality of the appropriation and employment of the past as a tool commonly employed by humans to (re)shape their cultural environment in times of need. Nevertheless, for each surge of revival activity, logic suggests that there will come a time when a particular revival movement might be said to have either failed or succeeded. If a once-neglected genre has been safely reinstated and is no longer at risk of extinction, then it no longer makes sense to frame it in terms of revival. This is not, however, the end of the story. The question remains: what comes after revival? Here we suggest a theoretical middle ground between the two poles of breakdown and never-ending revival, for which we adopt the notion of post-revival. A post-revival phase is characterized first and foremost by the recognition that a revived tradition has become firmly established in a new context where it can no longer be described as either moribund or threatened and is therefore no longer in need of rescue. This post-revival space may also be populated by spin-off genres and practices—the “new sounds, new textures, and new repertoires” for which the revival served as a catalyst (Livingston 1999: 81). Of course, the transition to a post-revival state is, in practice, a gradual process. Usually, there is no clear boundary between “revival” and “post-revival,” and in some cases we might identify particular trends as having a post-revival quality while others remain rooted in a revivalist gestalt. As a concept, however, post-revival is especially useful for the way in which it allows us to acknowledge the significance of the original revival impulse and to identify a new musical or social culture as part of its legacy. Post-revival also recommends itself as an analytical tool because of the ways in which it resonates with other “posts”: post-modern, post-industrial, post-colonial, post-national, post-ethnic—terms which color the ethnographic environments of many of the case studies in this volume. “What comes after revival?” was precisely the question on the lips of many Corsican musicians as they recognized that the riacquistu (lit. reacquisition) set in motion in the 1970s had succeeded not only in reversing the decline to which traditional music had seemed to be condemned but in elevating it to an unprecedented position of prestige that coincided with its entry into the world music market—a circumstance that introduced new dilemmas and challenges, as captured in Jean-François Bernardini’s trenchant observation that “to preserve what you have acquired is one thing, to give it a future is another” (cited in an edition of Corse-Matin, 2000). For many late- or post-revival artists, the answer to the question “what next?” has lain in exploring their individual creativity alongside experimenting with a more eclectic palette of musical idioms, including influences from beyond their own culture. In explicitly drawing a line under the revival proper, musicians free themselves from the apron strings of “tradition,” laying claim to their right to move forward in the same way that any artist who has never been cast as a spokesperson for a tradition is allowed to move forward, and inviting audiences to judge

30   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell their work on its own merits. At the same time, revivals may leave behind a foundation of infrastructures—financial, institutional, social, and knowledge-based—that serve as platforms for new post-revival artists entering careers in national institutions or global markets. Revival legacies also bestow many signifiers—particularly related to ethnicity, nationality, and heritage—which post-revival artists must maneuver and manipulate. These post-revival turns present a new set of questions. As musicians engage with the global music industry and incorporate influences from the transnational networks in which they now operate, how do they conceptualize their relationship with the home tradition? How do they reposition themselves in terms of genre or style? How does their view of their role as artist change? A range of answers to these and other questions are presented in the case studies assembled here. Is revival itself, then, just a phase? In some senses, the answer has to be yes. One of the most significant shifts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been the music industry’s recasting of folk or “roots” music as world music. This has its parallel in the realm of cultural policy and conservation where local traditions have been redefined as world heritage or, in UNESCO’s terms, the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. This particular shift—from an inward- to an outward-facing stance, and from local and national to global frames of reference—is of cardinal significance, as underlined in the theoretical contributions by Ronström and Sweers (this volume). In this context, post-revival sits within broader trends and processes—as captured, for example, in Arjun Appadurai’s model of global flows (1996) or Ulf Hannerz’s theorization of transnational connections (1996)—and enters into articulation with contemporary redefinitions of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and ethnicity as offered by these and other cultural theorists. The language of postcolonial theory is of critical importance in allowing us to conceptualize contemporary identities and intercultural relations free of the shadows cast by the old world order. Yet running across this new landscape we can clearly trace the tracks leading out from once local revival movements and, at a more global level, we can understand the contemporary trends captured in this new language as part of the continuing, age-old cycle of cultural renewal. The ultimate drawback of the “post” option, of course, is that it still ties us to what has gone before and in so doing denies the present its own identity, its own dynamic, its own validity. Considering cultural manifestations as post-revival developments allows us to give revivalists their due by uncovering the full impact of the “work” of revival and acknowledging the universal and continuous significance of revival as a fundamental cultural process. At the same time, post-revival sows the seeds of a new beginning.

Contents Overview The thirty diverse chapters in this collection are divided into eight thematically organized sections. The first set of essays provides a theoretical foundation that paves the way for the rich selection of case studies brought together in the following seven sections.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  31

These case studies, punctuated by ethnographically informed conceptual essays, document revival initiatives and theorize their multivalent impacts on music and dance cultures around the world. The volume concludes with a short Afterword. Section I, “Towards Multiple Theories of Music Revival,” comprises three essays whose authors debate the various significances of revival, deconstruct revival as cultural process, and propose new models for understanding the effects of revival in the contemporary world. Following this introductory chapter, Owe Ronström offers a framework for theorizing the discursive move from “tradition” to “heritage.” Presenting revivals as decontextualizations, metaphorical transformations, and shifts between different historic, geographic, social, and cultural contexts, he goes on to explicate the critical shift from knowers to doers and marketers as revival agents and to propose that “heritage” can be seen as a homogenizing counterforce to the diversifying and globalizing forces of post- or late modernity. Tamara Livingston reflects on how the influential revival model that she proposed in her 1999 Ethnomusicology article has subsequently been applied and adapted to a variety of case studies and suggests how this model might be expanded. Highlighting the participatory aspects of revivals as sites of social bonding and signification, she proposes that revivals play a vital role as powerful agents of cultural renewal and social reintegration. Section II, “Scholars and Collectors as Revival Agents,” focuses our attention on the critical role played by academics, documentarians, and public folklorists in revival processes—a role that has often been under-scrutinized. Early music scholar John Haines chronicles the intellectual history of antiquarians, the shared roots of musicology and ethnomusicology, and the development of universities into a modern industry. Illustrating the impact of academia on the centuries-long revival of early music, he also elucidates the links between the revival of European medieval music and folk traditions. Neil Rosenberg uses his own experiences as a folklorist and revivalist of North American traditions to deconstruct the complex relationship between the discipline of folklore and folk revivals. Following a critical review of his own seminal contributions and other revival literature, he proposes several alternative concepts to revival. Alan Jabbour’s narrative account of his roles in the American old-time string revival reveals the mutuality of the relationships between documentarians and the people they document, and how these relationships shape transmission processes, funding allocation, and the establishment of new traditions. Jabbour also reminds us of the cyclical nature of revivals and the dynamics of intercultural and intergenerational flows. Section III, “Intangible Cultural Heritage, Preservation, and Policy,” throws light on official local, state, and international strategies to preserve cultural traditions, highlights the structures and tensions created in top-down revivals, and explores the interface between institutional and grass-roots initiatives. Keith Howard examines the revival of South Korea’s intangible cultural heritage against the backdrop of state-led and UNESCO policies as well as student-led initiatives. Through the examples of folk, percussion, shamanic, and court traditions, he challenges arguments that preservation creates sterile museum objects by demonstrating how each has been utilized as the basis of new creativity. Barley Norton chronicles transformations in the Vietnamese music and

32   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell dance tradition ca trù, which in 2009 was inscribed on UNESCO’s Urgent Safeguarding list. In contrast to Howard, he argues that revivalist discourse that promotes ca trù as intangible cultural heritage threatens to limit its musical and ritual meanings, to define its contemporary social relevance in primarily nationalistic terms, and to make it more difficult for a vital, innovative musical culture to emerge. Colin Quigley investigates the Hungarian dance house movement and its journey from 1970s urban youth culture to state promotion and UNESCO recognition. Stressing the national yet inter-ethnic and multi-state character of the dance house revival and its integration of activism and scholarship, he explores the consequences of institutionalization for the string band idiom of rural Transylvanian from which the original movement drew its inspiration. Section IV, “National Renaissance and Postcolonial Futures,” charts the powerful role that revived traditions have come to play in newly independent and post-revolutionary societies. It explores tensions between notions of purism and syncretism, the interplay of continuity and transformation, and the dynamics of national institutions such as state ensembles and academies. Margaret Walker examines the revival of kathak, the classical dance of North India, which accompanied Indian independence from Britain in 1947. Proposing that the move to independence offered extensive opportunities for shifting identities, she deconstructs the evolution of kathak as a genre whose hybrid roots, stemming from Mughal courts, courtesans, and rural folk theater, were eclipsed in its reinvention as a male, devotional, Hindu tradition and symbol of middle-class Indian identity. Revisiting existing revival theories, she proposes a framework that embraces postcolonial experience and thereby sheds light on contemporary manifestations of global hybridity. Hélène Neveu Kringelbach traces the transformations of neo-traditional dance in Senegal, from the influences of French colonial policy, to the role of state-sponsored folkloric troops in post-independence nation-building, to the regionalist agendas of urban migrants and international emigrants. While emphasizing the role played by musical and choreographic theater in creating seductive versions of history, she argues that revival is a process that stretches not only in time but also in space. Tanya Merchant explores the ramifications of institutionalized musician training in a nationalist, post-Soviet project in Uzbekistan. She examines the multiple narratives of history and authenticity enacted in the teaching, aesthetic priorities, and performance of (Westernized) arranged folk music from the Soviet era and “traditional” music derived from more ancient maqom practices in the Uzbek state-run conservatory. Laudan Nooshin examines two revival movements in Iranian classical music. She contrasts the revival that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with its emphasis on “purity” and “authentiticy,” with the more forward-looking revival following the 1979 Iranian Revolution that appealed to notions of “revival as renewal” and yet was only made possible through conditions established as part of the first. Victoria Levine analyzes the crucial roles of individual activists and bodies such as the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee in re-establishing Native American culture in Oklahoma following more than three centuries of colonial suppression. Comparing the Choctaw and Chickasaw cases (the former growing out of a community-based, grassroots effort while the latter originated within the tribal government), she argues that these revival stories are less

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  33

about loss than about finding ways to reclaim cultural identity by integrating historic practice with contemporary experience. Section V, “Recovery from War, Disaster, and Cultural Devastation,” demonstrates the urgent, pragmatic, and emotional needs that revival agendas strive to fill through the reconstruction of music, dance, and other performing art traditions in communities that have been decimated by war, violence, revolution, political oppression, economic exploitation, or natural disaster. In her case study of the Homeland War (1991–1995) and its aftermath in Croatia, Naila Ceribašić describes how both official and grassroots articulations of traditional music were used as tools for coping with wartime insecurity and destruction, for uniting (and sometimes dividing) people along national and ethnic lines, and for reconstructing local identity and history in war-ravaged villages. In her Nicaraguan case study, Annemarie Gallaugher contextualizes the role of music in resurgence and development movements of indigenous and African-descended peoples in Latin America. She shows how the revival of Garifuna music, as an integral part of a cultural rescue movement initiated during the Sandanista revolution, facilitates the reassertion of a previously harshly suppressed identity as well as the creation of a dialogic space for renegotiating intercultural relationships. Margaret Kartomi explores how, in post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh and Sri Lanka and post-Taliban Afghanistan, the arts have been used to help overcome trauma, restore morale, and maintain peace. On the basis of these case studies, she proposes a preliminary methodology for research into musical revivals following major catastrophes, censorship, and neglect. Section VI, “Innovations and Transformations,” interrogates the dynamic tensions and paradoxes between preservation and change and illuminates how the past has served as inspiration, catalyst, and justification for changes in the present. Juniper Hill discusses how Finnish activists have used revival as a strategy to legitimate both musical innovations and social alternatives, exemplified by three distinct movements that entailed editing epic songs to bolster nation-building, embracing amateur instrumental music to rejuvenate depressed rural areas, and re-entering the creative processes of ancient music to foster greater artistic freedom and experimentation. In her case study on Brazilian popular music, Denise Milstein narrates how Protest Bossa musicians from the cultural center of Rio de Janeiro strove to authenticate their political agendas by engaging musicians from the peripheral region of Bahia, who, in turn, utilized revival ingredients in their irreverent, avant-garde songs to fuel the controversial Tropicália movement. Milstein reveals how disjunctures in center-periphery perceptions combined with influences from mass media and changing political regimes can spur radical transformations out of revival currents. Paula Conlon chronicles the transformations of the Native American flute, from Native Plains courtship ritual, to moribund tradition, to 1960s revival, to cross-cultural New Age fusions and international Grammy-awarded commercial success. Questioning how far the flute can travel and still remain connected to its heritage, she explores the ways in which different artists have been interpreted as traditional or nontraditional, and shows how “purists” may in fact be innovators and innovators may retain elements of the tradition. Focusing on the Baltic countries, Britta Sweers explores three globalizing perspectives that have influenced discourses of revival

34   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell and related processes of musical transformation: the sceptic, hyperglobal, and transformationalist. Questioning the extent to which meta-perspectives can help elucidate the impact of global flows on music revivals, she concludes that, while the examples presented support a transformationalist perspective, an adequate contemporary approach to revival requires the combination of all three perspectives. Section VII, “Festivals, Marketing, and Media,” illuminates the infrastructures and industries that have developed for the display, dissemination, and marketing of revived traditions, as well as the politics of representing, commercializing, and rebranding music-cultures for new audiences and new generations of participants. Addressing the early twenty-first century resurgence of English folk music and the important role of folk festivals, Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter consider the ways in which the increasingly commercialized and professionalized infrastructure of the burgeoning folk industry coexists and interacts with the established philanthropic, anti-commercial, and amateur ethos of the folk arts. Adriana Helbig focuses on the revival of the ethnic Ukrainian midsummer ritual of Ivana Kupala (St. John’s Eve) following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, with particular reference to gender discourses and identities. Against the backdrop of Kupala celebrations as spaces within which people are invited to explore their heritage, she questions the extent to which the populist neo-pagan ideals of female purity and motherhood associated with the revived rituals have influenced both contemporary understandings of femininity and the realities of women’s lives in post-Soviet society. Jane Freeman Moulin centers her discussion on a popular trailer projected daily in cinemas in Hawai‘i since 1992 by the movie theater chain Consolidated Amusement. She investigates the cinematic image of the trailer as a vehicle for cultural meaning, analyzing the way in which it embeds visual and auditory icons of the Hawaiian Renaissance and showing how it continues to engage contemporary perceptions of place and culture in an ethnically pluralistic, post-Renaissance Hawai‘i. Richard Blaustein examines how North American old-time fiddling has become an international cultural movement using modern technology to generate and sustain a trans-Atlantic community. Focusing in particular on the new communities and social practices enabled by the spread of the Internet, he shows how this special-interest “micromusic” group uses networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, and listservs to pursue its nominally old-fashioned passion and fulfill present-day emotional and social needs, thereby enabling its devotees to maintain a coherent sense of distinctive identity in a rapidly changing world. Section VIII, “Diaspora and the Global Village,” explores how emigrants, musicians in exile, and foreign affinity groups reclaim, recontextualize, and reinterpret musical traditions in diasporic and transnational contexts, and how these trends intersect with constructions of identity and belonging in the home territory. In her study of vocal polyphony from the Republic of Georgia, Caroline Bithell explores the multifaceted links between cycles of national revival since the mid-nineteenth century and the internationalization of Georgian polyphony in the post-Soviet period. Proposing that the proliferation of Georgian choirs outside Georgia might be viewed as a “third existence”

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  35

of folklore and a natural extension of internal revival processes, she pays particular attention to the role of intermediaries, to learning methods that help non-Georgians to achieve a more Georgian sound, and to the motivations and rewards of different stakeholders in these cultural exchanges. Sean Williams explores attempts by the Irish diaspora to connect to an Ireland of the imagination informed by narratives of loss. Deconstructing notions of Ireland as remaining in the rural past while the diaspora hovers in the urban future, she demonstrates the generational renegotiation of authenticity, and the centuries-long, dynamic relationship between Irish and diasporic identities. Anthony Shay explores the many facets of revivalist Iranian dance in the United States. Drawing on David Guss’ festival theory, Jane C. Desmond’s concept of dance as a vehicle for constructing national and ethnic identity, and his own constructs of “parallel traditions” and “choreophobia,” he contrasts the complexities of self-representation by Iranian Americans with the politics of representation in Iran, problematizes the orientalism and exoticism employed by both Westerners and Iranians, and explores the significance of Iranian dance for non-Iranian performers. Carol Muller considers the ways in which South African jazz musicians living in exile during the height of the apartheid era reclaimed both the musics of their homeland and their musical and political freedom. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion of being “out of place” and Diana Taylor’s theories about archives and repertories, she extends ideas about musical revival by focusing on the use of human memory in the absence of a prior recorded archive of South African music. Mark Slobin’s afterword brings the volume to a close with an analysis of the prefix “re-” and its various connotations of reversing, re-appropriating, restoring, rebuilding, and refurbishing. He concludes by suggesting that, in looking back over our engagement with the past, revival scholars might best move forward by stepping sideways into interdisciplinary domains.

Notes 1. Rosenberg (1993: 20) dismisses Hobsbawm’s explanation of invented traditions because of its focus on the formal activities of governments and institutions rather than on the informal aspects of culture and customs that Rosenberg feels are more relevant to folk revivals. In this volume, we analyze the important role that states, institutions, and various governmental policies wield in revival processes, in addition to more grassroots-driven revivals (see chapters by Levine, Howard, Merchant, Norton, and Quigley). 2. Lomax’s theory of Cantometrics (1968) was perhaps the last major study in the field of ethnomusicology to collect data from, and theorize about, a multitude of music cultures from around the world. The theory received heavy criticism, and since then the majority of ethnomusicologists have focused on conducting individual case studies in one region at a time (or, in some cases, following one ethnic group or affinity group across a diaspora). 3. See the many monographs on British folk revivals (Boyes 1993, Brocken 2003, Munro 1984), the Norwegian fiddle revival (Goertzen 1997), the Russian folk revival (Olson 2004), various North American folk revivals (Allen 2010, Cantwell 1996, Cohen 1995 and 2002,

36   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell Dunaway, Beer, and Seeger 2010, Groom 1971, Kearney Guigné 2008, Mitchell 2007, Scully 2008, Weissman 2005), Gregorian and plainchant revivals (Bergeron 1998, Zon 1999), and various overlapping early music revivals (Cohen and Snitzer 1985, Emery and Morowitz 2003, Haskell 1988, Kirkman 2010, Palmer 1989). For Central and Eastern Europe, see also the contributions to Slobin (1996). Other monographs that do not include explicit reference to revival in their titles but nonetheless focus on processes of revival, revitalization, and/or recontextualization (often indicated by the formulation “from . . . to . . . ”) include Bithell 2007, Goodman 2005, Sapoznik 2006, Slobin 2002, and Sweers 2005. 4. Filene (2000: 5–6) proposes that these cultural brokers often strove to cloak their own power so as not to undermine the authenticity of the performers they promoted. 5. The majority of the revival literature on Western European musics has focused on folk/ traditional music and early music. Many insights could yet be gained by additional, future research on revival themes in other eras of Western art music and in popular musics. 6. In some cases, even aesthetic motivations may be reactionary. For example, Nicholas Cook suggests that the neoclassical movement of nineteenth century Europe strove to recapture what were perceived as timeless classical aesthetic values in contrast to the virtuosity and showmanship culture of the piano wars (personal communications, November 2012, Cambridge, England). 7. We use the term “activist” in a broad sense to denote a continuum from “intentional” to “militant.” 8. This formulation, which appeared in the Communist Manifesto, lent itself as the title of Marshall Berman’s seminal book All That Is Solid Melts into Air:  The Experience of Modernity (first published 1982). 9. Classic texts on collective memory include Halbwachs 1925 and 1950 (republished 1994 and 1997), Connerton 1989, and Lipsitz 1990. 10. For a broader approach to ethnomusicology’s engagement with the study of history see Blum, Bohlman, and Neuman 1993. Monographs in which the invocation of the past, or the role of memory, in the musical expression of the present is a central theme include Emoff 2002, Harris 2004, Romero 2001, and Shelemay 1998. 11. In Stekert’s analysis, the “new aesthetic” is one of four categories, the others being traditional singers, imitators, and utilizers (the latter including “urban pop” and “urban art” groups). 12. Monographs that examine musicians and musical cultures in transition between local and global worlds include Bithell 2007, Buchanan 2006, Goodman 2005, Kapchan 2007, Klein 2007. 13. The notion of the “authenticity police” (applied to those who adopt a more traditionalist approach to performing the music of the past) puts in frequent appearances in the context of early music. See also Nooshin, this volume, with reference to Iranian classial music. 14. For monographs that take authenticity and its negotiation by indigenous performers and producers as their main focus, see Bigenho 2002 and Meintjes 2003. 15. Weisethaunet and Lindberg (2010) provide an overview of how discourse in different fields has focused on different authenticity criteria: the author-work relationship in art discourse; the autonomy of self in existentialist philosophy; the self in contrast to the culture industry and mass society in the Frankfurt school of philosophy; feeling and expression in rock criticism; and expression of social conditions and nationalism, as well as opposition to cultural grey-out, in folklore.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC REVIVAL  37

16. A related strategy famously used by John and Alan Lomax was to seek out musicians serving life sentences who, due to their lengthy imprisonment, had been isolated from recent commercial music. 17. For a more general discussion of hybridity and creolization as creative interplay, authentic experience, and contemporary reality, see Hannerz 1996. 18. See, for example, the website for Studies on Cultural Transfer and Transmission (www .soctat.org). 19. Burns (2012), for example, argues that the presentation of English folk music at world music festivals has stimulated significant growth in folk music audiences at home since the mid-1990s. 20. For further accounts of the institutionalization of folk and traditional musics, see Hill 2009, Keegan-Phipps 2007, McGraw 2009, Nettl 1985, Stock 1996 and 2004, and Wang 2003.

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38   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell Buchanan, Donna A. 2006. Performing Democracy:  Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burns, Robert G. H. 2012. Transforming Folk: Innovation and Tradition in English Folk-rock Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Butt, John. 2002. Playing with History:  The Historical Approach to Musical Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cantwell, Robert. 1996. When We Were Good:  The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Child, Francis James, ed. 1861. English and Scottish Ballads. London: Sampson Low. Cohen, Ronald, ed. 1995. “Wasn’t that a time!” Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Cohen, Ronald D. 2002. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940– 1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Cohen, Joël, and Herb Snitzer. 1985. Reprise:  the Extraordinary Revival of Early Music. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denisoff, R. Serge. 1971. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press. DeTurk, David, and A. Poulin Jr., eds. 1967. The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival. New York: Dell. Dorson, Richard M. 1950. “Folklore and Fakelore.” American Mercury 70: 335–343. Dunaway, David King, Molly Beer, and Peter Seeger. 2010. Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emery, Elizabeth, and Laura Morowitz. 2003. Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin De Siècle France. Aldershot: Ashgate. Emoff, Ron. 2002. Recollecting from the Past: Musical Practice and Spirit Possession on the East Coast of Madagascar. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. 1998. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feintuch, Burt. 1993. “Musical Revival As Musical Transformation.” In Transforming Traditions:  Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil Rosenberg, 183–193. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Feintuch, Bert. 2006. “Revivals on the Edge: Northumberland and Cape Breton—A Keynote.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 38: 1–17. Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fujie, Linda, ed. 1996. Folk Music Revival in Europe. Special issue, World of Music 38 (3). Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory:  A  Critical Introduction. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press. Goertzen, Chris. 1997. Fiddling for Norway:  Revival and Identity. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Goodman, Jane E. 2005. Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Groom, Bob. 1971. The Blues Revival. London: November Books Ltd. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1925. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan. (New edition: Albin Michel, 1994.)

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——. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (New edition: Albin Michel, 1997.) Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections:  Culture, People, Places. London and New York: Routledge. Harris, Rachel. 2004. Singing the Village: Music, Memory and Ritual among the Sibe of Xinjiang. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Haskell, Harry. 1988. The Early Music Revival: A History. London: Thames and Hudson. Hill, Juniper. 2007. “‘Global Folk Music’ Fusions: The Reification of Transnational Relationships and the Ethics of Cross-Cultural Appropriations in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39: 50–83. ——. 2009. “The Influence of Conservatory Folk Music Programs: The Sibelius Academy in Comparative Context.” Ethnomusicology Forum 18 (2): 205–239. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodder, Ian, et al., 1995. Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past. London and New York: Routledge. Kapchan, Deborah. 2007. Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Kearney Guigné, Anna. 2008. Folksongs and Folk Revival:  The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Peacock’s Songs of the Newfoundland Outports. St. John’s: ISER. Keegan-Phipps, Simon. 2007. “Déjà Vu? Folk Music, Education, and Institutionalization in Contemporary England.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39: 84–107. Kirkman, Andrew. 2010. The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, Debra L. 2007. Yorùbá Bàtá Goes Global: Artists, Culture Brokers, and Fans. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Koskoff, Ellen, ed. 2005. Music Cultures in the United States: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge. Laušević, Marjana. 2007. Balkan Fascination: Creating an Alternative Music Culture in America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 2002. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Creativity. New York: Penguin Press. ——. 2008. Remix:  Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Press. Lieberman, Robbie. 1995. My Song Is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–50. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Linn, Karen. 1994. That Half-Barbaric Twang:  The Banjo in American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Linton, Ralph. 1943. “Nativistic Movements.” American Anthropologist 45: 230–240. Lipsitz, George. 1990. Time Passages:  Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

40   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell Longinović, Tomislav. 2000. “Music Wars: Blood and Song at the End of Yugoslavia.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip V.  Bohlman, 622–643. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackinnon, Niall L. 1993. The British Folk Scene:  Musical Performance and Social Identity. Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia: Open University Press. McCann, Anthony. 2001. “All That Is Not Given Is Lost: Irish Traditional Music, Copyright, and Common Property.” Ethnomusicology 45 (1): 89–106. McGraw, Andrew. 2009. “Radical Tradition: Balinese Musik Kontemporer.” Ethnomusicology 53 (1): 115–141. Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham: Duke University Press. Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mills, Sherylle. 1996. “Indigenous Music in the Law: An Analysis of National and International Legislation.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28: 57–85. Mitchell, Gillian. 2007. The North American Folk Music Revival:  Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada. Aldershot: Ashgate. Morrow, Michael. 1978. “Musical Performance and Authenticity.” Early Music 6 (2): 233–246. Munro, Ailie. 1984. The Folk Music Revival in Scotland. London: Kahn & Averill. Nettl, Bruno. 1985. The Western Impact on World Music:  Change, Adaptation and Survival. New York: Schirmer. Neuenfeldt, Karl, ed. 2002. Indigenous Popular Music in North America: Continuations and Innovations. Special issue, The World of Music 44 (1). Olson, Laura J. 2004. Performing Russia:  Folk Revival and Russian Identity. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Palmer, Larry. 1989. Harpsichord in America: A 20th Century Revival. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pettan, Svanibor, ed. 1998. Music, Politics and War: Views from Croatia. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore. Pihl, Marshall. 1994. The Korean Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Porter, James, ed. 1997. Folklore and Traditional Music in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Reuss, Richard A., with JoAnne C. Reuss. 2000. American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Rice, Timothy. 1994. May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Romero, Raúl R. 2001. Debating the Past: Music, Memory, and Identity in the Andes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Ronström, Owe. 1996. “Revival Reconsidered.” The World of Music 38 (3): 5–20. ——. 1998. “Revival in Retrospect: The Folk Music and Folk Dance Revival.” Traditional Dance in Europe: Revival Activities, 4 November. Bulletin from the European Center for Traditional Culture, Budapest. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1985. Bluegrass: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ——. 1991. “‘An Icy Mountain Brook’: Revival, Aesthetics, and the Coal Creek March.” Journal of Folklore Research 28 (2–3): 221–240.

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Rosenberg, Neil. 1993. “Introduction.” In Transforming Traditions:  Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil Rosenberg, 1–26. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ——, ed. 1993. Transforming Traditions: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sapoznik, Henry. 2006. Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World. New York: Schirmer Books. Scully, Michael F. 2008. The Never-Ending Revival:  Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Seeger, Anthony. 1992. “Ethnomusicology and Music Law.” Ethnomusicology 36 (3): 345–359. Sharp, Cecil. 1907. English Folksong: Some Conclusions. London: Simpkin. ——. 1917. “Introduction.” In English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, comprising 122 songs and ballads, and 323 tunes, compiled by Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp. London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 1998. Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New  York Folklore 9 (3–4): 37–44. ——. 1993. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England (Wesleyan University Press). ——, ed. 1996. Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——. 2002. American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Solís, Ted. 2004. Performing Ethnomusicology:  Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stekert, Ellen. 1966. “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930–1966.” In Folklore and Society: Essays in Honor of Benj. A. Botkin, edited by Bruce Jackson, 153–168. Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates. Stock, Jonathan. 1996. Musical Creativity in Twentieth-Century China: Abing, His Music, and Its Changing Meanings. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ——. 2004. “Peripheries and Interfaces: The Western Impact on Other Music.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, 18–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweers, Britta. 2005. Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Taruskin, Richard. 1982. “On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance.” The Journal of Musicology 1 (3): 338–349. ——. 1984. “The Authenticity Movement Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory, Literalistic and Dehumanizing.” Early Music 12 (1): 3–12. ——. 1992. “Tradition and Authority.” Early Music 20 (2): 311–325. Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. London: Routledge. ——. 2007. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1993. “Reconstructing the Blues:  Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” In Transforming Tradition, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 220–240. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

42   Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell ——. 1994. Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis. Second Edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life:  The Politics of Participation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ucko, Peter J., ed. 1995. Theory in Archaeology:  A  World Perspective. London and New York: Routledge. UNESCO. 2003. “Frequently Asked Questions:  Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.” http://portal.unesco.org/culture/fr/ev.php-URL_ID=21606 &URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html Waitzman, Daniel. 1980. “Historical Versus Musical Authenticity: The Performer’s View.” The American Recorder: A Journal for Early Music 21 (1): 11–13. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–81. Wang Ying-fen. 2003. “Amateur Music Clubs and State Intervention: The Case of Nanguan Music in Postwar Taiwan.” Cultural Policy and Traditional Performing Arts in Asia. Special Issue, Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theater and Folklore 141: 95–168. Weisethaunet, Hans, and Ulf Lindberg. 2010. “Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and the Changing Real.” Popular Music and Society 33 (4): 465–485. Weissman, Dick. 2005. Which Side Are You On? An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America. London: Continuum. Wilson, William A. 1973. “Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism.” In The Journal of Popular Culture 6 (4): 819–835. Zemp, Hugo. 1996. “The/An Ethnomusicologist and the Record Business.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28: 36–56. Zon, Bennett. 1999. The English Plainchant Revival. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 2

Traditiona l Mu si c , Heritage Mu si c Owe Ronström

Revival What is revival? A funny word to start with, used in many contexts: religion, medicine, architecture, arts, music, and more. A “re-” that points backward, suggesting something that was, combined with a form of the Latin vivere, to live. The result—an invocation of life that presupposes and builds on the vanishing, missing, or dead. The already alive resists revival. In as much as life is a prelude to death, remembering is a prelude to forgetting. Revivals owe their existence not to life and remembrance so much as to death and forgetting because it is from the dead and forgotten that revivals are produced. A key to many understandings of “revival” is the notion of a past from which something is brought to a second life. And yes, much revival is about representing the past—but the representation itself takes place in the present. To be “about” also implies interpretation and staging, as in a theater. Even if what is staged refers to a past, it always takes place in the present. And, like theater, much of revival is about creating and shaping the sublime. What makes such productions meaningful is not so much what they point at or refer to, but the “affecting presence” that is their result (Armstrong 1971). The effect is a dichotomization of the world into primary and secondary levels of existence, and the opening of a distance between the representing and the represented (Handler and Linnekin 1984: 287). The importance of representations lies not so much in their relation to what really happened there and then, but in their meanings and functions here and now. To paraphrase William Thomas’s famous theorem, we might say that what interests us is not whether things are true or authentic, but whether such a belief has true and authentic consequences. Crucially, as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett writes, “Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation, restoration, reclamation, recovery, re-creation, recuperation, revitalization and regeneration,” revival—like heritage,

44   Owe Ronström tradition, and other forms of history use—“produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 149). As much as revivals are about what has happened, they are also about what may, should, or must happen. The past is activated to achieve something that is yet to be. If revivals are windows to some past, they also open doors to what is to come and pave the way toward the future (Ronström 2005). Revival is a missionary and visionary phenomenon: There are revivals not because there has been a past, but because there is a future to come. Like Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history, revivals make us “move forward backwards” (Benjamin 1968: 257–258). As with so many other productions of the past, revival stages what was, in the present, for reasons still to come. Revivals are productions whereby things, actions, or ideas are actively brought from one context to another to make them accessible to new actors, in new places and times. Again, like preservation, heritage, tradition, and other forms of history use, and like memory production in general, revival is a “decontextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1992) or, to quote Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a “re-coding operation” resulting in a “transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 149). By means of decontextualization, recoding, and transvaluation, things, actions, or ideas are transformed into examples or exhibits of themselves, in a way that foregrounds their pastness or remoteness and moves the production and display that is going on to the background (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 151, 156–165). Fundamentally, then, revival is an act of translation. Like all translators, the revivalist is trapped by the paradoxical dilemma of how to make sense of the foreign. He must “communicate the very foreignness that his interpretations (the translator’s translations) deny in their claim to universality. He must render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time” (Crapanzano 1992: 44). One way to achieve this is by employing tropes, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Metaphor is a means to organize our thinking, propose analogies, and create similarities (Scaruffi 2005), with its essence being “understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). Revival can be described as precisely this—a “metaphorical transformation” (Grundberg 2000), “a mapping from some source domain to some target domain” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 36) that sets different fields of association in interaction with one another (Black 1962) and produces “a spark between latent and manifest denotations” (Lacan 2002). Other basic tropes found in revivals, as in most productions of the past in the present, are metonymy and synecdoche. One consequence of having concrete bits and pieces to symbolically represent abstract and absent wholes is that much effort has to be invested in making us overlook the specific parts and the gaps between them, why such parts and gaps are chosen, by whom, and for what purposes. Metonymies can either stand alone or be combined to form long, intertwined chains in which every whole becomes a part that stands for another and larger whole, ultimately invoking vast mythical landscapes, chronotopes, or taleworlds. Such mythical landscapes can become explosively charged with implicit meaning and be used as tools or weapons by individuals and groups to expand social and cultural space and to win and exercise power (Ronström 1990).

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  45

Shifts In the most generalized sense, then, revivals are products of social processes by which the absent is represented in the present, for purposes in the future, by the use of culturally bounded expressive forms. A way to conceptualize this phenomenon is as shifts between different historic, geographic, social, and cultural contexts, between the individual and collective, private and public, informal and formal, and between different mythical geographies. In many ways, shifts are central to revival. The phenomenon seems to be, if not born from, then at least fueled by, the large migration waves that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most notably those that moved millions to the Americas. The spatial and social shifts that these led to kicked off a previously unseen interest in different pasts, memories, histories, traditions, and heritages (Klein 1998). But also, in less literal senses, shifts are central. Many folk music and folk dance revivals in the Western world have been explicitly built on shifts over time, from some past to the present; but, implicitly, they have also depended on social and spatial shifts, from rural to urban, from peasants and workers to an educated middle class, and from the local to the regional, national, or global. All these shifts notwithstanding, as long as they have taken place within what is understood as “a nation” or “a culture,” the result has often been considered not only “the same” but also naturally “ours.” Understanding revivals as decontexualizations, recoding operations, metaphoric transformations, and shifts places emphasis on the ongoing, on production. Such a perspective points to producers, agents, resources, values, and motives, and to the basic modes of production. In general terms, what characterizes this kind of cultural production? At the core, we typically find a body of entrepreneurs or “burning souls” who initiate the production by identifying something that could or should be revived. The identification has several aspects: uniqueness, similarity, continuity, and legitimation (Brück 1984). Through a number of distancing techniques, such as classification, typologization, and description, objectification is produced, to which is added values such as uniqueness and individuality. Objectification is necessary for standardization, by which similarity and recognizability is achieved, which in turn produces continuity, which may be the most important of these aspects. A historically grounded continuity is a prerequisite for authenticity, a quality mark that creates legitimation. Because few of the original burning souls can manage legitimation alone, it is necessary to establish contacts with individuals (researchers, experts) and institutions (universities, museums, media, festivals, schools) that produce, control, and distribute the necessary knowledge. Authenticity, then, is a result of successful legitimation, not an inherent quality of the object. The institutionalization that follows such procedures leads to formalization, and then to consolidation, strengthening, and completion of the objectification. All the steps in the production sequence help to raise the homogenization, a prerequisite for an effective uncoupling of the

46   Owe Ronström objects from their former contexts, which in turn is necessary for a successful distribution of these objects. Like tourism in general and heritage production more particularly, revival produces the local for export (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 153). When sufficiently homogenized and uncoupled, it is possible for objects to spread over vast areas on globalized motorways. Such processes are never one way, never complete. By becoming available to new actors in new contexts, a sequence in the opposite direction is initiated. The standardized and globally distributed products become again localized and charged with new values and meanings. If, in some respects, the products may still look the same, in other respects, they become more diversified. Hence, there are no truly “global” products: Everywhere, they take on new guises, uses, functions, and meanings.

Agents Approaching revivals as productions leads us to agents, entrepreneurs, constructors, and further to “factories” in which certain procedures and mechanisms are at work, producing imageries, mindscapes, affective modes, emotional set-ups, and ways to approach, perceive, and handle the absent thing that is to be revived. Three modes seem to be of special importance to revival production—historization, aesthetization, and authenticity. Historization is about attaching pastness, a quality central to many revivals. When pastness is attached, historization makes us look to what is represented, rather than to that which represents. Historization is a mode of production that foregrounds the absent at the expense of the producers and the production itself. Much revival is also about reformulating and controlling aesthetics. Through aesthetization, values that transcend the here and now can be attached, which may bring what is revived into connection with the eternally human and beautiful. An effect of aesthetization is visuality, a central quality and a key to revival production. Authenticity is about attaching factuality, truth, and also affect. Authenticity structures the ways revivals are produced, distributed, and consumed. One way of slipping out from the true–false dichotomy that is central to the idea of authenticity is to perceive it as a “key,” a “framing device” in Erving Goffman’s sense (Goffman 1974). From this perspective, authenticity can be understood as a mode that induces certain understandings and meanings. Authenticity is linked to legitimation and is important not so much for what it points to as for the emotions it brings about. To control authenticity is to exercise power over the past, as well as over the present. There are many authenticities. One is the authenticity of the producer. What is judged is how well the result matches the original intentions of the producer, the core of the classical Western art myth. Another is the authenticity of the product. When an object is produced as authentic, it is valued according to how well it represents the category it belongs to, how “typical” it is. This is the authenticity of much folk art, valued for its authentic origins. A third is the authenticity of the production. Here, the focus is on

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  47 neither the product nor the producer, but instead on the way in which things are done, which makes authenticity a question of production competence—using the right materials, methods, and tools. A fourth is the authenticity of the consumer. The authentic is the experience, the taste, or the emotion. What is true is what feels true, a position explored by the growing experience industry. A fifth is the authenticity of the model or archetype. When an object coincides with the prototypical model, it may become perceived as more valuable and authentic than other objects of the same category.

From Knowers to Doers and Marketers Any field or arena consists of at least three typical positions in relation to the actors’ motives or goals. Take the field of music. Most musicians’ prime motive is simply to make music: We can call them “doers.” For the typical doer, quality and authenticity are values anchored in the music making itself and the experiences that evolve from it. For another type of actor, it is not doing but knowing that music is about. For the typical “knower,” the knowledge itself is the goal. Quality and authenticity are anchored in the managing of knowledge, typically in scientific procedures. A third type of actor is one whose prime motive is to distribute and sell the results of the activities of doers and knowers. These actors include producers, managers, teachers, salesmen, and entrepreneurs of different kinds: We can call them “marketers.” For marketers, the goals of doers and knowers are, more often than not, means to reach other goals—for example, to raise attention, spread messages, attract audiences, or make money. Typically, quality is related to how successfully such goals are reached, and therefore quality is readily translated to quantity. Doers, knowers, and marketers are three analytical positions that relate in different ways to the modes of revival production. Since they are analytical positions and not roles, one and the same individual can take all three positions, depending on the context of analysis. Together, these positions make up a system, an analytical model that can be used to uncover processes of change in the control of and power over the expressive forms that make up the center of a musical field (Lundberg, Malm, and Ronström 2000). By applying these analytical categories to the development of the field of folk music in countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, England, France, and Hungary since the late eighteenth century, it is possible to follow two important shifts: first from knowers to doers, and then from doers to marketers. The concept of “folk music” was coined in northwestern Europe in the late eighteenth century, on the initiative of knowers. The content grew out of long-standing negotiations between knowers and doers (Figure 2.1). By the late nineteenth century, folk music in most European countries had became institutionalized and petrified into a national symbol, and, as such, it survived into the 1970s. At this point, however, a new generation of young doers instigated a massive folk music revival movement. They were many, well-equipped, and they soon became

48   Owe Ronström Folk music

Knowers

Doers

Marketers

Figure  2.1  Three positions in the field of folk music:  late eighteenth century.

Knowers

Folk music

Doers

Marketers

Figure  2.2  Three positions in the field of folk music:  the  1970s.

well-trained. Their activities made available more and more of the “original” sources of folk music:  musical transcriptions, recordings, and texts. Thus, the doers became equipped with new tools, while, at the same time, knowers rapidly lost control over such important parts of the field as aesthetic evaluations and definitions of central concepts (Figure 2.2). By breaking the knowers’ monopoly of the sources of knowledge, these young revivalists were able to move folk music from urban salons and national manifestations to small clubs, dance halls, and large popular outdoor celebrations. As a result, in many of these countries, there were now more folk musicians than ever before. The popularization of folk music during the 1970s and 1980s led to the emergence of new types of actors, ones who, up to this point, had been almost insignificant in the field of folk music: record producers, managers, and festival organizers. The more doers, the bigger the market, and the bigger the market, the more marketers. With them came stickers, flyers, riders, posters, and demo tapes, all important features of the pop/rock musical format that, during the following decades, was to become standard in the field of folk music, too. In the course of only a few years, marketers took control over arenas and media central to the field (Figure 2.3). The perspectives and goals of the marketers soon came into conflict with the already established and institutionalized perspectives of both doers and knowers. This resulted in a split in the field and saw the birth of new types of “folk-based” local musics, as well as a more transnational “folk-based” music that soon became known as “world

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  49 Knowers

Folk music

Doers

Marketers

Figure  2.3  Three positions in the field of folk music:  the  1980s.

Knowers

Doers

Marketers folk music

world music

Figure  2.4  Three positions in the field of folk music:  the 1990s.

music” or “local music not from here (wherever here is),” as the editor of Folk Roots, Ian Anderson, later summarized the world music phenomenon (Anderson 1997: 13; cf. Brusila 2003: 11) (Figure 2.4). One result of these shifts was a new wave of mediaization of the folk music scene, a process whereby local forms of music are adapted to mass media (Wallis and Malm 1984: 278–281). The ideas about the locus of music, or “where the action is,” changed. For example, in Sweden, folk musicians had tended to hold that their music was primarily located in the interactions between musicians, and between musicians and audience. This was institutionalized in the fiddlers’ gathering (spelmansstämmor) and expressed through its focus on informally playing together. Recordings were seen as secondary representations of music. By the early years of the twenty-first century, often the opposite was true—as had long been the case in the world of rock and pop. The prime locus of modern folk or world music shifted to formally controlled situations, such as festivals, studios, or rehearsal rooms. Live performances were now seen as secondary representations of recordings or of recordings still to be made. This led to a new level

50   Owe Ronström of objectification of the music, which was now conceived not so much in terms of the “anonymous folk traditions” of the old days, but as artistic creations of especially gifted individuals, a bow to the old romantic notion of the divinely inspired composer and artist that has long been cultivated in the domains of classical and popular musics. Another result of these shifts was a festivalization of the field of traditional music. This led to changes in the behavior of both musicians and audiences. Musicians consciously produced music for festival stages, with increased levels of expression and effect. Audiences “zapped” between different stages and programs, leading to even higher levels of expression and effect. At the same time, music making and consumption were increasingly concentrated on certain times and places (Lundberg et al. 2000: 336–340; Ronström 2001). As a consequence, the horizons and labor markets for folk musicians expanded from the local and regional to the national, transnational, and global. Whereas earlier folk musicians typically saw their own county or region as their primary working area, now the most popular folk groups toured extensively on a worldwide basis. Yet another obvious result was a general trend toward professionalization. As a consequence of bringing folk music into the ordinary music school system, not only did traditional musicians become more numerous, they also played more proficiently and were equipped with better quality instruments. In countries like Sweden, Norway, Estonia, and Hungary, up to the early 1980s, traditional music was not formally taught in schools but had to be learned informally from older musicians in fiddlers’ teams, folk groups, and cultural associations, or at community gatherings. By the early twenty-first century, traditional music was taught at all school levels up to university level. Whereas, earlier, the old folk musicians were the “heroes” or stars of the field, this status was now more often accorded to young, well-educated folk musicians. These shifts from knowers to doers, and from doers to marketers, are important trends in the folk music field. The number of marketers has become larger than ever before, and it is among the marketers that we find many of the most ardent “burning souls.” What they are burning for is not necessarily more or better music, or more money, but more ephemeral goods such as raised visibility, recognition, and status for “their” kind of music, for their country or ethnic group, if not for their record company, artist agency, or festival. Through this development, folk music has become part of a growing worldwide “attention economy” (Goldhaber 1997a,b), which in turn is closely related to the new global mode of heritage production. This can be understood as part of a massive trend affecting a large part of society, nicely summarized by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as “from the informative to the performative” (see Ronström 2007: 182)—a shift from the intellectual capacities that had previously been so central to the sensual, the emotional, and the experiential. When the emotional and experiential are foregrounded, what was once an end becomes a means: objects are transformed into instruments for the experiencing subjects, valued as long as they produce the right emotional experiences. This creates a drive for raised levels of aesthetic expression, and then aesthetics, not ethics, morals, or knowledge, become leading principles for evaluation (Bauman 1994). Taken together, these changes—from knowers to doers and marketers, and from knowing, doing, and marketing to the results and effects (emotional experiences, performances,

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  51 profits, raised attention)—represent a new order in the power structures surrounding the production and management of musical knowledge that, without doubt, will have many further consequences in the future (Lundberg et al. 2000).

Outlines of a Musical Geography The tendencies I have outlined here are but a few of the systemic structural changes that have occurred in the field of folk music, changes that have moved it into new territories, new musical mindscapes. On the one hand, it has moved closer to the classical and popular music domains, thereby becoming equipped with new formats, values, and types of musical behavior. On the other hand, radical changes have also taken place within the field itself. One of these concerns the ideas of what kind of pasts this music stems from, and why it should be preserved. In the following section, I discuss some aspects of what we might identify as a broad change from “tradition” to “heritage.” A generalized comparison of these notions, based on fieldwork in Scandinavia, Hungary, the former German Democratic Republic, and Yugoslavia, will point to some of the differences.1 We might start by thinking of “folk music” as a kind of live-action role-playing based on “old music.” What you are supposed to do may be fairly clear to most participants. But what is it all about? What kind of world is to be staged? What roles are there to distribute, and what symbols and values to manage? You have to know something about time and place, friends and enemies, social and cultural norms. You may not need all the details, but you will certainly need a basic understanding of the “big storylines.” Taken together, these stories, ideas, norms, and values make up what could be called a virtual reality world, a “mindscape” (Ronström 1996; 2007), “chronotope” (Bakhtin 1981), or “province of meaning” (Schutz 1945). In this light, “traditional music” and “folk music” are headlines, captions for “a territory of imagination” (Feintuch 2006: 8). What is staged is something rather different from the past lived reality that is claimed to be represented. But, then again, the idea was never really to reconstruct an authentic image of a bygone world as it once was but rather to stage it as it ought to have been.2 From such a world, you should not ask for empirical truth. The result of a marriage between local musics and the widely disseminated ideas of philosophers, linguists, ethnologists, and cultural historians of the late eighteenth century, the mindscape of “folk” or “traditional music” was, from its birth in northwestern European countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century, understood as growing naturally out of the landscape, producing a continuous musical geography of distinct local musics. The notion of a tradition leads to the local, with the idea that this music belongs to, represents, and is used and loved by a local “folk.” Such ideas soon became institutionalized in a large domain organized according to a musical “geosophy,” whereby a folk and their music were represented as consequences of place.3 The idea of a music that is “intimately bound up with place” (Feintuch 2006) has, from the very

52   Owe Ronström beginning, been a constitutive element of the “folk” or “traditional” musical mindscape in Western Europe. During the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a number of major changes occurred in this musical mindscape and the domain built around it, especially in Northwestern Europe (Ronström 2010). In the following section, my focus is on the mythical landscape or “world” of folk or traditional music in Northwestern Europe and, more particularly, on the ideas and stories that fiddlers learn together with their tunes—stories about the origins, functions, and meanings of the tunes themselves, about what their music is and where it belongs. I will call such worlds “musical mindscapes,”4 a concept that urges us to understand phenomena like fiddles, fiddle music, and folk music as both mental and physical—“mind” for the former and “scape” for the latter. Mindscapes are set up by establishing a certain perspective that makes us see a few things and overlook a whole lot more. Mindscapes are institutionalized in “domains,” large networks of interlinked practices, ideas, artifacts, and institutions. These domains operate in different ways, with different goals, and occupy different niches in time and space. What I argue is that, as an effect of “the intermingling of presence and absence in novel ways” (Giddens 1990: 21), the ideas about where folk and traditional music comes from—the musical mindscapes of this music— are now changing rapidly.

From “Tradition” to “Heritage” In a northern European context, “tradition” and “heritage” may seem more or less synonymous.5 And indeed, they are in many ways similar. Both are produced from things past—memories, experiences, historical leftovers. Both promise things in danger of disappearing—they promise a second life as exhibits of themselves, by adding value through an evocation of pastness, exhibition, difference, or indigeneity (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 149–150). They operate on the same markets and are rationalized and legitimized in much the same way.6 It is nevertheless important to recognize that they are not the same—that we are, in fact, dealing with two rather different modes of production, two different mindscapes of the past, anchored in different domains. To begin with, the “tradition” mindscape centers around the rural, the “old peasant society” of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and is mainly geared to production of locality and regionality. “Heritage,” on the other hand, is predominantly urban, even when located in the countryside, and is geared to the international or transnational. Whereas “tradition” tends to use time to produce “topos” (place, distinct localities, interconnected into large cultural geographies), heritage tends to use place to produce “chronos” (pasts more loosely rooted in place). The two mindscapes operate with rather different interfaces. Tradition produces a closed space: You cannot just move into it. Tradition works much like ethnoscapes or VIP-clubs: To enter, you have to be a member or be invited by a member. Membership is genealogical; it comes through birth or marriage. Heritage produces a much more open

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  53 space that almost anybody can move into. Instead of membership by birth or marriage, the right kind of values and wallets are necessary. Using computer language, we might say that whereas tradition operates like Windows, with restricted access to the source codes and with closed interfaces, heritage operates more like Linux, with open sources and interfaces. If tradition is principally in the plural, such that every parish or every group of folk can have its own tradition, then heritage tends to be understood in the singular, as “our cultural heritage.” There is much less heritage, which makes it more precious and expensive. If “tradition” produces the local, “heritage” clearly is tied to larger units such as the nation, Europe, or—as in World Heritage—the entire world. Anybody can make a tradition, but not everybody can have or appoint a heritage, which is why heritage production—to a much higher degree than tradition—is in the hands of specially approved professional experts who select what is to be preserved according to certain approved criteria. Selection is the key; the more selection, the more need for expertise. In that sense, heritage is a good example of the kind of global abstract expert systems, dependent on new forms of impersonal trust, that Giddens has described as one of the consequences of late modernity (Giddens 1990). Tradition brings about ownership and cultural rights: The local tradition produced is understood as belonging to the locals. Heritage tends to resists local people’s claims for indigenous rights. Heritage tends to “empty” objects and spaces, which makes it possible to refill them with all kinds of owners and inhabitants. Whereas tradition can be produced locally, the production of heritage is centralized and produces something beyond the local and regional, beyond the distinctive, the ethnic, the multicultural. It is everybody’s and therefore nobody’s. Not least important is how the two mindscapes structure feelings. Tradition tends to evoke a nostalgic, bittersweet modality, a longing for and mourning over lost good old days, together with commitments to honor a specific local past, often personalized as “family roots.” Heritage is about a much more generic past that you may pay an occasional visit to without much obligation, nostalgia, or grief. It is an “inspiring model, a spicy and mythical taleworld without attaching sorrow” (Gustafsson 2002: 181). If tradition mirrors the desires, anxieties, longings, and belongings of modernity (Eriksen 1993), heritage is more of an answer to processes in the late or postmodern world that promote play and experience, a shift from the informative to the performative in relation to the past.

Heritagization These changes in the musical mindscapes of folk or traditional music are great and impressive. As I have pointed out, in many places in Northern Europe there is now more folk music, practiced by more numerous and better educated folk musicians than ever before. Many of these people do not see themselves as traditional musicians, as in the old

54   Owe Ronström Swedish spelmän, but as professional folk musicians, fusion artists, world musicians. As doers and marketers have taken control over the mindscape, knowers have been transformed from definers and controllers to mere suppliers of material. A whole new musical infrastructure has developed, from teaching institutions to festivals and clubs, and traditional music has been transformed into a world of managers, posters, riders, festivals, copyright issues, and record releases. I argue that “tradition” and “heritage” are two forms of production of the absent in the present, for purposes still to come. Both are global phenomena that are “downloaded” locally to redefine, reformulate, and take control over aesthetics, history, economy, and power. I also argue that folk music, at least in northwestern Europe, is now rapidly moving from an older “tradition” mindscape into a much more recent “heritage” mindscape. Even when traditional music is understood as “folk” or “national,” it is today often positioned in a global arena. This shift from tradition to heritage introduces new discourses and redefines concepts; it changes our understandings of what kind of pasts the music comes from, to whom it belongs, and what it stands for, all of which are signals of important changes in the production of collective memory and history. The shift from tradition to heritage is deeply interconnected with globalization. As an effect of new, globalized technology, local styles are uncoupled or disembedded from their former musical mindscapes, their specific places and pasts, and made available over large spaces as “local musics, not from here” (Brusila 2003: 11). Freed from former understandings of “local,” specific forms of traditional music are boiled down to a minimum of signs, a few distinctive and highly typified stylistic traits that become possible to download and stage everywhere. Megan Forsyth, in her work on Shetland fiddlers, calls this “Shetlandising.” The traditional Shetland fiddling styles are boiled down to a minimum of signs in the form of a few distinctive and highly typified stylistic traits representing the Shetlands as a whole, which makes it possible for Shetland fiddlers to play jazz, pop, or rock with a Shetland touch and for non-Shetlanders anywhere in the world to, in a sense, become Shetland fiddlers (Forsyth 2007). Another obvious example is klezmer music, a globalized style of recent American origins often staged as old local “Eastern European-Jewish” (Slobin 1984). In his book Fiddler on the Move, Mark Slobin analyses klezmer as “heritage music,” along lines similar to those I  have outlined here. “Heritage,” Slobin notes, “replaces older terms perhaps now thought of as problematic. A prominent victim is the word ‘traditional’ ” (Slobin 2000: 13). When music is homogenized, uncoupled, and spread via global motorways over large areas, problems will inevitably arise with control over ownership and use of rights. Fiddle music from Cape Breton, homogenized as “typical” Cape Bretonish, is today performed also in the United States, England, and Scandinavia. This may eventually lead to a kind of crisis for the fiddlers in Cape Breton when they discover that they are not in control of this “local music, not from here,” to the extent that they might no longer fit into the model of themselves as themselves and thus become inauthentic (cf. Feintuch 2006). And, because traditional music and heritage music so often are used as representations of local or ethnic identities for whole groups, regions, or nations, the tendencies

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  55 I have outlined here will no doubt again turn these music domains into battle grounds in new and unexpected ways. Such changes have implications for both individuals and groups because they may get access to more musical forms to express their emotions, affections, and identities. There are also implications for the global music and tourist industries, as well as for transnational organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), with its World Heritage Lists. These global structures seem to have much to gain in terms of control over resources by promoting music as heritage. When local fiddle music, formerly understood as “traditional,” is transformed to “heritage music” or even to “World Heritage” music, it most certainly will have effects on musical behavior, the understanding of what the music is, represents, and comes from, and the mindscapes and domains of these musics.

A New Historical Subject? “In motion”—so could a good deal of “modernity” be summarized. Whole societies are set in motion, literally: Modernity is the era of mass movements and utopic visions. Individuals are set in motion, socially, spiritually, culturally, economically, politically, and, not least, geographically. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued, motion, break-up, and change is the core of modernity: “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1848, ­chapter 1). The inherent motion of modernity becomes apparent against a background of immobility and stability. If motion and change belongs to modernity, then stability belongs to the society out of which modernity develops and against which it braces itself, the “traditional peasant society.” In a common version of historiography, this is what the picture looks like: development, relentlessly progressing forward, toward modern times—an accelerating change that brings about a need to look backward, to a previous society, with greater continuity, more solid values, and a slower tempo. When everything is set in motion, history, tradition, and heritage become handrails to hold on to.7 There are reasons to be critical of this picture. In a series of articles, the Norwegian folklorist Anne Eriksen discusses the relationship between “tradition” and “modernity.” She starts by showing how ideas about “a genuine folk culture” grew out of a productive contrastive interplay with “modernity” or “modern society.” When modernity is characterized by breakup and the melting of all that is solid, tradition is characterized by stability, authenticity, secure social relations, and a life closer to nature. Modernity is pluralism, a world full of choices for the individual. Tradition, contrariwise, is fixed solutions and solid collective norms (Eriksen 1995: 23). This view, Eriksen goes on to argue, does not depend on any objective realities. The notion of “a traditional society” is a modern idea that grew out of the opposition to modern society and was, thereby, a part if it (cf. Handler and Linnekin 1984). “Tradition” is the fixed point that is necessary to bring about a new world set in constant motion. To

56   Owe Ronström praise old traditions does not necessarily mean being against modernity. On the contrary, by inducing stability and continuity, the notion of “a tradition” becomes a prerequisite for breakup and modernization. Even when traditions are revived and fostered as a means to symbolically reconnect to a lost world, and even if these traditions are used as handrails to hold on to when the winds of change blow hard, they nevertheless become springboards for cultural change (Eriksen 1993: 24). Hence, Eriksen concludes, if tradition is created by modernity, the opposite also must be true: that modernity is created by tradition. It is by using the ideas about tradition as context that modernity emerges as text (Eriksen 1995: 24). The base of Eriksen’s constructivistic argument is the idea that the human world is constituted by difference and that things can become visible for humans only through a productive contrast to something else, to what they are not. What if we apply this argument to heritage? I have described heritage as a new type of cultural production of difference, a new mode of production of the past that builds on and strengthens already established ideas about an essential qualitative difference between past and present. I  have also argued that the production of heritage, at least in northwestern Europe, should be understood in relation to its predecessor on the market of historical representations—the traditional peasant society. Now, if tradition is a modern concept, born out of modernity as its constitutive contrastive mirror image and as a projection of its inherent dreams and anxieties, could we then not understand heritage as part of a similar constitutive contrastive mirror image, emanating from the dreams and anxieties of a new and different type of society? The ideas about “the old peasant society” and “tradition” were born in the late eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had taken shape in a mindscape in which the territory was the nation and the time was a recent past, the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The historical subject that was created to populate this mindscape was “the folk.” Born out of modernity as its constitutive contrast, this mindscape contributes to modernization. The idea about “heritage” that breaks through during the late part of twentieth century builds on older practices, but produces a new type of mindscape. Its time is different, a rather vague, stretched out “past.” Its territory is another, more individually based “glocality.” The kind of modernity that produced tradition as its mirror image is no longer relevant. A crisis of representation (Ristilammi 1994: 31; cf. Harvey 1989), or a series of dislocations (Laclau 1990: 39), brings about a new society, one more disembedded, individualized, glocalized, fragmented, multicultural. New elites represent themselves through new cultural forms, placed in new mindscapes, populated by a new type of historical subject of which, as yet, we see only vague contours. If “traditional mindscape” can be seen as the mirror image of an emerging urban modernity, I propose heritage as yet another mirror image, a homogenizing counterforce to the diversifying and globalizing forces of post- or late modernity. As a constitutive part of this new world, heritage contributes to producing it as a visible and objectively existing reality.

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  57

Notes 1. This part of the present discussion is abbreviated from Ronström 2007. 2. A paraphrase of the core idea of The Society for Creative Anachronism. See http://www. sca.org/officers/chatelain/sca-intro.html (accessed March 17, 2011). 3. “Geosophy,” a notion from John Kirtland Wright, stands for metaphysically inspired world-views, as opposed to physical geography (Gillis 2004: 17). 4. Mindscape is a concept related to Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope.” As Bakhtin (1981) points out, the chronotope defines the genre. It is by being placed in a certain chronotope, or a certain mindscape, that phenomena like folk or traditional music become meaningful. 5. In Europe, “heritage” is a relatively new word that has been incorporated into an antiquarian discourse, standing initially for “old valuable buildings, monuments, and sites” and later for almost anything worth preserving. Its usage differs quite significantly from North American usage. In the United States, students studying their home language at college may now be called “heritage speakers” (Slobin 2000: 12), a phrase difficult to understand if translated into European languages. A phrase like “I have Swedish heritage” may be meaningful in North America, but will not be understood in a Western European context. 6. They also share a set of double references: first, to something in the past that is reenacted in the present, then to artefacts as well as behavior, and last, to the process of handing over things from one generation to another, as well as to the objects that are handed over. 7. A good example of this perspective is Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983).

References Anderson, Ian. 1997. “The Editor’s Box.” Folk Roots 174 (December): 13. Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1971. The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 1992. “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2 (2): 131–172. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1994. “Från pilgrim till turist.” Moderna Tider 47 (5): 20–34. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, 255–266. Hannah Arendt, ed. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. First published 1939. Black, Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brusila, Johannes. 2003. “Local Music, Not from Here”: The Discourse of World Music Examined through Three Zimbabwean Case Studies: The Bundu Boys, Virginia Mukwesha and Sunduza. Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology Publications, no.  10. Helsinki:  Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology. Brück, Ulla. 1984. “Identitet, lokalsamhälle och lokal identitet.” RIG 67 (3): 65–77. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1992. Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire:  On the Epistemology of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eriksen, Anne. 1993. “Den nasjonale kulturarven—En del av det moderne.” Kulturella Perspektiv 1: 16–25.

58   Owe Ronström ——. 1995. “Å lytte till historiens sus. Eller: Historie som emne for kulturforskningen.” Kulturella Perspektiv 4: 34–46. Feintuch, Burt. 2006. “Revivals on the Edge: Northumberland and Cape Breton—A Keynote.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 38: 1–17. Forsyth, Megan. 2007. “Reinventing ‘Springs’: Constructing Identity in the Fiddle Tradition of the Shetland Isles.” Shima 1 (2): 168–179. Gillis, John. 2004. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, Ervin. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldhaber, Michael H. 1997a. “The Attention Economy and the Net.” http://www.firstmonday. dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/index.html ——. 1997b. “What’s the right economics for cyberspace?” http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/ issue2_7/goldhaber/index.html Grundberg, Jonas. 2000. Kulturarvsförvaltningens samhällsuppdrag: En introduktion till kulturarvsförvaltningens teori och praktik. Gothenburg: Institutionen för Arkeologi, Göteborgs Universitet. Gustafsson, Lotten. 2002. Den förtrollade zonen:  Lekar med tid, rum och identitet under Medeltidsveckan på Gotland. Nora: Nya Doxa. Handler, Richard, and Jocelyn Linnekin. 1984. “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious.” Journal of American Folklore 97: 273–290. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Klein, Barbro. 1998. “Migration, folkloristik och kulturarvspolitik.” Tradisjon 1: 69–86. Lacan, Jacques. 2002. Écrits: A Selection. New York: W.W. Norton. Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. London and New York: Verso. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lundberg, Dan, Krister Malm, and Owe Ronström. 2000. Musik, medier, mångkultur: Förändringar i svenska musiklandskap. Gidlunds: Hedemora. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. (1848) 1983. Manifesto of the Communist Party. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Ristilammi, Per-Markku. 1994. Rosengård och den svarta poesin: En studie i modern annorlundahet. Stockholm and Stehag: Symposium. Ronström, Owe. 1990. “Danshusrörelsen i Ungern.” In Musik och kultur, edited by Owe Ronström, 123–168. Lund: Studentlitteratur. ——. 1996. “Revival Reconsidered.” The World of Music 38 (3): 5–20. ——. 2001. “Concerts and Festivals: Public Performances of Folk Music in Sweden.” The World of Music 43 (2–3): 49–64.

Traditional Music, Heritage Music  59 ——. 2005. “Introduction.” In Memories and Visions, edited by Owe Ronström and Ulf Palmenfelt, 7–19. Studies in Folk Culture, no. 4. Tartu: Department of Ethnology, University of Tartu. ——. 2007. Kulturarvspolitik: Visby—Från sliten småstad till medeltidsikon. Stockholm: Carlssons. ——. 2010. “Folkmusikens manus—En läsanvisning.” In Det stora uppdraget:  Perspektiv på Folkmusikkommissionen i Sverige 1908–2008, edited by Mathias Boström, Dan Lundberg, and Märta Ramsten, 207–224. Stockholm: Nordiska Museets förlag. Scaruffi, Piero. 2005. “Review of Max Black: Models and metaphors (Cornell University Press, 1962).” http://www.scaruffi.com/mind/black.html Schutz, Alfred. 1945  “On Multiple Realities.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5 (4): 533–576. Slobin, Mark. 1984. “Klezmer Music: An American Ethnic Genre.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 16: 34–41. ——. 2000. Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World. New York: Oxford University Press. Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. London: Constable.

C HA P T E R  3

A N E X PA N D E D T H E O RY F O R R E V I VA L S A S C O S M O P O L I TA N PA RT I C I PAT O RY M U S I C  M A K I N G TA M A R A L I V I NG STON

In 1999, I wrote an article entitled “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,” the purpose of which was to propose a conceptual framework for thinking about music revivals as a particular musical phenomenon distinguished by a certain set of shared assumptions, activities, and characteristics. The period since the 1960s has seen a plethora of music revivals and cultural renewal movements occurring across the globe. Scholarly interest in the subject has increased dramatically from a few publications in the 1980s to a surge of interest beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the new millennium. Clearly, music revivals have been an area of growing interest, not only for those who participate in them but as the subject of research. I was approached by the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Music Revival to contribute a chapter commenting on the application of my original model in the diverse case studies presented in the volume and offering a critical reflection on my earlier thinking about revivals. With this in mind, I begin my chapter with a brief summary of the main points I made in my original model. I reflect back on how my interest in music revivals came about as a result of the combination of academic curiosity and personal experience with participatory music making. This section is followed by a critical reflection of my original model in light of the case studies presented in the volume, in which I argue for the continued utility of my original model, albeit with some additions and modifications. In the next section, I suggest future directions for revival scholarship. In particular, I argue that the participatory aspect of music revivals deserves special consideration, given its importance as a critical site for the intersection of musical practice and social signification. I point to the work of ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino on participatory music and social constructions of individual identity (Turino 2008) and encourage the

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adoption of these concepts and theoretical frameworks in future scholarship on music revivals. I end the chapter with some observations on the vital roles played by music revivals as agents of cultural renewal and social healing, and their efficacy in making the past come alive in the present.

A Model for Music Revivals: Summary and Origins In my 1999 article, I defined music revivals as social movements “with the goal of restoring and preserving a musical tradition that is believed to be disappearing or completely relegated to the past.” I further argued that the purpose of revivals is twofold: “to serve as cultural opposition and as an alternative to mainstream culture” and to “improve existing culture through the values based on historical value and authenticity expressed by the revivalists” (Livingston 1999: 68). Synthesizing the literature on music revivals available in English (see the Companion Website for a bibliography in 3.Livingston.web.bibliography.docx ), I developed a list of distinguishing characteristics common to music revivals, including: 1. An individual or small group of “core revivalists” 2. Revival informants and/or original sources (e.g., historical sound recordings) 3. A revivalist ideology and discourse 4. A group of followers forming the basis of a revivalist community 5. Revivalist activities (organizations, festivals, competitions) 6. Nonprofit and/or commercial enterprises catering to the revivalist market (Livingston 1999: 69). I noted in my article that a key component of music revivals is a particular ideology and discourse based on the assumption that current musical practices of the tradition undergoing revival represent and manifest historical continuity and fidelity to historical sources, thereby constituting it as an authentic cultural expression. Reflecting back on my interest in revivals and the research that led to the development of my original model, it is interesting to note the way in which the subject came to occupy my attention. In the 1990s, I was a graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, engaged in studying Brazilian urban popular music. I was particularly interested in the plucked string-based instrumental style called choro. As I related in the introduction to my 1999 article, the focus of my doctoral dissertation research shifted several times before settling into its final form. At first, I thought I would be producing a historical study of a musical tradition that no longer existed, as the literature referred to it in the past tense. The unexpected discovery of a contemporary choro recording opened up the possibility of conducting an

62   Tamara Livingston ethnography of a living tradition. Once I began my research in Brazil, however, my focus shifted once more, from an ethnographic study of the current choro scene (which was admittedly undergoing a low point during the time of my fieldwork in the early 1990s) to the great burst of choro activity (the renascimento or rebirth) that had exploded on the music scene in the 1970s. I discovered that the choro revival had a strong participatory element. Choro musicians frequently told me that the most authentic form of choro was that found in the choro roda or jam sessions governed by an unspoken set of rules privileging the art of making music together rather than highlighting any one musician over another. Comparing the choro revival to revivals in the United States that were more familiar to me, I was intrigued by striking similarities in activities, structures, and discourses, and I felt compelled to look more closely at music revivals as a general musical phenomenon. Looking back on my fieldwork, I realize that my interest in music revivals was not purely academic. As a classical guitarist immersed in a largely solo repertoire, I particularly relished opportunities to engage in participatory music making as a change from my classical music upbringing. As a graduate student, I played a number of different instruments in a variety of ethnic music ensembles, including a Javanese gamelan ensemble, an Andean panpipe group, a Balkan music group, a Peruvian huayno ensemble, and a Russian Folk Orchestra. Even though some of these groups gave performances, the most enjoyable aspect for me was simply playing music with other people. In Brazil, I had numerous occasions to listen to choro revivalists reminisce about the revival period and talk about why they became involved. For many new converts, it was the participatory choro roda that attracted them and opened the door to a new musical and social world. These attitudes and emotions resonated strongly with my own experiences of participatory music making and have, since that time, informed my new interest in the participatory aspect of music revivals.

The Model for Music Revivals Revisited The diversity and scope of recent music revival case studies exhibited in this volume offered a unique opportunity for me to reevaluate my original model in terms of the variety of perspectives and analytical frameworks presented from disciplines including ethnomusicology, folklore studies, cultural anthropology, and dance studies. My first question was whether my original model provided a useful framework for other music revival researchers. Given the number of contributors who found at least some aspect of it useful or who incorporated definitions or terms from my 1999 article, I am encouraged to think it may still have some utility in facilitating cross-cultural study and analysis of music revivals and could continue to be of use as a preliminary framework. Certainly, the assertion made in my 1999 article that music revivals are an important feature of the twentieth-century landscape should be expanded to include at least this early part of the twenty-first century. It is also clear that music revivals and related movements are

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not confined to North America and Western Europe, as the scope of the Music Revival handbook suggests. Further cross-cultural analysis critically examining the similarities and differences of these cases will improve our understanding of the particular intersection of global and local processes as they inform such movements. At this point, it seems appropriate to comment on the use of the term “revival.” Many contributors to the volume have noted the limitations of the term and the particular baggage it carries. Admittedly, the term does not translate evenly or well across cultures. Revivalists themselves may be reluctant to use the term for their activities. Given these shortcomings, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin suggests that the term has outlived its usefulness and should be abandoned. I would argue, however, that it still serves a purpose: First, it provides a means for identifying and collating musical movements that share certain characteristics, and, second, it gives us a preliminary framework with which to analyze and discuss the ways in which these movements support or depart from the defined usage. Hill and Bithell’s qualification of “revival” as a broadly defined term designating a number of related processes—including regeneration, reclamation, resurgence, and recreation—that share the “fundamental motivation to draw or build on the past, and/or to intensify some aspect of the present” is eminently practical and allows us to continue to speak of these movements as related phenomena. The importance of metaphor as a means of understanding various revivalist processes and dynamics is a useful analytical perspective brought to light by the present collection of essays. My original model was based on a survey of music revivals in North America and Western Europe that tended to be framed by revivalists as reactions against and cultural alternatives to mainstream culture. Yet, as noted by Hill and Bithell, the case studies in this volume reveal that revivalists may position themselves in ways that emphasize various goals for the revival movement; for example, as cultural restoration of indigenous traditions (Conlon and Gallaugher). Particularly striking are the cases presented by Ceribašić and Kartomi, in which music revivals serve as a means of cultural healing or restoration after catastrophic events, including war and natural disasters. Significantly, metaphors such as these also serve to highlight the ways in which music is able to do vital social and cultural work that language and other cultural realms cannot. In each case, it is important to recognize and understand revivals as processes (as argued by Alan Jabbour and others in the volume) carried out through music (or dance) and instigated by individuals for the purpose of accomplishing particular social and cultural goals. This view allows for a much more accurate and nuanced consideration of the motivations and internal dynamics of these movements. An interesting point to consider is whether the processes of professionalization, institutionalization, commercialization, and commodification, noted by Hill and Bithell as part of inherent processes of recontextualization within revivals, are inevitable and therefore a necessary aspect of music revivals. These processes are often the source of angst for revivalists as they struggle to position themselves ideologically within the revivalist discourse of historical continuity, authenticity, and preservation yet teach, advocate, and promote their tradition to others. Scholars have been resistant until recently to even consider music revivals as legitimate subjects for scholarly inquiry,

64   Tamara Livingston revealing deeply held assumptions about the standards for authentic music practices. Even if these processes prove to be inevitable, we should not make the mistake of considering them as unidirectional, with a set of predictable outcomes. These processes can just as easily engender new flows back toward the participatory continuum. Musical systems are fluid, and it is not hard to imagine counterrevivals or other movements, currents, and eddies, taking the tradition along other paths. Indeed, within any revival, anytime the music is performed in a face-to-face participatory context, one could argue that, at that instant, the revival has been transformed or reclaimed as a participatory act of social-musical interaction. It is incumbent on scholars to trace these paths wherever they may lead, considering them as additional venues and means for accomplishing revivalists’ goals. The assertion I made in my original model that music revivals are middle-class phenomena and that revivalist ideologies tend to be constructed on certain modes of thinking and structuring of experiences shared by middle-class people in consumer capitalist and socialist societies is one I would like to revisit. At the time my 1999 article was written, I was hesitant to assert the relationship between music revivals and social class. On the one hand, it seemed clear to me that revivalist conceptions of “modern” and “traditional,” the tendency to value and emphasize presentational over participatory forms of music making, and the treatment of music as a thing that can be turned into a commodity were products of a certain worldview and certainly not universally held. Yet, I was uncomfortable locating the source of this transnational worldview in a particular social class and suspected there would be limitations in applying this concept in a global context. Although this assertion may hold in certain cases in North America and Western Europe, as well as in postcolonial contexts (see for example Walker), it may not be as relevant in other cases of renewal and reclamation. Within a global context, Hill and Bithell note, it is important to recognize and unpack multiple ideologies of renewal and reclamation, each situated within its own ontological genealogy, goals, narratives, and discourse. To this end, I suggest that looking at these tendencies and characteristics as hallmarks of a broad cosmopolitan cultural formation is of much greater utility. According to Turino, cosmopolitan cultural formations are “defined by habits of thought and practice derived from a combination of Christianity and capitalist ethos and practices under the umbrella discourse of modernity” (Turino 2008: 118). He continues that there are several sources and types of cosmopolitan life ways and habits of thought, tracing their source to European and U.S. colonialism and capitalism or to its “competitive alternative,” the modernist-socialist cosmopolitan formation embraced by the former Soviet Union and China (Turino 2008: 118). Those who adopt these life ways either consciously or unconsciously may come from any number of classes, although they are most predominant in middle-class and postcolonial elites. The significant difference between cosmopolitanism and class is that the former emphasizes a particular worldview, not income level. As Turino writes, this cultural formation exists outside the confines of social class, nationality, or ethnicity:  “Like diasporas, cosmopolitan cultural formations involve prominent constellations of habits that are shared among widely dispersed groups in countries around the world; but

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unlike diasporas, cosmopolitan formations are not traced to any particular homeland (Turino 2008). Unpacking the motivations of individual revival participants, however, requires a much more granular approach. Turino warns us that although there may be many adherents to a cosmopolitan cultural formation, “for any given individual, the models for habit formation, thought and practice are multiple” (2008: 120). He continues that “the more eclectic a person’s experiences are, the more eclectic her habits, and the more tools we will need to understand her patterns of decision making and social action and interaction” (2008: 120). In revival participants, large cultural formations, such as cosmopolitanism, are cross-cut by a number of specific affinity groups or “cultural cohorts” formed by shared habits based on particular aspects of the individual, including but not limited to age, gender, class, or color. The primary benefit of applying Turino’s model to the study of music revivals is that it provides a framework for talking about broadly shared habits and beliefs without losing sight of the individual and his or her socially and individually constituted identity, and it reminds us of the necessity of grounding the global in the local. In my original model, I proposed that revivals were the result of the activities of “core revivalists” taken up by a broader base of those engaged as participants in the revival. I suggested that core revivalists were endowed with authority not so much by whether they were insiders to the tradition, but more from their positions as scholar, academic, or respected professional musician and, perhaps most important, their self-imposed roles as ardent defender and advocate of “their” musical tradition. A fascinating example noted in Bithell’s chapter on Georgian polyphonic singing is the large number of choirs made up mostly of non-Georgians living outside of Georgia. Their impact is significant, acting as cultural agents promoting touring Georgian ensembles, music workshops, and pilgrimages to Georgia to study with the masters of the style (Bithell). At the time I wrote my 1999 article, I did not expect to find this level of passion and commitment from revivalists far removed from a tradition. This type of revivalist appears in a number of the case studies presented here and represents an interesting challenge for ethnomusicologists attempting to account for the level and intensity of their involvement. Hill and Bithell echo my interest in the fundamental question of what involvement in revivals reveals about broader psychosocial processes. I  suggest that the reason music revivals are so prevalent and engage so many people is that they provide multiple opportunities to fill basic social and individual needs for participants in a way that other cultural realms cannot. Among these basic needs are the desire for meaningful social interaction (without the burden of verbal communication), the desire for personal creative fulfillment, and the need to feel historically connected or grounded. As a process that relies on nonverbal communication, at least in the act of making music, music revivals are especially effective because they reach individuals through the senses at the level of emotion and association. Music revivals offer an open invitation to participate; without recruiting new converts, revivals soon wither and die. Revivals with a strong participatory component are especially invitational, leading to a wide spread of the music practice and the potential to last for decades, if not longer.

66   Tamara Livingston In considering revivalist communities, much has been said about the fluidity of roles, motivations, activities, and means of communication. Borrowing Blaustein’s concept of “constellations” used to describe internet-based musical common interest groups, one might imagine revivalist communities as a constellation of affinity groups and networks rotating around and engaging in the musical tradition, changing and shifting over time. Converts to a tradition may have initially become engaged for one reason, but they may change their stance more than once over time. To some degree, one might argue that this is typical of all musical activity, no matter the style, tradition, or genre. Is there, then, a particular trajectory or trajectories typical of revivalists within a musical system? We might also look at revivals as systems capable of supporting a number of different positions regarding the central narratives of authenticity and historical lineage, or, as described by Hill and Bithell, as “sectors of a circle where the shared point of reference is the seed, or the question, at the center but where there is no attempt to establish a hierarchy in the diversity of responses.” The nature of this constellation or circle may then give indications as to the longevity of the revival, whether it self-destructs when the majority of revivalists find the central narrative and musical parameters too restrictive or whether it survives in loosely affiliated “postrevival” interest groups. A case in point is the Brazilian choro revival and the central aesthetic requirement that “authentic” choro must be played solely on acoustic instruments. This stance was challenged by those who felt that keeping electric instruments out of choro would stigmatize it as “music of the past” and prevent choro from become a modern, progressive art form. Conversely, certain cultural critics saw the incursion of imported rock and electric instruments as a symbol of cultural colonialism and were eager to add their voices to those of revivalists desiring to keep the tradition acoustic and therefore purely Brazilian. A primary reason for the decline of the choro revival in the 1980s was the decline of government support, but the debate over electric instruments carried over into the development of postrevival styles: a traditional style using traditional acoustic instruments emphasizing a historic repertoire and newly composed pieces in the older style, and a progressive style incorporating electric instruments and experimenting with fusions of choro with jazz and rock idioms.

Revivals and Participatory Music: How Music Matters Revisiting my original model of music revivals in light of the contributions to the Music Revival volume has rekindled my fascination with the power of music revivals to effect cultural change. Hill and Bithell have provided future researchers with a new, top-down vantage point in their introductory essay in which they seek to synthesize and distill the findings presented into broad categories and taxonomies. They have also succeeded in teasing out and defining common themes and areas of interest cutting across revivals,

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including theorizing authenticity and ideologies of renewal, the documentation and analysis of recontextualization processes, and the concept and nature of “postrevival” musical formations. There are many paths one could take to analyze these themes, and, indeed, the contributors to this volume have used and incorporated a number of theoretical approaches from folklore studies, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, sociology, and museum studies to explore issues of musical innovation/transformation, ideologies of authenticity, agency, revivalist communities, processes of festivalization and commodification, and revivalist cultural politics. As a musician and a frequent participant-observer for whom music plays an important role in my personal and communal identity, I am most interested in the “doing,” the act of musical engagement and the process of signification that may enrich it. Looking at the point at which participatory musical practice and meaning is coupled with ideas of historical continuity and authenticity may provide interesting insight into the inner workings and meanings of revivals. Thomas Turino, in his book Music as Social Life, offers a new perspective that I believe holds great promise in the study of music revivals. Turino challenges us to consider music not through the filter of genre, style, and subculture, nor by its association with something else (music and religion, music and politics, music and identity). Instead, he proposes considering music in the ways that it becomes socially meaningful. The four basic fields of music making he proposes (participatory, presentational, high-fidelity music, and studio audio art) are differentiated by sharply contrasting systems of values, social goals, frames of interpretation, practices, roles and responsibilities, and sound features. Whereas processes of commodification entail recording and possibly studio art, the majority of the revivals presented here are characterized by mostly presentational and participatory fields, from staged contests to professional dance ensembles, to core revivalist performers and groups, to participatory jam sessions, workshops, classes, and camps. Indeed the pedagogical component almost always includes participatory music as part of its endeavors. Turino describes participatory music as “actively contributing to the sound and motion of a musical event through dancing, singing, clapping, and playing musical instruments when each of these activities is considered integral to the performance” (2008: 28). Participatory forms of music making are characterized by open forms and repetition, with subtle variation and constant rhythm preferred over dramatic contrasts, and a dense texture that allows for individuals to enter and exit without disturbing the musical experience. Although participants may take solos and improvise, this will not override the concern for the overall musical texture and for remaining “in sync” with each other. He continues, “In participatory music making one’s primary attention is on the activity, on the doing, and on the other participants, rather than on an end product that results from the activity” (Turino 2008: 28). In other words, participatory music is “heightened social interaction” that arises from participants’ focus on each other in the act of music making, for example, from synchronous body movement, body language (including mirroring), and an inward focus on the doing rather than an outward focus on presenting to an audience (Turino 2008: 42–43).

68   Tamara Livingston Closely examining the nature and role of participatory aspects of revivals has the potential to shed light on a number of interesting questions, including the tension between fidelity to authoritative historical sources and musical innovation and creativity. In revivals with both participatory and presentational components—for example, the Southern old-time fiddling revival in the United States, described by Jabbour—I suggest that fidelity to a historical style reference may serve to invite or facilitate participation by limiting the social pressure or concern for musical innovation. Jabbour emphasizes the importance of informal jam sessions over the activities of professional touring groups and notes that the instrumental format allowed for a greater participatory aspect than did sing-alongs in which the lead singer rotated between participants. In the Southern old-time fiddling revival in the United States and the Brazilian choro revival, we see that revivals offer a rare opportunity for communal music making within cosmopolitan cultural formations that favor and privilege presentational, high-fidelity, and studio audio art.1 The participatory music making perspective may also reveal interesting findings about how ideologies of authenticity and historical continuity become personally meaningful to revival participants. What happens when the sonic bonding that occurs during participatory music making is associated with revivalist discourses of historical continuity and authenticity? Or, conversely, just because participatory music making is framed with a particular ideology, does this mean that participants will accept and/ or internalize these meanings? How do the motivations of players differ from those not directly involved in performance? Are there tensions between these music fields within revivals that result in individual and cohort shifts during the revival process? Clearly, there is still much we do not know about the revival process, and I hope that future researchers will take up the challenge in studying this aspect.

Conclusion: Revivals and Social Reintegration The potential of music revivals to make positive changes in culture is significant. Despite the politics of culture and the exclusive aspects of ideologies of authenticity (especially those that uphold ideas of ethnic purity or racial superiority) found in some revivals, music has a greater capacity to heal than to destroy. Communities and nations recuperating from the sudden destructive acts of nature or war or emerging from the ravages of prolonged cultural suppression have turned to music revivals as a means of healing. Music serves as a powerful means for restoring and re-engaging individuals with each other, their culture, and their past. Yet the ability of revivals to work positively for cultural renewal or social integration resulting from engaging in participatory music is not limited to these extreme circumstances. The combination of musical participation and the social cohesion it can create, combined with the powerful ideologies of connecting

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and shaping the past in the present, is something that we all, especially those of us living in cosmopolitan cultural formations, desperately need. As an educator who has taught music appreciation and world music surveys to countless undergraduates in the United States, I am disturbed by the prevailing notion held by many students, policy makers, and the media that music is irrelevant at worst and mere entertainment at best. In the United States, neither music nor the arts are considered to be of sufficient value to avoid cuts in primary schools. As a result, I encounter many students whose engagement with music is limited to the role of consumer and whose musical identity is represented by the quantity of songs on his or her iPod. They may not fully realize it, but they are starved for musical engagement and the social cohesion it facilitates. This is not the only realm in which students are disconnected. My staff and I at the Archives and Rare Books Division at Kennesaw State University regularly offer presentations and tours of our archival and rare book collection to students. It is fascinating to watch students who seem to have been born plugged in to the Internet and expect all things of value to be available at their fingertips visit our facility. Many students are unfamiliar with libraries or may have grown up with few books in their homes. Watching their faces light up and their curiosity come alive as we place an illuminated medieval manuscript or a seventeenth-century folio of Shakespeare’s dramatic works in their hands, I cannot help but think they have been starved for the historical connection and the human touch manifest in these items. For them, this tactile experience of holding these objects connects them in a way that lectures about history cannot, for, in this way, they become a part of the historical narrative. Music revivals offer a similar experience through music. Music revivals, at one time the despised stepchild of ethnomusicology and folklore studies, have at last been recognized as vital agents of cultural change. They invite all of us to be a part of history, to reconnect musically with each other and to reintegrate our communities.

Note 1. In some cases the form of presentation (i.e., presentational, recordings) is associated with a dominant cultural power as much as with the style or genre of the music. In Brazil during the 1970s and ’80s, participatory communal forms of traditional music making including samba and choro were strongly associated with concepts of backwardness, despite the work of revivalists. Therefore, revivalists believed putting choro on stage, making high-quality recordings, and commodifying it were absolutely necessary to bring choro into the modern world and to compete with cultural exports from the United States and Europe.

References Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,” Ethnomusicology 43 (Winter): 66–85. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

PA R T I I

S C HOL A R S A N D C OL L E C TOR S A S R E V I VA L  AG E N T S

C HA P T E R  4

A N T I Q UA R IA N N O S TA L G IA A N D T H E I N S T I T U T I O NA L I Z AT I O N O F E A R LY  M U S I C JOH N HA I N E S

This essay explores modern performances of medieval music as a phenomenon of musical revival. The revival of so-called early music, better known for most of the modern period as “ancient music,” was crucial to defining other musical revivals, specifically that of European folk music. The revival of European medieval music, like that of European folk traditions, originated in early modern antiquarianism and was shaped by its obsession with the restoration of things to an original, pure state. Both revivals underwent a remarkable institutionalization in the nineteenth century indispensable to their becoming academic subjects worthy of being included in this book. In comparing approaches to early music and folk music, key central concerns arise in both cases, as surveyed in this essay: their origins in the activities of early modern academic societies; a nostalgia for the past and, nostalgia’s corollary, a dissatisfaction with contemporary culture; an obsession with written sources paired with an academic validation of oral and illiterate performances; and a specifically nineteenth-century trend toward institutionalization in the wake of industrialization. Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, the Western tradition of reviving early music started long before the nineteenth century. In this essay, I  shall distinguish between what I shall term early music and Early Music, with a focus on the former. We may define early music as reflecting a modern nostalgia for a musical past considered ironically superior for its presumed innocence; and Early Music, as an institutionalized performance movement peaking out of this general movement in the late twentieth century. More often than not, the history of the so-called Early Music movement has been related by partisan performers and musicologists, as some ethnomusicologists have recently stressed (Livingston 1999: 67–68 and 74–77; Shelemay 2001: 6–10). Early Music

74  John Haines historians frame their account as a revival beginning in the nineteenth century—either early or late 1800s, depending on the author—and culminating in the late twentieth century, capped off by a period of decline and, according to at least one expert, “the end of Early Music” (Haskell 1988; Haynes 2007; Sherman 1997: 20; Taruskin 1995, 164–172). So goes “the extraordinary revival of Early Music,” as one source puts it (Cohen and Spitzer 1985). But such a predictable, century-long rise-and-fall narrative is suspiciously neat and, ultimately, historically shortsighted. For Early Music—a label exclusive to the closing decades of the twentieth century, as detailed below—should be understood as belonging to the longer history of early music. The Western fascination with early music goes back to the sixteenth century and the phenomenon of antiquarianism. Antiquarians studied not only Greek and Roman antiquity, but the more recent Middle Ages, which they in fact also called “antiquity.” They believed that ancient things, including ancient music, should be revived, resurrected from oblivion. Antiquarians also theorized about the connection between contemporary folk traditions and antiquities, musical or otherwise. As they saw it, contemporary folk traditions held the key to resurrecting ancient songs. After the early modern period, antiquarian interest in music grew, following trends arising out of the industrialization and capitalization of Europe and the Americas. The most crucial development relating to more recent times was the emergence of the industrial university in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In the late 1900s, almost as an afterthought to these major developments, the expression “Early Music” became common coin. But for centuries before this, early music—meaning the traditional, antiquarian enthusiasm for ancient music—had thrived, along with its sister, folk music, as I shall relate throughout this essay.

Antiquity and Its Music From the earliest antiquarian studies, the word “antiquity” included the Middle Ages. When the late fifteenth-century scholar William Worcestre traveled England looking for English antiquities (“antiquitates Anglie”), he included cultural relics of the court of King Arthur in his searches (Worcestre 1969: x–xi). From the sixteenth century onward, English and French antiquarians called the Middle Ages “antiquity,” as in John Leland’s De antiquitate Britannica (1534–1550) and Claude Fauchet’s Recueil des antiquitez gauloises et françoises (1579) (Evans 1956: 1–32). It was crucial at this time to associate the less loved Middle Ages with the more prestigious Greek and Roman antiquity. In ­chapter 3 of his landmark work La deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549), for example, Joachim du Bellay contended that although medieval French was not as illustrious as ancient Greek or Latin, it was great in its simplicity; its speakers “expressed their thoughts with bare words, without art or ornament” (Du Bellay 1970: 22–28).1 Long after the 1500s, this implicit association of medieval antiquity with that of Greece and Rome would remain key to validating the Middle Ages as a distinct historical period worthy of study.

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FIGURE  4.1. “An Example of the Rulers or Chiefs in Virginia.” From Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,  pl.  3. (Reproduced with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum.)

The study of medieval antiquity was prompted by a modern nostalgia for a golden age. Endemic to this nostalgia was antiquarians’ repulsion by their own modern times. The seventeenth-century antiquarian Michael Drayton, for example, shunned his own “lunatique Age,” bemoaning his contemporaries who would “heare of nothing that . . . savors of Antiquity” (quoted in Evans 1956: 15). Far from being a recent idea, this shunning of the present out of love for the past goes back to early modern antiquarianism. To this day, the nostalgia for a lost golden age remains a prominent theme in the pursuit of musical antiquities. Ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay has compared the Early Music movement to Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film The Lost World (1997) “because of the manner in which both of these endeavors to construct and transform the past in the present” (Shelemay 2001: 6). Harpsichordist extraordinaire Wanda Landowska once confessed that the music of Bach and Couperin represented a perfection that she thought her contemporaries could only hope to attain (Landowska 1996: 24 and 28). More recently, one scholarly enthusiast has written regarding performers of early music: “living in our time, we do well to holiday in saner ages” (Godwin 1974: 15). Significantly for the later dialogue between musicology and ethnomusicology that is the theme of this essay, early antiquarians treated the then recently discovered Americas and their inhabitants as a kind of parallel to medieval antiquity. As they saw it, both the

76  John Haines Middle Ages and the so-called New World were home to noble savages. In A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Thomas Harriot stated that although indigenous “Virginians” (i.e., Algonquians of North Carolina) “have no true knowledge of God . . . and are destitute of all learning, yet they pass us in many things, as in sober feeding and dexterity of wit in making . . . things so neat and fine” ([1588] 2007: 59) His illustration of Algonquian chiefs elaborates on this, showing elegant, muscular warriors with delicate tattoos covering their bodies (Figure 4.1). As Harriot and other European observers of the New World saw it, Indians of the Americas, like the ancient inhabitants of Europe, possessed a natural greatness that modern Europeans had lost. Montaigne lauded the Tupí of Brazil as men endowed with “a very pure and simple naïveté” and free of modern artifice (Montaigne 1906:  270). The same word Montaigne used to describe South American indigenous peoples, “naïveté,” was already strongly associated with the good old days (bon vieulx temps) of medieval France (Haines 2004: 50–51). English observers took a similar perspective. In his 1627 History of Great Britaine, John Speed described ancient Britons as “poor and rude” but filled with innocence—“simple and farre from those artificiall frauds, which some call wit and cunning” (1627: 179). Marveling at their nakedness and “hardiness,” Speed supplemented his discussion with engravings of the Picts taken directly from Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report published a few decades earlier (see Figure 4.2). Such “patience” as the early Britons exhibited “we find even now . . . in the wilder Virginians” (180–181), Speed declared, directly linking the ancients of Europe and the primitive inhabitants of the Americas. Thus, sixteenth-century European intellectuals conceived of the inhabitants of both the Middle Ages and the New World as carved out of the same ancient mold: barbaric and savage on the one hand and innocent of modernity on the other. The Tupí may have been cannibals, Montaigne argued, but their society was superior in many respects to that of modern Europeans. For the Spanish clergyman Bartolomé de la Casas, the inhabitants of the West Indies were “the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity . . . of any people in the world” (Montaigne 1906: 268; de la Casas 1974: 38). Just as du Bellay had argued for the similarities of medieval French and ancient Greek, so Montaigne did for the tongues of the Tupí, praising their poetry as “Anacreontic” and their “sweet language” as having Greek-sounding endings (279).2 Thomas Harriot felt that medieval Europeans were just like American Indians in their wild innocence; as he put it, “the inhabitants of Great Britain were in times past as savage as those of Virginia” (Harriot 2007: 73). To demonstrate this point, Harriot followed his illustrations of early Algonquians with five images of the Picts who lived in early medieval Britain. His depiction of a Pict warrior, a ferocious-looking, tattooed headhunter, intentionally resembles that of the early Algonquian chiefs found earlier in the same work (Figure 4.2; compare Figure 4.1). The concept of a single, vague premodern antiquity encompassing ancient Rome and Greece as well as the Middle Ages endured long after the 1500s. Especially telling is the variety of expressions used to describe medieval antiquity from 1600 to 1800: among others, “Gothic,” “Saxon,” moyen temps, moyen âge, and, of course, “antiquity” (Voss 1972: 73–75; Evans 1956: 15, 20, and 29).3 Not until the late nineteenth century were the now accepted labels for the Middle Ages and Renaissance first used, and this mostly

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FIGURE  4.2.  “A

True Picture of a Pict.” From Harriot, A Briefe and True Report, app.,  pl.  1.

in non-English publications. Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France (1833–1867) is often credited with popularizing “Moyen Âge” and “Renaissance” (Voss 1972: 99), but only in the mid-twentieth century did English-language publications on music unanimously switch to the now standard “Middle Ages.” Still in 1901, for example, the label “Middle Ages” was absent from The Oxford History of Music (Woolridge 1901). Consensus was

78  John Haines finally reached around midcentury, as signaled by Gustav Reese’s landmark Music in the Middle Ages (1940). In sum, from 1500 to 2000, antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance were usually amalgamated into one sprawling, vague antiquity. Antiquarians throughout these five centuries frequently used the concept of revival when discussing things ancient. The word “revival” as signifying the restoration of old things owes its existence to antiquarian studies, as Neil Rosenberg has pointed out; he has identified the earliest use of the word “revival” in this sense from the 1660s (1993: 17). Early modern antiquarians made it their goal to restore (restaurare) ancient things to a pristine state, if necessary by first resurrecting them from obscurity (Howard 1990: 15). For example, at the very start of his book on English antiquities, William Camden made clear his intention “to restore Britain to its Antiquities, and its Antiquities to Britain” (1695: preface). As antiquarianism slowly morphed into archeology, the study of old objects and not just old literature became increasingly important. From coins to monuments, antiquarian-archeologists excavated and revived the past. Writing in the late 1660s, Thomas Sprat raved that “many of the lost Rarities of Antiquity will be hereby restor’d,” many of which had “been overwhelm’d in the ruins of Time” (quoted in Evans 1956: 29). The revival of ancient things from “the ruins of time” endured as a favorite notion of the antiquarian-archeological movement. The French author Chateaubriand wrote in the early 1800s of Pompei as a “living antiquity” that “had spent twenty centuries in the bowels of the earth” (Chateaubriand 1969: 1505, cited in Haines 2001a: 25). From the sixteenth century onward, the concept of restoration-resurrection-revival was also applied to the songs and music of antiquity. For example, the sixteenth-century historian Claude Fauchet published the texts of the songs of the trouvères from the medieval “antiquité françoise,” whom he claimed to have “extracted, as it were, from the prison of oblivion where ignorance had kept them in a confused heap” (quoted in Haines 2004: 80).4 Except for the case of plainchant mentioned below, the application of the concept of revival-restoration to the performance of songs or other music came a little later, in the 1700s. Given the antiquarian precedent, it is no surprise that eighteenth-century English academic societies devoted to performing music of the past labeled their subject “ancient music,” adopting an antipopular ideology characteristic of their sixteenth-century antiquarian predecessors.5 In the early nineteenth century, the father of the French Concerts historiques, Alexandre Choron, might have been quoting Claude Fauchet some three centuries earlier when he wrote of musical amateurs “who came together to perform pieces of ancient schools, and to pull them out of oblivion” (quoted in Wangermée 1948: 187). The label “ancient music” endures to this day, as in the Academy of Ancient Music or the Studio de musique ancienne, two thriving Early Music ensembles. It is important to stress that musical antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries viewed their subject with a mixture of repulsion and curiosity, an attitude that originated in sixteenth-century antiquarianism. Charles Burney, for example, would write disparagingly of “Gothic antiquities,” whose study “can furnish but small pleasure or profit to an enlightened and polished people” (Burney 1782: 41). For most of the period 1500–2000, then, what is now known as “early music” was called “ancient music.” Rooted in the antiquarian activity of restoration, what could be labeled

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FIGURE  4.3.  “The Virginians’ Manner of Dancing at their Religious Festivals.” From Harriot, A Briefe and True Report, pl.  18.

the ancient music movement also inherited from its antiquarian parent a fascination with indigenous American peoples as reflecting a pure but wild mentality long lost to moderns (see Figure 4.3). In reviving ancient music, antiquarians frequently called on contemporary folk traditions. To give a few examples: in restoring plainchant, sixteenth-century European Catholic authorities appealed to the oral performance of chant “handed down from a most ancient time”; Montaigne turned to popular songs or villanelles of Gascogne, France, for the literary revival of medieval secular song; and the Count of Tressan in the eighteenth century used peasant songs of the Pyrénées to reconstruct medieval epic songs (Haines 2004: 51 and 106–108; Hayburn 1979: 35). These and other musical antiquarians believed that contemporary folk traditions contained in kernel form old performance traditions that had not been written down. In fact, their association with illiteracy was paramount to their authenticity. Montaigne, for example, praised the peasants of Gascogne for being free of the knowledge of “science or even writing” and thus able to produce “popular and purely natural poetry” (quoted in Haines 2004: 51). A little over three centuries later, ancient music enthusiast Wanda Landowska praised

80  John Haines the “admirable old songs” of the peasants from her native Poland; “they make art without being poisoned by the pride of progress” (1924: 17). For learned antiquarians, popular or folk traditions were well suited to the naïveté of ancient song, to its simple and natural character. Because of the aforementioned connections that sixteenth-century Europeans saw between the Middle Ages and the New World, they also linked these two musical traditions. European visitors to the Americas were frequently drawn to the music and dance traditions of indigenous Americans, since they believed these resembled the ancient European folk dances with which they were familiar. Thomas Harriot, for example, describes Algonquians’ festive dancing as an idyllic ritual full of sensual joy and energy, suggesting a New World echo of the lost European golden age (Figure 4.3). During their “large and solemn ceremony,” Harriot relates, three maidens (“the most beautiful they can choose,” he adds) dance in the center of a circle. The nearly naked and embracing maidens are shown surrounded by dancers and “stakes resembling veiled nuns’ heads,” writes Harriot, imposing medieval—or at least Christian—imagery onto a distinctly non-Christian musical ritual (Harriot 2007: 69). Paradoxically, while antiquarians looked to oral traditions for the revival of ancient things, they also relied on academic knowledge to extract ancient music from popular oral performances. In the revival of chant, for example, erudite counterreformers in France and Italy believed they needed to restore (restituere) chant from its state of oral corruption (correptio cantus) and to purge (purgare) it of certain corruptions that had accrued over time like mold on a monument (Hameline 1997: 14 and 20). So the intellectuals took it on themselves to discriminate between what was authentically ancient or not in popular oral musics. The same mentality can be observed in secular music of the same period, in the purported revival of Greek music by the Florentine Camerata or in the French vers mesurés à l’antique created by the Académie de poésie et musique (Haines 2004: 75).6 Musical imagination could also be used to supplement historical sources. John Dryden, for example, based his heroic epic King Arthur (1691) on scholarly medieval authors such as Bede—“to inform myself . . . concerning the Rites and Customs of the Heathen Saxons,” as he wrote. As for the musical setting of his poem, Dryden left it in “the Artful Hands” of Henry Purcell, “who has Compos’d it with so great a Genius, that he has nothing to fear but an ignorant, ill-judging Audience” (quoted in Davies 2000: 255 and 273). The restoration of early music, then, apparently required literate, academic knowledge, even when based on popular or illiterate traditions. To sum up the preceding section, the quest for early music originated in sixteenth-century antiquarianism and an interest in ancient music. One of the defining elements of musical antiquarianism was nostalgia for a premodern golden age. Another was the belief that a subterranean connection existed between contemporary folk traditions and the ancient music of Europe. The premodern golden age. included the music of indigenous Americans that antiquarians saw as providing a novel insight into the lost early music of Europe. Both American Indians and early Europeans were seen as savage but noble and as superior in many ways to people of modern times. Early modern antiquarians viewed folk traditions—from the peasant songs of Gascogne to the indigenous dances of Virginia—as shedding light on the lost musical worlds of early

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medieval Europeans. As these antiquarians saw it, these traditions could help restore musical antiquities. In the revival of ancient music from the sixteenth century onward, antiquarians saw themselves as pulling musical works from obscurity and resurrecting them in order to make them available as printed texts to the general public for their cultural edification.

Early Music and the Postindustrial University Eventually, in the predominantly academic circles where the pursuit of ancient music thrived, the adjective “ancient” would be replaced with the even vaguer adjective “early.” As I have already mentioned, this label “ancient music” persisted into the twentieth century. One of the best known cases of this is Wanda Landowska’s Musique ancienne (1901), which was awkwardly translated into English as Music of the Past (1924). Landowska devoted the fourth chapter of her book to le mépris pour les anciens (“contempt for the old masters”), a chapter in which she pitted the “religion of musical progress” against “the great masters of the past” (Landowska 1924: 18 and 1996: 31). By anciens, Landowska meant the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century that she favored; but the word anciens also followed a traditional antiquarian nomenclature. Landowska’s musical anciens belonged by implication to a vaster and vaguer antiquity than the baroque, one ranging anywhere from around the birth of Christ to just before her time. Still current in the 1920s, when the English translation of Landowska’s book was published, the expression “ancient music” or musique ancienne was officially supplanted only a half century later by the moniker “Early Music,” which had become standard in English by the late 1900s. What brought about this change? The most significant event contributing to the christening of early or ancient music as Early Music was the remarkable transformation of the university following the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the late 1700s, the university had largely remained the constrained, esoteric environment it had been since the Middle Ages, focusing on disciplines closely related to philosophy-cum-theology and catering to small numbers of students. This changed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Germany leading the way. The Prussian template for postsecondary education was that of a government-sponsored, hierarchical bureaucracy. Now swollen to unprecedented numbers, the population of universities ranged from undergraduates and graduates to administrators and professors, the latter devoted primarily to the printing of their research in the booming industry of academic publishing (Clark 2006: 255–264). New universities sprang up in the 1800s to accommodate more and more students. Along with these came fashionable, new “luxury disciplines” (Luxuswissenschaften) such as botany or Romance philology (Craig 1984: 70). The doctor of philosophy degree was created, with graduate students producing dissertations in these new disciplines. Starting

82  John Haines in the 1800s, a deluge of doctoral dissertations poured in, a majority of these being in the then fashionable domain of philology or historical linguistics (Clark 2006: 183–184, 220–223, and 500–508). By the late 1800s, philological studies had become the model for yet another “luxury discipline”: the science of music, or Musikwissenschaft. The earliest German professorial appointments in historical musicology (historische Musikwissenschaft), the branch of musicology devoted to European art schools and artists (Kunstschulen, Künstlern), were nearly all held by scholars of medieval and Renaissance music (Adler 1885: 16; Haines 2003: 130–131). Other types of Musikwissenschaft also flourished at this time. The so-called systematic branches included the study of non-Western music that Guido Adler in 1885 named Musikologie. The latter “new and praiseworthy field connected” to systematic musicology, Adler wrote, had focused on “folksongs of different peoples, lands and territories” (1885: 14).7 This folk song branch of musicology, later known as ethnomusicology, flourished alongside its Western historical counterpart in the heyday of the German postindustrial university, notably in Berlin, with Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs (McLean 2006: 39–42 and 249). By the early 1900s, the German academic model, including the two main branches just mentioned of the novel science of Musikwissenschaft, had transferred to North America. German émigrés such as Franz Boas at Columbia University and Leo Schrade at Yale University mentored a new generation of North American musicologists in the first half of the century (115–116). An echo of the extraordinary economic boom that had prompted the German postindustrial academic phenomenon of the late 1800s resounded in North America a little over a half century later. Following World War II, postsecondary institutions multiplied in the United States and Canada. Colleges and universities were hastily erected to meet unprecedented demands, and student enrollments soared thanks to the baby boom and to funding packages like the famous GI Bill (Hacker and Dreifus 2010: 35–37). The performance of ancient music, previously the province of antiquarians, now blossomed in the university in the form of student ensembles or collegia devoted to such performance. By the final decades of the twentieth century, the so-called Early Music ensemble had become a staple in music faculties and departments (Haskell 1988: 161– 188). To the only slightly younger ethnomusicological contingent in academia, the pandering to Early Music seemed, and indeed was, unfair. The mood of the late 1990s can be seen in Bruno Nettl’s satire about a “scholar from Mars” who remarks on the curious habit of university music students speaking of the great masters of Western music as if these masters roamed departmental halls (Nettl 1995: 11–42 and 130–135). It should be noted, however, that ethnomusicology experienced an only slightly delayed version of Early Music’s trajectory in the postindustrial university. The 1950s and 1960s also witnessed the emergence of ethnomusicology in North American academia, initially outside music departments and faculties but joining their ranks in due course. Over the last few decades, related performance groups such as the Gamelan ensemble have rivaled their Early Music counterparts. It goes without saying that Musikwissenschaft and its

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performance ensembles, along with the entire “multiversity” system of the late 1900s, has suffered in the early twenty-first-century crisis of the global capitalism that made the industrial university possible in the first place (Hacker and Dreifus 2010: 1–9; Clark 2006: 139 and 163). Quite late in the industrial university’s development, the label “Early Music” became common coin. If one was to speak of early music, then the main question became “Earlier than what?” In the first half of the twentieth century, there was no standard chronological limit for the adjective “early.” In 1901, for example, the Stainers labeled “early Bodleian music” (i.e., music collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford) as compositions “ranging from about A.D. 1185 to about A.D. 1505,” thereby excluding most of the Middle Ages and nearly all of the Renaissance (Stainer and Stainer 1901). The cutoff date for Early Music began to firm up after World War II. With the spree of English musicological publications typical of this period came such anthologies as Carl Parrish’s Treasury of Early Music (1958), subtitled “an anthology of masterworks of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque era.” The musicological boom in North American academia and related publications during the crucial 1960s canonized the idea of early music as beginning sometime after the fall of the Roman Empire and ending around 1750. By 1973, the concept had become official with the first issue of the journal Early Music. Yet almost as soon as it became an accepted idiom, Early Music grew world-weary. Historians such as Harry Haskell performed autopsies of the so-called revival of Early Music, worrying that its global popularity had gotten out of hand (Haskell 1988: 189– 197). The now celebrated debate surrounding authenticity around 1980 focused on the presumably correct way of performing older music and which performances could be considered closest to those from hundreds of years ago (Leech-Wilkinson 2002: 141– 147; Taruskin 1995: 3–47). The authenticity debate was generated in greater part by academic scorn for the unexpected proliferation of Early Music ensembles and related activities outside academia (e.g. Renaissance fairs), both in performances and in sound recordings. In the lead-up to this intellectual storm in a teacup, the popular long-playing vinyl record had played an important role. The unprecedented possibilities of recorded sound had led performers of ancient music to make exaggerated claims, such as Thomas Binkley’s statement that his renditions of medieval music brought its performance “close to the elusive original, an accomplishment thought impossible just a decade ago” (quoted in Haines 2001b: 374). Recorded sound had made early music more compelling than ever. Here as with antiquarianism, enthusiasts borrowed liberally from contemporary folk traditions in the re-creation of early music. In the 1930s, for example, Max Meili used a Swiss mountain song; at the end of the century, several groups borrowed from classical Arabic music (quoted in Haines 2004: 244–249). Apocalyptic pronouncements at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries about the decline or even end of Early Music should not overshadow the fact that, as I have argued in this essay, academic interest in restoring ancient music has endured for centuries and does not appear likely to end anytime soon.

84  John Haines

Early Music and Folk Music At this point, it should have become apparent to the reader just how closely related are the revivals of early music and of folk music. If hagiographies of Early Music have fallen prey to an overly simplistic rise-and-fall narrative, as stated at the beginning of this essay, so have histories of Western (i.e., European and North American) folk song revival. In fact, these histories follow nearly the same basic outline as their early music counterparts. The revival of European folk music is usually said to have started in the nineteenth century, prompted by Johann Gottfried Herder’s Volkslieder (1778–1779) (Baumann 1996: 73). As with Early Music, this folk music revival is portrayed as beginning around 1800, with a high point in the middle of the twentieth century (Rosenberg 1993: 4–6). Here, too, the entry of folk music studies into the mainstream of North American universities during the 1950s and 1960s is regarded both nostalgically and pessimistically by writers who, it should be noted, personally experienced this period (2 and 16–17; Jackson 1993: 73–83). Compare, for example, Bruce Jackson’s dramatic opening at a 1984 symposium on folk song revivals—“a folksong revival occurred in America thirty years ago”—with Bruce Haynes’s description of “our movement” in the 1960s as a “revolution . . . reacting against the established style” (Jackson 1993: 73 and Haynes 2007: 40–41). Nostalgia yields to middle-aged skepticism, however, as each sees the 1960s as foreshadowing a decline. For Jackson, the folk song revival of the 1960s “became ordinary,” since it carried within itself “the seed . . . of its own destruction” (1993: 79–80). Haynes laments the lack of improvisation and “the cover band mentality” in recent Early Music performances that had characterized it some forty years earlier (2007: 203–214). As ever, musical antiquities breed longing for the past and condescension for the present. For the historiography of folk music, as with that of early music outlined earlier, this conventional rise-and-fall narrative from 1800 to 2000 does not stand up to closer inspection. Indeed, early music and folk music grew up together. And throughout these growing-up years, the concept of revival played an important part, as I have already suggested in my discussion of Europeans’ attraction to the dances of indigenous Americans in the sixteenth century and Landowska’s praise of Polish peasant songs in the twentieth. Another signal case of the twin development of early music and folk music is that of the romancero, which can boast of being one of the most successful genres in the history of modern print. It began its life in the late Middle Ages as a collection of vernacular songs or romances “enjoyed by people of low and servile condition,” as one mid-fifteenth-century writer put it (Mérimée n.d.: 14, n. 1). The early printed romancero flourished in Spain as part of that country’s bid to become the leading power in Europe and the New World. By the 1700s, the romancero had spread outside Spain, emblematizing various nationalistic literary heritages; French antiquarian collections of romans were based on the Spanish romancero. When Herder published his Volkslieder in 1778–1779, he drew on this vast romancero literature (Haines 2004: 125–141; Mérimée n.d.: 29–32). Rather than an innovator of folk song, Herder was a continuator—and at times even a plagiarist—of a tradition that had existed for three centuries before him. By

ANTIQUARIANISM AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF EARLY MUSIC  85

FIGURE  4.4. Marius Barbeau transcribing a song from the phonograph. (Reproduced with permission of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.)

the nineteenth century, the romancero was even more closely associated with national folklores, with Jacob Grimm and Lord Byron among its disciples (Mérimée n.d.: 17 and 33–34). Considered an early source of European folk song, romanceros often mixed critical editions of medieval lyric song and national folk music, as in Paulin Paris’s work Le romancero françois (1833) or Prosper Tarbé’s Romancero de Champagne (1863–1864) (Haines 2008: 189–190). For many, songs of the Middle Ages and romances from the postmedieval romancero came from one and the same primitive folkloric fund (190). As a result of this frequent association of ancient song and folk song, nineteenth-century critical editions of medieval texts were poised in the twentieth century to become the template for printed editions of folk songs. The well-known spree of folk song publications in the first half of the twentieth century includes a little-discussed work by the anthropologist Marius Barbeau, Romancero du Canada (1937) (Haines 2008: 189–190; Rosenberg 1993: 5–6). Barbeau’s collection is representative of its time and of the illustrious romancero tradition and exhibits

86  John Haines conventional sympathies between early music and folk song as well as certain assumptions long held by antiquarians, as discussed earlier. Throughout Romancero du Canada, Barbeau argues that French emigrants to Canada in the sixteenth century marvelously preserved the folk songs of their native land. In many cases, he goes on to say, their songs go further back than the early modern era. At the time of Barbeau’s writing, the question of what constituted a legitimate or scholarly critical edition of folk song had become pressing. Barbeau based his 1937 Romancero on songs he had recorded over twenty years, patiently transcribing each version from phonograph recordings (Figure 4.4). Barbeau was working in a relatively new field; Hornbostel’s landmark essay on transcribing sound recordings had appeared in 1909, and pioneers in this area such as Francis Densmore and Béla Bartók had started their work only a decade or so prior to Barbeau’s publication (Haines 1999: 4; 2008: 185). Although Barbeau’s musical editions did not rival in intricacy those of Bartók, his scrupulousness in taking all variants into account was downright philological. Following each song in Romancero du Canada, he catalogued all known versions in North America and Europe, beginning with the many recorded versions he had made, each listed like so many manuscript variants of a medieval text. Just as his antiquarian predecessors had done, Barbeau aimed to extract the ancient songs of France from the folk songs of his Canadian romancero. Trained in the methodology of the postindustrial university, he did this by using the philological method of collating all versions and presenting a critical edition. Following this learned scheme, Barbeau planned to restore these songs to an original state, like so many “Gothic temples worn out by the wind and the rain,” as he wrote (Barbeau 1937: 83). In Romancero du Canada and elsewhere, Barbeau glorified the Canadian folksingers he recorded, calling them jongleurs. His Canadian jongleur resembled in some ways the noble savage revered by antiquarians and archeologists. Like the indigenous American musicians or popular singers of rural Europe, Canadian jongleurs did not rely on writing, Barbeau claimed. Their illiteracy did not prevent them from performing feats of memory rivaling those of literate modern minds; “their memory was prolific” and “their stock of songs was novel and inexhaustible,” he wrote (quoted in Haines 2008: 193). Inexplicably, the songs of the Canadian jongleurs originated in the Middle Ages and further back yet to “the Celtic era” (Barbeau 1937: 122). Proof of this presumably lay in melodic scales (such as the D mode of “Renaud”) or poetic themes (such as the pastoral and morning-song themes in “Lisette”) (78, 129). But mostly Barbeau’s assertion of the antiquity of French-Canadian folk songs had to be taken on faith. On more than one occasion, he described how a song was rescued from oblivion. Of “Le Prince Eugène” he wrote that “it was on its way to complete oblivion . . . when we caught it just as it was about to disappear” (22). Such claims were motivated by a strong Quebec nationalistic movement at this time. In the first half of the twentieth century, French Canadians needed to assert their independence from English-speaking North America on the one hand and from France on the other (Haines 2008: 188–189). Throughout Romancero du Canada, Barbeau asserted that French folk song had been better preserved in Quebec than in France. For example, “Sommeilles-tu, ma petite Louison?” had vanished from France, he wrote, but was still sung in the Montreal region (Barbeau 1937: 118).

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FIGURE  4.5.  Jean Beck holding his handmade instruments. (Reproduced with the permission of Thomas Dalzell, grandson of Jean  Beck.)

Throughout his prolific career, Barbeau maintained a love-hate relationship toward philology. Raised in rural Quebec, where he was taught that real art “had to be imported from Europe,” as he would later remember it, Barbeau studied anthropology at Oxford and the Sorbonne. A decisive encounter with Franz Boas in 1913 prompted him to return to Quebec and study the neglected folk songs of his own heritage (Haines 2008: 185–186). What Barbeau had learned from the relatively new science of anthropology he now proposed to apply to a corpus of songs that was rooted, as he saw it, in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, of course, called for a medievalist’s approach, namely, the science of philology. In the mid-1910s, when he set out to record and transcribe the songs of his native terroir, Barbeau, like other ethnomusicological pioneers at this time, was very much working out his methodology as he went along. Early on, moved by an instinctive reverence for medievalism, he looked to Romance philology for inspiration (see Figure 4.5). In 1916, Barbeau sought the help of Jean-Baptiste Beck, a musicologist who had trained in philology. Beck had emigrated from Europe to North America in 1911

88  John Haines

FIGURE  4.6.  Juliette Gaultier singing at the 1928 Canadian Folk Song and Handicraft Festival. (Reproduced with permission of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.)

following his implication in the death of prominent medievalist Pierre Aubry the year before. Aubry had evidently committed suicide, while fencing, following his loss of a unique lawsuit against Beck for musicological plagiarism (Haines 1997; 2001c; 2002b: 363–366; 2004: 214–218). Recent research has uncovered that during the same period, Beck was being sued in Strasbourg by the husband of his lover, who was the mother of two children by him and whom he had failed to support financially (Solberg 2009). The contentious Beck fled to the United States and was working at Bryn Mawr

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University when Barbeau contacted him. He at first ignored Barbeau’s letter. After some prompting from Franz Boas, Beck responded to Barbeau’s invitation to help him transcribe French-Canadian folk songs. Like many medievalists of his day, including his nemesis Aubry, Beck strongly believed in the linkage of medieval and contemporary folk song. His own background included a stint as a café-concert ensemble director in Paris. Throughout his scholarly career, Beck often performed medieval music, sometimes with popular songs. Around the time of his first encounter with Barbeau, Beck was collaborating with famed café-concert performer Yvette Guilbert (Haines 2004: 241–242). As part of this active performance side career, Beck made his own medieval musical instruments; his collection included many stringed instruments, some with elaborate decorations (Figure 4.5). I have detailed elsewhere Beck’s epistolary debate with Barbeau in 1917 concerning the transcription of French-Canadian folk songs (Haines 1999). The gist of this debate was that each man defended the scientific integrity of his academic training for essentially the same reasons. At one point, Beck claimed his “philological rigor” was superior to what he perceived as Barbeau’s loose anthropological approach. Barbeau professed a “historical exactitude” superior to Beck’s penchant for creative liberties (1–3). That is to say, both men had similar methodologies that necessarily diluted science with subjectivity; not surprisingly, since the twins historical musicology and ethnomusicology emanated from the same maternal Musikwissenschaft. Despite their presumed irreconcilable differences, Beck and Barbeau ended up collaborating some ten years later on an event that Neil Rosenberg has considered seminal in the history of folk revivals, the 1928 Quebec première of Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion (Rosenberg 1993: 6). This musical play by the medieval trouvère was arranged for modern orchestra by Beck and performed by the orchestra of the Vingt-deuxième Royal Regiment twice in late May 1928 (Haines 2002a). The New World performance of this “old folk comedy opera,” as one paper put it, was the brainchild of John Murray Gibbon, who predicted that it would be a “musical sensation” (Haines 2002a: 287).8 Gibbon had planned the Jeu de Robin et Marion as part of the second Canadian Folk Song and Handicraft Festival, a five-day extravaganza of songs, dances, and art compositions by the Canadian heavyweights Healey Willan and Ernest MacMillan.9 Like Beck and Barbeau’s arrangement of the Jeu de Robin et Marion, other performers at the festival, such as the Bytown Troubadours and Juliette Gaultier (Figure 4.6), freely mixed medieval music and imagery with Canadian folklore.10

Conclusion The case of Barbeau and Beck’s collaboration serves as a fitting conclusion to this essay on the history of early music revivals. As we have seen, this history began in earnest during the sixteenth-century push for antiquarian research. Antiquarians thought of early music as belonging to an immense, amorphous antiquity running from classical Greece to the late Middle Ages. As they viewed it, the concept of revival or restoration became crucial, since they regarded antiquities as lost and as requiring resurrection from

90  John Haines oblivion. Endemic to this explicit concept was the implicit notion of nostalgia: the longing for a long-lost world free of the literacy and industrialism that plagued modernity. In this sense, the indigenous people of the Americas that Europeans were discovering in the sixteenth century stirred this nostalgia, reminding them of their own “medieval antiquity.” Musical antiquarians and, later, archeologists—the phrase “musical archeologist” was eventually coined in the nineteenth century (Haines 2004: 165–166)—regarded contemporary folk traditions, both in the New World and closer to home, as indispensable to the restoration of early music. Folk music, as they saw it, transmitted orally what written sources could not: the early music of the West in its most primitive and naïve form, untainted by the literacy of modern print. Following the industrialization of the university in the nineteenth century, the same basic view of the intimate relation between early and folk music continued in musicological studies, and this view persists to this day. With these academic developments in the nineteenth century, the antiquarian search for early music was eventually institutionalized as Early Music in the late twentieth century. As their predecessors had, these musical antiquarians turned to contemporary folk traditions for the restoration of old sounds. Despite their institutional differences, the studies of folk music (in the branch of musicology first known as Musikologie) and European art music (belonging to historische Musikwissenschaft) have often interacted, as the case of medievalist Jean Beck and anthropologist Marius Barbeau makes clear. They may have initially disagreed over the proper way of transcribing French-Canadian folk songs. But their vision of early song remained compatible enough to ensure their landmark collaboration at the 1928 Folk Festival in Quebec, followed by a lifelong friendship. In the decades after the Quebec première of Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion, Barbeau visited Beck on several occasions and cited him more than once in his publications on French-Canadian folk song. When Beck died in 1943, Barbeau paid a visit to Beck’s widow. Shortly after this, Louise Beck wrote to Barbeau thanking him “for your courteous words of the role my husband played in your work, . . . I know that he would have been very proud” (Haines 1999:  4). If such sentiments aptly summarize Beck and Barbeau’s relationship over some four decades, they also serve as a model for the interaction between historische Musikwissenschaft and Musikologie, two disciplines that, like early music and folk song, have more in common than not.

Notes 1. “La simplicité de notz majeurs, qui se sont contentez d’exprimer leurs conceptions avecques paroles nues, sans art & ornement.” 2. “la poësie . . . tout à fait Anacreontique . . . un doux langage & qui a le son aggreable, retirant aux terminaisons Grecques.” 3. Moyen âge is the French expression for “Middle Ages,” the period between antiquity and early modern times. 4. Trouveres were medieval song-makers of northern France active in the thirteenth century.

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5. See Weber (1992: 28–29 and 47–56), who considers the expression novel in the eighteenth century. 6. Vers mesurés à l’antique refers to French poetry, popular in the Renaissance, fashioned according to ancient Greek metrical verse. 7. “Ein neues und sehr dankenswerthes nebengebiet dieses systematischen Theiles ist die Musikologie . . . di sich zur Aufgabemacht, die Tonproducte, insbesondere die Volksgesänge verschiedener Völker, Länder und Territorien.” 8. Festivals, box 72, file 14, 1, Marius Barbeau Collection, Canadian Museum of Civilization,. 9. Programs, box 170, file 1, 9–11, Marius Barbeau Collection. 10. Festivals, box 72, file 14, 23; Programs, box 170, file 1, 11, Marius Barbeau Collection.

References Adler, Guido. 1885. “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft.” Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1: 5–20. Barbeau, Marius. 1937. Romancero du Canada. Ottawa: Beauchemin. Baumann, Max Peter. 1996. “Folk Music Revival: Concepts between Regression and Emancipa­ tion.” World of Music 38: 71–86. Camden, William. 1695. Britannia. London: F. Collins. Chateaubriand, François-René. 1969. Œuvres romanesques et voyages. Paris: Gallimard. Vol. 2. Davies, N. 2000. “King Arthur; or, The British Worthy.” In Henry Purcell’s operas: The complete texts, edited by Michael Burden, 253–335. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De la Casas, Bartolomé. 1974 [1552]. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. Translated by Herma Briffault. New York: Seabury Press. Du Bellay, Joachim. 1970. La deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse. Edited by Henri Chamard. Paris: Marcel Didier. Burney, Charles. 1782. A General History of Music. Vol. 2. London: J. Robson & G. Robinson. Clark, William. 2006. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, Joel, and Herb Spitzer. 1985. Reprise:  The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music. Boston: Little, Brown. Craig, John. 1984. Scholarship and Nation Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society, 1870–1939. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans, Joan. 1956. A History of the Society of Antiquaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godwin, Joscelyn. 1974. “Playing from Original Notation.” Early Music 2: 15–19. Hacker, Andrew, and Claudia Dreifus. 2010. Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It. New York: Holt. Haines, John. 1997. “The ‘Modal Theory,’ Fencing and the Death of Pierre Aubry.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 6: 143–150. ——. 1999. “Marius Barbeau and Jean Beck on Transcribing French-Canadian Songs.” Journal for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections 30: 2–7. ——. 2001a. “Généalogies musicologiques: Aux origines d’une science de la musique vers 1900.” Actamusicologica 73: 21–44. ——. 2001b. “The Arabic Style of Performing Medieval Music.” Early Music 29: 369–378. ——. 2001c. “The Footnote Quarrels of the Modal Theory:  A  Remarkable Episode in the Reception of Medieval Music.” Early Music History 20: 87–120.

92  John Haines ——. 2002a. “Paraphrases musico-théâtrales du Jeu de Robin et Marion, 1870–1930.” Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre 216: 281–294. ——. 2002b. “The First Musical Edition of the Troubadours: On Applying the Critical Method to Medieval Monophony.” Music & Letters 83: 351–370. ——. 2003. “Friedrich Ludwig’s ‘Musicology of the Future’: A Commentary and Translation.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 12: 129–164. ——. 2004. Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2008. “Marius Barbeau et le Moyen-âge.” In Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-century Culture, edited by Gordon Smith et al., 185–197. Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization. Hameline, Jean-Yves. 1997. “Le plain-chant aux lendemains du Concile de Trente.” In Plain-chant et liturgie en France au XVIIe siècle, edited by Jean Duron, 13–30. Versailles: Royaumont. Harriot, Thomas. 2007 [1588]. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Haskell, Harry. 1988. The Early Music Revival: A History. London: Thames and Hudson. Hayburn, R. 1979. R.  Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 95 A.D.  to 1977 A.D. Collegeville, MN.: Liturgical Press. Haynes, Bruce. 2007. The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Howard, Seymour. 1990. Antiquity Restored: Essays on the Afterlife of the Antique. Vienna: IRSA. Jackson, Bruce. 1993. “The Folksong Revival.” In Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil Rosenberg, 73–83. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Landowska, Wanda. 1924. Music of the Past. Translated by William Bradley. New York: Knopf. ——. 1996. Musique ancienne. Edited by Henri Lew-Landowski. Paris: Ivrea. Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel. 2002. The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals:  Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43: 66–85. McLean, Mervyn. 2006. Pioneers of Ethnomusicology. Coral Springs, Fl.: Llumina. Mérimée, Ernest. N.d. Le romancero espagnol. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre. Montaigne, Michel de. 1906. Essais. Vol. 1. Bordeaux: Imprimerie nouvelle. Nettl, Bruno. 1995. Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Parrish, Carl. 1958. A Treasury of Early Music. New York: Norton. Reese, Gustav. 1940. Music in the Middle Ages. New York: Norton. Rosenberg, Neil. 1993. Introduction to Folk Music Revivals Examined, Neil Rosenberg, ed., 1–25. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 2001. “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds.” Ethnomusicology 45: 1–29. Sherman, Bernard. 1997. Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers. New York: Oxford University Press. Solberg, Winton. 2009. “A Struggle for Control and a Moral Scandal: President Edmund J. James and the Powers of the President at the University of Illinois, 1911–14.” History of Education Quarterly 49: 39–67. Speed, John. 1627. The History of Great Britaine. London: George Humble.

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Stainer, J. F. R., and C. Stainer. 1901. Early Bodleian Music: Sacred & Secular Songs Together with Other MS. Compositions in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ranging from about A.D. 1185 to about A.D. 1505. London: Novello. Tarbé, Prosper. 1863–64. Romancero de Champagne. Reims: Dubois. Taruskin, Richard. 1995. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York: Oxford University Press. Voss, Jurgen. 1972. Das Mittelalter im historischen Denken Frankreichs. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Wangermée, Robert. 1948. “Les premiers concerts historiques à Paris.” In Mélanges Ernest Closson, 185–196. Brussels: Société belge de musicologie. Weber, William. 1992. The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-century England. Oxford: Clarendon. Woolridge, H. E. 1901. The Oxford History of Music. Vol. I. The Polyphonic Period. Pt. 1. Method of Musical Art, 330–1400. Oxford: Clarendon. Worcestre, William. 1969. Itineraries. Edited by John Harvey. Oxford: Clarendon.

C HA P T E R  5

A FOLKLORIST ’S E X P L O R AT I O N O F T H E R E V I VA L M E TA P H O R N E I L V. RO SE N BE RG

In 1961 when I began work on a Ph.D. in folklore at Indiana University, revivals were thought to exist outside the boundaries of the discipline. I  found it challenging to teach, research, and write about folk music without taking revival into account. By the mid-1980s, my teaching of folksong and ethnomusicology courses, and the research that led to my book Bluegrass: A History (1985), had convinced me of the need to address revival directly. In 1987, I organized a panel on revivals at the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting. From this came Transforming Tradition (1993a), a series of studies by folklorists about North American folksong revivals. These were important steps for me in a lifetime of studying vernacular music. In this essay, I digest and review these and other works, retracing my involvement with musical revivals as scholar and musician. My aim is to reflect on my scholarly journey as a way of exploring the usefulness of “revival” as a metaphor for the description and analysis of musical life. I first heard music at home from my parents. I grew up with the aural media of the 1940s—radio, movies, and records. They were powerful influences. I remain fascinated with the aural history of sound recordings. At seven, I began classical violin lessons. I’ve been a musician ever since. I came to the study of music from teenage participation in American folk music revival scenes of the 1950s, first in the Pacific Coast university town of Berkeley, California, and then at Oberlin, a small midwestern liberal arts coeducational college in northern Ohio. By the time I got my undergraduate degree in history, I’d decided I wanted to study folk music. Today I might have chosen to apply to the American Roots Music Program at Berklee College of Music in Boston. But at the start of the 1960s, the best option seemed to study at Indiana University’s Folklore Department.

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A Journey through Folklore The mobilization of folklore—particularly folksong—in American cultural politics during and after the Great Depression (see Rosenberg 1993a:  8–9, also Filene 2000; Whisnant 1983) fueled a national folksong revival that became an American popular music boom in the 1960s. Folklore became an attractive option for those, like myself, who envisioned careers of research and teaching about the music they had embraced (Jackson 1993). In 1961, I entered graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington to begin work on graduate degrees in folklore. By then, I had absorbed contemporary American folk revival and academic folklore perspectives about my own music making: I was a folk revivalist. Folk revivalists were considered marginal. I accepted this stance, wanting to learn about the “real stuff ” at the center of the revival. I had a suburban vision of the old cultural anthropological trope of an authentic culture “before contact.” This “other,” I now suppose, is what Greil Marcus, writing about the music in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, called “the old, weird America” (Marcus 1997). I  was encouraged in this vision by the campaigning of my supervisor, Professor Richard M. Dorson, against “popularizers.” The “fakelore” that he railed against included the work of folksong revivalists (Dorson 1949).1 Dorson was the leading advocate for making folklore an independent academic discipline. The American Folklore Society had been founded in 1888, but until the postwar era of the mid-twentieth century its leadership came from other academic disciplines— mainly the students of the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and the Harvard ballad scholar James Frances Child, that school’s first professor of English. Folklore was an area of specialists. Anthropologists reported on their research on third-world indigenous cultures’ exotic arts as folklore, while literary scholars reported on the oral traditions of the unlettered and the past in their own and cognate first-world cultures as folklore. Until 1966 the American Folklore Society rotated its yearly meetings between the American Anthropological Society and the Modern Language Association. Folklore was taught mainly as part of the curricula of departments of anthropology, language, and literature. In the United States, the awarding of separate doctoral degrees in folklore began at Indiana University in 1954. The graduates of this program and several others that began soon afterward created and reflected the push to establish folklore as a separate discipline with a unique perspective. The first widely used classroom textbook came in 1965, Alan Dundes’s Study of Folklore, and with it his definition of a “folk group”: “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is—it could be a common occupation, language, or religion—but what is important is that a group . . . have some traditions that it calls its own” (Dundes 1965: 2). The folk revival scenes I’d participated in certainly fit Dundes’s definition of “folk groups.” They were heterogeneous agglomerations of individuals drawn to a

96   Neil V. Rosenberg constantly changing multifaceted music culture that, like all music cultures, incorporated repertoires and performance practices that had traditional aspects. But because of their association with “fakelore,” it was not easy in the folklore program at Indiana to study revivals, or indeed to study any kind of music beyond the ballad traditions canonized by Child. Fortunately, a first-class world music collection was associated with the Folklore Program—the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, renamed the Archives of Traditional Music in 1965. It had come to Indiana from Columbia University in 1948 with its director, the anthropologist and comparative musicologist George Herzog. Herzog retired in 1961. His place was taken by George List, who taught introductory courses in ethnomusicology (a newly named discipline), transcription, and analysis. In 1962, Alan P. Merriam joined the Anthropology Department and began teaching other ethnomusicology courses. I took all the ethnomusicology available to me as a folklore student. But I was unable to do much field research on musical topics, for at that time the local scenes in which I was interested weren’t exotic enough for most ethnomusicologists. I knew what was happening locally—indeed, I was participating in it: buying and selling instruments, learning songs and tunes, trading tapes, going to jam sessions, buying records, booking bands, and so on—but had little opportunity to step back, observe, and report (Rosenberg 1995c). In Bloomington, I participated in the local folk revival scene (Rosenberg 1995b). At the same time, I became involved in a larger regional bluegrass music scene. I thought then that this brought me closer to “the real stuff.” Bluegrass had deep southern rural origins and mainly working-class participants. It was a gritty “other” with an antique repertoire and connections with the larger world of country music. Still informally called hillbilly music by some and directly descended from the old-time music in Smith’s Anthology, it seemed like the logical contemporary folk music. In the early 1960s, bluegrass music was a music being made and consumed by people who were mainly between the ages of twenty and fifty. The form was less than two decades old. I embraced it as a “new thing,” an essentially young and progressive genre with close ties to the old hillbilly music as well as with other contemporary forms like jazz, blues, and rockabilly. Between 1961 and 1968, bluegrass music underwent a cultural transformation as it was first “discovered” by folk revivalists and then experienced its own revival. This was part of a larger American vernacular music (bluegrass, old-time, blues, Cajun, etc.) movement that included folklorists whose work I admired, like Archie Green and D. K. Wilgus (Porterfield 2004). In 1966, I began writing articles and reviews for Bluegrass Unlimited, a then new monthly that is still publishing today, and drafted the first of many bluegrass liner notes.2 In 1968 I moved to St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, Canada’s newest province, to teach folklore and to organize the folklore archive founded by Herbert Halpert, head of the new Department of Folklore at the provincial university, Memorial.3 Plunged into a new and rapidly evolving cultural milieu—formerly a British colony, Newfoundland

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had joined Canada less than two decades before—I was teaching bright young people and working with new colleagues, all seeking to comprehend, confront, and adjust to living in a postcolonial world. At Memorial, I taught “Introduction to Folksong” each semester and worked full-time as archivist of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA). To teach the course effectively, I began studying Newfoundland’s musical traditions. MUNFLA was an important resource in a project of educating young Newfoundlanders about their culture (Halpert and Rosenberg 1974, 1976). As MUNFLA’s archivist (1968–1975) and director (1976–1990), I worked to create collections and indices for its musical holdings (Rosenberg 1991c). Newfoundland, the world’s sixteenth largest island and North America’s easternmost landmass, became England’s first permanent colony because of its fisheries, which for centuries furnished cod to world markets. Fishers, first from southwest England and later from Ireland, established small communities along its thousands of miles of jagged coastlines, eventually expanding northward to the mainland Canadian coast of Labrador (today the province’s official name is “Newfoundland and Labrador”). These coastal villages and towns are called “outports,” which the Dictionary of Newfoundland English defines as “coastal settlement(s) other than the chief port of St. John’s” (Story, Kirwin, and Widdowson 1990: 863). There are few settlements in the province that are not close to the coast; with the exception of a few paper and mining company towns in the interior, the outports constitute its nonurban hinterland. My research on folksong in Newfoundland focused on the music of the outports (Casey, Rosenberg, and Wareham 1972). In doing so, I embraced the conventional academic and local intellectual wisdom of the time that gave high value to the populist authenticity of these communities (Overton 1988). As before, my focus was on the “real stuff.” Newfoundland’s folk revival had deep history (they all do!) but was undergoing rapid and extensive change. Once again I became part of the local scene, both as consumer and performer. It would be several decades before I felt comfortable studying this revivalism, an important aspect of Newfoundland’s musical traditions. At the same time, my continuing activity as a performer of and writer about bluegrass kept me in touch with that scene in the United States. It also led me to a related scene in Canada’s neighboring maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Consequently, in the early 1970s I became interested in the relationships between folk and country music in that region. Concentrating my research in small towns and rural districts, I avoided college and university communities. Again I set out to study, properly as I thought, the “real stuff ” (Rosenberg 1976, 2010). This research shaped my annual “Introduction to Folksong” course (Rosenberg 1984) as well as my other courses, including “Oral History,” “Ethnomusicology,” and “Canadian Folklore.” Teaching folklore studies gave me a valuable holistic perspective of culture from the bottom up. In particular, I came to understand music deeply through teaching the study of repertoire—how it is created and used, its history and logic. Historically, folklore studies had focused on texts, but by the 1970s the definition of folklore as artistic

98   Neil V. Rosenberg communication in small groups led to a widening of perspective (Ben-Amos 1972). The folklore theorist Alan Dundes argued for three levels of analysis: text, texture and context (Dundes 1964). Still, as D. K. Wilgus pointed out in 1972, the text (in Dundes’s broad sense) remained the key focus, the starting point for folklore research. At this time, my primary concern was to learn how things worked in what I began to think of as musical systems. Structuralism, a popular theoretical approach of the time, shaped my thinking. Another influence was Merriam’s Anthropology of Music, my first ethnomusicology textbook. I discovered useful process models in the work of Anthony F. C. Wallace (1956) and Kenneth S. Goldstein (1971) and began building my own models. The one that most fully reflected my interests was an essay titled “Big Fish, Small Pond: Country Musicians and Their Markets” (Rosenberg 1986). I began work on this model during the 1970s after studying the history and discography of a popular bluegrass band, the Osborne Brothers (Rosenberg 1967, 1971, 1972). Subsequently, I  incorporated data from my research in Atlantic Canada (the standard Canadian term for the region encompassing Newfoundland and the Maritimes) and drew heavily on new research on early country music history. My thinking was also shaped by ideas and debates sparked in the classroom by early drafts of the model and two books I used regularly as texts: Glassie, Ives, and Szwed’s Folksongs and Their Makers (1970) and Charles Keil’s Urban Blues (1966). Here’s how I introduced my work in “Big Fish”: I have sought to develop a model which explains the ways in which such professionalized music, in this case country music, and folk expression are intertwined, without assuming an evolutionary historical process for the form as a whole. Instead, I believe, the very nature of a professionalized music which draws its workers from an identifiable group will inevitably affect and reflect the music traditions of the group. In other words, the music continues to function as folk music. In essence, it speaks for the group, articulating the concerns, beliefs, attitudes and world view of the group. Both content analysis and audience interviews support this point: it is not the song, its text (or the performer) which is inherently traditional, but the role of that item, the behaviors surrounding it, its function, its use and import. (1986: 152–153)

The model was presented as a graph, a visual metaphor, in which one axis was “musician’s status” (“apprentice”, “journeyman”, “craftsman”, “celebrity”) and the other “market level/scope” (“local”, “regional”, “national”, “international”). I discussed the way, when performers move between levels of status and market, social and economic forces shape musical styles and repertoires; I argued that “performers manipulate their repertoire to advance their career while at the same time presenting songs which are ideologically and stylistically acceptable to their audiences.” Basically this was a way of explaining how folksong repertoires are affected by the processes of popular culture. My arguments in “Big Fish” were shaped by the then new “performance approach,” which looked at folklore as “aesthetically marked performances” (Fine 1996: 554). When studying texts from this contextual perspective, folklorists generally focused their

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research on small group performer-audience relationships—the local, the face-to-face. In closing, I pointed out that because this study included performer-audience relationships in nonlocal, mass-mediated markets, it might present a dilemma for folklorists. However, to me it seemed a necessary widening of perspective.

Facing Revival Until the mid-1980s, I generally avoided using the term “revival” in my research and writing. Indeed, for folklorists (and ethnomusicologists—see Livingston 1999: 68) the term often seemed little more than a put-down or brush-off. Still, by that time I was including folk revival in my “Introduction to Folksong” course. I  wrote about the course in 1984, giving an outline and a bibliography, briefly prefacing each section. Of the final section, “Revival,” which ended the semester, I said: “Here we turn to a historical consideration of the North American folksong revival, and discuss this and similar movements in terms of several useful models constructed by Anthony F. C. Wallace and Richard Peterson. The phenomenon of folk festivals and folklorists’ involvement in it is also considered” (Rosenberg 1984: 123). The 1956 essay on revitalization movements by Wallace, an anthropologist, and the 1972 jazz history outline by Peterson, a sociologist, gave structure to class discussions. Two other readings came from folklorists. David Engle’s “Sketch,” about a German folk revival singer (1981), provided a rare case study. Camp and Lloyd’s influential “Six Reasons Not to Produce Folklife Festivals” (1980) had appeared in the first collection of essays to emerge from the American public folklore movement (Collins 1980). In arguing against the music-dominated festivals as means for advancing the cultural-political agendas of public folklore, they were forced to acknowledge the importance of the revival that had nurtured them. I found this a useful way of addressing the still largely undocumented history of folk revivals. My first substantial writing about folk revival came in Bluegrass: A History (1985: 166– 202). The book was grounded in the process models I’d studied or built myself, but it didn’t discuss theory much, for its aim was to trace the history of this musical genre. The folk revival boom of the fifties and sixties had an important place in that narrative. My first stab at speaking in more theoretical terms about revival came in 1991. Writing about the history of a banjo tune associated with labor strife in the American South, I noted that the same aesthetics were found in the perspectives and agendas of both folklorists and revivalists in mid-twentieth-century America (Rosenberg 1991a). Around the same time, I returned to Newfoundland music in the first of a series of articles that focused on the urban middle-class intellectual crafting of the rural outport image that was central to postcolonial dialogues about the regional culture (Rosenberg 1991b). New concepts I found useful in this analysis included Raymond Williams’s “key text” and Philip Bohlman’s “canon” (Williams 1961: 13; Bohlman 1988: 104–120).4 I attributed an earlier lack of interest in (or downright antipathy toward) this material on the

100   Neil V. Rosenberg part of folklore scholars to its “popular nature” (Rosenberg 1991b: 46), thus sidestepping “revival” in my analysis. At this point I was editing a book of essays by fifteen scholars on North American folk music revivals, Transforming Tradition (1993a). Its introduction sketched the history of North American folksong revivals, culminating in popular stereotypes and understandings of “folksong” and “folksinger.” Turning to the intellectual threads in this history, I discussed two key concepts: “authenticity” and “revival.” A section titled “The Shifting Sands of Folk Authenticity” traced the intellectual outline of folk music studies to show how ideology and technology had shaped the collection and publication of folk music in the twentieth century.5 This introduced the intellectual arena in which the fifteen contributors to this book were situated (1993a: 10–17). The next section focused on the connections between “revival” and other key words associated with it like “movement” and “popular culture.” All the contributors agreed that “folk music revivals . . . constitute an urban middle-class intellectual community,” but each tended to embrace one of two contrasting perspectives. Some viewed the revival community as a social elite, while others saw it as a social consensus (1993a: 17–21). This still seems an important contrast. Left unexamined was a major question: what does “community” mean? I’ll return to these points. Transforming Tradition’s essays were grouped in three parts, each focusing on a different aspect of North American folk music revivals. The first covered “The Great Boom,” the era from around 1958, when the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” became a pop hit, to 1965, when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Its authors included older World War II veterans like the producer Kenny Goldstein and the scholar-teacher-activist Archie Green, who were at the center of the American scene in those years and were what Tamara Livingston would later call “core revivalists” (2001: 56). When I described “the small San Francisco network of record collectors” in which Archie Green “began his intellectual quest” (1993a: 29) I neglected to mention that the network included Harry Smith. In 1993, Smith was not nearly as well known as he became after 1997, when Smithsonian/Folkways reissued his Anthology of American Folk Music. The other three contributors to this section came to the revival as teens in the fifties and sixties. The great boom was essentially an American event, and in those essays was viewed from American eyes. This era in popular music saw the industry dominated internationally from America, so that when “folk music” went pop, it also went international. David Engle’s 1981 study of a German folk revival singer had examined this phenomenon. Later, I would write about how it introduced genres like bluegrass to international listeners. Today’s flourishing bluegrass scenes, particularly in Europe, date from that great boom (Rosenberg 1998b).6 Transforming Tradition’s second part, “The New Aesthetic” (1993a: 123–175), focused on developments after the great boom, recognizing its international dimension by shifting the focus to Canada. This part’s three articles illustrated the ways a particular American pop boom affected music in another country and its heading came from Ellen Stekert’s 1966 article (reprinted in the first part) “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban

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Folksong Movement: 1930–1966.” Writing from an insider’s point of view about boom subcultures, Stekert had coined the term “new aesthetic” to describe the music-culture of urban middle-class folk music revivalists—a synthesis of “folk, classical, jazz, and pop styles” (Stekert 1993: 99–100). The third and final part of Transforming Tradition was titled “Named-Systems Revivals” (1993a: 177–293), a term coined to describe music-cultures that are “aggregates of shared repertoire, instrumentation, and performance style generally perceived as being historically and culturally bounded by such factors as class, ethnicity, race, religion, region, commerce, and art” (177). I stressed the importance of the act of naming because close study of the word “bluegrass,” inspired by Archie Green’s earlier work on “hillbilly,” had demonstrated to me how naming can affect any system (Green 1965; Rosenberg 1985: 95–131). When “revivalists become part of the system,” I suggested, it may become “gentrified.” The politics of change when this happens entails reaching “agreement about the cultural values that the system is thought to embody” (Rosenberg 1993a: 178). The seven essays presented case studies of the cultural politics involved in such processes. From one, Burt Feintuch’s “Musical Revival as Musical Transformation,” (2003: 183–193) came the idea for the title of the book. The authors in this part of the book generally wrote not of “folk music” but “revivals.” This shift of gaze was probably shorthand: “folk” was assumed, “revival” included it. The assumption had the unanticipated effect of making the field of inquiry accessible to scholars for whom “revival” was more important than “folk.” Transforming Tradition was meant to be a utilitarian volume. I hoped its introduction, detailed general index, and extensive bibliography would encourage further research and study.

Revival as Paradigm “Revival” has become a familiar descriptive term in both popular and academic discourse about music. In a 1996 entry on “revivalism” for American Folklore:  An Encyclopedia, I noted that “folklorists have been among the principal folklore revivalists” and concluded that “the possibility of revivalism always exists whenever anyone identifies something as folklore” (Brunvand 1996: 623). Perhaps more important than the contents of that essay was the very fact that the encyclopedia’s editor, who had earlier called revivals “largely irrelevant to the study of folklore,” included the topic (Brunvand 1979). This growing interest was also reflected in Tamara E. Livingston’s article “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,” published in 1999 in Ethnomusicology. Livingston called revivals “middle-class phenomena” and stressed their oppositional nature as cultural alternatives (Livingston 1999:  66). Her model offered a “basic recipe” with “six ingredients” found in revivals—some “required,” others left to “individual discretion”—that make each revival “a unique creation” (69). This framework enabled her to sift through key issues that had arisen in the new writing

102   Neil V. Rosenberg about revivals. Her list of ingredients included such useful descriptive terms as “core revivalists.” Transforming Tradition’s introduction discussed only a few of the various issues and ideas presented in its fifteen essays. Livingston’s “recipe” synthesized material from these and other publications to offer a state-of-the art framework for revival studies. Indeed, there is much to read about revivals because, as she points out, revivals have a “strong pedagogical component” (1999: 73). In the decade or so since Livingston’s “recipe” was published, a large number of books about folk music revival have appeared. This reflects the demographics of interest in revival, as the aging baby boomers who experienced the great boom enter their anecdotage. In a later essay for The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Livingston reprised and streamlined her general theories and made an important point: “cultural politics are inherent in music revivals regardless of the type of music being revived or the intentions of those involved” (2001: 56). Indeed, as she points out, “revival industries” have an important role. But any art that becomes part of a commodification process also becomes the object of cultural politics.

Cultural Politics When John Cohen, a core revivalist in New York’s Greenwich Village during the late 1950s and early 1960s, recalled his life in a Third Avenue loft, he populated his description with famous avant-garde photographers (Robert Frank), beat writers (Allen Ginsberg), and folk pop singers (Bob Dylan) as well as the old-time musicians from Appalachia and Peru with whom he was involved through his own art (John Cohen 2001).7 All were, in their different ways, involved in the complex cultural dialogues of that time and place. The diversity of social and cultural connections made for a volatile and fascinating mixture of artistic creativities. Scholars and critics of the arts must work hard to describe products, like music, shaped by these diverse volatilities. Charlotte Frisbie’s statement to fellow ethnomusicologists, quoted at the end of Transforming Tradition’s part on authenticity, which stressed “interests in critiquing our own history, [and] in gender, the practice and problems of representation, and the connections between music, political policy, power relations and identity” (Frisbie 1990:2; Rosenberg 1993a: 17), remains relevant. The issues Frisbie mentioned, which along with others are often simply described broadly as “cultural politics,” shaped my thoughts as I continued to write about my research, and review the work of other researchers. I was beginning to think that the sociocultural processes involved in studying and presenting issues surrounding contemporary folk music could be more complex than the paradigm or concept of revival might lead us to believe. It seemed important to recognize and address hitherto hidden or assumed aspects of the dialogues in which Cohen and others, including myself, had been engaged.

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My first step in this process came in a contribution to a book about fieldwork epiphanies; I told how my epiphany lay in the discovery that my agendas as a fieldworker in the Maritimes differed from those of local intellectuals and colleagues and from the perspectives of the musicians I’d been researching. “Folklore research,” I  said after describing my experiences, “invariably reveals the proprietary interests of the people studied and all of us who study or are otherwise involved with them” (Rosenberg 1996: 144). I viewed such proprietary interests as part of “cultural politics” in my work as recorded sound reviews editor for the Journal of American Folklore from 1991 to 1995. Three review essays I wrote there experimented with metaphors of process. The first discussed reissues. I concluded that “reissuing is an enterprise of historical revisionism in which recordings, discographies, and books on music history, ethnography, and performance techniques are linked” (Rosenberg 1993b: 202). Revival is just one of many possible motives in the play of proprietary interests on which reissues are grounded. The second turned to “representation.” Parsing this as a metaphor, I suggested that recordings “represent” in three ways: they stand “for ideas like history, tradition, biography or region”; they “re-present texts, tunes and the facts that accompany them, as taken from earlier contexts”; and finally, they “synthesize a former present—the past—into a new present” (Rosenberg 1993c: 450). I concluded that the uses of this metaphor helped to show how “texts—words, music—are communicated, learned, reshaped, and put into place for symbolic uses, personal or public” (461). Here, to name revival as a determining factor seemed pointless, too broad a brush. The third of these review essays explored perceptions of instrumental music, redefining “classification” as a metaphor that could stand, variously, for organizing data, or for reading social class, or for adding to the classical music canon. I discussed the ways “folk” instruments and the repertoires associated with them represented “alternative types of elite art music from outside of the conservatory,” in settings that valorized “the performer instead of the composer” (Rosenberg 1995a: 200). While many of the performers could be connected to folksong revivals, that connection did not seem to be useful in tracking classification. In playing with “representation” and “classification” I sought to illuminate processes sometimes obscured by the metaphor of revival.

Revivals Now In studying the contemporary world’s music cultures, often described as postmodern and globalized, We must ask:  What is the utility of separating “revivals” from other kinds of musical (or even more broadly, artistic) processes? It is useful to have models like Livingston’s “recipe.” But focusing on revivalism as a middle-class “imagined community” (2001: 56) creates a quandary. Revivals don’t exist in a vacuum. We profit in our understanding of music cultures when we recognize the presence of revivals in them,

104   Neil V. Rosenberg but if we ignore the messy edges and overlaps in the realities of lived musical lives, we may overlook important information. An example of the problems created when revival is viewed separately comes from the idea that a revival involves or is itself a “named system.” This is a useful concept, but it is limiting when one studies the careers of individual musicians. Limits imposed by the idea of named systems led me to speak in “Big Fish, Small Pond” of country musicians’ “markets,” because the musician who performs in public is “in economic terms, both entrepreneur and product” (Rosenberg 1986: 153). Consequently, it is not always in the interest of musicians to be identified with a named system if that identification appears to artificially restrict their market. On the other hand, a system name can be a useful tool for expanding the market. It is clear that musicians may have many reasons for moving in and out of revivals.8 Another dilemma in thinking about revival is posed by the idea of “community.” Today this word often connotes the virtual as well as the imagined and thus has become quite a broad way of describing networks of people who share musical interests. A finer tool is found in Bruce Bastin’s Red River Blues (1986). The blues revival led Bastin to research what his subtitle describes as “The Blues Tradition in the Southeast.” He drew on a generation of research into rural blues recordings from the 1920s into the 1940s—research that owed much to the work of English cultural geographer Paul Oliver. Using names published on early 78 rpm records and in subsequent discographies and studies, Bastin sought to locate and interview the musicians who had made the music on these recordings. In the process of meeting them in their homes, he learned about the musical networks with which they were associated. These he termed “cells” (Bastin 1986: 31–32, 272, 275, 282, 288). These were geographically situated, not imagined, communities. Thus, in writing of Orange County, North Carolina, he reports: The county possessed quite distinct and separate “cells” of musicians, including both the string band tradition in Cedar Grove and a blues tradition in and around Chapel Hill, more closely identified with that of Durham. Blurring the borders of these cells are musicians like Jamie Alston, the only black member of a white country string band. (1986: 272)

Bastin describes other regional cells and later speaks of “a series of separate cells or schools of musicians” in North Carolina’s Piedmont region, detailing nuances of region and style (288). In his introduction, Bastin stressed that he was writing a history, not “an ethnomusicological survey” (1986: x). His work, which might be called an ethnography of the past, presented a research challenge that he responded to with the useful “cells” metaphor. In its organic sense of the smallest unit of life, “cell” conveys activity within boundaries while at the same time allowing for outside influences through osmosis. The political sense of the word “cell” works this way, too. Like “named systems,” “folk groups,” and “scenes,” “cells” are conceptual grids that we can impose on our perceptions of people who share musical involvements. However we

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choose to perceive such groups, another factor must be considered: history—the reality of constant change over time. How are we to make sense of this? Christopher Small suggests: “[T]here is no such thing as music. Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do” (Small 1998: 2). Thinking about music as an activity leads to another useful metaphor, one that connects musicking to other cultural activities familiar to folklorists: consumption.

Consumption In the 1970s, American folklorists began lobbying Congress for the inclusion of folklore in federal and state funded cultural institutions (see Rosenberg 2010: 185–186), and by the end of the century this had happened: A majority of the American Folklore Society’s members were engaged in public folklore. With the growth of public folklore came a shift in priorities in the discipline. The idea of “folklife,” a holistic approach pioneered in Europe, shaped the perspectives of public folklorists.9 Folk music, one of the founding specialties, moved to the margins. In “Reconstructing the Blues” (1993) Jeff Titon described the questions of authenticity raised by public folklorists that were affecting the American folk music scene. Decisions about funding performers were being shaped by complex criteria set forth in Joe Wilson and Lee Udall’s book Folk Festivals:  A  Handbook for Organization and Management (1982: 18–23). We’ll return to this issue later. With folk music’s decline, other specialties, like the study of foodways, gained importance. Charles Camp explained why: “[T]he folklife movement, with foodways at its ideological bow, succeeded where the folksong revival had failed in reconnecting the notion of tradition to ordinary people and the communities they constituted” (1997: 368). Camp encapsulates in “ordinary people and the communities they constituted” the focus of public folklore in its attempt to engage a broad consensus, essential to the continuing political success of publicly funded meliorative endeavors. Of course, foodways has an advantage in this regard since all humans must eat whereas music is optional. But in both cases, it is an activity that consumes its repertoire at each performance.10 Eating and musicking and the practices of consumption that surround them create a transcendent subjective experience. “Consumption” is a useful metaphor for understanding ongoing processes of change in music cultures. It connotes the creation of energy and waste, of gain and loss. Metaphors like this and the others I’ve discussed are useful tools we create or borrow in writing about musical history.

Postrevival? In 1997, my essay for the Smithsonian/Folkways reissue of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music sought to communicate lessons from decades of studying and

106   Neil V. Rosenberg teaching about what I was now most comfortable calling vernacular music—a fabric that wove revivals, survivals, and new inventions in music alongside industrial processes, economic transformations, and business practices together over a period of decades (Rosenberg 1999). It first seemed ironic to me that my essay was in same booklet in which Marcus articulated the image of “The old weird America,” for from my perspective this was an “othering” of the music that ran contrary to much of what I’d concluded in my field research and model construction. In essence, my position was and is aligned with that of Camp’s connections with ordinary people and communities—what I would call the “social consensus” approach (Rosenberg 1993a: 19–20)—while I see Marcus’s invention of “old weird America” as a “social elite” approach that mystifies ordinary people and communities. But it’s important to understand that two very different sets of American cultural politics are involved here. On the one hand, Camp is speaking as an advocate for public folklore, a populist movement within the arena of state and nonprofit cultural stimulus politics. On the other, Marcus speaks as the literary critic perhaps responsible more than any other for ensconcing rock music in the national literary canon; his “old weird America” connected with the artistic creations of folk-to-rock icons like Bob Dylan. Sean Wilenz (2010) shares Marcus’s critical involvement with Dylan (they have collaborated as editors) but as a historian looks beyond Marcus to synthesize a detailed analysis of diverse historical sources and research. Wilenz and Marcus represent an important part of contemporary academic and cultural criticism about music in America. They are writing about its newest canons. Thus in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it appears that the great boom achieved its political and cultural goals, and we might call that “postrevival.” But I’m not sure how well this travels. In 1998, when those of us who wrote notes for the Smithsonian/Folkways reissue of Smith’s Anthology won Grammys for Best Album Notes, I was one of only a handful of Canadians in that year’s list of winners, and consequently the focus of considerable public attention in the form of interviews in the national media. Subsequently, a request came from the Canadian journal Labour/ LeTravail to write about the Anthology and working-class music. This presented an opportunity to discuss some shortcomings in Smith’s work that I felt had been overlooked and to raise an issue of national cultural politics: In all of the hubbub about winning a Grammy . . . I  was interviewed often by the Canadian media. I was asked many questions but no one asked the one that seemed obvious to me: why has there been no Anthology of Canadian Folk Music on a similar model? . . . the idea of recycling old working-class popular music recordings to construct a national aural mosaic has not attracted its Canadian Harry Smith. (Rosenberg 1998a: 331)

To what extent are revivals shaped by national political agendas?

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Recent Revival Studies In disciplines like folklore and ethnomusicology, which view themselves as international, the impact of national patterns of cultural politics are sometimes overlooked. Four recent book-length studies of North American revival music scenes have particularly interested me not only because of personal experience in the scenes they depict but also because they illustrate how political agendas shape visions of national cultures. Mark F.  DeWitt’s Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California (2008) explores, as his subtitle says, “modern pleasures in a postmodern world.” Discussing identity issues, he begins with consideration of the meanings of “insider” and “outsider” in relation to group membership. This leads him through Hall’s (1989) idea of “Other” as he discusses music and dance that first developed among Louisiana francophones. He uses “revivalist to refer to an outsider who plays or dances to Louisiana French music,” explaining that he refers “to outsiders as revivalists in the sense generally understood by those who administer ‘folk arts’ funding in the United States” as described by Titon in 1993. His purpose for “using revivalist as shorthand for cultural outsiders is not to reinscribe the folk arts meaning but to critique it” since his book demonstrates “the thoroughgoing extent of the partnership between insiders and outsiders in maintaining” this music everywhere (DeWitt 2008: 28)—what I’d call “social consensus.”11 DeWitt then moves to the question of identity in terms of the distinctions raised by Bauman’s suggestion that today we are all postmodern vagabonds who share identity issues; hence his subtitle. I recognize in DeWitt’s narrative old friends from my participation in the Berkeley folk scene. Here is further evidence for an enduring local interest in folk dance music that reaches back a century in the history of the Bay Area’s arts scene. When I described Berkeley’s revival history to Livingston, she reported that I’d suggested “a series of interlocking or recurring revivals on new themes at certain times,” suggesting the importance of location as an “important variable” (Livingston 1999: 83). Indeed, the themes do change in this location. They are consumed by local population that’s a volatile mix of longtime residents and recent arrivals to a region that has long embraced novelty, innovation, opposition, and alternative routes. In describing what he calls “Berkeley Bohemia,” historian Charles Wollenberg describes a famous family, the Boyntons, who in 1914 moved into what locals usually describe as a modern replica of a Greek temple, situated on Buena Vista (good views are valued in this city), a road that snakes up the North Berkeley hills. Wollenberg tells of the place and the family: the Temple of Wings [is] a hillside platform with roof supported by thirty-four Corinthian columns. Until 1923, the structure had no walls, though sailcloth could be deployed in case of heavy wind and rain. The Boyntons often wore togas and robes and lived mostly on fruits and nuts.12 Florence Boynton was a friend and follower

108   Neil V. Rosenberg of the modern dancer Isadora Duncan, and the temple was sometimes a venue for Duncan’s performances. The tradition was passed on to the Boyntons’ daughter, Sulgwynn, who, along with her husband Charles Quitzow, gave modern dance lessons to several generations of young Berkeleyans. (2008: 80–81)

Most of this narrative is familiar to me because I grew up in the neighborhood. Sulgwynn was “Mrs. Quitzow” to me. Her young Berkeleyan students were girls. She regularly held “socials,” formal dance events to which each student was encouraged to invite a boy. To guard against gender imbalance, she kept a list of young men she knew from previous socials who liked to dance. I went frequently to these socials as a teen. I’d enjoyed square dancing in grade school and had a growing interest in folk music. Mrs. Quitzow was renowned for her work as a teacher of modern dance, but at the socials in the old temple, folk dancing shared equal time with couples ballroom dancing. Mr. Quitzow played the piano while she taught the latest folk dances from various parts of the world.13 Thus, in Berkeley “folk” and “modern” were part of the arts scene and had been for a long time. This is the node at which the Cajun and zydeco dance music revival described by DeWitt would later bloom. Shall we call this a community, a scene, a folk group, or a cell? At least one of my fellow dancers from the Quitzows’ shows up in DeWitt’s narrative about Berkeley’s folk music milieu. DeWitt’s foray into the history of the Berkeley folk revival reaches back to the 1950s but acknowledges that, at that point, it was “already flourishing” (2008:154).14 Luis Kemnitzer’s “West Coast Record Collector,” in the new notes to the Smith Anthology (1997), gives another useful description of Bay Area folk art consumption, from a decade before that. Extended historical ethnography is not easy. By the time we report on the present, it has receded into the past, and the earlier history is even more distant. DeWitt’s useful summary notwithstanding, the Berkeley folk scene has yet to find its historian. Abundant documents and willing informants exist, but creating such a wide-ranging history would not be easy, given the complex cultural politics typical of revival processes. John Bealle’s 2005 study of the Bloomington, Indiana, scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Old-Time Music and Dance, subtitled “Community and Folk Revival,” deals, like DeWitt’s work, with a place and people familiar to me. But it tells a story of events mostly beyond my experience of just a few years earlier. In describing a music-culture that no longer exists, Bealle laments that “postmodern culture . . . brought down the oppositional wall that . . . separated the dominant culture from all that was not,” so that “suddenly things that were once the exclusive province of an underground economy . . . could now be bought by anyone” (xiv–xv). Bealle’s detailed narrative follows a folk dance and old-time music oriented community over two decades. It’s in a college town that has a venerable history of alternative music and interest in folk arts like Berkeley’s but a very different town-gown dynamic. Reading Bealle’s valuable history of the politics of culture at work in that microcosm, I  encountered individuals whom I  know were involved in the Northern California Cajun-zydeco dance scene.

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Like Bealle, Ray Allen in Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival (2010) devotes considerable space to a band that began in Berkeley, the Highwoods Stringband (Bealle 2005: 142–151; Allen 2010: 199–202). Both narratives discuss the cultural politics that constricted the career of these talented and popular musicians. Allen quotes one band member from an interview published in 1979, the year after they disbanded: “[W]e’re too traditional to appeal to a wide commercial audience, but the folklorists say we’re outside the tradition because we weren’t born into it” (Allen 2010: 202). This was the “no revivalists” issue that affected the American old-time music-culture, the same issue raised by Titon and DeWitt. A decade later it “exploded,” according to Bealle, in the pages of a new magazine, the Old-Time Herald, “attracting twenty-five printed contributions and covering a period from February 1989 to October 1990.” Central in the debate was the “martyrdom” of the Highwoods Stringband. It stood for the experience of many younger musicians, “having been embraced and then rejected by traditional music festival organizers” (2005:  231). It was a controversy about who would be paid to represent this music. Allen closes his book on the New Lost City Ramblers with a chapter titled “Passing for Traditional and Rethinking Folk Revivalism” (2010: 243–250) that discusses these issues, questioning the politics of “revivalist” in the United States. He thus joins the dialog about the use of the term “revivalist” that DeWitt sought to critique. This dialog is important to these students of American folk arts, for “revivalist” is part of the discourse of governmental arts funding. This is a national political debate. In Canada, where government funding of the folk arts has different history and structures, “revival” does not have the same meaning it has in the United States. It’s not that there is no dialog in Canada, it’s just a different dialog. Anna Kearney Guigné’s study Folksongs and Folk Revival (2008) depicts the work of the federally funded Ontario composer and ethnomusicologist Kenneth Peacock. Before Newfoundland became part of the Canadian confederation, outsiders studying its folk traditions had come from Britain and America (Rosenberg 1989). Following confederation, Canada asserted hegemony over Newfoundland’s resources—natural and cultural (Rosenberg 1994). Guigné’s study, subtitled “The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Peacock’s Songs of the Newfoundland Outports,” shows how Peacock’s elite aesthetic agenda shaped his work in creating “a major resource for Newfoundland revivalists seeking to explore the province’s folksong traditions,” as part of his romantic “mission to capture the sounds of Canada’s musical heritage” (Guigné 2008: 240, 237). In Newfoundland and elsewhere in Canada, some of the songs collected and published by Peacock and other collectors, like “She’s Like the Swallow” (Rosenberg 2007), have become heritage symbols. The folksong revival is generally viewed as something that happened in the pop music of the sixties, and “revivalist” is not the contentious term that it is in the United States. There are other contentious terms, however. Peacock was, in contemporary local parlance, a “CFA,” a widely used acronym for “come from away.” It refers to anyone, not born in Newfoundland, who is a resident or tourist there (Young 2006: 54). It entered

110   Neil V. Rosenberg widespread local circulation via a joke current in the early 1970s when Memorial University had undergone considerable growth in enrollment and new faculty members were arriving from all quarters of the globe. “You can’t get a job at Memorial,” the joke-teller would begin, “unless you got your CFA.” Listeners would ask for an explanation of the acronym, which seemed to stand for some kind of academic degree, like “Ph.D.” In a society still used to imposed colonial leadership, “come from away” was self-explanatory. CFAs like Peacock were welcomed, if sometimes guardedly, in postcolonial Newfoundland. As Guigné shows, his book became locally influential only after it was embraced by young Newfoundland folk rockers as a musical source. Today in Newfoundland, government policy issues surrounding the revival of traditional and folk culture are not considered through the lens of “public folklore.” Instead, in the twenty-first century they are being addressed through work on the UNESCO initiative to view such things as “Intangible Cultural Heritage” (Pocius 2010). In this milieu, “CFA” is as much a part of backroom cultural politics as “revivalist” is in the United States.

Conclusions From my perspective as a folklorist, studying revivals was a process of self-examination facilitated by models and metaphors. I started at “folk group” and then created a graphic metaphor of musical process before finally turning to the close examination of revival. I came to understand that “revival” was just one of many possible metaphors for describing processes of cultural politics in music cultures. In thinking about these processes I explored other metaphors, like representation, classification, named systems, communities, cells, and consumption. There are others, like “scene,” that could also be explored. All can be related to revival. In the fall of 2010, a new women’s shoe store opened in St. John’s biggest mall. It presented its styles in six categories, one of which was “grunge revival.”15 I don’t know if that name alludes to an ongoing cultural movement or was invented by someone in marketing. I also don’t know if it sold shoes. But by the beginning of December those categories were gone, displaced by Christmas sales. “Revival” is now a familiar metaphor in the study of vernacular music, and that makes it accessible and useful. But it must be used carefully, because its denotations and connotations vary widely. I’ve found in such situations that leaving revival in favor of other metaphors can be beneficial.

Notes 1. Dorson’s coinage, “fakelore,” was in the style and tradition of H. L. Mencken, cofounder of the American Mercury, the magazine in which Dorson introduced the term.

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2. The inclusion of four of these articles, reviews, and liner notes in Goldsmith (2004) reflects the interest they engendered. 3. Halpert had been a student of George Herzog at Columbia University. 4. Williams’s idea was rearticulated as “key song” in the essays of Pickering and Richards in Pickering and Green’s (1987) volume Everyday Culture: Popular Song and the Vernacular Milieu. 5. I did not attempt to define “authenticity”; it is a word that, as the title of the section suggests, is constantly being reshaped according to the intellectual zeitgeist. I saw my task then being to describe the factors that dominated this process in the era. 6. I  discovered the economics behind this international pop music phenomenon when I studied the songs connected to the 1956 and 1958 Springhill, Nova Scotia, mine disasters. In essence, nationally mediated Canadian country songs were overshadowed by an international folk hit that is, today, the only song about the disasters that is still remembered and heard in the Canadian media that memorialize them (Rosenberg 2000). 7. Wilenz (2010: 47–84) describes the beat-folk connections between the forties and the sixties in Greenwich Village more broadly. These and the related regional, national, and international artistic networks of the era were humorously envisioned by Earl Crabb and Rick Shubb in a 17- by 22 1/2-inch poster, “Humbead’s Revised Map of the World with List of Population.” (First published in 1967, it was reprinted in 1980 in von Schmidt and Rooney’s “illustrated story of the Cambridge folk years,” 124–125. Crabb has posted it at, and sells it from, his website, www.humbead.com/hmbmap.html.) 8. Livingston (1999: 72) provides a case in point, an example of the reluctant rockabilly who would rather play country but opts for the more lucrative rockabilly gigs. 9. Ironically, “folklife” scholars in Europe were abandoning that term in favor of “ethnology” at the very point when it became popular in America. 10. The cultures and economics of foodways and musicking can also be compared in terms of modes of production: the snack and the jam; Carnegie Hall and the latest fashionable restaurant; and so forth. Unexplored metaphors! 11. In Rosenberg (1993d) I describe such partnerships when discussing the work of specialists and revivalists who became activists in a music system. 12. This sentence is the standard nonbohemian Berkeleyan description of life at the temple. I heard it often in the 1950s. Only recently did I notice that it includes folk metaphors (“fruits and nuts”) for homosexuals and the mentally ill. 13. We also did familiar folk dances: square dances, the Virginia reel, the Hora, etc. 14. Rita Weill’s notes to Mike Seeger’s phonograph album Berkeley Farms, which documents “oldtime and country style music of Berkeley,” provide biographical and historical details for early 1970s music in the scene DeWitt describes. 15. The other clever categories for shoes in the store called Spring were: urban nostalgia, dark romance, bejeweled, new classics, and geek chic.

References Allen, Ray. 2010. Gone to the Country. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bastin, Bruce. 1986. Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

112   Neil V. Rosenberg Bealle, John. 2005. Old-time Music and Dance:  Community and Folk Revival. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ben-Amos, Dan. 1972. “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context.” In Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, edited by Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman, 3–15. Austin: University of Texas Press for the American Folklore Society. Bohlman, Philip V. 1988. The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brunvand, Jan. 1979. Folklore: A Study and Research Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brunvand, Jan, ed. 1996. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland. Camp, Charles. 1997. “Foodways.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art, edited by Thomas A. Green, vol. 1, 366–372. Riverside, CA: ABC CLIO. Camp, Charles, and Timothy Lloyd. 1980. “Six Reasons Not to Produce Folklife Festivals.” Kentucky Folklore Record 26: 67–74. Casey, George J., Wilfred W. Wareham, and Neil V. Rosenberg. 1972. “Repertoire Categorization and Performer-Audience Relationships: Some Newfoundland Examples.” Ethnomusicology 16: 397–403. Cohen, John. 2001. There Is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs. New York: PowerHouse. Cohen, Norm. 1999. “The Sinking of the Titanic and the Foundering of American Folksong Scholarship.” Southern Folklore 56: 3–26. Collins, Camilla A., ed. 1980. “Folklore and the Public Sector.” [Special Issue]. Kentucky Folklore Record 26: 1–2. Crabb, Earl. 1969. www.humbead.com/hmbmap.html, accessed May 16, 2013. DeWitt, Mark F. 2008. Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Dorson, Richard M. 1949. “Folklore and Fakelore.” American Mercury 70: 335–343. Dundes, Alan. 1964. “Texture, Text and Context.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 28: 251–265. Dundes, Alan. 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Engle, David G. 1981. “A Sketch of the German Folk Revival Singer Katzi Ritzel.” Lore and Language 3: 67–79. Feintuch, Burt. 1993. “Musical Revival as Musical Transformation.” In Transforming Tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil V.  Rosenberg, 183–193. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fine, Elizabeth C. 1996. “Performance Approach.” In American Folklore:  An Encyclopedia, edited by Jan Brunvand, 554–556. New York: Garland. Frisbie, Charlotte. 1990. “President’s Report.” SEM [Society for Ethnomusicology] Newsletter 24 (2): 2. Glassie, Henry, Edward D.  Ives, and John Szwed, eds. 1970. Folk Songs and Their Makers. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Culture Press. Goldsmith, Thomas, ed. 2004. The Bluegrass Reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Goldstein, Kenneth S. 1971. “On the Application of the Concepts of Active and Inactive Traditions to the Study of Repertoire.” Journal of American Folklore 84: 62–67. Green, Archie. 1965. “Hillbilly Music:  Source and Symbol.” Journal of American Folklore 78: 204–228. Guigné, Anna Kearney. 2008. Folksongs and Folk Revival. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland ISER Books. Hall, Stuart. 1989. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference.” Radical America 23 (4): 9–20.

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Halpert, Herbert, and Neil V.  Rosenberg. 1974. “Folklore Work at Memorial University.” Canadian Forum, March 1974, 31–32. Halpert, Herbert, and Neil V. Rosenberg. 1976. “MUNFLA: The Development of a Folklore and Language Archive at Memorial University.” Laurentian University Review 8 (2): 107–114. Jackson, Bruce. 1993. “The Folksong Revival.” In Transforming Tradition, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 73–83. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Keil, Charles. 1966. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kemnitzer, Luis. 1997. “West Coast Record Collector.” In booklet with Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith, 29–31. Smithsonian/Folkways SFW 40090. Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,” Ethnomusicology 43 (Winter): 66–85. Livingston, Tamara. 2001. “Musical Revivals.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3, United States and Canada, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 55–59. New York: Garland. Marcus, Greil. 1997. “The Old, Weird America.” In booklet with Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith, 5–25. Smithsonian/Folkways SFW 40090. Overton, James. 1988. “A Newfoundland Culture.” Journal of Canadian Studies 23: 5–22. Peterson, Richard A. 1972. “A Process Model of the Folk, Pop and Fine Art Phases of Jazz.” In American Music from Storyville to Woodstock, edited by Charles Nanry, 135–151. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books. Pickering, Michael. 1987. “The Past as a Source of Aspiration: Popular Song and Social Change.” In Everyday Culture: Popular Song and the Vernacular Milieu, edited by Michael Pickering and Tony Green, 39–69. Milton Keynes, England: Open Press. Pocius, Gerald. 2010. “The Emergence of Intangible Cultural Heritage Policy in Newfoundland and Labrador.” Newfoundland Quarterly 103 (1): 43–45. Porterfield, Nolan. 2004. Exploring Roots Music. Latham, Md.: Scarecrow Press. Richards, Sam. 1987. “Westcountry Gypsies: Key Songs and Community Identity.” In Everyday Culture: Popular Song and the Vernacular Milieu, edited by Michael Pickering and Tony Green, 125–149. Milton Keynes, England: Open Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1967. “Osborne Brothers Discography.” Bluegrass Unlimited 1 (12): 2–5; 2 (1): 6–8; 2 (3): 2–3. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1971. “The Osborne Brothers, part 1: Family and Apprenticeship.” Bluegrass Unlimited 6 (3): 5–10. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1972. “The Osborne Brothers, part 2: Getting It Off.” Bluegrass Unlimited 6 (8): 5–8. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1976. Country Music in the Maritimes: Two Studies. Department of Folklore Reprint Series 2. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1984. “Introduction to Folksong.” In Teaching Folklore, edited by Bruce Jackson, 139–149. Publications of the American Folklore Society, New Series, 9. Buffalo, NY: Documentary Research. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1985. Bluegrass: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1986. “Big Fish, Small Pond: Country Musicians and Their Markets.” In Media Sense: The Folklore–Popular Culture Continuum, edited by Peter Narváez and Martin Laba, 148–166. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1989. “Folksong In Newfoundland:  A  Research History.” In Ballades et chansons folkloriques (“Actes de la 18e session de la Commission pour l’étude de la poésie de traditional orale [Kommission für Volksdichtung] de la S.I.E.F. [Société internationale d’ethnologie et de folklore]”), edited by Conrad Laforte, 45–52. Québec:  CELAT, Université Laval.

114   Neil V. Rosenberg Rosenberg, Neil V. 1991a. “ ‘An Icy Mountain Brook’: Revival, Aesthetics and the ‘Coal Creek March.’ ” Journal of Folklore Research 28: 221–240. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1991b. “The Gerald S. Doyle Songsters and the Politics of Newfoundland Folksong.” Canadian Folklore canadien 13: 45–57. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1991c. “MUNFLA, A Newfoundland Resource for the Study of Folk Music.” In Studies in Newfoundland Folklore: Community and Process, edited by Gerald Thomas and J. D. A. Widdowson, 154–165. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Breakwater. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993a. Transforming Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993b. “From the Sound Recordings Review Editor: Reissues.” Journal of American Folklore 106: 190–204. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993c. “From the Sound Recordings Review Editor:  Representations.” Journal of American Folklore 106: 450–461. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993d. “Starvation, Serendipity, and the Ambivalence of Bluegrass Revivalism.” In Transforming Tradition, 194–202. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1994. “The Canadianization of Newfoundland Folksong; Or, The Newfoundlandization of Canadian Folksong.” Journal of Canadian Studies 29 (1): 55–73. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1995a. “From the Sound Recordings Review Editor: The Classification of Traditional Instrumental Music.” Journal of American Folklore 108: 186–201. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1995b. “Neil V. Rosenberg: The Indiana University Folksong Club and the Bloomington Scene.” In “Wasn’t That a Time!” Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival, edited by Ronald D. Cohen, 71–78. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1995c. “Picking Myself Apart:  A  Hoosier Memoir.” Journal of American Folklore 108: 277–286. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1996. “Strategy and Tactics in Fieldwork: The Whole Don Messer Show.” In The World Observed: Reflections on the Fieldwork Process, edited by Edward D. Ives and Bruce Jackson, 144–158. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1997. “Notes on Harry Smith’s Anthology.” In booklet with Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith, 35–37. Smithsonian/Folkways SFW 40090. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1998a. “Notebook/Carnet:  The Anthology of American Folk Music and Working-class Music.” Labour/Le Travail 42: 327–332. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1998b. “What’s International about the International Bluegrass Music Association?” In Popular Music: Intercultural Interpretations, edited by Toru Mitsui, 289– 297. Kanazawa, Japan: Kanazawa University Graduate Program in Music. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1999. “American Folklore Scholarship:  A  Response to Norm Cohen.” Southern Folklore 56: 27–33. Rosenberg, Neil V. 2000. “The Springhill Mine Disaster Songs: Class, Memory, and Persistence in Canadian Folksong.” In Northeast Folklore: Essays in Honor of Edward D. Ives, edited by Pauleena MacDougall and David Taylor, 153–187. Orono: University of Maine Press. Rosenberg, Neil V. 2007. “‘She’s Like the Swallow’: Folksong as Cultural Icon.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 22: 77–115. Rosenberg, Neil V. 2010. “The Politics of Organology and the Nova Scotia Banjo.” In Musical Traditions Cultures and Contexts, edited by Robin Elliott and Gordon E. Smith, 181–207. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurie University Press. Smith, Harry, ed. 1997. Anthology of American Folk Music. Rev. ed. 6-CD boxed set. Smithsonian/ Folkways SFW 40090. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

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Stekert, Ellen. 1966. “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement: 1930–1966.” In Folklore and Society: Essays in Honor of Benj. A. Botkin, edited by Bruce Jackson, 153–168. Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates. Stekert, Ellen. 1993. “Cents and Nonsense in the Urban Folksong Movement:  1930–1966.” In Transforming Tradition, edited by Neil V.  Rosenberg, 84–106. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press. Story, G. M., W. J. Kirwin, and J. D. A. Widdowson. 1990. Dictionary of Newfoundland English. 2nd ed.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1993. “Reconstructing the Blues:  Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” In Transforming Tradition, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 220–240. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. von Schmidt, Eric, and Jim Rooney 1979. Baby Let Me Follow You Down. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–281. Weill, Rita. 1972. Notes [12 pp.] to Berkeley Farms, edited by Michael Seeger. Folkways FA 2436 (12-inch 33 1/3 phonograph album). Whisnant, David E. 1983. All That Is Native and Fine. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press. Wilenz, Sean. 2010. Bob Dylan in America. New York: Doubleday. Wilgus, D. K. 1972. “The Text Is the Thing.” Journal of American Folklore 86: 241–252. Williams, Raymond. 1961. Culture and Society. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Wilson, Joe, and Lee Udall. 1982. Folk Festivals: A Handbook for Organization and Management. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Wollenberg, Charles. 2008. Berkeley: A City in History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, Ron. 2006. Dictionary of Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Downhome.

C HA P T E R  6

A PA RT I C I PA N TD O C U M E N TA R IA N I N T H E A M E R I C A N I N S T RU M E N TA L F O L K M U S I C R E V I VA L A L A N JA BB OU R

Since the 1960s, the United States has witnessed a powerful instrumental folk music revival, which has developed many branches but has focused primarily on Southern old-time fiddling as its source of repertory, style, and spiritual inspiration. It has been a revival that drew deeply on intergenerational and cross-cultural contact with and documentation of elderly fiddlers and other instrumental musicians. The emphasis on the Southern repertory and style of this revival is not new; it represents a long-standing pattern in American culture, which since the early 19th century has turned to Southern creativity for national inspiration. This modern instrumental folk music revival, though related both to the roughly contemporaneous folksong revival and to the parallel revival in folk dancing, reveals many features that serve to distinguish it from its folksong counterpart. The various chroniclers of the folksong revival have hardly mentioned this instrumental folk music revival in their accounts. I was a participant in this instrumental revival, and I recount a few of my experiences here, both for what they have contributed to the revival and as a source of reflection on that revival’s cultural texture and larger meaning.

Assessing Revivals The book Transforming Tradition (1993), edited by Neil Rosenberg, contains an introductory essay by Rosenberg that is an important contribution to the published literature on cultural revivals.1 The English-language word “revival,” Rosenberg points out, has

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been applied in cultural situations since the 17th century, and has been applied specifically to folk culture since the dawn of the twentieth century. The term’s layers of meaning are worth unpacking, because the layers reveal much and may allow us to glimpse more about the twists and turns of cultural discourse in the modern world. The word “revival” since the seventeenth century has been used to describe a simple cultural circumstance, as when a theatrical play is revived, or someone revives a fiddle tune learned from an old hillbilly 78-rpm record. Curiously, evidence for this sense of the word predates the more literal sense of reviving a life. Here the word is somewhat metaphorical, since the play or fiddle tune never literally “died” to be later “revived.” It was always available in a script or on a recording and perhaps remained in people’s memories as well. But though metaphorical, its sense is not complicated. The play or fiddle tune was previously performed, lay dormant for a period, and is revived to active performance. In a more extended metaphorical usage, the earliest citation for which is by New England preacher Cotton Mather at the dawn of the eighteenth century, “revival” betokens a special effort to reawaken religious commitment, fervor, and devotion (Rosenberg 1993: 17). This religious application of the term is very much alive today. The outdoor encampments of the Second Great Awakening from the beginning to the middle of the 19th century are echoed today in the tent revivals still flourishing in rural American settings. But the rural tent revivals are not the only continuation of the tradition; many contemporary American Protestant churches, both rural and urban, schedule occasional “revivals,” often featuring guest preachers, in addition to the regular schedule of church events. A church revival may recruit new members, but its chief goal is to intensify a congregation’s religious devotion, reach out to inactive members, and reinvigorate religious practices neglected in the course of day-to-day life. A contemporary American use of the word “revival” refers not to reawakening culture among its existing adherents, but rather to the adoption of arts and cultural practices outside the source cultural group. This usage seems to have grown out of the mid-20th-century American folksong revival movement. It may have been introduced by Charles Seeger, but it quickly took hold as a way of describing the imitation of rural traditional artists by urban, educated devotees of rural folk music (Rosenberg 1993: 17–18). A white musician who imitates the style and repertory of older black bluesmen, or a New Englander who learns to sing in an old Southern Appalachian style, may be referred to as a “revivalist.” “Revival” and “revivalist,” in this sense, have stirred anger among some American performers by suggesting that their music, which imitates or adopts certain folk genres, lacks authenticity compared to the art of people born into the source cultural group. This last meaning of “revival” leads me to offer a confession and propose a new term. In the 1970s, as the first director of the Folk Arts Program for the National Endowment for the Arts, I was in part responsible for spreading this use of the terms “revival” and “revivalist” to contrast with “traditional.” Faced with a limited amount of available funds, and encountering people inspired by the American folk revival who found their way to the Endowment’s door, we began using “revival” and “revivalist” as terms contrasting

118   Alan Jabbour with “traditional,” trying to convey that we sought to give priority to longstanding forms of traditional arts maintained within traditional groups. But what seemed conceptually reasonable as a way of prioritizing proved deeply problematic in practice. In the earlier stages of the folk revival, it had seemed easy to distinguish newcomers from old-timers. At the Galax (Virginia) Fiddlers Convention in 1967 or 1968—where I  was an eager participant with our band, the Hollow Rock String Band—it was no problem distinguishing local Blue Ridge musicians from visitors reared outside the region. Their music, spoken dialect, and dress were all different. If you moved from Chicago to eastern Kentucky in 1970, drawn by a back-to-the-land dream and the romance of the Appalachians, your singing style probably didn’t sound like the locals. But what about twenty or thirty years later? Is one forever a revivalist, after moving to a community, rearing a family there, and playing in local bands for a generation or two? Based on many interviews and conversations, I would say that local musicians themselves judge non-local musicians principally on who they learned from and how well, not on their family name and birthplace. The use of “revival” and “revivalist” with this meaning generated lasting antagonisms since the 1970s between public folklorists and many activists of the folk revival, who should have been allies.2 For years, folk revival activists blamed “academics” for impugning the authenticity of their artistic performances and creations. Ironically, the academy was not the source—public folklorists like me set these terms into motion. Meanwhile, a new generation of academic folklore theorists hammered out new conceptualizations of folklore based on small-group creative performance and communication, providing flexible alternatives to the older idea of folklore based on fixed ethnic, occupational, religious, and regional groups. The “revival versus authentic” dichotomy that we unleashed actually missed the fresh new thinking in the academic field of folklore studies about a more dynamic and embracing definition of folklore. Hence, by way of atonement, I offer a fresh term as a cautionary flag in assessing the relationship of individuals to cultural traditions. In the mid-twentieth century, a generation of literary critics of the school known as New Criticism embraced the term “intentional fallacy” as a way of asserting that an author’s declared “intention” is not relevant to interpreting a literary work. The meaning of a poem, this theory insists, can only be derived properly from consideration of elements internal to the poem itself. Hence, a literary work may mean what its author intended, or not, and may also reveal meanings the author never intended or was consciously aware of (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946: 468–88).3 Similarly, I propose “origin fallacy” as a cautionary reminder that a person’s ethnicity, religion, place of origin, or other group membership is an untrustworthy measure of the authenticity of that person’s artistic expression. The career of the great Cape Breton (Canada) fiddler Jerry Holland, born and reared in Boston of non-Cape Breton parents, illustrates the dangers of the origin fallacy. Jerry Holland’s recent passing was mourned throughout Cape Breton and wherever Cape Breton music is admired, and his contributions to Cape Breton music have been profound. Assessing the term “revival” invites a few broader comments on the cultural process. We tend to think of groups as fixed entities, and we confuse “group” and “culture”

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in our discourse. Both groups and cultures are dynamic, not fixed. A group acquires new members when people marry into the group, move to where the group is concentrated, or otherwise join the group. It loses members by this same flow of human movements. Culture is even more changeable, reflecting a constant process of sorting new ideas and new cultural artifacts and integrating them into the repertory of an individual or group. Perhaps the inward-facing culture of the hearth is more conservative, and the outward-facing culture of the marketplace more open to new ideas and new cultural forms. But whether at the hearth or in the marketplace, culture is interactive and dynamic, with cultural artifacts, genres, and stylistic ideas constantly flowing in and out of a community. Thus, it is not unreasonable to call culture itself “intercultural.” The natural state of culture includes an intercultural flow. People often see the past as more stable and unchanging, and the present as more dynamic and changing. Further, they imagine movement from past to present as accelerating in the same direction. History, by this way of thinking, might be like a jet plane taking off—from stasis on the ground to climbing through the air. Though we know better intellectually, our mental models for culture and cultural history tend to be straight-line models that fail to anticipate the oscillation, cyclic patterns, or plain meandering that are clearly part of cultural history. An example of the cyclic patterns of cultural history is the process by which cultural transmission through time often skips generations. “Grandparent education” is a classic form of this cultural oscillation, which may have the effect of causing cultural traditions to pass through troughs of inattention followed by peaks of renewed attention. The term “grandparent education” actually represents not only literal grandparents, but other elderly family members and elderly neighbors. It could almost be described as “non-parent education,” since the restrictive governance of parents and the rebellion of their children can inhibit the teaching and learning of certain cultural traditions, but it also typically involves trans-generational inspiration and training. Thus my fiddling mentor, Henry Reed (1884–1968) of Glen Lyn, Virginia, learned fiddle tunes as a youth from many elderly neighbors, notably Quincy (“Quince”) Dillion (1827–1903), and I  (1942–) learned tunes from Henry Reed, who was the age of my grandparents.4 Was my learning from him substantively different from his learning from Quince Dillion? Henry Reed seemed to think of me not as a documentarian but as a young enthusiast learning his repertory and art, and there is no question that I was both a documentarian and an apprentice in my relationship with him. Arguably, his learning from Quince Dillion and my learning from him are both examples of “grandparent education.” Should we use the word “revival” to describe this ancient cultural pattern of grandparent education surviving a generational trough? Or is Henry Reed’s learning from his neighbor Quince Dillion “traditional,” but my learning from him, having not grown up in his neighborhood, a form of “cultural revival”? These two examples teach us more by considering their likeness than by searching for ways to contrast them. I would argue that both cases are “traditional.” They may also be considered cases of cultural revival, in the sense that there was a loss or diminishing of tradition for a generation, then a revival in the next generation. But we must then acknowledge that this kind of

120   Alan Jabbour “revival,” the result of grandparent education, is not some external force transferring cultural goods from one culture to another. Rather, it is part and parcel of the normal cultural process itself.

The Hollow Rock String Band and the Instrumental Folk Music Revival When I recorded old-time fiddlers in the mid-1960s in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, I worked primarily with fiddlers in their 70s and 80s. There seemed to be fewer fiddlers in their 50s or 60s, and they generally learned few tunes of the older repertory I was documenting from their elders. Among the generation in their 30s and 40s, the fiddle seemed almost a rarity, and the numbers seemed equally sparse for kids, teenagers, and young adults. Seeing these numbers made me pessimistic about the future of old-time fiddling in the Upland South. I brooded that older repertories and styles would perish quickly and forever. My documentary mission was to preserve for future research these tunes and ways of playing, which seemed doomed to be swept away by the tides of novelty promoted by radio and record companies—in short, by modernity. Two factors led me to depart from the documentary course I had set for myself. The first factor I can only describe as “animal spirits.” The fiddlers, learning that I had played violin and was interested in fiddle tunes, treated me as if I were there not just to document but to learn. This challenged my imagination: I began learning to play their tunes the way they played them. Though I thought I was salvaging a dying tradition, the animal spirits in me drove me to learn it anyway. The second factor was aesthetic. The tunes were beautiful to me—both in the abstract, as melodic structures, and in their sensuous surface, namely, the style of their performance. Our inner response to beauty is obsessive. A beautiful melody or performance demands your active embrace, whatever your documentary mission. After I began learning old-time fiddling, I found a group of other young musicians in the Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, area with whom I could share the music I was learning. Bertram Levy, a Duke University medical student, introduced me to Tommy Thompson and his wife, Bobbie Thompson. The three of them had already been playing music together. I began bringing to the Thompsons’ house the tunes I was learning from my recording expeditions, and they learned the tunes from me. In the process, an ensemble style evolved from our music together. The tunes we played were all purely instrumental; singing was not part of our musical performance. The fiddle played the melodic lead; the five-string banjo played an adaptation of the melody an octave lower in the downstroke style known variously as “clawhammer,” “frailing,” or “knocking”; the mandolin played a melodic line approximating the fiddle; and the guitar played a moving bass line and chords. Unlike bluegrass musicians, we never took solo instrumental breaks but instead developed an ensemble style heavily weighted to the melody and the

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treble range and repeated insistently with micro-variations. The chords were usually of my own devising. My fiddle mentors rarely gave specific guidance for chording each tune—though if Henry Reed’s sons were visiting when I visited, they might accompany him on guitar—so in many cases we literally invented the chords. Of course we met more musicians with each passing season, especially at regional old-time fiddlers’ conventions, so we were not clueless about approaches to chording fiddle tunes. But nobody else at the fiddlers’ conventions was playing the dozens of grand old fiddle tunes that became the hallmarks of our repertory.5 People often asked us if we were influenced by the New Lost City Ramblers, a string band formed in the late 1950s and reformed in the 1960s that had an important role in the American folksong revival and also influenced the instrumental folk music revival. They preceded our group, the Hollow Rock String Band, so it is natural to suppose that they had a shaping influence on us. But they actually focused on songs more than instrumental music, and their earliest recordings were predominantly influenced by a disparate variety of Southern commercial recordings from 1920s "hillbilly" bands through 1950s bluegrass. The Hollow Rock String Band created its own consistent old-time style, drawing from the repertory exclusively of living elderly musicians we had visited and learned from. Both our repertory, which was overwhelmingly of pre-World War I vintage, and the style of rendering that repertory became deeply influential on the burgeoning instrumental folk music revival from the 1960s to present. Interestingly, though the New Lost City Ramblers did not influence us, they had a significant influence on the band organized by our banjo player, Tommy Thompson, after the Hollow Rock String Band broke up. The Red Clay Ramblers arguably were deeply influenced by the New Lost City Ramblers in their focus on solo and ensemble singing, their varied and mostly recorded sources, and their manner of stage presentation.6 Our band aborning in the 1960s needed a name to enter competitions at fiddlers’ conventions. The Thompsons’ house in the Hollow Rock rural community west of Durham had become our gathering place, so we decided to call ourselves the Hollow Rock String Band. In no time at all, a wider circle of musicians materialized at the Thompson home for jams and quickly learned our repertory. It rapidly became a music scene involving dozens of active musicians. Summer music and dance parties sometimes attracted a hundred or more. We noticed that when we jammed in the parking lot during fiddlers’ conventions, we were starting to attract crowds—happily including both young folks and old folks. In the fall of 1967, our band taped an album in a Durham studio. The album (The Hollow Rock String Band 1968) came out in the spring of 1968 on the West Virginia-based Kanawha label—I think the company printed 500 copies. By then I  was finishing my Ph.D.  dissertation at Duke University and had accepted a job at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the fall. Bertram Levy was leaving to begin his Stanford University medical residency. The old band was breaking up. But the music scene that had coalesced around us generated a new band, the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, whose recordings (The Fuzzy Mountain String Band 1971, The Fuzzy Mountain String Band: Summer Oaks and Porch 1972) joined the Hollow Rock albums as early

122   Alan Jabbour influences on the mushrooming old-time instrumental music revival. Then our banjo player, Tommy Thompson, developed another band, the Red Clay Ramblers, which became a fixture in Durham and Chapel Hill and a popular touring band around the country. Though there have been gradual changes in personnel, the Red Clay Ramblers continues as a successful band in the early twenty-first century. Reflecting now on these events and developments, I  see myself as a participant-observer—or indeed as a participant-documentarian—in an American instrumental folk music revival that erupted in the 1960s and is still playing itself out in the 21st century. There is an extensive literature on the American folksong revival, which most observers date from the post-World War II era. The literature on the folksong revival treats the instrumental folk music revival, if at all, only cursorily.7 The revival that our Hollow Rock String Band helped to launch largely ignored vocal music, concentrating on instrumental technique, style, and a repertory that only slightly overlapped with the folksong revival repertory. The entire social and cultural underpinning of the movement was different—collective instrumental jams, as opposed to sing-a-longs that rotated the lead systematically to each participant. I recall many music parties in the 1970s that broke up into folksong gatherings on one house level and instrumental jams on another. We were not a footnote to the folksong revival—we were a kindred but different revival with strong links to the folksong revival, but also ties to bluegrass, ties to a parallel dance revival, and, like the folksong revival, important ties to collectors and academics.

Tales of the Instrumental Folk Music Revival I’ve been calling our revival an instrumental folk music revival, because not only the fiddle but the banjo, guitar, mandolin, and other instruments received renewed attention from the 1960s on. But at its core, it has been a fiddle-led revival. Its core repertory has been mostly fiddle tunes, and the fiddle is consistently the lead instrument in the formal bands and informal jams of the movement. Suddenly in the later 1960s and early 1970s, fiddle players were everywhere. Many had just taken up the fiddle. Only a few like me had studied violin as a youth. Curiously, though the Southern repertory and old-time band instrumentation were almost instantly transported to every part of the United States and became both widespread and deeply entrenched, it took another generation before many trained violinists suddenly became seriously interested in traditional fiddling. Much of the literature about the American folk revival sees the revival story as essentially a story about artistic performances brought to the general public, but I am convinced that the revival owes as much to the scholar-collectors as to the performers. Furthermore, many of the scholar-collectors have been performers themselves, not only

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in college classrooms, but in public venues and on radio and record. Thus, the documentation of folk musicians and emulation of their repertory and style become an essential part of the story of the revival, and the story of the American folk revival begins not in the 1950s or 1960s, but with John and Alan Lomax and dozens of other collectors in the 1920s and 1930s (Jabbour 2001: 58–76). In this context, the modern revival of Southern old-time fiddling presents an interesting case. The vast region of the Upland South, its geography and history tied together by early settlement patterns, stretches from east of the Appalachians to west of the Ozarks. The region has a long history of exporting its musical creativity—the banjo, the minstrel stage, ragtime, blues, country music, bluegrass, and both black and white gospel music. Its fiddling tradition is quite varied, but a number of features in both repertory and style make the fiddling of this broad region distinctive. Since the 1960s, the Upland South has seen a vigorous revival of older fiddle styles, for which the term “old-time” has been widely adopted. “Old-time” in its broadest sense, meaning “in the old days” or “in an old-fashioned style,” is an old term widely used throughout the United States. In Southern music, the term found a new use after the post-World War II emergence of bluegrass as a new Upland South style. Appalachian fiddlers’ conventions began using “old-time” as a technical category within banjo, fiddle, and band competitions. There were now separate “old-time” and “bluegrass” categories. “Old-time” in this sense does not refer to the age of the performers—the term applies strictly to musical style. Thus when our Hollow Rock String Band competed in fiddlers’ conventions in the 1960s, we entered in the “old-time” category. So did other young musicians playing in our general style. Perhaps this is how the new name for Upland South fiddling and string band music gradually became “old-time”—a ubiquitous term that covered more or less everything but bluegrass and country and western. Bluegrass musicians play some old-time songs and instrumental tunes, but they have special requirements in style and repertory that distinguish their music from the broad old-time category. Nevertheless, increasingly and confusingly in northern North America and Europe, the terms “old-time” and “bluegrass” are being used almost interchangeably. Almost all my field recordings in the 1960s and 1970s were in fiddlers’ homes. One fiddler I visited, Taylor Kimble, lived along the Blue Ridge near Laurel Fork in southwestern Virginia. After I recorded him, he asked to hear it and seemed pleased and fascinated. A few months later, I went to see Taylor again. After we visited a while, he proposed making some music. I went to get my tape recorder from the car, and on my return I was surprised to see another tape recorder sitting there already. Taylor said he had admired my tape recorder during my last visit, so he bought himself one. Now it was my turn to admire his tape recorder—it was a lot better than mine. After another few months, I visited Taylor again. He surprised me by playing a tune I had not heard him play before. Even more surprising, he played it in three parts, just like my fiddling mentor Henry Reed, who lived a long way from Taylor’s Blue Ridge home. When I asked Taylor what he called the tune, he said “Stony Point”—the same title as Henry Reed’s! Naturally I asked him who he learned it from. “Why, I learned it

124   Alan Jabbour from you, Alan,” he said. “You played it for me the last time you were here, and I recorded it. I liked it, so I learned it.” Listen to audio ­example 6.1 (“Stony Point,” Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier 2000) to hear Henry Reed’s version of this tune , and audio e­ xample 6.2 (“Stony Point,” A Henry Reed Reunion 2002) to hear my version . I met Taylor not long after his wife passed away. As a widower living alone in his seventies, music became even more important in his life. Other young people, including some who learned about him from me, came to visit, and he was happy to share his fiddle and banjo repertory. A few years later, he was invited to visit some young musicians in Maryland, and while he was there he met a widow from the Blue Ridge named Stella Holladay, who played banjo. They had grown up fifty miles from each other and had never met, but they took a liking to each other and fell to playing tunes together. When I next came to visit Taylor in Virginia, he seemed very excited. “Alan,” he said, “go out yonder to the kitchen; I’ve got a surprise for you.” I went to the kitchen, and there was Stella sitting in a chair by the kitchen table. They had gotten married. It’s a measure of their joy that each of them learned the other’s entire musical repertory in their few happy years together. My stories about Taylor Kimble illustrate how deeply intertwined the art and the lives of us young musicians were with the elderly musicians we visited. Far from being detached observers, we found our lives enmeshed with the life and art of the people we had come to observe. We were living proof of the Observer Effect, as it is called in the social sciences, inspired perhaps by the Uncertainty Principle of quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg: namely, that the act of observation affects the object observed. Heisenberg or no Heisenberg, the story of a cultural movement is not likely to be complete without recognizing the impact on it of its observers. Our revival movement begins with our interaction with—our entering into and becoming part of the lives of— the musicians from whom we learned. Chief among the fiddlers who shaped my repertory and style was Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, along the New River on the Virginia-West Virginia border (see photograph in Figure 6.1). He was in his eighties when I met him in the mid-1960s, and he passed away in 1968. Henry Reed taught me one tune that he learned in his area from a fellow who had been down in Texas. When I got home, I learned the tune from my recording of Henry Reed, and then taught it to my fellow band members. Other young fiddlers learned it from us, and soon “Texas” was being played all over the region and beyond. Meantime I visited Henry Reed a year or two later, and he happened to play this tune again. I asked him its name, and without hesitating he said “New Castle,” explaining that it was the county seat of nearby Craig County, Virginia. I was a little abashed to learn that what we were calling “Texas” was actually “New Castle.” So, as I encountered people calling the tune “Texas,” I would politely explain that the real name is “New Castle.” I even cheerfully took the blame for causing the confusion. But the correction was not always greeted with a full measure of enthusiasm. One young woman, being instructed on the proper title, looked a little defiant. As her eyes flashed, I realized she was thinking

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FIGURE  6.1.  Henry Reed playing fiddle in his home, Glen Lyn, VA, ca. 1966-67. Photograph by Karen Singer Jabbour.

something akin to “You can’t take my ‘Texas’ away from me!” Sometimes the ways of tradition overwhelm your impulse to correct it, and you need to accept the authenticity of a tradition, even when it codifies a mistake you yourself set into motion. So, here’s— “Texas,” or “New Castle.” Listen to audio e­ xample  6.3 to hear Henry Reed’s rendition of this tune (“Texas,” Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier 2000 ). Not long before the Hollow Rock String Band broke up, I taught band members a couple of tunes I had just learned. One was from Henry Reed and had no name. It was an interesting tune in G with a nineteenth-century feel—a schottische-like I-IV-V-I chord progression and lots of scales and arpeggios. The other was from an elderly fiddler in Martinsville, Virginia, Joe Anglin, who called it “Lady of the Lake”—a beautiful old minor tune in A, akin to Henry Reed’s “Ducks on the Pond,” yet different enough to learn as a separate piece. Within a few weeks, I moved to Los Angeles, California, to begin teaching at UCLA, and band member Bertram Levy moved to Palo Alto, California, to begin his medical residency at Stanford University. By the time I visited Bertram in Palo Alto, he had already begun his Johnny Appleseed mission of seeding the West Coast with our fiddle tune repertory. His efforts had a significant impact on the budding fiddle

126   Alan Jabbour revival in California. In the 1970s, he moved to Port Townsend, Washington, and in 1977, he created the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, which continues to be hugely influential in the encouragement and dissemination of fiddling in America and beyond. Meanwhile I had moved to Washington DC, and my life increasingly took me away from fiddling crosscurrents. But in the early 1990s, I played fiddle at a dance camp on Lake Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho with my old friend Tommy Thompson. The dance camp went by the name “Lady of the Lake.” When I got there, the local sponsors asked me enthusiastically if I would play the tune “Lady of the Lake,” so, puzzled but obliging, I played Joe Anglin’s minor-sounding A tune from Virginia. My hosts could not conceal their disappointment, but they could not conjure up the melody they were hoping for, so the request languished in uncertainty. Tommy and I started working our way through our repertory of tunes from Henry Reed and other fiddlers. On the second or third day of the camp, by chance we played that untitled nineteenth-century-ish tune in G from Henry Reed. Our hosts leapt up in joy. “That’s ‘Lady of the Lake!’ ” It seems that Bertram Levy, our West Coast Johnny Appleseed of Appalachian fiddle tunes, had mixed up the titles and called this tune “Lady of the Lake.” Now a whole dance camp on Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was named for the misnomer. By the late 1990s, I was playing the fiddle more again. When I played the same untitled Henry Reed tune in G, on a few occasions someone would say, “Isn’t that an old New England tune?” I would reply—standing up for my mentor—“No, that’s a Henry Reed tune from Virginia.” I noticed my interlocutors would sometimes give me a look as if to say, “Yeah, well I think I know better.” Eventually someone pointed out that Rodney and Randy Miller had recorded the tune under the title “Lady of the Lake” on their classic New England double-album of contradance music, New England Chestnuts. Since then it has entered the repertory of contradance bands from coast to coast. Folklorist Gary Stanton has actually traced the tune’s progress—from Henry Reed to me to Bertram Levy (who accidentally gave it its new name) to Marty Somberg to Laurie Andres to Rodney Miller and a new lease on life as a New England contradance tune. The title “Lady of the Lake,” by the way, originally names a dance, and it has attached itself historically to several different fiddle tunes, of which this is just the latest. The story nicely illustrates the fascinating byways of tradition, when seen up close. So when I recently recorded the tune myself, in a fiddle-banjo duet with Ken Perlman, I cheerfully acceded to its new name, “Lady of the Lake.” Listen to audio ­example 6.4 (“Polka in G,” Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier 2000) to hear Henry Reed’s rendition of this tune , and audio ­example 6.5 (“Lady of the Lake,” Southern Summits 2005) to hear my own rendition . For more than a decade I’ve been getting together with Henry Reed’s family and other friends every Labor Day weekend. We play a lot of music, featuring, of course, Henry Reed’s large and distinctive repertory. At one such gathering a few years ago, one of his sons said to me, “Alan, play ‘Rocking the Babies to Sleep.’ ” Puzzled, I said, “I don’t know ‘Rocking the Babies to Sleep.’ ” “What,” they said, “didn’t daddy teach it to you? He always used to play it for us kids.” So they got their fiddles and taught me the tune. It is a beautiful, melancholy waltz—originally an Irish song. I loved it, and it is on my most recent

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CD. Like other tunes in his repertory, “Rocking the Babies to Sleep” is both venerable in origin and, in its present version, unique to Henry Reed as the modern-day source. But I was not the first to publish it. A group of Shetland teenagers attending a Pennsylvania folk music camp where I was teaching learned “Rocking the Babies” from me. They put it on a CD they released several months before my own CD. The anecdote reveals something important about fiddling today: there is a considerable amount of cultural cross-pollination. The Shetland fiddle revival is closely in touch with parallel movements in Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern Appalachians. Tunes regularly pass from one cultural region (or one cultural repertory) to another. Americans assume that some of the traditional American instrumental tunes are English, Scottish, or Irish in origin, and careful comparative study bears out this assumption. But the Southern American tunes also reveal important African American and American Indian influences, and a few tunes in the repertory come from elsewhere in Europe. A favorite traditional waltz in America, “Peekaboo Waltz,” was a Swedish waltz before it was recast in the nineteenth century with a fresh English-language text describing a father playing peekaboo with his young child. The traditional tune and new song were a hit in nineteenth-century America and are still widely performed. The well-known Southern American breakdown “Flop-Eared Mule” first appeared in the nineteenth century on the American scene as “Detroit Schottische” and is drawn from a widely distributed central European dance tune. Stylistic traits, though subject to a greater conservatism, are also capable of crossing from one region or culture to another. It is important to imagine cultural groups not as islands sequestered from contact with other groups, but as interlocking nodes in a larger integrated human system that provides every group with the sustaining nourishment and creative stimulation provided by cultural interchange with other groups. Listen to audio e­ xample 6.6 (“Rocking the Babies to Sleep,” Southern Summits 2005) for my version of this tune . I turn finally to a tune that has circled the globe. In the 1960s I learned “Over the Waterfall” from Henry Reed and taught it to our circle of young musicians. The tune is related to the ballad sometimes called “Eggs and Marrowbones,” in which a woman tries to blind her husband and push him in the river but is tripped and falls in the water herself. It is a venerable British tune, both as a song and as an instrumental tune. A nineteenth-century English set calls it “Girl with the Blue Dress On.” But as a fiddle tune called “Over the Waterfall,” all modern versions stem from Henry Reed’s version, as adopted, adapted, and passed along by me. Our band loved the way the tune plummets down, as if over the waterfall, at the end of the first strain, so we matched some intriguing chords to it and began playing it regularly. It was already in circulation throughout the country when it appeared on our 1968 album, The Hollow Rock String Band. It was often used as an instructional tune on banjo, strummed dulcimer, and hammered dulcimer, helping to circulate it even more broadly—though its very popularity among novices led some advanced players to begin snubbing it as unfashionable. In 1981, my wife and I were invited to Hungary for a special bilateral round of events involving Hungarian and American folklorists. First came a conference in Budapest, then

128   Alan Jabbour another conference in the southern Hungarian town Kecskemet, coinciding with a festival of the cultures of the Danube. By then, we had met a circle of young people who were going out to Hungarian villages—including ethnic Hungarian villages across the border in Rumania—to document oldtime Hungarian music, dance, and crafts. They were part of the táncház movement, an important Hungarian folk music revival (centrally featuring the fiddle) and, in retrospect, a harbinger of the fall of the Iron Curtain a decade later. In Kecskemet, they invited us to a late-night party at the Ceramics Workshop. The Hungarian fiddlers were playing and the schnapps was flowing. At a certain point in the party, a visiting band from Brittany began playing Breton music. Suddenly the word got out that the tall American played the fiddle. So the Breton fiddler came over and formally asked if I would like to play a tune. I agreed, and she turned and communicated with her band in a language I could not understand. But I could tell from the context that they were probably debating what tune in their repertory the tall American might know. Finally she turned again to me and said brightly in English, “Do you know ‘Over the Waterfall’ ”? Listen to audio ­example 6.7 (“Over the Waterfall,” Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier 2000) for Henry Reed’s version , and to audio ­example 6.8 (“Over the Waterfall,” The Hollow Rock String Band 1968) for our band’s version . The fiddle has sustained energetic revival movements in many regions. In the United States, the Appalachian revival is matched by a New England revival. Farther west, there is a flourishing Missouri fiddle movement, and a powerful contest-fiddling style originating in Texas has swept across the western and central parts of the country. Various ethnic styles have also flourished in the United States. Irish fiddling has flourished both in Irish urban neighborhoods and with a wider, often non-Irish constituency throughout the country. Cajun and Zydeco fiddling in Louisiana have undergone a renaissance. New England fiddling, both with and apart from contradancing, seems to be flourishing. A  number of smaller traditions of fiddling seem to have survived, revived, and thrived in the contemporary American environment. Canada is hosting several simultaneous fiddle revivals. The Cape Breton fiddle revival has become a powerful cultural movement with impacts radiating well beyond Cape Breton itself, including back to Scotland, where its cultural roots lie. Other parts of Atlantic Canada are also enjoying a surge of interest in their fiddle traditions. The Quebecois tradition is flourishing and may be spreading. And from the Ottawa Valley westward to the Pacific, various fiddle repertories and styles are reviving or flourishing. Across the Atlantic, the Irish fiddle revival remains strong, has institutional underpinnings, and reaches beyond Ireland to Britain, Europe, and especially the New World. The Scottish fiddling tradition seems strong and also has New World adherents. The Shetland revival has moved into its second and third generations since collector Tom Anderson launched it, and other areas like the Orkneys seem touched by the fiddle revival impulse. Elsewhere in Europe, from the Nordic countries to France to Hungary, we see signs of fiddle revivals. Are they separate revivals? Or are they all cousins in one great international fiddle revival? The last half of the eighteenth century bred a revolution in instrumental music

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and dance, a macro-revival fueled both by the politically and socially revolutionary era and by the democratization of the Italian violin throughout Europe. That revolution expressed itself in various ethnic or regional forms—micro-revivals that became the older Scottish, Irish, English, Cape Breton, New England, Pennsylvania, and Southern Appalachian instrumental traditions we know today. It may well be that the current revivals across North America and Europe are a similar macro-revival, within which one may observe various micro-revivals, each tinged by the cultural particulars of its ethnic or regional character. Just as “Over the Waterfall” and other Henry Reed tunes quickly spread around the country and abroad, the general Southern old-time repertory and style began to take hold in other parts of the United States. I myself resisted the trend toward calling it just “old-time,” feeling that there could be old-time Irish, old-time Cape Breton, or old-time New England repertory and style—Southern music should not aggrandize the term by adopting “old-time” without qualification, as if it were the only old-time music. I preferred more descriptive regional compounds, like “Southern old-time music” or “Appalachian old-time music.” But the best evidence that it is a strong and important cultural movement is that a need is felt for a name—a simple name. Like the Henry Reed tunes that people now call “Texas” and “Lady of the Lake,” “old-time” seems to be winning out as the name, despite my quixotic efforts to “correct” the tradition. Paradoxically, the only terminological competition is “bluegrass,” which is favored by some, especially in Europe and other faraway places, to describe Southern old-time and bluegrass stringband music collectively. But the passionate adherents of this Upland South instrumental music revival—the movement’s insiders, whether they live in the Appalachians, Seattle, or London—never call it “bluegrass.” They call it “old-time music.”

Concluding Thoughts Many indicators point to the institutionalization of the North American and European fiddle revivals as a cultural movement. The movement now has magazines to represent it. The Old-Time Herald, published in Durham, North Carolina, presents overwhelmingly Southern old-time content—though, as with bluegrass, jazz, blues, and other Southern exports, the artists may be from anywhere. Another magazine featuring Southern old-time music, The Old Time News, is published in England by the Friends of American Old Time Music and Dance (FOAOTMAD). Looking beyond the Southern old-time scene, another magazine, Fiddler Magazine, features all varieties of fiddle-related traditions, artists, and activities. Other institutional forums include the annual Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia, known to the national network of old-time musicians simply as “Clifftop.” The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, known as “Fiddle Tunes,” was inaugurated by Bertram Levy in 1977 and is going strong in 2012 as a benchmark festival for fiddling in North America. And the peripatetic North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, produced by Ian Russell of the University of

130   Alan Jabbour Aberdeen (Scotland) and known as “NAFCo,” takes place every two years and alternates between Aberdeen and other North Atlantic sites such as St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Derry and Donegal, Ireland/Northern Ireland. Reading the magazines and attending the festivals, one gets a good sense of the dimensions of both the Southern old-time revival movement and the kindred fiddle revival movements elsewhere in North America. But professional folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other cultural ethnographers have barely taken note of the Southern-rooted old-time movement. The lack of serious attention seems not to be simply because the movement is modern. Perhaps it is in part because we ourselves as folklorists have played so large a part in the movement. We have been more than observers and even more than participants—we have been major shapers of the movement. Further, like many Southern musical movements that have preceded it, the modern old-time revival has spread around the country and abroad—a testimony to its cultural energy, but an enormously complicated challenge to anyone trying to limn its sphere of activity and influence. Most important, though the movement might have seemed in the 1960s and early 1970s like a musical fad for educated outsiders, it has now taken hold deeply with younger musicians in the home region as well as nationwide and abroad. One can now hear outstanding young fiddlers, banjo players, and stringbands from the Appalachian region playing old-time tunes (including Henry Reed tunes) in an old-time style and describing themselves as performers of “old-time music.” The reader of this essay may have noticed that in separate parts of the essay I have connected the Southern instrumental folk music revival (the old-time revival) to (1) a larger American folk revival, where song was center-stage, and (2) a multicultural fiddle revival occurring all over North America and Europe. This may seem inconsistent, but perhaps it points to a need to place more emphasis on revival as a process for the periodic energizing and vivification of culture, and less emphasis on reifying that process by thinking of "a revival" as a culturally bounded thing. The revival of Southern instrumental folk music in the past half century has cultural connections to the American folksong revival, to the international fiddle revival, and to a folk dance revival as well. Seeing "revival" as a dynamic process with interconnections ramifying in multiple directions provides a useful antidote to our tendency to bind and circumscribe cultural phenomena with the nouns by which we name them. Nouns may help us see or hear a song, fiddle tune, or dance more clearly. Cultural processes are not so easy to see or hear and must be apprehended by understanding their enactment through time and space. But when we search for the fluid processes underlying the events we see and hear, we gain a sense of culture as a dynamic system of human interconnection—like the human body’s marvelous array of interconnected dynamic systems. From this perspective, "revival" begins to make sense, not as something that happens to culture, but as a processual tool by which culture as a system renews and remolds itself. Contemporary revival movements deserve our closer attention as scholars. We have neglected them compared to our documentation and analysis of other forms of cultural tradition. As the twentieth century progressed, documentary tools multiplied and became democratized, so that documentation became everyone’s way of signifying

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that what was being done was important. For those who observe passively without overt involvement in the process, it bears recalling that even dispassionate observation may influence the process being observed, if only by signaling through documentation that the events being documented must be important. But for others, and here I clearly include myself, involvement with documenting a tradition has verged into actively fostering revival and revitalization of the tradition. We are playing a major role in the very cultural process we are documenting. For revival movements, documentation has become an inextricable part of the cultural process. The documentarians have been shaping forces in the revivals as surely as the people toward whom the microphones and cameras are usually pointed.

Notes 1. My “Foreword” to that volume (pp. xi–xii) contains kernels of the ideas developed here. In 2008, a different version of this essay served as a keynote at the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and yet another version served as the Phillips Barry Lecture at the American Folklore Society’s 2010 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. 2. A published debate on this issue occurred in The Old-Time Herald, a magazine widely read by enthusiasts of Southern American old-time music. (See Benford 1989: 22–27; Wilson 1990: 25–31; and letters to the editor in vol. 1, no. 8; vol. 2, nos. 2, 3, 4, 5.) 3. The general term “New Criticism” was adopted in literary criticism from Ransom 1941. 4. See Jabbour (2000), a Library of Congress website for my field recordings and photographs of Henry Reed and my essay, “Henry Reed: His Life, Influence, and Art.” 5. Carter (1991: 73–89) provides a thoughtful analysis of the musical style of the Hollow Rock String Band and its impact on the instrumental folk music revival. 6. See Allen (2010) for a thorough history and critical appraisal of the New Lost City Ramblers. On pp. 203–205 he discusses the Hollow Rock String Band, the Fuzzy Mountain Band, and the Red Clay Ramblers. 7. See, for example, the excellent analyses of the folksong revival in Cantwell (1996), Filene (2000), and Cohen (2002). There are also numerous memoirs and biographical accounts. Allen (2010) provides extensive notes and references.

References Allen, Ray. 2010. Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Benford, Mac. 1989. “Folklorists and Us—An Account of Our Curious and Changing Relationship.” The Old-Time Herald, 1 Spring (7): 22–27. Cantwell, Robert. 1996. When We Were Good:  The Folk Revival. Cambridge:  Harvard University Press. Carter, Thomas. 1991. “Looking for Henry Reed: Confessions of a Revivalist.” In Sounds of the South, edited by Daniel W. Patterson, 73–89. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cohen, Ronald. 2002. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

132   Alan Jabbour Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Jabbour, Alan. 2001. “The Flowering of the Folk Revival.” In American Roots Music, edited by Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown, 58–76. New York: A Rolling Stone Press Book/Harry Abrams. Ransom, John Crowe. 1941. The New Criticism. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions. Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Wilson, Joe. 1990. “Confessions of a Folklorist.” The Old-Time Herald, 2 (3): 25–31, 43. Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. 1946. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54: 468–488. Revised and republished in Wimsatt, William K. 1954. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, 3–18. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Discs Cited The Fuzzy Mountain String Band. 1971. Somerville, MA: Rounder 0010, LP. (Malcolm Owen and Bill Hicks, fiddle; Bobbie Thompson, guitar; Vicki Owen, dulcimer; Blanton Owen and Eric Olson, banjo.) The Fuzzy Mountain String Band: Summer Oaks & Porch. 1972. Somerville, MA: Rounder 0035, LP. (Malcolm Owen and Bill Hicks, fiddle; Sharon Sandomirsky, guitar; Tom Carter, banjo and mandolin; Blanton Owen and Eric Olson, banjo.) The Hollow Rock String Band: Traditional Dance Tunes. 1968. Charleston, WV: Kanawha 311, 1968. Reprinted 1997 with the original notes and an additional essay by Alan Jabbour, “The Hollow Rock String Band Remembered a Generation Later,” Charlottesville, VA: County Records CO-CD-2715, CD. (Alan Jabbour, fiddle; Bertram Levy, mandolin; Bobbie Thompson, guitar; Tommy Thompson, banjo.) Jabbour, Alan, fiddle, Bertram Levy, banjo, and James Reed, guitar. A Henry Reed Reunion. 2002. Washington DC and Port Townsend, WA: privately published by Alan Jabbour and Bertram Levy, CD. Jabbour, Alan, fiddle, and Ken Perlman, banjo. Southern Summits. 2005. Washington, DC, and Arlington, MA: privately published by Alan Jabbour and Ken Perlman, CD. Miller, Rodney, fiddle, and Randy Miller, piano. New England Chestnuts, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. 1980-81. Two LPs. Reissued 2001, Westmoreland, NH: Great Meadow Music, two-CD set.

Websites Cited Jabbour, Alan. 2000. Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection. Washington: The Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/reed/. Contains sound recordings, photographs, extensive text materials, and a video. Accessed September 4, 2012.

PA R T I I I

I N TA N G I B L E C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E , P R E SE RVAT ION , A N D  P OL IC Y

C HA P T E R  7

R E V I V I N G KO R E A N I D E N T I T Y T H R O U G H I N TA N G I B L E C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E K E I T H HOWA R D

In the last few decades, we have become accustomed to the concept of cultural heritage. We visit museums; we search out World Heritage Sites; we are used to tourist brochures that concentrate on local customs, costumes, and cuisines. We travel the world, expecting to find music and dance shows staged for tourists and souvenir shops selling local trinkets in each port. Everywhere, efforts are made to preserve and present local cultural difference. We have seemingly forgotten how scholars warned that preserving cultural forms was not an option as society changed (e.g., Blacking 1978, 1987: 112; Nettl 1985: 124–127) and sidelined the polemic against freezing culture in preservation, as our contemporary zeitgeist has shifted to accepting, through revival, “a past that is alive” (Bharucha 1993: 15). This chapter explores the revival of the intangible cultural heritage, and the interface between preservation and creativity, in one key battleground for debate and legislation: South Korea (the Republic of Korea). It builds on my two monographs Preserving Korean Music (2006a) and Creating Korean Music (2006b). Korea is today known not just as a manufacturer of cars and mobile phones but for ancient temples and palaces, a cuisine that famously includes kimch’i pickled cabbage and pulgogi marinated beef, and music ranging from nongak/p’ungmul percussion bands to kut shaman rituals, aak and chŏngak court music and dance, and more.1 By “revival,” then, I here embrace all elements of cultural production, past and present, that in recent decades have been the subject of both official, state-led preservation orders and community or student-led efforts to create icons of Koreanness. As will become clear, revival takes cultural traditions that have continued in some form from the past as well as re-creating forms that have been lost, in a creativity that is both reflective of the past and demanding of novelty.

136  Keith Howard

Preserving Korea’s Intangible Cultural Heritage In many respects, South Korea has led the way in reviving indigenous performance arts and crafts, as well as in rebuilding ancient palaces and temples. In the 1960s, the government reframed and refocused legislation that dated back to a time when Korea was a colony of its neighbor, Japan, to serve a new national agenda. Initially, the motivation was a fear of loss and a desire to retain a national identity, but as time passed, the system became a foundation on which to create relevance for today, with icons of the past being utilized in new creativity.2 The motivation for preservation can also be framed by nostalgia, born in Korea as a middle class emerged through rapid economic development and urbanization. But nostalgia is a luxury—it is for people who have time and money, not those struggling to survive.3 The appeal to preserve the past and revive cultural forms for the present developed along two distinct pathways, one—if I may use analogies to the political parties of the United States or Britain—true Republican/Conservative and the other Democrat/ Labour. The first and major pathway came from the right-wing military dictatorship led by Park Chung Hee. Park came to power through a coup in 1961 and saw in the promotion of Koreanness a way to balance nationhood with modernization, urbanization, the mass media, land reform, and rapid social change. In his first year in office, Park promulgated Law 961, the Cultural Property Preservation Law (Munhwajae pohobŏp). This built on but rescinded legislation inherited from the Japanese, dating back to an Office for the Royal Family’s Property Management (Cheshil Chaesan Chŏngniguk) set up in 1907 when Korea was a protectorate of Japan. A year after formal colonization, the 1911 Temple Act (Jisatsurei) tightened legal constraints on archaeologists and treasure hunters, requiring an inventory of all tangible heritage items considered worthy of conservation and controlling their export. After the Pacific War, as the liberated but divided Korea struggled with civil war, Japan rescinded its similar legislation, replacing it in 1950 with the Cultural Property Preservation Law, the Bunkazai hogoho—using the same Chinese characters, incidentally, that Korea later chose for its law. Note that many politicians, businesspeople, and academics active in Korea in the 1960s had trained in Japan during the previous decades, so it is not surprising that they looked to Japanese legislation as a model. The Korean law was distinguished from Japanese legislation in two ways, both linked to the proposal to preserve Intangible Cultural Properties (Muhyŏng munhwajae):  music, dance, drama, plays and rituals, martial arts, and crafts and food. First, because it was accepted that the Korean literati and court culture, the so-called high tradition, had largely been imported from China, the more indigenous folk culture or “low tradition” was embraced in an effort to create the iconicity that politicians and academics sought.4 Second, the nature of the intangible heritage meant that individual artists and craftspersons needed to become agents for conservation and revival, teaching and

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performance. These were nominated as “holders” (poyuja), although the Korean public normally refers to them as “Human Cultural Properties” (In’gan munhwajae). Whereas in Japan emphasis is placed on a holder’s skills honed over a lifetime, in Korea the focus is squarely on the performance art or craft. Since the early 1970s, each of the several hundred, mainly elderly Korean holders appointed at any given time has been paid a monthly stipend equivalent to roughly half the average wage, whereas in Japan the stipend is greater for those conserving “high traditions” but for many years was nonexistent for those conserving the “low.” Korean lawmakers demanded a system that, like Japan, also preserved buildings, documents, and artifacts as Tangible Cultural Properties (Yuhyŏng munhwajae), customs and morals as Folk Cultural Properties (Minsok charyo), and animals, plants, fossils, and geological forms as Monuments (Kinyŏmmul). Fifty years on, the result is striking: alongside the 108 Intangible Properties sit Tangible Property 1, Namdaemun, the six-hundred-year-old southern gate to Seoul in 2008 severely damaged by an arsonist; four small volcanic outcrops on the coast of Cheju Island that are home to unique invertebrates, red algae, poriferas, and coral insects; animals and insects that include fireflies found only in a small area around Muju in the southwest and long-horned beetles in Kwangnŭng Forest near Seoul; and Monument 53, the Chindo dog—a kind of spitz with a curly tail. In the 1960s, the operation that swung into action to carry out the demands of the legislation was cast in the “historical-reconstructional” approach of Asian folklore (after Janelli 1986:  24–25, using Richard Dorson’s term). This also tracked back into the Japanese colonial period and to ethnographies that were compiled in the 1930s by both Japanese and Korean scholars. That genres of folklore were documented reflected decline, but also a very different enterprise: an effort to future-proof colonial rule by documenting what was to be promoted as a shared Japanese and Korean cultural inheritance.5 Ethnographers, then, studied local shamanic rituals, but also mask dramas, dance, and music. Less attention was given to court and literati “high traditions.” After liberation from the Japanese yoke in 1945, war and the subsequent rush to modernize all but obliterated what was left. This began to be recognized in the 1950s, from which time we can trace a scattering of discussions in the National Assembly, and the stark reality of loss was vividly portrayed in a series of hard-hitting articles on individual performers and artisans published between 1959 and 1963 by the journalist Ye Yonghae (1929–1994) in the Korea Daily News (Han’guk ilbo). Ye told me in 1991 how his articles, collected into a book in 1963, were “like the last breath for those about to die, like an injection of life” (interview, August 1991, Seoul). He wrote about the making of the bamboo-and-horsehair hat, until the turn of the twentieth century normal attire for Korean men that allowed them to tie their topknots; by 1960 only Mo Manhwa, in his seventies, could still make the bamboo brims for the hats, splitting bamboo into sufficiently fine yarn, while Yu Sangyun, then seventy-nine, was the last person able to combine the hat crown and rim (Ye 1963: 337–351). Ye wrote about a zither maker, Kang Sanggi, then sixty-eight, who was unable to sell enough instruments to survive and so referred to himself as a joiner, “more often than not wasting his unique skill on repairing furniture in his dingy workshop” (207). Chŏng Yŏnsu still made decorative

138  Keith Howard knots—maedŭp—used as decorations on belts, costumes, furniture, and funeral biers, but “frustrated by the virtual indifference to this craft by the world, he is now a bitter man, reticent about his craft, which he alone can perform” (365–371). Ye featured more than fifty musicians, all celebrated exponents of the dying traditions of court music, of kagok lyric songs, p’ansori epic storytelling through song, sanjo extended repertoires for melodic instrument plus drum, and pŏmp’ae formal Buddhist chanting. All of these crafts and performance arts were over time destined for appointment as Intangible Cultural Properties.6 First, though, scholars were despatched to conduct initial research and produce reports. Their scholarly reports matched Korea’s Confucian respect for the past but enshrined two aspects that would mitigate against creativity: they sought out archetypes, and they imposed a system that was top down, requiring authentication from above. The scholars did more than document: they reconstructed partially lost performance genres, encouraging potential holders to return to what they proposed as original forms (wŏnhyŏng). In reality, in the 1960s much of the available documentation was inadequate, particularly in respect to folk arts and crafts, so scholars judiciously matched historical materials to what remnants they could still observe and added, when deemed appropriate, elements from other places and other performance traditions. For example, diffusionist thinking encouraged the reconstruction of mask dance dramas using common themes and character types. Hence, the report on the Hahoe mask dance drama (Hahoe t’al ch’um), last performed in 1928, used the failing memory of one man who as a teenager had taken a minor role in the 1920s but levered the storyline to fit those of other known dramas. The Kangnyŏng mask dance drama, from today’s North Korea, used data collected by a folklorist in 1943 and published in 1957 and coupled this to three migrants now living in South Korea, only one of whom originally came from Kangnyŏng. Again, putative links between Buddhism and shamanism during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) were exploited, encouraging illiterate or semiliterate shamans to incorporate Buddhist chants (as discussed in relation to the southwestern Chindo tradition in Mikyung Park 1985 and Howard 2006a: 146). The reports of scholars were submitted to a Cultural Properties Committee (Munhwajae wiwŏnhoe) and became the basis for appointments. The reports built into several hundred large volumes, the Cumulative Research Series Reports on Important Intangible Cultural Properties (Chungyo muhyŏng munhwajae chosa pogosŏ).7 Rarely do reports discuss what was restructured, and in maintaining the top-down approach, an Intangible Property was regarded as immutable and unchangeable once appointed. The rhetoric, of course, argued differently: the musicologist Chang Sahun (1916–1991), for many years a member of the Cultural Properties Committee, wrote that a Property must “aim to keep originality. If one thing is appointed which is not the original form it may have lost its value” (1982:  347). A  few recognized that appeals to authenticity were hazardous—a slippery path that had devalued folklore elsewhere (to paraphrase Staub 1988)—and substituted historical contextualization over originality. Hence, Yi Pohyŏng (b.1937), a folk music expert and long-term adviser to the Cultural Properties Committee, carefully articulated in interview with me in 1990 how holders must “demonstrate by performance that they belong to the history of the genre” while Properties

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“must be judged as to how they fit into the background of Korean tradition” (interview, July 1990, Seoul). The system has, after fifty years, created both “high tradition” and “low tradition” icons of identity. In fact, three Properties have made it to the ranks of UNESCO Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity and are promoted internationally. These were appointed in 2001, 2003, and 2005, respectively:  Chongmyo Cheryeak, music for the Rite to Royal Ancestors, in Korea also designated as Intangible Property 1 (appointed in 1964) and the epitome of the “high” tradition; p’ansori, epic storytelling through song, an art genre descending from the “low” tradition, in Korea Property 5 (appointed in 1964); and Gangreung Danoje (Kangnŭng tanoje), a spring festival and ritual with origins in China mixing “high” and “low” traditions, Property 13 (appointed in 1967). The second pathway via which Korean culture gained its iconicity came from students and demonstrations that campaigned against the same military government that was promoting legislation to protect the cultural heritage. Initially, these demonstrations were cast as rituals, the biggest being the Ritual to Invoke Native Land Consciousness, held annually from 1963 at Seoul National University. This sought to clean the campus of “government smells” and invited shamans and folk musicians to participate. In so doing, students turned from westernization and modernization back to the supposedly timeless folk culture of the countryside. The same underlying motivation continued in the 1970s with the so-called minjung munhwa populist culture of the masses, using mask dance dramas as well as shaman rituals, and capturing the village meeting places (madang) of old where such things were once performed, in what was known as madang kut and, subsequently, madang kŭk (where kut signifies ritual and kŭk theater). Clearly, though, satirical folk performances needed to be recast, replacing the landowners and Buddhist monks of old with corrupt politicians and urban woes. Hence, adaptation was the rule, and the form of revival undertaken gave scant attention to historical authenticity. By the early 1980s, when I first visited Korea, students had added a further aspect to their cultural quest: during vacations, they would travel to the countryside, learning the old ways.8 Revival, situated along the confluence of the two pathways, gathered pace as students graduated and became scholars and bureaucrats. This began to shift the top-down agenda of preservation toward promotion, with discussions about creativity and development. And as the constructs of identity evolved, creating icons of Koreanness from traditional cultural forms, new cultural forms became popular, experienced as part of westernization. Whereas traditions embraced by the preservation system were once learned and experienced as part of daily life, they no longer are. Hence, choices had to be made to select what aspects of the old to retain, and what creativity and development would be allowed.9 In today’s Korea coexistence rules: traditional music (kugak), for example, is heard alongside Western music (sŏyang ŭmak). Again, whereas traditional music served as accompaniment to court banquets and ceremonies, as part of work activities or death rituals, or as local entertainment, both kugak and sŏyang ŭmak today are performed in urban concert halls, supported by corporate or government

140  Keith Howard sponsorship, and may be populist, recorded for CD and internet downloading, and broadcast. Social and cultural change gives rise to many arguments in Korea against preserving the old. The arguments are not unique to Korea but in general terms tend to focus on relevance (“Old folk songs or folk bands are irrelevant today”), on freezing culture (“How can folk songs or folk bands be frozen, performed as museum artifacts in archetypal forms that have had the very life taken out of them?”), on the notion that new forms of cultural production have replaced the old (“Korea has developed and supports its culture, so there is no need for preservation”), and on selection (“Why are some folksingers nominated by the state to perform only some genres of folk song?”).10 To consider the first, communal rice-farming songs—to take one example of folk songs—used to be sung virtually everywhere rice was grown (that is, primarily down the western side of the Korean peninsula). But the need for these songs declined with land reform in the 1950s, which got rid of many tenanted farms, and ended when tractors in the 1970s reduced the need for any large workforce to gather at times of sowing, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting. Again, to give a second example, Korean people used to need funeral songs to mark the rite of passage between the worlds of the living and the dead, and such songs have been collected from the elderly in virtually every village of Korea. Until the recent past, and as was still common in the countryside into the 1980s, large numbers of people would gather to send off the dead, assembling in the home of the deceased, accompanying the bier out of the village and into the local mountain for internment. Such gatherings differ in urban surroundings, where a bus will replace the march through the village, and the decline of communal funerals can be charted against the rise of Christianity. To give a third example, where village groups used to assemble at festival times for entertainment—whether singing, dancing, or playing the ubiquitous percussion music of old—families today gather around televisions. Second, the notion that preservation freezes culture regularly surfaces in ethnomusicology forums. Or at least it used to, but conferences of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) over the last decade stand witness to a reconsideration, not least, I suspect, because many members have provided expert reports on music genres to UNESCO (to which the ICTM is affiliated) for the three rounds of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” in 2001, 2003, and 2005. It could be argued that the real problem with the notion of freezing cultural artifacts is that this is precisely what galleries and museums do throughout the world. Museums have high status, and they showcase the products of the intangible heritage. Not surprisingly, much of the discussion about preserving the intangible heritage has therefore been framed by museum curators and archivists. Why can’t performance arts be showcased in a similar way to the presentation of archaeological or industrial artifacts? I note that museums are increasingly interactive, inviting visitors to take part in workshops and the like, and thereby adding the showcasing of process—for example, the creation of crafts—to that of products—art and craft objects). A second counterargument is also relevant: the preservation of a performance art or craft supports new creativity and thereby allows the generation of new meanings. The

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old permeates the new by providing an icon of identity. For example, everyday court food, Chosŏn wangjo kungjung yori, is preserved as Property 38, even though there has been no royal court since the death of the last king in 1919 (he was survived by a son who was in turn survived by his consort). Property 38 was appointed in 1970; alongside it, numerous cooking schools populate the streets of today’s Seoul, teaching traditional recipes and creating dishes that fuse old and new. Taken together, these have challenged the widespread adoption through the colonial period of Japanese food and, over the last fifty years, of hamburger joints and all other manner of Western cuisine. Korean dress, hanbok, since 1988 Property 89, is much the same: on special occasions every Korean woman wants to wear a fashionable costume that mixes old and new patterns, dyes, and materials.11 Once everyday wear, hanbok has been supplanted by Western dress, but revival has reinvented it as a fashion statement, a way to distinguish the catwalks of Seoul from those of Paris.12 Or, to give an example relating to music, alongside the preserved court and folk music, every year sees hundreds of new compositions premiered that use traditional instruments, sometimes mixing them with Western instruments, and referencing old melodies and rhythmic structures to conjure sonic representations of the air, rivers, and mountains of Korea and the emotions and spirituality of its people (Howard 2006a: 45–46). Third, statements to the effect that “Korea has developed and supports its culture so there is no need for preservation” hide a claim that art and culture should be self-sustaining rather than supported by governments or other agencies. Some would indeed argue that art and cultural production change as a society changes and will continue to flourish because of the inherent creativity of the human race. The contrary view, that without state support art will move away from local production as it is grabbed and controlled by media conglomerates, is also heard. In this view, art is part of contemporary consumerism and shifts from active to passive involvement—hence this perspective is heard from those, in Korea as elsewhere, who are nostalgic for the past. Taken back to music, the argument might go that folk songs that were once songs of the people become pop songs for the people. Essentially, in the 1940s, this was Theodor Adorno’s perspective on popular culture in Europe: as plastic, as lacking inherent value, as using tried and trusted means to sell products. Again, after World War II, much the same sentiment was also behind John Maynard Keynes’s argument that the fledgling Arts Council of Great Britain should focus on excellence above popularity, as a conduit for support to less profitable arts. Arts funding in Britain shifted under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In America, a vacillation between the two contrasting perspectives can be seen with funding for the arts under Republican and Democrat administrations. In Korea, the two sides of the argument have been a constant part of debates about preservation since the 1960s and became more heated in the 1990s, with the globalization effort of the regimes of Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung. Fourth, the argument about selection reflects the fact there are (or once were) many different folk song genres in Korea that could be appointed Intangible Cultural Properties and a large number of potential holders or Human Cultural Properties. Funding, though, can never be sufficient to support each and every genre or person.

142  Keith Howard Rather than debate which of Korea’s myriad performance arts or crafts should become an Intangible Cultural Property, a few—for this is a minority perspective—argue that it is best if none do. The choices of scholars or government agencies can certainly be critiqued on the grounds that some are inappropriate. Or, with some genres of holders selected, a further argument opens up, for other genres will decline as performers and craftspersons who failed to receive support give up their practices. What happens when those appointed for, say, a shaman ritual find they can charge more than their colleagues who have not been appointed? Or what happens when one folksinger becomes a star while other equally skilled singers languish unnoticed by the media?

Global Perspectives In the 1990s, the Korean Intangible Cultural Property system became a global model for preservation and revival as the Korean National Commission for UNESCO invited UNESCO member state representatives to conferences and workshops.13 UNESCO had promoted World Heritage Sites for some decades, seeing in them a shared and universal heritage. Concerns had surfaced in the 1964 Venice Charter, when Egypt proposed flooding the Abu Simbel valley, and became more visible following the 1972 General Conference. Although UNESCO produced recordings of disappearing music—issued on four series—and later published its Red Book of Endangered Languages, its concern with the intangible essentially began in 1971. UNESCO’s discussions appear to have been jump-started by the reaction to Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Cóndor Pasa” cover on their 1970 album Bridge over Troubled Water. This took a Bolivian melody, written fifty-eight years earlier in 1913 but itself imitative of folk music, and set it to new lyrics.14 The Bolivian president questioned what protection UNESCO should provide to music like this. Much later, in 1989, the twenty-fifth UNESCO General Conference adopted the Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, which listed a set of provisions and recommended the establishment of national inventories of institutions, archives, and documentation systems. A shift in the tangible heritage agenda, to accommodate beliefs and usage in World Heritage Site appointments, became evident. As one prominent example, the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been added to the list in 1979, but it was not the site so much as what happened there that was to be memorialized. The 1989 Recommendation included provision for moral and economic support to holders of folklore and argued that the rights of local communities to their own cultural heritage should be protected. By 1994, the focus shifted from documentation and archiving to revival, adding the notion of “Living Human Treasures” (a term already in use in France). Member states were asked to compile lists of those who practiced traditional arts and crafts. Three rounds of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity followed, appointing nineteen, twenty-eight, and forty-three items, respectively, in 2001, 2003, and 2005. To this point, much discussion had taken place within the International

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Council of Museums and the International Council on Monuments and Sites, and this led to accusations of bias toward monumental European structures and the cultural practices associated with them. An attempt was made to counter this within the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage that, with updated guidelines, was agreed at the 2003 General Conference. The Convention recognized that globalization brought “threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction” and set up an Intergovernmental Committee to oversee heritage listings—181 items had been added by the end of 2008, and the intangible heritage was made a UNESCO strategic priority for the 2008–2013 period (Lira and Amoêda 2009: 4).

Reviving Korea’s Intangible Cultural Heritage My argument is that because Korea started legislating in the 1960s, it has remained ahead of UNESCO globally. By 2004, the year after the UNESCO Convention had been agreed, 115 Korean Intangible Cultural Properties had been appointed at the national level, of which 108 remained current (seven additional Property appointments had been canceled), categorized as music (17), dance (7), theater (14), plays and rituals (24), crafts (43), food and drink (2), and martial arts (1). I will focus on just a small clutch of these to briefly explore how revival has occurred subsequent to Property appointments.

Folk Songs Folk songs were appointed as Properties 19, 29, 51, 57, 84, and 95 in 1968, 1969, 1973, 1975, 1985, and 1989. Of these, Properties 19, 29, and 57 are professional genres,15 embracing Sŏnsori san t’aryŏng, the songs of itinerant male troupes, Kyŏnggi minyo, folk songs associated with courtesans and centered in the province surrounding Seoul, and Sŏdosori, folk songs maintained by refugees from the northwest of the peninsula who since the Korean War have lived in South Korea. Three Properties cover local repertoires: Namdo tŭl norae, southern or more precisely southwestern rice-planting songs (Property 51), Nongyo, regional dry-field farming songs (Property 84), and Cheju minyo, folk songs from the southern island of Cheju (Property 95).16 A set of eight songs was performed as Namdo tŭl norae at the 1971 National Folk Arts Contest by a group from Inji village, Chindo island. The set compressed the whole agricultural season—placing shoots in seedbeds (normally March), transplanting (May), weeding (June and July), a final weeding (August), and a celebratory song at harvest (September)—into twenty-five minutes. Slow and fast seedbed-planting songs and slow and fast transplanting songs were paired, and a story of lovesickness was incorporated in the first transplanting song that added interest. Three weeding songs—a pair, and then a

144  Keith Howard song originally given close to harvest when the crop could be predicted—were followed by a final processional, “Kilkkonaengi.” Plastic rice shoots with lead bases were introduced for the stage; women planted and weeded while men passed them rice shoots and played percussion interludes between songs. One male performer danced and played the puk barrel drum in front of the singers—clearly an introduction for stage use, since if he did this in a paddy field he would trample the precious crop. An ox—normally for stage performances a pantomime beast festooned in ribbons—added spectacle to this final song. This beast, programs announced, was a prize for the year’s most hard-working tenant or was purchased through a mutual savings scheme and lent to the owner of the most productive paddy fields at harvest time; these ideas are reprised in several publications, including those by Ruriko Uchida (1980: 112) and by a group of Chindo island researchers (Naegojang chŏnt’ong kakkugi 1982: 153–154). In 1972, Chi Ch’unsang, a folklorist from Chŏnnam University in the provincial capital, was sent by the Academy of Korean Studies to Inji to record song texts. While he recorded many lyrics that have since disappeared from the Property set, he also helped standardize each song (see Chi Ch’unsang 1980, 1987). By the 1970s, when the songs were performed as a set, decline in local singing during the agricultural season was terminal. Elsewhere, too, folk songs were fast disappearing. Chi was one of many involved in text collection throughout the Korean countryside, but only much later, in 1989, was the first comprehensive recording project launched. Then, the Korean broadcaster MBC sent three producers and eight researchers led by Ch’oe Sangil to the southern Cheju island, where they recorded five hundred songs over a five-month period.17 From these, MBC published ten CDs and a 366-page book of lyrics. Joined by scholars based in regional cities, the team moved on to other provinces, in seven years recording 14,300 songs that were condensed onto 103 CDs in the Comprehensive Collection of Korean Folksongs (Han’guk minyo taejŏn). Ch’oe reckoned his team could find barely 10 percent of the singers Chi and others had collected texts from for the Academy of Korean Studies’ project a decade earlier; the vast majority of singers had died. At the MBC studios in Seoul in 1999, he told me: “many of the singers we found and recorded were old, so perhaps 20 percent have died. Probably, because of their age, a further 20 percent can no longer sing. . . . It is no longer possible to carry out a recording project like we did” (interview, August 1999, Seoul). As the old has declined, so revival has occurred. Revival has placed many local folk songs on festival stages, a move spearheaded by those involved in the appointed Properties. Local and popular folk songs have become the sonic backdrop to films about the Korean countryside, suggesting an iconicity of identity in folk songs that matches the deeply felt affinity to “home” (kohyang)—the birthplace or ancestral home. And both local and popular folk songs have become models for new creativity directed at new audiences. To give one example, key among a new generation of singers is Yong Woo Kim (b. 1968). As a student, much like his peers, he spent his vacations in the countryside. He learnt folk songs from the holder of Property 51, Cho Kongnye (1930–1997) and from the holder of Property 95, Cho Ŭlsŏn (1915–2000). Cho Kongnye taught him the women’s song and dance genre Kanggangsullae, which he reworked as a much shorter piece for male

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chorus, adding a new countrapuntal melody to his solo, on his first album, Chigye Sori (1996). She also taught him a song for grinding meal, “Panga t’aryŏng,” that features on his second album, Kwenari (1998), and she is heard in duet with him on his fourth, Chilkkonaengi (2003), released six years after her death. Cho Ŭlsŏn taught Kim “Pongjiga,” a song that once accompanied the making of horsehair hats, featuring a refrain in which a vocal falsetto with sharp dynamic contrasts represents the weaving of hair in and out of the bamboo frame; on Kim’s first album, it is slowed down and accompanied by a notched flute, the tanso, and a synthesizer, in the process abandoning the falsetto and with it any connection to weaving. Again, she taught him an unaccompanied milling song, “Yongch’ŏn’gŏm,” which, accompanied by piano, guitar, haegŭm fiddle, p’iri oboe, changgo drum, and ching gong on his fourth album, became a pop song that reached third place in the Korean charts—quite an achievement, when the Korean recorded music industry was the second largest in Asia.18 Kim’s audience is not local villagers but urban youth, hence revival has found a new audience for old folk songs. It has done so through adjustment and arrangement—I resist the suggestion here, much as Kim and his audience resist it, that there has been appropriation or anything akin to an “invented tradition.” As he remarked to me in 1999: When I sing old folk songs my style is different to that of old singers. Our culture has changed as times have changed. Old people grew up in the past, so they are my source . . . but I must adapt to create my own style . . . I have to adjust my voice to fit with the forces I am using. I work with different instruments and different voices. (Interview, June 1999, Seoul)

Percussion Bands Percussion bands (in Korean, nongak or p’ungmul, often referred to in English texts as “farmers’ bands”) were appointed as Property 11 in 1966. At that time, the name of the Property was nongak shibi ch’a. In 1985, it was renamed nongak, which many Koreans consider a Japanese term, so p’ungmul, an alternative, has considerable contemporary currency for exactly the same repertoire; shibi ch’a means twelve beats (or twelve patterns).19 Percussion bands undertook village ritual functions (named, for example, maegut), communal work activity accompaniment (in ture and p’umashi groups), fund-raising (kŏllip “grain begging,” ttŭlbalbi “treading the yard,” chŏl kŏllip “temple grain begging,” and so on), and entertainment (p’an’gut). Bands were a ubiquitous part of rural Korea until recent times, performing music and dance and sometimes involving dramatic elements.20 Property 11 initially appointed members of a band from Samch’ŏnp’o in South Kyŏngsang province that had a history claimed to trace back four hundred years. By 1980, the two initial holders had died, and a third was nominated from Chinju (a nearby town inland from Samch’ŏnp’o) to maintain the same performance style. Other areas, however, had equal or greater claims to recognition, and bands playing five regional styles had won prizes at one or more of the first

146  Keith Howard twenty-three National Folk Arts Contests: “central” (kyŏnggi), “right” (udo), and “left” (chwado) styles from the western side of the peninsula, and “southeast” (yŏngnam) and a local Kangnŭng style from the eastern side. In 1985, three of these were appointed to the renamed Property: from Iri, North Chŏlla province (udo); P’yŏngt’aek, Kyŏnggi province (kyŏnggi); and Kangnŭng. The government funded a local preservation society for each in 1986, when Samch’ŏnp’o was reappointed (yŏngnam). And in 1988, a band from Imshil (chwado) was appointed to complete the five-style lineup. Nongak/p’ungmul remains an iconic Korean soundworld. Watch a football match when the Korean Red Devils are playing, and it is hard to miss the characteristic drums and gongs. It is taught in schools, and it remains popular on university campuses. However, village ritual practices were centered on tutelary deities, who at the New Year would be carried around a village to bless wells, food stores, and offices—practices that died out with modernization, sterilization, and pest control. Similarly, fund-raising activities were inherently local, often linking to mutual savings groups (kye) that pooled resources to buy, say, an ox, or for the construction of shared storehouses; banks, commerce, and farming schemes such as the government’s New Village Movement (Saemaŭl undong), which began in the early 1970s, have rendered such activities redundant.21 Shared village entertainments, often taking place in the market or a village meeting site, have also declined rapidly, largely giving way to family celebrations and to small group socialization around televisions in homes. As the traditional performance contexts for nongak/pungmul disappeared, so revival began, recasting the genre for urban stages. Chief among the developments has been SamulNori. In February 1978, four percussionists took to the stage at the Space Theater (Konggan Sarang) in Seoul, and in June they adopted the name.22 SamulNori established a genre, samullori, which was taken up by many other quartets. Today, samullori is arguably the most popular Korean traditional music both in Korea and abroad. Samullori is not nongak/p’ungmul. Its fixed pieces of relatively fixed duration contrast with the extended and open-ended performances of local bands. The quartets have fixed membership and fixed individual roles, whereas flexibility—sometimes just men, sometimes small groups and sometimes large—characterized nongak/p’ungmul. Samullori musicians wear standardized costumes, typically white under black jackets, with two or three colorful sashes. And whereas nongak/p’ungmul was danced and performed standing, samullori is mostly performed seated. SamulNori developed a core repertoire between 1978 and 1982, assembling rhythms from regional nongak/p’ungmul styles and recasting them for its four musicians, one to each of the core nongak/p’ungmul instruments, the kkwaenggwari (small gong), changgo (double-headed hourglass drum), puk (barrel drum), and ching (large gong). SamulNori’s first piece was “Uttari kut,” an assembly based on the Kyŏnggi style, and in April 1978 they premiered their second piece, “12 ch’a, 36 karak,” based on Samch’ŏnp’o practice and soon renamed “Yŏngnam nongak.” The group’s third piece premiered in May 1979: “Honam udo kut” or “Honam udo nongak”—“right” style. Two members of the quartet came from the Kyŏnggi region, one from Samch’ŏnp’o, and one from Taejŏn at the northern tip of the Honam region. SamulNori’s fourth piece, in November 1979,

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fused rhythms from each of the three core western styles, as “Samdo nongak.” Three more pieces followed, including one, “Samdo sŏl changgo,” in which all four musicians took changgo drums. This core repertoire remains today, played with some variation of length and structure by all samullori quartets, and forming the basis of student percussion bands. Some development has taken place, notably with Dulsori, a larger group that tours the world and has headlined in Australia, Britain, Korea, Portugal, Singapore, and Spain;23 but even Dulsori is recognizably modeled on the repertoire established by SamulNori.

Shaman Rituals In Korea, shaman rituals (kut) are veritable feasts of music and dance. Many would contend that deep within the Korean mentality sits a legacy from shamanic and animistic rituals stretching back two thousand years or more. Kim Yŏlgyu, for instance, writes:  “our shaman consciousness is not easily lost. The consciousness may remain with Koreans forever, because it once gave meaning to our lives” (1987:  168–169). “Shamanism” is, of course, a term used loosely to cover a multitude of practices, and the fusing in Korea of two traditions, one where illness is typically interpreted as a calling from the spirits and where ecstasy marks spirit possession, and the other where hereditary inheritance gives rights to ritual practice indicates a divergence from putative Siberian forms (Howard 1998). Today, the ecstatic is moving in on former hereditary territory, but the basic tenets remain, wherein ritualists work as intermediaries between this and the other world to address death or illness and to ensure good fortune. Sustained attempts were made to stifle shamanism during the twentieth century, first by missionaries and the Japanese and then with modernization by the Korean government. Urbanization coupled to inroads made by modern medicine and compulsory education has made decline considerable. The first Property appointments that nodded to shamanism were Unsan pyŏlshindae and Kangnŭng tanoje, appointed Property 9 in 1966 and Property 13 in 1967. From Unsan and Kangnŭng, respectively, these Properties were preserved and promoted in the context of a rapidly modernizing Korea on a basis somewhat akin to quicksand, because modernization tended to be equated with Christianity more than the supposedly backward shamanism. Put simply, scholars and government officials were highly educated urbanites, wary of “superstition” and often converts to Christianity.24 The two Properties, then, were designated as communal festivals, with officials and mask dance dramatists as the initial holders. Despite the centrality of shaman rituals, and reflecting initial unease about promoting the supposedly backward, shamans were appointed holders only much later—Hwang Namhŭi (b.1937) for Unsan pyŏlshindae in 1992, and Pin Sunae (b.1959) for Kangnŭng tanoje in 2000. With the progression of students into professional careers coupling to a rise in widespread nationalist sentiment, the 1970s saw the Cultural Properties Bureau petitioned to recognize shaman rituals, but the student embrace of shamanism in demonstrations

148  Keith Howard against the government meant that the preservation system was not able to begin to preserve shaman rituals more openly until after the assassination of the military dictator Park Chung Hee in 1979. In November 1980, three rituals were appointed as Properties 70, 71, and 72: Yangju sonori kut from the south-center, Cheju ch’ilmŏri tang kut from the southern island of Cheju, and Chindo Ssikkim kut from the southwestern island of Chindo. The first of these persisted with the old appointment style—the first two holders were a cow attendant (wŏnmabu) and musician—but the latter two were publicly situated squarely in shamanism; the shaman holders, An Sain (1928–1990) and Kim Taerye (1933–2009), were supported by ritual assistants and musicians whose biographies identify shaman parents or relatives. In 1985, three more appointments were made in Property 82, all rituals for abundant fishing—from the east coast (Tonghaean pyŏlshin kut), west coast (Sŏhaean paeyŏnshin kut with Taedong kut), and western islands (Wido ttipaennori). A fourth fishing ritual was absorbed into Property 82 in 1987, from the south coast (Namhaean pyŏlshin kut). The regional spread was completed with three further ritual appointments as Properties 90, 98, and 104, in 1988, 1990, and 1996, respectively: Hwanghaedo Pyŏngsan sonorŭm kut from the northwest—in today’s North Korea but performed by migrant ritualists living in the south; Kyŏnggido todang kut, characteristic of the province surrounding Seoul; and Sŏul saenam kut, from Seoul itself. When I  first visited Korea in 1981, the revival of shamanism had begun in Seoul, rather than in local villages. It can be traced back to the Ritual to Invoke Native Land Consciousness, and through madang kut. It was promoted through popular books of photographs of traditional rituals, published under the title Han’guk ŭi kut (Korean shaman rituals). A Ritual Society (the Kuthoe) had begun to sponsor regular staged rituals, mostly put on—somewhat curiously—in the Cecil Theatre owned by the Anglican Church in downtown Seoul. These were transformed from the all-night rural rituals of old to work within the space and time confines of a theater, so that, for instance, ritual scenes designed to attract and placate dangerous spirits were cut while dance routines were beautified. The transformation resulted in performances that Chongho Kim (2003) calls “ritual concerts” (a translation of the Korean kut kongyŏn). Some folklorists and cultural theorists critique these; for example: “the tourism industry takes part in the commercialization of shamanic art . . . Now shamans sing and dance on the stages of theatres to inspire the spirit of artists” (Chungmoo Choi 1987: 73; see also 1989: 235– 249). Or, from the musicological perspective, as voiced by Mikyung Park: “if there is a degenerative aspect [of contemporary shamanism] . . . then this is it.” Park reports local informants commenting: “there’s no gusto or zest” (Park 2004: 87).25 Some shamans had been invited to perform at the Space Theater by its manager, Kang Chunhyŏk, sometimes solo and sometimes alongside SamulNori or other secular musicians. This resulted, through the 1990s, in a series of commercial CDs that intriguingly fused sacred and secular elements. They featured the Chindo ritualists Kim Taerye (1935–2009) and Pak Pyŏngch’ŏn (1933–2008), who were the holders of Property 71, and the east coast holder of Property 82, Kim Sŏkch’ul (1922–2005).26 Other ritualists, such as Property 82 holder Kim Kŭmhwa (b. 1931), became actors, appearing on celluloid, while many films shot in the Korean countryside included snippets of shaman rituals.

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In Korea today, ritual concerts are symbolic of shamanic revival. Their producers market folklore and fill a commercial niche by building up artistic presentation at the expense of spirituality. Hence, the reality of the spirit world and the need to bring spirits to the stage (rather than the ritual space) gives way to an essentializing view in which shamanism is merely part of heritage. This is not to denigrate the quality of performance achieved, and Kim Sŏkch’ul’s music—rather than ritual—has inspired two Ph.D. projects by non-Koreans that eloquently illustrate its appeal (Simon Mills 2003, and see Mills 2007; Simon Barker 2010). Indeed, Barker’s transformations of ritual rhythm to create a new jazz drumming language became the subject of an award-winning 2008 film directed by Emma Frantz, Intangible Asset 82—a transformation to global stages that would have been hardly imaginable without the revival that has taken place.27

Court Music Since the Korean preservation system packages both folk and court, a number of court music genres have been appointed Properties. In its narrow sense, aak denotes court sacrificial ritual music and dance, while chŏngak more broadly incorporates music of the literati; both are routinely used as umbrella terms for court music. But Korea no longer has any court; the last king reigning when the peninsula became a Japanese colony in 1910 died in 1919, and the consort of the last prince died in the 1980s. Two sacrificial rituals are, however, maintained. Music and dance for the first, Chongmyo cheryeak, appointed Property 1 in 1964 and a UNESCO Masterpiece in 2001, is today performed annually on the first Sunday in May, for national events and festivals at the Royal Ancestral Shrine (Chongmyo), and as a concert item divorced from the shrine. The shrine itself, a World Heritage Site entered on the UNESCO list in 1995 but earlier designated in Korea as Monument 125, has two halls: the nineteen-room Chŏngjŏn and the sixteen-room Yŏngnyŏngjŏn (Tangible Cultural Properties 227 and 821, respectively). The second sacrificial ritual, music and dance in the Ritual to Confucius, the Sŏkchŏn taeje, was appointed within Property 85 in 1986. At the Asian Games that year and again at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, the Sŏkchŏn taeje was held up as a historically authentic tradition to be used as a model for restoring Confucian rituals elsewhere in East Asia.28 The Confucian Shrine, the Taesŏngjŏn, is Tangible Property 141. The National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (Kungnip kugagwŏn; since 2010 known in English as the National Gugak Center), the government-funded repository for court music and dance, provides the musicians for both. The National Gugak Center is the successor to court institutes dating back at least twelve hundred years; while the music for Property 1 dates from King Sejŏng’s reign (1418–1450), the music for Property 85 and the dance for both date back in Korea to 1116, when they were received as a gift from the Chinese Sung emperor Huizong.29 Over time, waves of decline and revival have marked both rituals. In 1918, what was then known as the Court Music Department (Aakpu), funded by the increasingly impoverished king, appealed to its equivalent in Tokyo for support. This led to a visit in

150  Keith Howard 1921 by the Japanese musicologist Tanabe Hisao (1883–1984), who found only the Rite to Royal Ancestors still performed and argued that supporting it was vital to maintain the relationship between Korean and Japanese cultural heritage.30 His intervention led to a limited revival. Liberation in 1945 brought no restoration of the monarchy, and the rite was again downgraded. Only parts continued to be performed. Marking the first modern revival, seven senior musicians who had trained at the Court Music Department in the 1920s were in 1964 declared holders of the music and dance for the rite as Property 1; an eighth holder joined them in 1968. The revival, though, was not undertaken in one go. Substantial restoration in 1969 fused the memories of the Property holders with an investigation of historical sources; members of the king’s lineage, the Chŏnju Yi, took responsibility for ritual procedures. Singing and the playing of stringed instruments had stopped altogether in the nineteenth century, although stringed instruments were still placed in the ensemble; zither playing was restored after the musicologist Yi Hyegu (1908–2010) published an article about it (1957: 379–380), and in the 1970s singing was reintroduced (Provine 1986: 7–10). In 1976, costumes were restored when Yi Ku (1931– 2005), the last living son of Korea’s last crown prince, Yi Un (1897–1970), presided over the ritual. In the 1980s, texts were reintroduced that had been removed by the Japanese colonial government beginning in 1911 for being inappropriately (Korean) nationalist. Female dancers for sacrificial rituals had been dismissed prior to the Japanese annexation. At the time of Tanabe’s visit, Court Music Department students were seconded to provide the dance. As a limited effort at revival, this probably coincided with a simplification of the dance that introduced a particular bowing movement, sambangbae, consisting of a bend of the upper body that could be performed in three directions in turn. The next revival of dance came in the 1950s, when male students (but since 1962, boys and girls) attending the school associated with the National Gugak Center were drafted in. At this time, so as not to interfere with studying the curriculum, the dance was further simplified. Restoration of a more complete dance, based on source materials, came in 1981, when the dancer and teacher Kim Yŏngsuk removed the sambangbae movement. The National Gugak Center has also revived other court music and dance genres and today has responsibility for five additional Properties. Ch’ŏyongmu, Property 39, is the only surviving court masked dance. Ch’ŏyongmu features five dancers and traces back to the Unified Shilla period (668–907 CE).31 It had disappeared some time before 1865, when it was revived for the first time. Without court dancers, it again fell into disuse at the end of the nineteenth century and was revived again in the 1920s, using students of the Court Music Department. The memories of those students facilitated the modern revival for Property appointment in 1971, and five former students were declared holders. Taech’wit’a, Property 46, percussion and brass music for ceremonies, royal processions, and military marches, stretches back in one form or another for many centuries, with something akin to it depicted in a fourth-century tomb at Anak, near today’s Pyongyang. A first attempt at revival came in the 1890s, to counter the development of Western brass bands, but this was abandoned during the early colonial period. Initial attempts were made by musicians at the Court Music Department to restore it in 1930,

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hence in 1971 the Cultural Properties Committee looked to a surviving musician from that time, Ch’oe Insŏ (1892–1978), as the first holder. Since 1993, Ch’oe’s student Chŏng Chaeguk (b. 1942) has been holder. Property 20, Taegŭm chŏngak, court music for the transverse bamboo flute, offers sonic iconicity. The unique buzzing sound of the Korean instrument is known to all, along with a legend about the flute’s invention that appears in a twelfth-century history book, Samguk yusa (Romance of the Three Kingdoms). The journalist Ye Yonghae had written about the flute player Kim Sŏngjin (1916–1996) in his newspaper column, so the genre and the Property itself was something of a hotchpotch repertory to allow Kim Property holder status.32 The National Gugak Center also takes responsibility for Properties 30 and 41, kagok lyric songs and kasa narrative songs. Court music, including sacrificial rituals, was in the past unknown to the general public. Likewise, the genres now appointed as Properties 20, 30, and 41 were primarily confined to the literati. This was always a small group comprising the educated nobility (yangban) who numbered less than 3 percent of the total population when hierarchy was formally abandoned in the 1890s, plus a small urban middle class of professionals, administrators, and merchants known as the yŏhangin (Sung Hee Park 2010). Today, however, the National Gugak Center functions as the government’s loudspeaker for music, employing some four hundred musicians and dancers in five facilities—in Seoul, Namwŏn, Chindo, Pusan, and Cheju—and broadcasting and performing both at home and abroad. Through the center’s efforts at revival, then, court music and dance has become the property of all Koreans. Musicians wearing red or yellow costumes—the royal colors—adorn tourist brochures and advertisements and act as cultural diplomats on world stages. So ubiquitous has this become that most would assume court music and dance has held iconicity for a long time, but this is not the case. Indeed, when the National Gugak Center first sent court musicians to Europe to perform in 1973, the rave reviews allowed the musicologist Hahn Man-young to reflect in a manner that indicates how marginal court music had become to the domestic audience: A [Korean] court piece . . . is the equal to a Beethoven symphony, and our traditional ensembles are a match for the Berlin, London and New York Symphony Orchestras. It is ironic that such value has been placed on Korean music not by Koreans but by Westerners. . . . Only now that our [National Gugak Center’s] performances have been praised abroad have our musicians realized their high artistic excellence. . . . Why didn’t we realize that this was music to be proud of in a modern world? (Hahn 1990: 39–40)

Court music also sits behind much of the vibrant Korean composition scene, a place populated by many hundreds of composers.33 They generate new works not least for every single performance student studying traditional music at each of several dozen Korean universities.34 Ch’ŏngsŏnggok, one piece from Property 20, the taegŭm chŏngak repertory, has proved particularly iconic. Originally the taegŭm accompaniment to a lyric song, it has been appropriated by many, both in compositions for Korean instruments

152  Keith Howard (by, for example, Lee Sang-kyu; b. 1944) and in avant-garde works by Korean composers abroad such as Isang Yun (1917–1995) and Younghi Pagh-Paan (b. 1945).35 Thus, it is hard to find a Korean who is unaware of Korean court music today. While Ye Yonghae’s comment that his articles written between 1959 and 1963 functioned “like the last breath for those about to die, like an injection of life,” may have been true at the time, the situation in Korea today is very different, and the iconicity of court music, and of dance, ritual, and performance costumes, has been assured through preservation and revival.

Conclusion As Korea began to modernize in the 1960s, legislation to protect the intangible cultural heritage was designed to give Koreans a sense of identity and a sense of pride. This legislation did so through preserving performance arts and crafts that marked the nation as special. As the preservation efforts fused with student movements, attempts at revival gathered pace. Koreans began to identify with their traditional music and dance, and as they did so, the revival could be sustained. It has continued to the present day. Just as performing arts and crafts stand as sonic and visual icons of Koreanness, images stretch beyond music and dance to papier maché and wooden masks (t’al; Properties 6, 7, 15, 17, 18, and more), black wide-brimmed hats (kat; Property 4), decorative knots (maedŭp; Property 22), lacquerware inlaid with mother-of-pearl or shell (najŏn ch’ilgi and kkŭnŭmjil; Properties 10 and 54), wooden architecture (taemok; Property 74), costumes (ch’imsŏn; Property 89), food (Chosŏn wangjo kungjung ŭmshik; Property 38), and more. Not only do these icons adorn many a Korean house or apartment but also they are the stuff of tourist shops, of Korean airports and hotels, and are the images portrayed around the world to represent Korea. Notwithstanding modernity and the promotion of popular culture in what has become known as “Korean Wave,” Koreanness is assured both at home and abroad through the iconicity of the intangible heritage—the revival of that heritage has come to define Korea within and outside the peninsula and has helped to forge Korean people’s perceptions of their place in the world and global perceptions of the Korean people. There is, though, another side to this story, which I have only begun to indicate in the case studies I have presented in this chapter. Preservation in Korea has been a process formulated by government agencies and a broad assembly of scholars, journalists, and nationalists. It has sought to retain archetypes and in so doing may have given ammunition to those who criticize the apparent freezing of cultural production. However, and most important, preservation has created icons of performance arts and crafts. These form the basis of new creativity, in a manner that some would define as “postrevival,” allowing for the emergence of urban singers of updated folk songs, staged SamulNori percussion quartets, ritual concerts featuring adaptations of rural shamanism, and a highly developed and extensive catalogue of creative composition emerging from court music. The two elements, preservation and creativity, go side-by-side, one validating the

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other, and one ensuring the maintenance of activity in the other. Preservation and creativity are, then, equally important elements in revival.

Notes 1. This chapter uses the McCune-Reischauer romanization system for Korean terms; square brackets give McCune-Reischauer where other systems are used in publications and CDs. 2. In this chapter, “icon” and “iconicity” are used not in Judith Becker’s sense, but to relate to musical forms that, together with their visual representations, are widely recognized as representations of a national culture and identity by Koreans. “New creativity” is used to capture how an existing piece created in the past is used today as the basis for new creation while avoiding the tautological literal translation of the Korean term “ch’angjak kugak” as “new creative traditional music.” 3. Class in Korea is a contentious issue linked to a Confucian-based hierarchy that was solidly in place until the beginning of the twentieth century. This hierarchy was divided between a literate aristocracy, the yangban, and a largely illiterate and poverty-stricken peasantry (with professional musicians as one of five groups beneath these, occupying a virtually outcast position as the ch’ŏnmin). By the seventeenth century, a middle class of traders, translators, and so forth had emerged, typically working in the towns, although their actual identity is a matter of some dispute (see Yi Sŏngmu 1980, Lee Sŏngmu 1991, and, in relation to music, Hahn Man-young 1990: ­chapters 3 and 4, and Sung Hee Park 2010). In the twentieth century, the class division began to break down, but it was only with industrialization, urbanization, and the increase in tertiary education from the beginning of the 1960s that the farming population markedly declined and a new and educated middle class emerged. 4. The East Asian concept used here is of the “low,” “folk,” or Little Tradition contrasted to the “high,” “court,” or Great Tradition (for which see Bauman 1992: xiii–xxi). Although it is tempting to consider folk culture purely indigenous, population migration means that Korean shamanism is often considered to have roots in Mongolia and Siberia while cultural assimilation links, say, Korean masked dance dramas (t’al ch’um) to Chinese archetypes and to genres still performed in Japan. 5. Hyung Il Pai (1998, 1999) offers extensive documentation for the intention to create a shared cultural past, though focused primarily on archaeology. 6. For a full list of Properties, see Howard (2006a: 177–180). In respect of the arts and crafts mentioned here, hat making (kat il) became Property 4 in 1964, instrument making (akki chang) Property 42 in 1971, maedŭp Property 22 in 1968, kagok, p’ansori, sanjo, and pŏmp’ae Properties 30, 5, 16, 23, 45, and 50, in 1969, 1964, 1968, 1968, 1971, and 1973, respectively. 7. “Important” (Chungyo) designates national (kukka) rather than regional/provincial appointments. In my discussion here, I refer only to Intangible and Tangible Properties appointed at the national level. 8. One might question—and I was often reminded of this when I carried out fieldwork in rural Korea between 1982 and 1984—both the motivation and the impact of students visiting the countryside. They were often intolerant of the harsh realities of rural agriculture, of limited use as workers, and critical of the way of life. I recall one evening spent in Inji Village, Chisan District, Chindo, where student guests were arguing with villagers that they should not replace thatched roofs (with tin) and paper windows (with glass). The old looked nice and was “really” Korean, they argued; but, came the retort from local villagers,

154  Keith Howard the new was much more comfortable, glass windows were better insulated, and fewer rats and insects could live in a tin roof. 9. In Creating Korean Music (2006b), I cast this conception in a particular frame: The past has been obscured and mystified (after Berger 1988: 164), maintained by organizing symbolic interpretations (after Goffman 1959: 2–4). 10. The sheer amount of discussion on the intangible heritage constitutes a good reason to generalize at this point. Over the years, I have collected more than five hundred Korean reports and publications on the intangible heritage, a far from complete collection but enough to demonstrate the inherent difficulty in citing specific articles or reports as representative. 11. Property 89 is ch’imsŏn chang, the craftsmanship of traditional costume, and sits alongside Property 22, decorative knot craftwork (maedŭp chang), appointed in 1968, and Property 80, embroidery (chasu chang), appointed in 1984. 12. As a young and struggling ethnomusicologist, in 1987 I took a short-term job as a musician playing Korean traditional music for a Korean fashion show in Paris. The show was held twice a day for a week at Le Meridien, Montparnasse, to bring contemporary hanbok to the French. 13. The Korean National Commission sponsored a policy meeting in Seoul in 1996 (see Howard 1996), eight workshops for representatives from thirty-seven member states between 1998 and 2002 (of which only four were held in Korea), and in 2002 led a revision of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage guidelines. 14. Simon is said to have been told by the composer of another cover, Jorge Milchberg, that it was by an anonymous eighteenth-century composer. In fact, the composer was Alomia Robles, whose son filed against Simon for copyright infringement. 15. The distinction here is between “popular folk songs” (t’ongsok minyo) and “local folk songs” (t’osok minyo), the former sung by itinerant performers, kisaeng courtesans, and kwangdae male musicians. The distinction is discussed by Howard (1999a: 1–37; 2006a: 82–86) and Provine (2002: 880–883). One reason for preserving “popular folk songs” lies in their prominence, as the focus of many recordings and broadcasts throughout the twentieth century, and as the subject of much musicological study. 16. A further Property could be added to this list, the women’s song and circle dance genre Kanggangsullae, appointed Property 8 in 1966. Although associated with local practice along the southwestern seaboard, the first “holder” was a professional dancer and singer, Yang Hŭngdo (1900–1968); I have discussed the two subsequent “holders,” Ch’oe Soshim (1908– 1990) and Kim Kirim (1927–1999), elsewhere (Howard 1989: 144–148 and 2006a: 90–91). 17. Previous field trips had tended to be much shorter. Chi was one of a number sent by the Academy of Korean Studies in 1972 to Chindo for a period of just one week; the volume they produced runs to more than seven hundred pages of oral literature (song lyrics and stories). 18. The Korean recording industry is considered in Howard (2006c). 19. Ch’a may also be rendered as ch’ae. The use of the term nongak probably predates Japanese colonialism, since its two Sino-Korean characters, nong for “farming” and ak for music and dance, were certainly in use during the nineteenth century: the 1870s witnessed a promotion of farming, using the nong character, and in a text for one of the p’ansori stories dating to the 1880s, one sung episode is named “Nongbuga” (Song of farming). 20. Howard (1989: 50–61) documents one 1984 event that coupled village ritual, fundraising, and entertainment together across a four-day period.

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21. The New Village Movement began as a reaction to the increasing disparity between urban and rural wages. It took over much that had formerly been sponsored by American 4-H clubs. 22. Initially, the quartet were part of a larger folk music ensemble; the name SamulNori was introduced by the folklorist Shim Usŏng. 23. Clips can readily be found on YouTube. 24. This is particularly the case with scholars and officials who had studied in Europe or North America, where Christian churches act as the center of the Korean community. For the Korean-American case, see Ecklund (2006). 25. See also Yong-Shik Lee (2004: 43) for a perspective on the annual performances of shaman rituals appointed as Properties, which he regards as a “ritualization of fossilization.” 26. See discography. 27. See www.intangibleasset82.com and www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeCiaVhdszA (both accessed May 17, 2013). Barker is based in Australia, but in March 2011 he gave sellout concerts at New York’s Lincoln Center before making two trips to London in the same year. In respect to the film’s title, I note that in the 1980s and 1990s I translated -jae not as “Property” (or what was then the normative Korean translation, “Treasure”) but as “Asset.” In this chapter, I revert to “Property” because this has now been adopted as the standard term used by Korean scholars and institutions when writing in English. 28. In 1968, a tour of Korean court musicians to Taiwan is claimed to have encouraged the Taiwanese to reconstruct their Confucian ritual (noted in Grayson 2002: 178). The Taiwanese reconstruction is discussed by Fu-yen Chen (1975). 29. For details see Pratt (1976), Provine (1975, 1980) and Song (1992). 30. Although Koreans vehemently disagree, E. Taylor Atkins argues that Tanabe “acted as a saviour for a cultural resource his countrymen had enfeebled” (2009: 181). 31. As Seo Jung Rock has shown (2010), the dance has considerable importance, in Korea for an associated text/song, and to Japan as evidence of the role Korea played in the development of Japanese culture. 32. This is my interpretation, and will likely be contentious. However, among the many hundreds of Cultural Property Committee reports on performance arts and crafts, only one carries the name of an individual, and this is the report about Kim’s flute performance. 33. Works for Korean instruments by twenty-four representative composers are included on the 12-CD set Ch’angjak kugak kwanhyŏnak/Creative Traditional Orchestral Music (2000). For a review, see Howard 2001. English-language accounts of the genre include Killick (1990, 1992), Lee Sang-Mann (1989), Chae Hyun-kyung (1996), and Gyewon Byeon (2001a, 2001b). Although some have attempted to survey this genre, typically identifying three periods—of gestation (1939–1961), experimentation (1962–1973), and individual expression (1974 onward) (see Chŏn Inp’yŏng 1987; Killick 1990), or simply dividing into decades (Yi Sanggyu 1995: 109–115)—to do justice to the genre is well outside the scope of this article. Yi Sanggyu (1995) identified a total of 2,239 compositions that had been performed by 1995, and a 1996 book compiled at the National Center listed 2,821 archived scores (Song Hyejin et al. 1996). 34. The musicologist Lee Hyegu, in setting up the curriculum for the first degree in traditional music at Seoul National University in 1959, made it a requirement that all performers be examined in court music, folk music, and contemporary works. 35. For details, see Howard (1999b, 2006b: 108, 143).

156  Keith Howard

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1968) 1988. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York: Continuum. Barker, Simon. 2010. “‘Scattering Rhythms’:  The Koreanisation of the Western Drumset.” PhD diss., University of Sydney. Bauman, Richard. 1992. Introduction to Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainment, edited by Richard Bauman, xiii–xxi. New York: Oxford University Press. Berger, John. 1988. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Bharucha, Rustom. 1993. Theatre and the World:  Performance and the Politics of Culture. London: Routledge. Blacking, John. 1978. “Some Problems of Theory and Method in the Study of Musical Change.” Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 9: 1–26. ——. 1987. A Commonsense View of All Music: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byeon, Gyewon. 2001a. “Ch’angjak kugak:  Writing New Music for Korean Traditional Instruments.” PhD diss., University of London. ——. 2001b. “The Concept of Compositions in Korean Music.” In Sixth International Asian Music Conference, 224–229. Seoul:  Tongyang ŭmak yŏn’gushil/Asian Music Research Institute. Chae Hyun-kyung. 1996. “Ch’angjak kugak (Newly Composed Korean Music): Making Korean Music Korean.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Chang Sahun. 1982. Hwajŏnt’aewa hwaryut’ae. Seoul: Susŏwŏn. Chen, Fu-yen. 1975. “Confucian Ceremonial Music in Taiwan with Comparative References to its Sources.” PhD diss., Wesleyan University. Chi Ch’unsang. 1980. Han’guk kubi munhak taegye 6/1:  Chŏlla namdo Chindogun p’yŏn. Sŏngnam: Han’guk chŏngshin munhwa yŏn’guwŏn. ——. 1987. Chŏnnam ŭi nongyo. Kwangju: Chŏlla Namdo. Choi, Chungmoo. 1987. “The Competence of Korean Shamans as Performers of Folklore.” PhD diss., Indiana University. ——. 1989. “The Artistry and Ritual Aesthetics of Urban Korean Shamans.” Journal of Ritual Studies 3 (2): 235–249. Chŏn Inp’yŏng. 1987. “Ch’angjak kugak.” In Han’guk ŭi onŭl ŭi ŭmak, 165–189. Seoul: Han’guk ŭmak yŏn’guhoe. Cultural Properties Administration. 2002. The Preservation and Management of Cultural Properties. Taejŏn: Cultural Properties Administration. Dorson, Richard M. 1972. Introduction to Folklore and Folklife:  An Introduction, edited by Richard Dorson, 1–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ecklund, Elaine Howard. 2006. Korean American Evangelicals:  New Models for Civic Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Grayson, James Huntley. 2002. Korea: A Religious History. Richmond, VA.: Routledge Curzon. First published in 1989. Hahn Man-young. 1990. Kugak: Studies in Korean Traditional Music. Translated and edited by Keith Howard and Inok Paek. Seoul: Tamgu Dang. Han’guk minyo taejŏn. 1992–96. Seoul: MBC Radio. Howard, Keith. 1989. Bands, Songs and Shamanistic Rituals:  Folk Music in Korean Society. Seoul: Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.

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——. 1996. “Hoeŭirok/Summary.” In Muhyŏng munhwajae pojonŭl wihanje pangbŏmnon/ Methodologies for the Preservation of Intangible Heritage, 238–251 (English) and 147–158 (Korean). Seoul: Korean National Commission for UNESCO. ——. 1998. “Korean Shamanism Today.” In Korean Shamanism: Revivals, Survivals, and Change, edited by Keith Howard, 1–13. Seoul: Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society/Seoul Press. ——. 1999a. “Minyo in Korea: Songs for the People and Songs of the People.” Asian Music 30 (2): 1–37. ——. 1999b. “Korean Tradition in Isang Yun’s Composition Style.” In Ssi-ol. Almanach 1998/99: 67–106. ——. 2001. Review of Creative Traditional Orchestral Music [Ch’angjak kugak kwanhyŏnak]. Ethnomusicology 45 (3): 524–527. ——. 2006a. Preserving Korean Music:  Intangible Cultural Properties as Icons of Identity. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. ——. 2006b. Creating Korean Music:  Tradition, Innovation, and the Discourse of Identity. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. ——. 2006c. Introduction to Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, edited by Keith Howard, vii– xi. Folkestone, England: Global Oriental. Janelli, Roger L. 1986. “The Origins of Korean Folklore Scholarship.” Journal of American Folklore 99: 24–49. Killick, Andrew. 1990. “New Music for Korean Instruments: An Analytical Survey.” MA diss., University of Hawai‘i. ——. 1992. “Musical Composition in Twentieth-century Korea.” Korean Studies 16: 43–60. Kim Chongho. 2003. Korean Shamanism: The Cultural Paradox. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Kim Yŏlgyu. 1987. Arirang . . . Yŏksayŏ, kyereyŏ, soriyŏ. Seoul: Chosŏn ilbosa. Lee Sang-Mann. 1989. “South Korea.” In New Music in the Orient: Essays on Composition in Asia since World War II, edited by Harrison Ryker, 249–264. Buren, The Netherlands: Frits Knuf. Lee, Sŏngmu [Yi Sŏngmu]. 1991. “The Rise of Chungin and Their Characteristics.” Papers of the British Association of Korean Studies 1: 110–119. Lee, Yong-Shik. 2004. Shaman Ritual Music in Korea. Seoul: Jimoondang. Lira, Sérgio, and Rogério Amoêda, eds. 2009. Constructing Intangible Heritage. Barcelos, Portugal: Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development. Mills, Simon. 2003. “The Ritual Music of South Korea’s East Coast Shamans:  Inheritance, Training and Performance.” PhD diss., University of London. ——. 2007. Healing Rhythms:  The World of South Korea’s East Coast Hereditary Shamans. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Naegojang chŏnt’ong kakkugi, comps. 1982. Okchu ŭi ŏl. Chindo, Korea: Chindo kunji p’yŏnjip wiwŏnhoe and Kwangju: Chŏnil ch’ulp’ansa. Nettl, Bruno. 1985. The Western Impact on World Music. New York: Schirmer Books. Pai, Hyung Il. 1998. “The Colonial Origins of Korea’s Collected Past.” In Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity, edited by Hyung Il Pai and Timothy R. Tangherini, 13– 32. Korea Research Monograph 26. Berkeley:  Center for Korean Studies, University of California. ——. 1999. “Nationalism and Preserving Korea’s Buried Past: The Office of Cultural Properties and Archaeological Heritage Management in South Korea.” Antiquity 73: 619–626. Park, Mikyung. 1985. “Music and Shamanism in Korea: A Study of Selected Ssikkum-gut Rituals for the Dead.” PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles. ——. 2004. “Improvisation in the Music of Korean Shamans: A Case of Degeneration Based on Examples from Chindo Island.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 36: 65–89.

158  Keith Howard Park, Sung Hee. 2010. “Patronage and Creativity in Seoul: The Late 18th to Late 19th Century Urban Middle Class and Its Vocal Music.” PhD diss., University of London. Pratt, Keith. 1976. “Music as a Factor in Sung Koryŏ Diplomatic Relations, 1069–1126.” T’oung Pao 62 (4–5): 199–228. ——. 1977. “Some Aspects of Diplomatic and Cultural Exchange between Korea and Northern Sung China.” In Chang Sahun paksa hoegap kinyŏm tongyang ŭmakhak nonch’ong/Articles on Asian Music: Festschrift for Dr Chang Sa-Hun, 313–324. Seoul: Han’guk kugak hakhoe. Provine, Robert C. 1975. “The Sacrifice to Confucius in Korea and Its Music.” Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 50: 43–69. —— 1980. “Chinese Ritual Music in Korea: The Origins, Codification, and Cultural Role of Aak.” Korea Journal 20 (2): 16–25. —— 1986. “Vocal and Instrumental Music in Sacrificial Rites Performed at the Korean Royal Court: A Case History.” In Actes du XIIIe Congrès de la Société Internationale de Musicologie, Strasbourg, 29 aoŭt–3 septembre 1982: La musique et le rite sacré et profane II, edited by Marc Honneger et al., 245–269. Strasbourg: Association des Publications près les Universités de Strasbourg. ——. “Folksongs.” In East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea, edited by Robert C. Provine, Yosihiko Tokumaru, and J. Lawrence Witzleben, vol. 7 of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 879–889. New York: Routledge. Seo, Jung Rock. 2010. “Ancient Korean and Japanese Court Dance: Historical Relationship and Transmission.” PhD diss., University of London. Song Hyejin. 1992. “The Acceptance of Dasheng yayue in Koryŏ.” Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies 3: 171–182. ——, Kim Myŏngsŏk, and Sŏ ŭn’gyŏng, eds. 1996. Han’guk ŭmak: Ch’angjakok chakp’um mongnokchip. Seoul: Kungnip kugagwŏn. Staub, Shalom. 1988. “Folklore and Authenticity:  A  Myopic Marriage in Public-sector Programs.” In The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, edited by Bert Feintuch, 166–179. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Tanabe, Hisao. 1970. Chūgoku Chōsen ongaku chōsa kikō. Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomo Sha. Taylor Atkins, E. 2009. Primitive Selves:  Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. Uchida, Ruriko. 1980. “Rice Planting Music of Chindo (Korea) and the Chugoku Region (Japan).” In The Performing Arts, edited by John Blacking and Joann Keali’inohomoku, 109– 119. The Hague: Mouton. Ye Yonghae. 1963. In’gan Munhwajae. Seoul: Han’guk ilbosa. Yi Hyegu. 1957. Han’guk ŭmak yŏn’gu. Seoul: Kungmin hakkyo yŏn’guhoe. Yi Sanggyu. 1995. Ch’angjak hwaltong mit kugakki kaeryang ŭi sŏnggwawa munjejŏm. In Kwangbok 50-junyŏn kinyŏm haksul taehoe/Proceedings of the Conference for the Fiftieth Celebration from Japanese Colonization:  109–160. Seoul:  National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. Yi Sŏngmu. 1980. Chosŏn ch’ogi yangban yŏn’gu. Seoul: Ilchogak.

Discs Cited Ahn Sook Sun [An Suksŏn] and Kim Dae Ryeh [Kim Taerye]. 1998. Live Concert. Samsung Music SCO-166CSS.

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—— and Park Byung Chon [Pak Pyŏngch’ŏn]. 1998. Ascend. Samsung Music SCO-167CSS. Ch’angjak kugak kwanhyŏnak/Creative Traditional Orchestral Music. 2000. Kugak ch’unch’usa/ Korean Traditional Music and Publishing SRCD-8396–SRCD-8399, SRCD-8473–SRCD-8476, SRCE-8658–SRCD-8661. Kim Sŏkch’ul. 1997. Kyŏljŏngp’an/Final Say. Samsung Music SCO-121CSS. Kim Suk Chul [Kim Sŏkch’ul]. 1993. Nopsae param/East Wind. Samsung Nices SCO-023CSS. Kim Taerye. 1995. Ch’ŏnmyŏng/Supreme. Samsung Nices SCO-055CSS. Park Byung Chon. 1994. Kuŭm tasŭrŭm/Unrestrained Sound. Samsung Nices SCO-024CSS. Yong Woo Kim. 1996. Chigye Sori. Seoul Records SRCD-1354. ——. 1998. Kwenari. Samsung Music SCO-165KYW. ——. 2003. Chilkkonaengi. Universal DK0403.

C HA P T E R  8

M U S I C R E V I VA L , C A T RÙ O N T O L O G I E S , A N D I N TA N G I B L E C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E I N V I E T NA M BA R L EY NORTON

This chapter examines processes of music revival with reference to the northern Vietnamese music and dance tradition ca trù, which in contemporary performances typically features a small chamber ensemble of voice, a three-stringed lute, and two percussion instruments (a small drum and a struck idiophone). In 2009, “Ca Trù Singing” was successfully nominated for inscription on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Intangible Cultural Heritage “Urgent Safeguarding List.” This list aims to acknowledge intangible heritage that is “facing grave threats” and is in “extremely urgent need of safeguarding.”1 Although the inscription recognizes that the viability of ca trù is at risk, efforts to revive the tradition predate the UNESCO nomination in 2009: the build-up to the nomination since the turn of the millennium spurred some safeguarding initiatives, and the first tentative steps toward revival can be traced back to the years following the end of the Second Indochina War (the “Vietnam War”) in 1975. Drawing on this history of revival, this chapter considers revivalist discourse relating to ca trù and the practice of revival at the local level. An interesting feature of revivalist discourse is the way in which history is being invoked and revised in order for ca trù to become “intangible cultural heritage.” To understand ca trù in its current phase of revival, it is therefore necessary to gain an appreciation of its diverse historical manifestations, its historical ontologies that rely on its “embeddedness” in different contexts (Bohlman 1999). Through an examination of how the historiography of ca trù has been interpreted in revivalist discourse, I aim to show how the promotion of intangible cultural heritage serves to limit and fix ca trù ontologies and has shaped contemporary understandings of the genre. Going beyond

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the narrow confines of the recent revival, this chapter therefore critically examines the historical record on ca trù, drawing on research by Vietnamese scholars. Throughout the chapter, evaluation of nationalist discourse and discussion of the history and politics of revival is balanced with consideration of musicians’ engagement with revival processes, an engagement marked by considerable energy, enthusiasm, and determination, as well as by frustration and ambivalence toward official discourse on ca trù and government-led and UNESCO-driven initiatives. As an ethnomusicologist who has conducted field research on ca trù during several trips to Vietnam from 1994 to 2012, I have in small ways been involved in the revival movement. In practical terms, this has included accompanying singers on the long-necked đàn đáy lute at ca trù clubs and on Vietnamese television, and helping to organize two European tours by one group called the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble. As a scholar, I have also been directly involved in the UNESCO nomination process: first through being invited by the Vietnamese Musicology Institute to give a paper at the international conference in 2006 titled “Ca Trù Singing of the Việt People,” which was organized in Hanoi to prepare for the submission of the file; and second through acting as an examiner for UNESCO when the file was submitted in 2009. I recommended in my examiner’s report that ca trù be listed on the Urgent Safeguarding List because I broadly agreed that the musical culture was in a fragile state, although I also made some critical comments and recommendations about some of the safeguarding measures proposed.2 The recent trend for ethnomusicologists to do “applied” or “engaged” work with organizations like UNESCO has led to renewed critical engagement with cultural policies and their implementation and to an assessment of the presuppositions inherent in the concept of intangible cultural heritage (Seeger 2008; Weintraub and Yung 2009). International proclamations and top-down action plans of cultural management, however well intentioned, may have unintended consequences, and they do not always effectively encourage sustainable musical ecologies based on diverse, community-based, participatory musical activities (Titon 2009). The discussion of processes of revival in this chapter therefore aims to raise questions about the strategies being employed to revive ca trù in the twenty-first century. Although ca trù’s historical trajectory is shaped by distinctive national and local factors, the case of ca trù revivalism is, I think, significant for considering music revivals more broadly because it highlights the historical cycles of revival and reveals patterns of transformation—especially concerning the dynamics between international and national agencies and local musical communities—which are having an impact on musical practices across Asia and other parts of the world.

Revivalist Discourse: Ca Trù as Intangible Cultural Heritage The world today, it seems, is awash with intangible cultural heritage, and we are surrounded at every turn by systems of cultural heritage management. The

162  Barley Norton unstoppable advance of intangible cultural heritage has largely been due to UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, but the Convention emerged from a longer history of discourse relating to the protection and preservation of tradition and folklore, which has developed since the end of World War II (see Howard 2006; Ruggles and Silverman 2009; Smith and Akagawa 2009). In Vietnam, the concept of “intangible cultural heritage,” rendered in Vietnamese as di sản văn hóa phí vật thể, emerged strongly around the turn of the millennium, largely in response to UNESCO policies and the perceived threat of globalization to Vietnamese cultural identity. In 1998, Resolution 5 of the Eighth National Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party, which was titled “On Building and Developing a Progressive Vietnamese Culture Rich in National Character,” was an important turning point in government policy toward culture (see Ministry of Culture 1999). Although the Party has long asserted that culture should be imbued with “national character” (Ministry of Culture 1972), Resolution 5 paved the way for laws, decrees, and action plans on cultural and intangible cultural heritage. These include the passing of the Law on Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2001 and the Law on Cultural Heritage in 2009, the ratification of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2005, and the establishment of National Target Programs for Cultural Heritage Management. In short, UNESCO-affiliated organizations in Vietnam, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information, and state-run institutes are now concentrating a great deal of their energies on nominating, safeguarding, and promoting tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The current enthusiasm for utilizing UNESCO policies as a mechanism for revival has led to several Vietnamese music genres being successfully nominated for intangible cultural heritage status: The imperial court music tradition nhã nhạc and “the space of gong culture in the Central Highlands” were recognized as Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2003 and 2005, respectively; in 2009, quan họ folk singing from Bac Ninh province was recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity; and, in 2011, hát xoan folk singing was listed on UNESCO’s Urgent Safeguarding List. At the time of writing (2012), further nominations to UNESCO are also in progress. So what has led Vietnam to wholeheartedly embrace UNESCO policies on cultural heritage? The current enthusiastic promotion of cultural heritage is fueled in equal measure by nationalist anxiety and pride—nationalist anxiety about the loss of Vietnamese cultural identity due to the forces of globalization and the influx of foreign culture and nationalist pride concerning Vietnam’s cultural status in the world (see Vietnamese Institute for Musicology 2004). Such pride stimulates a competitive spirit in which Vietnamese officials increasingly measure the country’s international cultural standing by whether nominations to UNESCO are successful and through the evaluation of Vietnam’s cultural heritage compared with that of other countries in the region and the world at large. For ca trù to become recognized as intangible cultural heritage in urgent need of safeguarding, Vietnamese officials responsible for governing cultural heritage have forged a new discourse on revival. The key aspects of revivalist discourse on ca trù, which are

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evident in the UNESCO nomination file and the accompanying video documentation (see Example 8.01 ), may be summarized as follows: 1. Ca trù is authentic culture because it is an ancient, unique, and pure Vietnamese art untainted by influence from “outside.” 2. The decline of ca trù in the second half of the twentieth century was due to the Franco-Vietnamese war (from 1945 to 1954) and the Second Indochina War (from the early 1960s to 1975). 3. Elderly musicians born prior to 1945 are the last remaining culture-bearers of authentic ca trù, so the genre’s revival relies on elderly musicians who were active prior to 1945 transmitting the tradition to the younger generation. 4. There is little understanding of ca trù in contemporary society and traditional performance contexts have been lost, so new ways need to be found to promote the genre as intangible cultural heritage. 5. In contemporary Vietnam, there is a new environment for the revival of prerevolutionary traditions, and intangible cultural heritage is now protected by law. As David Lowenthal has noted in his virulent critique of the relationship between heritage and history, “heritage the world over not only tolerates but thrives on and even requires historical error” (1998:132), and ca trù is no exception. Revivalist discourse relies on a nationalist revision of ca trù historiography. Scholarly publications on the history of ca trù, which were used to support the UNESCO nomination, demonstrate a marked concern with origins (e.g., Nguyễn Xuân Diện 2007; Đặng Hoành Loan et al. 2006). Some scholars claim that the antecedents of ca trù date back to the beginning of the Lý dynasty (1010–1225) in the eleventh century (Đặng Hoành Loan et al. 2006: 7). Although this claim predates the recent revival and is based on scant historical evidence (see ĐỗBằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề 1962: 24), this date of origin neatly coincides with the founding of an independent Vietnamese state and serves to support the notion that the roots of ca trù are ancient and purely Vietnamese (see also Tran 2012). The claim that the origins of ca trù date to the eleventh century has been challenged by scholars at the Sino-Vietnamese Institute in Hanoi who argue that the earliest reliable documentation proving the existence of a musical genre called ca trù dates from the fifteenth century (Nguyễn Xuân Diện 2007: 110). This later date of origin, however, does not detract from the prevalent assertion that ca trù is worthy of revival because it is an ancient, unique, and pure Vietnamese tradition. I have previously argued that this view of ca trù’s history is fueled by patriotic nostalgia, a longing for a utopian past in which foreign cultural presence is erased from memory (Norton 2005). The patriotic nostalgia of the current revival contrasts markedly with interpretations of ca trù in the postrevolutionary period following the August Revolution of 1945, when the genre was unofficially prohibited and condemned as a bourgeois, decadent art that had been corrupted by French colonialism. Revivalist discourse often blames the demise and neglect of ca trù on the devastation wrought by war. However, the reasons why ca trù was effectively silenced after 1954

164  Barley Norton were largely due to the ideological position assumed by the Vietnamese Communist Party, which formed the government of northern Vietnam after the Franco-Vietnamese war.3 Unlike other traditional music styles, such as the music theater forms chèo, tuồng, and cải lương, which were supported in northern Vietnam through the formation of an extensive network of state-run troupes, no organizations or performance venues were established to propagate ca trù. The music schools and conservatories set up by the new communist government also did not teach it. The Party did not consider ca trù to be suitable for the new socialist society for two main reasons. First, ca trù was seen as feudal and elitist because it was a form of entertainment for the Confucian scholars and intellectuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, it was associated with “social evils” such as prostitution, drugs, and gambling, when it was a popular form of entertainment in “singing bars” (ca quán) in Hanoi and other urban areas in northern Vietnam prior to 1954. The form of ca trù performed in the singing bars was known as hát ả đào (lit. “songs of the songstresses”), but the bars were closed down by the new socialist government after 1954. Communist rhetoric on hát ả đào argued that it been “corrupted” by colonialism. This view is expressed, for instance, in an article by the violinist and Party cadre Đào Trọng Từ: [T]‌he a dao song was born and for several centuries was one of the most beautiful popular artistic traditions. French colonialism ruined these village customs of virtue and culture and reduced a dao song to the role of accompaniment to prostitution. (Đào Trọng Từ 1984: 26)

When Đào Trọng Từ describes the songs performed by female ả đào singers as virtuous and an integral part of village rituals prior to colonial influence, he is no doubt referring to a form of ca trù known as hát cửa đình (lit. “singing in the village communal house”). Compared with hát ả đào performed in singing bars, hát cửa đình has a different repertoire, performance style, and ritual function. Ca trù’s ontologies will be discussed further in the next section, but historical evidence suggests that hát cửa đình was performed during rituals held in honor of village tutelary spirits and historical personages who belonged to famous ca trù lineages. One of the interesting things about the way official discourse on ca trù has evolved since the mid-twentieth century is the way revival cycles have changed as state policy and ideology have changed. In the revolutionary period from the 1950s until the beginning of the reform era in 1986, when the “Renovation policy” (đổi mới) was introduced, “true” Vietnamese culture was understood in terms of rediscovering traditional culture that had been suppressed by French colonialism. Rediscovered traditions were then subject to “correction” and “improvement” to make them appropriate for the new socialist society (see Meeker 2007). The aim was to preserve the “essence” and “spirit” of traditional culture, but the forms and content were reworked so they had “socialist content and national character.” Such a conception led to the development of “modern national music” (âm nhạc dân tộc hiện đại) at the Hanoi Music Conservatoire and the modification of traditional songs for the purposes of

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promoting socialist ideology through the use of new revolutionary lyrics and the reform of performance practices (see Arana 1999; Norton 2009). Although there were a few occasions when ca trù songs were performed with new revolutionary lyrics (Norton 2005: 33), the musical style was not altered to suit the revolutionary socialist agenda. In “reform era” Vietnam since the late 1980s, there has been an important shift in how authentic musical culture is envisaged:  Prerevolutionary culture is now increasingly being expressed in terms of anxiety and concern over the loss of an authentic and rapidly disappearing cultural heritage. As Lauren Meeker writes: Folk music practice prior to 1945 and those practitioners trained prior to 1945 are now seen as part of an ever-receding “authentic.” 1945, therefore becomes ever more urgent as a sign of loss and an impetus for preservation as the last generation to receive their training prior to 1945 ages and passes away. (Meeker 2007: 104)

The August Revolution of 1945 is understood to be a marker between “old” and “new” in both the postrevolutionary period and in the reform era. As Meeker has pointed out, however, there has been a shift in the way 1945 is referenced in relation to music. In the reform era, musical practices that existed prior to 1945 are now presented as authentic culture in need of urgent preservation, whereas in the postrevolutionary period the emphasis was on rediscovering and developing the Vietnamese essence embedded in traditional culture that had persisted despite feudalism and colonial domination. Elderly musicians born prior to 1945 are now revered as the last surviving custodians of authentic tradition. Such reverence is evident in the list of twenty-one ca trù “folk artists” provided in the UNESCO nomination file; the youngest person on the list was born in 1931. This emphasis on elderly musicians born prior to 1945 also supports the argument that ca trù is “out of time” and that prerevolutionary traditions need to be revived and protected by laws on intangible cultural heritage.

Ca Trù Ontologies: An Historical Perspective Having outlined some of the key aspects of revivalist discourse, let us turn to an examination of ca trù’s historical ontologies. In its broadest sense, the term ca trù can refer to vocal performances that involve the “audience” showing their appreciation and rewarding the musicians. The etymology of ca trù is important here: ca is the Sino-Vietnamese word for singing or song, and trù refers to the bamboo cards or tokens that were thrown

166  Barley Norton into a basket during performances to compliment the musicians. After the performance, the tokens were converted into money. In contemporary performances, ca trù is usually performed by a chamber ensemble consisting of three performers: a female singer who accompanies herself on a percussion instrument called the phách, an instrumentalist who plays a long-necked three-stringed đàn đáy lute, and a drummer who plays a small “praise drum” (trống chầu) (Figure 8.1). Although it is hard to pinpoint when this chamber ensemble gained prominence, Vietnamese scholars have long argued that it gradually evolved from a larger ensemble during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that the reduction in ensemble size was due to changes in performance context (e.g., Trần Văn Khê 1962: 82). Today, the chamber ensemble is the predominant ensemble, except for some hát cửa đình performances when a large temple drum and gong are used instead of the praise drum. The complexity of ca trù’s history is reflected in the large number of Vietnamese terms that refer to its different historical manifestations. So far, I have highlighted the important distinction between small-scale performances for the purposes of entertainment in singing bars, known as hát ả đào—also hát cô đầu (“songs of the songstresses”) or hát chơi (“singing for entertainment”)—and hát cửa đình performances for rituals in village communal houses. Other terms that are thought to refer to different forms of ca trù refer to particular performance contexts defined by location or by function. Names based on location include hát nhà tơ (“singing at official residences”), hát cửa quyền (“singing at the royal palace”), and hát ca công (“singing in ca trù ancestors’ temples”),4 and those

FIGURE  8.1 The Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble with Nguyễn Thúy Hòa (singer/phách player), Nguyễn Văn Khuê (đàn đáy lute), and Nguyễn Văn Mùi (“praise drum”) in 2009. (Photograph by Barley Norton.)

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Hát ả đảo (“Songs of the songstresses”)

Hát cửa đình (“Singing at the village communal house”)

Hát nhà trò (“Singing for amusement”)

Hát nhà tơ (“Singing at official residences”)

Ca Trù Ontologies

Hát cửa quyền (“Singing at the royal palace”)

Hát ca công (“Singing in ca trù’s ancestors’ temples”)

FIGURE  8.2  Summary

Hát thi (“Singing for competition”)

of the main ca trù ontologies.

that refer to function include hát nhà trò (“singing for amusement”) and hát thi (“singing competition”). It is evident from historical sources that these different names delineated important differences in performance practice, repertoire, song texts, and instrumentation. Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề (1962: 59–128), for instance, outline the distinctive repertoire, song texts, and performance practices of hát chơi (i.e., hát ả đào), hát cửa đình, and hát thi, which are listed as the three main forms of ca trù. Historical records about other ca trù ontologies are less specific and detailed. Hát nhà trò, for example, is thought to have been a semi-theatrical event involving humorous dance gestures imitating characters such as hunters, drunks, and madmen, but little further detail is known (see Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề 1962: 46). The term ca trù, which has become dominant in the recent revival since the early 1990s, seems to imply the existence of a singular genre characterized by a clearly defined mode of performance. The diversity of performance practices and contexts that have now been encompassed by the umbrella term ca trù, however, complicates the notion that ca trù is a fixed, unitary genre. Such diversity does not sit easily with a nationalistic revival discourse that relies on asserting that the essence of ca trù, and even its musical characteristics, has remained intact for centuries. To counter the tendency for ca trù to be understood as a single category with an immutable essence, it is important to emphasize that the historical record indicates dramatic historical change and a process of flux rather than stasis. In his chapter “Ontologies of Music,” Philip Bohlman employs the notion of “embeddedness” to describe how music is connected to and inseparable from other activities (1999: 19). By referring to ca trù ontologies in the plural (see Figure 8.2), I aim to highlight how conditions of embeddedness have

168  Barley Norton given rise to a diverse range of musical practices. The ontologies of ca trù, I would suggest, can be thought of as a fluid network of related performance activities, some of which overlapped and coexisted in different historical periods. The ontological status of ca trù is important to take into account when considering processes of music revival because understandings about what constitutes ca trù have affected contemporary performances. Certain understandings about ca trù have, for instance, led to an emphasis on the reconstruction and festivalization of hát cửa đình rituals, as will be discussed in the next section. Much of the debate about the early history of ca trù is based on discussions about specialist terminology. The claim that an early form of ca trù emerged in the Lý dynasty (1009–1225) is based on references to terms such as đào nương and quản giáp, which are found in historical records relating to the Lý dynasty court. According to Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề (1962), the term đào nương was derived from a singer called Đào Thị who was famous during the reign of Lý Thái Tổ (1009–1028), and quản giáp was a title given to the official who directed singing and dance performances at the Lý dynasty court. Both of these terms came to be closely associated with ca trù traditions:  đào nương is now commonly understood to refer to female ả đào singers and quản giáp was an official rank associated with the administrative structures of ca trù musical guilds, known as giáo phường, which are thought to have been widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The existence of these terms, however, does not necessarily prove a connection to an early form of ca trù. Đào nương, for instance, likely referred to female singers in general, not to singers of a particular genre. Dismissing Lý dynasty origin theories, Nguyễn Xuân Diện argues that the historical sources used by Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề only provide information about “music in general” and not specifically about ca trù (Nguyễn Xuân Diện 2007: 19). Nguyễn Xuân Diện’s origin theory is based on a reference to the term ca trù in a poem by Lê Đức Mao (1462–1529), which was compiled some time before 1505. The two lines that include the words ca trù from the poem are: Ten cups of rice wine, hundreds of ca trù performances, The happiness of witnessing ca trù at a celebratory banquet.5

From his reading of the poem, Nguyễn Xuân Diện concludes that by the fifteenth century ca trù was performed at banquets held in honor of village tutelary spirits. Little evidence can be gleaned from Lê Đức Mao’s poem to suggest strong connections between the musical performance described and contemporary forms of ca trù, so many questions remain about the significance of this poetic reference. Interestingly, the term ca trù was not commonly used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which also problematizes the argument that the fifteenth-century musical performance referred to by Lê Đức Mao is directly connected to contemporary forms of ca trù through a process of linear historical development.6 From the sixteenth century onward, there is a wider range of historical evidence relating to ca trù ontologies in northern Vietnam. This includes wood carvings in communal houses and pagodas of musical ensembles dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth

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centuries, inscriptions on stone stelae from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and texts written in Sino-Vietnamese characters and romanized Vietnamese script (known as quốc ngữ) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 Wood carvings in communal houses which are thought to date from the sixteenth century depict musicians—including, in one instance, a woman—playing a long-necked lute similar to the modern đàn đáy. In wood carvings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the đàn đáy is featured as part of a larger ensemble (Nguyễn Xuân Diện 2007: 76–78). Historical importance has been placed on these depictions because in contemporary practice the đàn đáy is used exclusively for ca trù and is not included in ensembles for other traditional genres. Based on the extant wood carvings, Nguyễn Xuân Diện and other scholars have argued that, from the sixteenth century onward, ca trù was performed in communal village performances as a form of worship for local tutelary deities. The wood carvings from the following two centuries also provide support for the view that ritual performances in village communal houses were performed by a large ensemble, which included the đàn đáy along with other string, wind, and percussion instruments. The stone stelae from the seventeenth century onward suggest that a sophisticated system of music transmission and village ritual performance was organized according to the giáo phường or “guild” system. These guilds were organized according to family lineages, and each guild possessed the customary rights to perform at particular village communal houses. The consensus among Vietnamese scholars is that the music guilds from different districts performed at important festivals, which could last several days, to honor village tutelary spirits, as well as at other ritual and lifecycle events (e.g., Bùi Trọng Hiền 2006: 94). In return, the guilds received financial compensation for their performances. Local music guilds owned the customary performance rights to perform songs and dances at village communal houses, and many of the stelae record legal contracts concerning the sale of performance rights between village communities and from village communities to wealthy individuals. Based on a close reading of legal contracts inscribed on twenty-three stone stelae from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the historian Nhung Tuyet Tran (2012) has explored the reasons why village guilds sold their communal performance rights. Her argument is that they were sold as a survival strategy for local communities that were strapped for cash due to the socioeconomic turmoil that resulted from the civil warfare that was rife at the time. She argues further that the reason why ca trù became a form of elite entertainment was that many local troupes had to sell their communal performance rights to wealthy male scholars and officials because of financial difficulties. In the sample of stelae Tran examined, the sale of customary rights by guilds to private individuals was more common during the eighteenth century compared with the seventeenth, and she argues that this was a key reason why ca trù evolved from a large-scale communal performance for all members of the village community to an elite form of entertainment for rich officials and scholars in intimate private settings. Tran also points out that it is likely that this change in performance context resulted in wealthy individuals acquiring female singers as servants who would have been expected to fulfill sexual

170  Barley Norton services for their masters. Certainly, today, the term ả đào conjures up associations with prostitution in elderly people’s minds. In addition to Tran’s compelling argument that economic imperatives led to the rise of ca trù as an elite form of private entertainment, developments in Vietnamese poetry— particularly the rise of the poetic form hát nói—is also likely to have contributed to the rise in popularity of intimate performances for the entertainment of scholars and officials.8 The hát nói poetic form, which in its standard form consists of eleven lines of text, was the main medium of literary expression for the scholars who sponsored private performances, and these poems were sung to a musical form bearing the same name. In a survey of hát nói poems, Nguyễn Văn Ngọc (1932) divides the rich diversity of poems he collected into the following main themes: ambition, patience, pessimism, hedonism, nature, love, moral teachings, and irony/humor (see Addiss 1973). He concludes that the underlying ethos behind the poems is an expression of liberal Daoist thought, which went beyond the rigid codes of Confucian doctrine (Nguyễn Văn Ngọc 1932:  XVI– XVII). Today, famous poems by writers such as Nguyễn Bá Xuyến (1759–1822), Cao Bá Quát (1808–1855), Nguyễn Công Trứ (1778–1859), and Dương Khuê (1836–1898) are seen as an artistic pinnacle in the history of Vietnamese literature, and they are the mainstay of contemporary performances in the hát ả đào style.

The Practice of Revival In his book Musics of Vietnam, published in 1975, Pham Duy finishes a short section on hát ả đào with the statement: “At the present time, hát ả đào is almost extinct” (1975: 100). This statement is not evidenced, but it gives an indication that, by the mid 1970s, hát ả đào was no longer perceived to be a vibrant, living tradition. Although it has been reported that President Hồ Chí Minh attended hát ả đào performances by the singers Quách Thị Hồ and Nguyễn Thị Phúc in the Temple of Literature in Hanoi during the 1962 lunar new year (Chu Hà 1980: 59), ca trù was no longer practiced regularly and was essentially silenced in northern Vietnam after 1954. The end of the Second Indochina War in April 1975, however, gave the eminent scholar Trần Văn Khê, who at that time was living in France, an opportunity to make a visit to Hanoi in April 1976 to make recordings of the singers Quách Thị Hồ and Nguyễn Thị Phúc accompanied by the lutenist Đinh Khắc Ban.9 The recordings made by Trần Văn Khê, which were released on the Auvidis-Unesco label in 1978, brought a limited amount of international attention to Quách Thị Hồ (Trần Văn Khê 1991 [1978]). Although the ca trù revival did not gain momentum until the 1990s, the first fragile shoots of revival emerged after 1975, which was somewhat remarkable given the political context in the aftermath of war. Despite Party opposition to ca trù in the previous decades, there were a few advocates for revival within the state-controlled cultural bureaucracy in the late 1970s and 1980s. Foremost among these was the musician and scholar Nguyễn Xuân Khoát, who had been President of the Vietnamese Musicians’

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Union from 1940 to 1942. Nguyễn Xuân Khoát made efforts to increase understanding of ca trù through giving talks at conferences, universities, and schools, and by broadcasting programs on the national Voice of Vietnam Radio (Trần Văn Khê 1997: 15; Nguyen Xuân Khoát 1980: 7). Along with other cultural officials, Nguyễn Xuân Khoát also contributed to a book called Hát Cửa Đình Lỗ Khê. Following the publication of this book in 1980, a film—Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù—was made in 1984; both the book and the film concentrated on the hát cửa đình tradition in the village of Lỗ Khê on the outskirts of Hanoi.10 The reunification of the country in the aftermath of war was marked by tight control over cultural expression in an attempt to build a new socialist society. Unsurprisingly, the small number of publications and broadcasts about ca trù during the late 1970s and 1980s were couched in Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, presumably in order to be accepted by the Party-controlled cultural bureaus through which public performances and publications were approved. For instance, ca trù was praised for the way it contributed to revolutionary communism, and performances often included new poems that praised the Party (Chu Hà 1980; Ngô Linh Ngọc and Ngô Văn Phú 1987). The recordings made by Trần Văn Khê in 1976 included Quách Thị Hồ singing a poem by Chu Hà that praised the Party (see Trần Văn Khê 1991 [1978]), although the music itself was not “improved” or “reformed” to suit the socialist agenda. The hát cửa đình tradition, rather than the hát ả đào of the singing bars, was the main focus for the initial revival efforts after 1975. To conform to the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism, the village tutelary spirits worshipped in hát cửa đình performances are described as “heroes who fought against foreign invaders” (Chu Hà 1980: 29). The on-screen narration by the scholar Ngô Linh Ngọc for the 1984 film Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù also interprets the musical tradition in terms of the rhetoric of defending the country. The film begins with a “musical form” (thể) called “Giáo Trống,” which can be glossed as “Drum Prelude.” The text intoned for the “Drum Prelude” in the film is as follows: And so it is! Steady rain, favorable wind, Calm water-well, clear river. Having destroyed the army of ants and men, Now with a knock on the door, I ask permission for the “Drum Prelude.”11

Following the performance of “Drum Prelude” and another piece “Giáo Hương” (“Incense Prelude”), the film continues with Ngô Linh Ngọc commenting on the meaning of the song text: Most of the tutelary spirits of the village are famous historical dignitaries who did “good work” (công) defeating enemies when they were alive. The words of the “Drum Prelude” sung by the lead singer are therefore truly appropriate. . . . In the past, boys played the bronze drum to chase away enemies. Hát cửa đình praises the feat of arms of the heroic spirits so the large praise drum must be used.

172  Barley Norton Following the “Drum Prelude,” the film features performances of some other pieces from the distinctive hát cửa đình repertoire by the most revered elderly performers from Hanoi and Lỗ Khê, all of whom except Phó Thị Kim Đức are now dead.12 Despite the narrative of resistance to foreign aggression, the film is a valuable document that reveals much about what was known about hát cửa đình in the early 1980s, and some contemporary musicians have used it as a learning resource. It is important to note, however, that the majority of the performers in the film were specialists in the hát ả đào style and had not performed hát cửa đình extensively prior to 1954. It is therefore likely that some of the performances in the film, especially those involving dance such as “Bỏ Bộ” and “Bài Bông,” were reconstructed based on partial memories and information about hát cửa đình song texts and performance practices gleaned from written sources. Despite the making of the film Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù, public performances and broadcasts of ca trù were still extremely rare in the late 1970s and 1980s, and no formal institutions were set up for teaching or performing the tradition. Nonetheless, a small number of young musicians were taught privately during the 1980s, and the singer Lê Thị Bạch Vân has reported that twenty-eight teaching sessions were held for musicians from state-run music troupes and the Voice of Vietnam Radio in the mid 1980s under the auspices of the Hanoi Department of Culture and Information (Lê Thị Bạch Vân 2008: 262). In the more liberal economic and cultural climate that has ensued from the introduction of the Renovation policy in 1986, prerevolutionary music genres that had previously been discouraged or banned gradually began to re-emerge. This re-emergence was quite slow: It was not until 1991 that the first ca trù organization, the Hanoi Ca Trù Club, was established by Lê Thị Bạch Vân. When I attended the club in the summer of 1994, the elderly lutenist Chu Văn Du usually performed, but, after his death at the end of 1994, Lê Thị Bạch Vân found it increasingly difficult to find đàn đáy players. On some occasions, she managed to find elderly musicians from rural areas to perform, but in 1995, when I had the opportunity to attend the club again, performances were sometimes curtailed because no lute players could be found. Apart from the Hanoi Ca Trù Club, the other main group that was active in the 1990s was the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble. This ensemble, which was established in 1993, consists of members of one family. (See Example 8.02. ) The head of the Ensemble, Nguyễn Văn Mùi, who follows in a line of five generations of ca trù musicians, was instrumental in encouraging his children to master key repertoire (see Nguyễn Văn Khuê 2008). During the 1980s, his two sons Nguyễn Văn Khuê and Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến learned the đàn đáy with the lutenist Phó Đình Kỳ, and his daughter Nguyễn Thúy Hòa studied singing with Quách Thị Hồ. The ensemble is the first ca trù group to have toured abroad in Europe and Asia, and it continues to perform regularly in Vietnam and abroad. After initially studying the đàn đáy with Chu Văn Du in 1994, I studied with the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble during several research trips during the mid and late 1990s (see Norton 1996). From this short overview, it should be evident that the fledgling revival from 1975 to the late 1990s was primarily based on the enthusiasm and commitment of just a few musicians with little state support. Since the late 1990s, however, there has been an

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increase in revival activity, which has partly been due to the increasing involvement of government organizations and international agencies in the lead-up to the UNESCO nomination in 2009. Although the effects of ca trù’s successful inscription on UNESCO’s Urgent Safeguarding List will continue to unfold in future years, in what follows I discuss the impact of the intensification of revival efforts since the turn of the millennium and the initial reactions of the musical community to ca trù being granted “intangible cultural heritage” status. The revival strategy led by the Vietnamese Institute for Musicology has been to raise the profile of ca trù by collecting information about musicians and the activities of ca trù clubs, organizing conferences and publishing research, and arranging large-scale festivals.13 These activities are also embedded in the six safeguarding measures proposed in the UNESCO nomination file, which additionally includes measures to support musical transmission, to restore architectural “vestiges” (di tích) connected to famous ca trù lineages, and to increase awareness of the genre through workshops in schools and universities. The estimated expenditure for the safeguarding measures is more than fifty billion Vietnamese đồng (equivalent to more than US$2.5 million). However, the musicians that I spoke to in July 2010 and August 2012 said they had not seen any evidence that the safeguarding measures had begun to be implemented. Indeed, the lack of state support of ca trù activities since the nomination has caused many musicians to be extremely sceptical of the grassroots benefits of the UNESCO inscription. The issue of musical transmission is crucial for revival because very few musicians are competent ca trù performers in Vietnam today. Despite the acknowledgment of this fact in the UNESCO file, to date, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information has spent funds on conferences and festivals, rather than on encouraging teaching. In 2002, however, the Ford Foundation office in Hanoi funded an influential teaching program. During this two-month program, consisting of forty teaching sessions, more than sixty students from thirteen provinces across northern Vietnam were taught by the elderly singer Nguyễn Thị Chúc and three members of the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble. After the training, some of the students returned to their local areas and set up clubs themselves, and, according to the nomination file, more than twenty-two clubs had been established by 2004. This expansion has meant that the “club” (câu lạc bộ) has become the main unit of revival.14 Although the Ford Foundation teaching program had a tangible effect on increasing the number of people engaged in practical learning and performance, the tutors were acutely aware of the limitations and potential dangers of the program. Due to the high student–teacher ratio, teaching was done in large groups, and students had to play in unison together. This meant that students mainly learned fixed versions of phrases with little variation or improvisation. When I discussed the program with members of the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble, they stressed that much more time was needed if the students were to gain sufficient experience and knowledge to deviate from the fixed versions they had learned. A documentary about the teaching program made by Vietnamese Television (VTV) shows the students performing the musical form “Xẩm Huê Tình” in unison with eleven drummers, twenty-eight singers, and thirteen đàn đáy players

174  Barley Norton (see Example 8.03 ). Although this version of “Xẩm Huê Tình” served the purpose of bringing the students together in a final performance, such a performance with multiple instrumentalists and singers has no historical precedent. Usually, this song is performed with just one lutenist, singer, and drummer, as illustrated by a 1935 recording and a more recent performance by the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble (see Examples 8.04 and 8.05 ). The large group performance of “Xẩm Huê Tình” by more than fifty musicians trained on the Ford Foundation program precludes the possibility of a flexible, improvised performance style that is an important feature of the small ensemble performances, and it shows how new teaching contexts can result in changes to performance practices. Concerns have also been voiced that the tradition will be “deformed” (bị biến dạng) by students with insufficient skill and knowledge setting up clubs and teaching others in their local areas (Lê Thị Bạch Vân 2008: 269). Since the growth in the number of clubs that followed the Ford Foundation teaching program, few new ones have been established. One exception is the Ca Trù Thăng Long Club established in 2006 by an instrumental tutor at the Academy of Music, Phạm Thị Huệ. This club received funding from 2006 to 2008 from the Center of Educational Exchange with Vietnam (a subsidiary of the American Council of Learned Societies) to teach ca trù to a group of students from the Music Academy. Esbjörn Wettermark’s detailed study of the club discusses Phạm Thị Huệ’s pragmatic approach to teaching, which combines her experience as a tutor at the National Music Academy with traditional methods of “immersion and apprenticeship” (Wettermark 2010a: 83). The club has become a prominent part of the contemporary ca trù revival because of its regular performances involving large numbers of students, its aim to produce “professional” musicians through a systematic program of teaching, and the considerable amount of attention it has received from the media. But it has also courted considerable controversy and criticism from within the ca trù community, not least because Phạm Thị Huệ established the club and began to teach ca trù just one year after she began learning the đàn đáy lute.15 In another interesting development, the Ca Trù Thăng Long Theater was set up in 2009 with Lê Thị Bạch Vân as artistic director, and this provoked a public spat about the closeness of the theater’s name to the Ca Trù Thăng Long Club (Thăng Long is an old name for Hanoi). Aiming to attract domestic and international tourists, the theater staged ca trù performances at the Revolutionary Museum in Hanoi. The publicity brochure made the ethos of the theater clear with its strapline: “Ca Tru—Vietnamese quintessence—World Heritage. Let’s preserve and develop it the sustainable way!” When I attended some performances shortly after it opened, audience numbers were small, and it turned out that the project was short-lived, closing down after just a few months. A notable feature of the Ca Trù Thăng Long Club has been its commitment to reconstruct hát cửa đình. The club’s monthly performances at a village communal house in Hanoi typically feature renditions of hát cửa đình repertoire, including dance pieces performed by groups of female students (see Example 8.06 ). Drawing on the diverse instrumental skills of the Academy students in the club, Phạm Thị Huệ has also set up

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a bát âm orchestra to perform. The bát âm orchestra is quite distinct from ca trù traditions, yet Phạm Thị Huệ deemed it suitable for club performances because of its connections with rituals held in village communal houses, and she wanted to include it to create a more appealing, diverse event for audiences (see Wettermark 2010b). The issue of audiences is an important one for the revival, as many ca trù artists are disappointed by the level of appreciation shown by audiences; for a performance to be “inspired” (ngẫu hứng), it is necessary for musicians to develop a rapport filled with “sentiment” (tình cảm) with the audience (see Norton 2013).16 An emphasis on reconstructing hát cửa đình has also been evident in the festivals organized by the Vietnamese Musicology Institute in the lead-up to the UNESCO nomination. In revivalist discourse, hát cửa đình is understood as a pure, ancient tradition, untainted by the negative associations of hát ả đào performances in singing bars. The fact that some hát cửa đình pieces can also be performed with a large number of dancers—even though much of the detailed knowledge about hát cửa đình and the dances has already been lost—also makes them suited to festival performances in large, proscenium-arch theaters like the Hanoi Opera House (Figure 8.3). Dances that imitate the royal court dances of Huế imperial court music nhã nhạc have also been drawn on to devise new hát cửa quyền pieces that are presented as faithful to tradition. What we see in the staging of hát cửa đình and hát cửa quyền dances at festivals is a reconstruction, and in some respects a reinvention of tradition, in a way that is designed to impress Vietnamese and international audiences with the value of ca trù as “world heritage.” Such modern festivals can themselves be viewed as rituals that promote cultural identity through symbolic representations of heritage (Cooley 2006). Given the plan outlined in the file submitted to UNESCO to organize more ca trù festivals and the fact that numerous other festivals have sprung up across Vietnam since the 1990s, the festivalization of hát cửa đình looks set to continue in future years.17 Understandably, given the endangered state of ca trù, the primary focus of revival efforts has been on reconstructing “traditional” practices. Since the 1990s, however, a small number of musicians have participated in a disparate collection of musical projects that combine elements of ca trù with other musical styles. New musical projects have included compositions, popular songs, and experimental video works that incorporate ca trù influences.18 The syncretic approach of such works is not supported by traditionalists, but some within the ca trù community argue that change and development is important if ca trù is to be a living tradition, rather than a reproduction of “museum” pieces from the prerevolutionary past. Here, I will briefly discuss a collaboration involving the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble, which I documented in the film Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh (Norton 2010). In 2009, the group Đại Lâm Linh, led by the pianist and songwriter Ngọc Đại and the two singers Thanh Lâm and Dung Linh, recorded their debut album, and three of the songs on the album feature members of the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble. For the recording, the singer Nguyễn Thúy Hòa and the lutenist Nguyễn Văn Khuê performed sections from the hát ả đào musical forms “Gửi Thư” and “Tỳ Bà Hành,” and these were integrated into Ngọc Đại’s composed songs (see Example 8.07 ). Although the vocal melodies sung by Nguyễn Thúy Hòa retained

176  Barley Norton

FIGURE  8.3  Reenactment of hát cửa quyền dance, based on Huế royal court dances, at the “Ca Trù Singing of the Việt People” festival in the Hanoi Opera House in 2006. (Photograph by Barley Norton.)

key aspects of the distinctive hát ả đào vocal style, she changed her vocal phrasing and percussion rhythms on the phách to suit the musical context, and Nguyễn Văn Khuê improvised new phrases on the đàn đáy lute. Nguyễn Thúy Hòa also spoke about how she adopted a different attitude when performing in a new context. Reflecting on her performances, she remarked: “When I first practiced with Ngọc Đại I sang in a strictly traditional way. Then I listened to how the other musicians expressed their thoughts and feelings. So I started to express my own feelings through the medium of ca trù” (Nguyễn Thúy Hòa, personal communication, 2009). Postrevival projects like the collaboration with Đại Lâm Linh are indicative of the willingness of some ca trù musicians to move beyond strict adherence to tradition and to develop ways of performing that engage with new forms of musical expression. Although innovation and change is largely absent from debates about the ca trù revival (Norton 2008), prominent ca trù musicians have already shown interest in postrevival experimentation, and this has the potential for new musical directions to be pursued in future years.

Conclusion Discourse on cultural heritage that emphasizes the importance of cultural forms in the construction of national identity can easily overshadow different points of view

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and potentially limit the proliferation of diverse approaches to revival. The UNESCO criteria for the recognition of intangible cultural heritage refer to the importance of the participation and involvement of communities, groups, and individuals, which seems to suggest collective agreement. Yet cultural heritage policy emanating from international and state-run organizations raises thorny issues concerning ownership, control, and stewardship of musical traditions (Titon 2009), and, in the case of ca trù, the nomination to UNESCO seems to have contributed to tensions and rivalry between groups of performers. Although most musicians I spoke to acknowledge that UNESCO recognition raises prestige and status, some voices within ca trù circles are wary of the sudden increase in attention stimulated by the nomination and are critical of the progress that has been made in developing a viable musical culture based on high levels of proficiency and a deep appreciation and understanding of music, dance, and literature. Some performers and aficionados fear that ca trù will be damaged if training programs are not properly executed and low standards of performance become the norm. Another often-voiced issue is the need for appropriate venues to be established that are suitable for appreciating ca trù traditions, in addition to the village communal houses that currently host some hát cửa đình performances. In the new climate of UNESCO-driven and state-led revivalism, there is concern in ca trù circles that deep, sustained appreciation for the ritual, musical, and literary aesthetics will be overshadowed by the appropriation of ca trù as a cultural symbol for domestic and international tourist consumption. A  danger of the current revival is that ca trù will become an empty vessel filled to the brim with nationalist sentiments and imbued with heritage, but lacking in other possible meanings relating to the historical ontologies of ca trù. The weight of cultural heritage threatens to limit ca trù’s musical and ritual meanings, to define its contemporary social relevance in primarily nationalistic terms, and to make it more difficult for a vital, innovative musical culture to emerge. The two forms of ca trù that have been the primary focus of revival are hát ả đào and hát cửa đình, with the latter being particularly emphasized due to its connections with village rituals that are conducive to reconstruction on the stage and at festivals. Reviving other historical manifestations of ca trù is hampered by the fact that much knowledge about performance practices has been lost. Nonetheless, there is scope for imaginative revival projects that are informed by historical research on ca trù’s diverse ontologies and for initiatives to forge new styles that do not aim to adhere to historical precedents. Establishing a sustainable, diverse, and dynamic ca trù musical ecology in contemporary Vietnamese society is a process that (a decade into the twenty-first century) is only just beginning, and it is not going to be an easy task. Yet it is a task in which musicians, clubs, and audiences are enthusiastically engaged. The challenge for the government and international agencies that have shaped the revival process is to facilitate a system of stewardship that encourages diversity and participation, rather than seeing ca trù solely as a resource for bolstering national identity and promoting Vietnamese culture on the national and international stage.

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy for several research grants that have facilitated trips to Vietnam. I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến and the members of the Ca Trù Thái Hà Ensemble for their long-standing help and inspiration.

Notes 1. See http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/ for information about UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. 2. The ca trù nomination file submitted to UNESCO and the reports of the two external examiners (myself and Gisa Jähnichen) can be downloaded from http://www.unesco. org/culture/ich/doc/src/ITH-09-4.COM-CONF.209-14+Corr.-EN.pdf#exam00029. For other information about the UNESCO nomination of “Ca trù singing” see: http://www. unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&USL=00309. 3. Historically, ca trù traditions were mostly found in northern Vietnam including provinces near the central city of Huế. Some ca trù musicians lived in the Republic of Vietnam in the south from 1954 until the reunification of the country in 1975, but ca trù performances do not seem to have been popular in the south during this period. 4. Hát ca công refers to special rituals that took place in temples dedicated to famous ca trù lineages. Today, ca công temples can be found in Thanh Hóa province (see Bùi Trọng Hiền 2006; Vũ Nhật Thăng 2006). Hát ca công and hát cửa đình are sometimes referred as hát thờ, which means “singing for worship.” 5. The poetic text in Vietnamese is: “Thọ bôi kể chục, ca trù điểm trăm. Mừng nay tiệc ca trù thị yến.” See Nguyễn Xuân Diện (2007: 72). For further discussion see Nguyễn Đức Mậu (2010: 129). 6. Nhung Tuyet Tran’s research points out that terms such as đình ca, đình môn, and đình hát were used to refer to music and dance performances in village communal houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the term ca trù does not seem to have been common at that time (Tran 2012: 142). 7. Nguyễn Xuân Diện (2007: ­chapter 1) provides detailed lists of the historical sources on ca trù housed at the Sino-Vietnamese Institute in Hanoi. See also Đặng Hoành Loan et al. (2006). 8. The literature expert Nguyễn Đức Mậu, for instance, has argued that the hát nói poetic form evolved in response to the demands of ca trù musical culture (see Nguyễn Đức Mậu 1998 and 2010). 9. Trần Văn Khê’s anecdotal account of his trip to Hanoi in 1976 provides a fascinating insight into Quách Thị Hồ’s attitude toward the recordings (Trần Văn Khê 1997). 10. The film was directed by Ngô Đăng Tuất (1984). For a study of contemporary ca trù performance in the village of Lỗ Khê, see Anisensel (2009). 11. The song text in Vietnamese is: “Ô là vậy! Mưa hòa, gió thuận. Bể lặng, sông trong. Đã diệt xong lũ kiến đàn ông. Nay vỗ cửa tôi xin Giáo trống.” This is a standard text that predates

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the Vietnamese-American conflict. The same text (with slight differences) is documented by Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề (1962: 92). 12. The film Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù features performances by the singers Quách Thị Hồ, Phó Thị Kim Đức, Nguyễn Thị Phúc, and Nguyễn Thị Hào, and the lutenists Nguyễn Thế Tuất, Phó Đình Kỳ, Đình Khắc Ban, and Chu Văn Du. 13. State-run organizations have coordinated a series of conferences and festivals since the late 1990s (e.g., Ca Trù Cổ Đạm 1998, Hanoi Ca Trù Festival 2000, Ca Trù Thanh Hóa 2005, Ca Trù Singing of the Việt People 2006). 14. Much like in English, the idea of a club in Vietnamese suggests a group of people who come together to share and support a common interest. 15. In the spring of 2010, Phạm Thị Huệ also received criticism for changing her “club” into a “guild” (giáo phường). This was a highly controversial move because the term giáo phường has deep historical associations relating to the transmission of ca trù and the distinctive styles of performance that were developed in different locales. Many in the ca trù community consider this to be an abuse of the term’s historical meanings (see Wettermark 2010b: 30). 16. The issue of audiences has been further highlighted by the fact that, in 2011, both the Ca Trù Thăng Long Club and the Hanoi Ca Trù Club started to perform several times a week for tourists in the old quarter in Hanoi. Although such performances provide an important income stream for the clubs, the predominantly foreign tourists who attend these performances have usually never heard ca trù before, so have little understanding of the musical style and performance conventions. 17. Since the UNESCO inscription in 2009, two national ca trù festivals have been organized in Hanoi by the Vietnamese Musicology Institute (one in 2009 and one in 2011). Apart from these two festivals, however, at the time of writing (2012), no tangible progress has been made on implementing the safeguarding measures outlined in the UNESCO nomination file. 18. Such experiments include ca trù-influenced popular songs like “Chiều Phủ Tây Hồ” by the songwriter Phú Quang, which was performed by the popular singers Thanh Lâm and Tùng Dương with accompaniment on the đàn đáy lute by Phạm Thị Huệ in 2009. The lutenist Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến has also composed new works like “Luân Hồi” (2009), which draws on ca trù instrumentation and musical material. In France, the jazz guitarist Nguyễn Lê and the singer Hương Thanh have set the ca trù song “Xẩm Huê Tình” over a bass line on the gimbri (Gnawan three-stringed lute) and a sampled Malay drum loop on their album Moon and Wind: New Sounds from Vietnam (Nguyễn Lê and Hương Thanh 1999). Other examples include a video art work by the Ho Chi Minh-based artist Như Huy called “Memories” (2009) (see http://vimeo.com/28609113).

References Addiss, Stephen. 1973. “Hat A Dao, the Sung Poetry of North Vietnam.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93 (1): 18–31. Arana, Miranda. 1999. Neotraditional Music in Vietnam. Kent, Ohio: Nhạc Việt. Anisensel, Aliénor. 2009. “Chanter le Ca Trù au Village de Lỗ Khê (Nord du Viêt-Nam): Une Fête Rituelle au Temple Communal et à la Maison des Patrons de Metier du Ca Trù.” Revue Péninsule 59 (2): 143–169.

180  Barley Norton Bohlman, Philip V. 1999. “Ontologies of Music.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 17–34. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Bùi Trọng Hiền. 2006. “Không Gian Văn Hóa—Các Chức Năng Văn Hóa Xã Hội và Những Hình Thức Biểu Hiện cữa Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù.” In Đặc Khảo Ca Trù Việt Nam, edited by Đặng Hoành Loan et al., 79–109. Hà Nội: Viện Âm Nhạc. Chu Hà. 1980. “Hát Cửa Đình Lỗ Khê.” In Hát Cửa Đình Lỗ Khê, 28–125. Hà Nội: Sở Văn Hóa Thông Tin. Cooley, Timothy J. 2006. “Folk Festival as Modern Ritual in the Polish Tatra Mountains.” In Ethnomusicology:  A  Contemporary Reader, edited by Jennifer C.  Post, 67–84. New York: Routledge. Đặng Hoành Loan et al., eds. 2006. Đặc Khảo Ca Trù Việt Nam. Hà Nội: Viện Âm Nhạc. Đào Trọng Từ. 1984. “Vietnamese Traditional Music.” In Essays on Vietnamese Music, by Đào Trọng Từ, Huy Trần and Tú Ngọc, 7–28. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Đỗ Bằng Đoàn and Đỗ Trọng Huề. 1962. Việt-Nam Ca-Trù Biên Khảo. Saigon: Văn-Khoa. Howard, Keith. 2006. Preserving Korean Music:  Intangible Cultural Properties as Icons of Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lê Thị Bạch Vân. 2008. “Ca Trù Hà Nội: Thực Trạng và Một Số Giải Pháp.” In Kỷ Yếu Hội Thảo Khoa Học Quốc Tế: Hát Ca Trù Người Việt, 258–275. Hà Nội: Viện Âm Nhạc. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meeker, Lauren. 2007. “Musical Transmissions:  Folk Music, Mediation and Modernity in Northern Vietnam”. PhD diss., Columbia University. Ministry of Culture. 1972. Về Tính Dân Từc trong Âm Nhạc Việt Nam. Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Hóa. ——. 1999. Xây Dựng và Phát Triển Nền Văn Hóa Việt Nam Tiên Tiến Đậm Đà Bản Sắc Dân Tộc: Thức Tiến và Giải Pháp. Hà Nội: Bộ Văn Hóa Thông Tin. Ngô Linh Ngọc and Ngô Văn Phú. 1987. Tuyển Tập Thơ Ca Trù. Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Học. Nguyễn Văn Ngọc. 1932. Đào Nương Ca. Ha Noi: Vinh Hung Long Tho Quan. Nguyễn Xuân Diện. 2007. Lịch Sử và Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù: Khảo Sát Nguồn Tư Liệu tại Viện Nghiên Cứu Hán Nôm. Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới. Nguyễn Xuân Khoát. 1980. “Vài Nết Về Nền Ca Nhạc Cổ Truyền.” In Hát Cửa Đình Lỗ Khê, 7–26. Hà Nội: Sở Văn Hóa Thông Tin. Nguyễn Đức Mậu. 1998. “Hát Nói: Từ Điệu Thức Ca Trù Đến Thể Loại Văn Học.” Tạp Chí Văn Học 11: 50–59. ——. 2010. Ca Trù Hà Nội: Trong Lịch Sử và Hiện Tại. Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Hà Nội. Nguyễn Văn Khuê. 2008. “Khôi Phục, Bảo Tồn và Gìn Giữ Ca Trù trong Một Dòng Tộc.” In Kỷ Yếu Hội Thảo Khoa Học Quốc Từ: Hát Ca Trù Người Việt, 139–144. Hà Nội: Viện Âm Nhạc. Norton, Barley. 1996. “Ca Trù: A Vietnamese Chamber Music Genre.” Special issue of Nhạc Việt: The Journal of Vietnamese Music 5 (1): 1–103. ——. 2005. “Singing the Past: Vietnamese Ca Tru, Memory and Mode.” Asian Music 36 (2): 27–56. ——. 2008. “Phục Hồi Ca Trù: Những Vấn Đề và Thách Thức.” In Kỷ Yếu Hội Thảo Khoa Học Quốc Tế: Hát Ca Trù Người Việt, 175–180. Hà Nội: Viên Âm Nhạc. ——. 2009. Songs for the Spirits:  Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ——. 2013. “Engendering Emotion and the Environment in Vietnamese Music and Ritual.” In Performing Gender, Place and Emotion, edited by Fiona Magowan and Louise Wrazen, 29– 59. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press.

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Pham Duy. 1975. Musics of Vietnam. Carbondale and Edwardsville:  Southern Illinois University Press. Ruggles, D. Fairchild, and Helaine Silverman, eds. 2009. Intangible Heritage Embodied. New York: Springer. Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa, eds. 2009. Intangible Heritage. New York: Routledge. Seeger, Anthony. 2008. “Theories Forged in the Crucible of Action: The Joys, Dangers, and Potentials of Advocacy and Fieldwork.” In Shadows in the Field:  New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2nd edition), edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley, 271–288. New York: Oxford University Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 2009. “Music and Sustainability:  An Ecological Viewpoint.” The World of Music 51 (1): 119–137. Tran, Nhung Tuyet. 2012. “The Commodification of Village Songs and Dances in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Vietnam.” In State, Society and the Market in Contemporary Vietnam, edited by Hue Tam Ho-Tai and Mark Sidel, 141–157. New York: Routledge. Trần Văn Khê. 1962. La Musique Vietnamienne Traditionnelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ——. 1997. Tiểu Phẩm. Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh: Nhà Xuất Bản Trẻ. Vietnamese Institute for Musicology. 2004. Traditional Music in Globalization Context. Hanoi: Vietnamese Institute for Musicology. Vũ Nhật Thăng. 2006. “Âm Nhạc Ca Trù.” In Đặc Khảo Ca Trù Việt Nam, edited by Đặng Hoành Loan et al., 110–159. Hà Nội: Viện Âm Nhạc. Weintraub, Andrew N., and Bell Yung. 2009. Music and Cultural Rights. Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wettermark, Esbjörn. 2010a. “Thăng Long Ca Trù Club—New Ways for Old Music.” Finnish Journal of Music Education 13 (1): 72–87. ——. 2010b. “Shifting Mindscapes in the Vietnamese Historical Consciousness and its Impact on Music Revivalism: Ca Trù and the Thăng Long Ca Trù Club.” Master’s diss., Goldsmiths, University of London.

Discs Cited Nguyễn Lê and Hương Thanh. 1999. Moon and Wind: New Sounds From Vietnam. ACT 92692. Trần Văn Khê. 1991 [1978]. Traditional Music: Ca Trù and Quan Họ of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Auvidis-Unesco D8035.

Films Cited Norton, Barley. 2010. Hanoi Eclipse:  The Music of Dai Lam Linh. Boston:  Documentary Educational Resources. Ngô Đăng Tuất. 1984. Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù. Film company unknown.

C HA P T E R  9

T H E H U N G A R IA N DA N C E HOUSE MOVEMENT AND R E V I VA L O F T R A N S Y LVA N IA N S T R I N G B A N D  M U S I C C OL I N QU IG L EY

The Hungarian dance house movement (táncházmozgalom) is frequently listed among the many music revivals that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Ronström 1998).1 The first meeting of what was to become this movement was held on May 6, 1972, in Budapest: a social dance gathering among members of four professional folk dance companies based in the capital. Although there were precedents that led to this gathering, it clearly marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of Hungarians’ engagement with their musical heritage (Frigyesi 1996). The dance house movement shares the common components of music revivals generally: the presence of core revivalists, revival informants, a revival discourse, followers, activities, and associated enterprises (Livingston 1999: 71). The dance house movement is distinctive, however, for a number of reasons. Prominent among them are its intimate connection to dance, its national and yet interethnic and multistate character, its integration of activism and scholarship, and its rather centralized institutionalization. In this chapter, I examine each of these distinctive features in turn, paying attention to their musical consequences. Much has been written about the movement since its inception, including manifestos from its leaders, the opinions of cultural managers and commentators, analyses of academics, and the recollections of its founders. Much historical documentation is available, thanks to a reflective and at times nostalgic turn among its leaders, often occasioned by various anniversary observances of that founding event. (Several sources are referenced in this essay, but see also Halmos, Hoppál, and Halák [2012]; Sebő [2007]; Siklós [2006]; Táncházhöskora [DVD, 2007].) A wealth of ephemeral materials may be accessed through the Dance House Archive, housed at the Hungarian Heritage House (Hagyományok Háza).2 This chapter utilizes a variety of these resources, along with my

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first-hand observations, conversations, and interviews beginning in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, continuing through fieldwork in Romania during 1997–1999, residence in Budapest in 2006–2008, and participation in the fortieth-anniversary conference held at the annual Dance House Festival (Táncháztalálkozó) in 2012. On November 12, 2011, “The Táncház method:  a Hungarian model for the transmission of intangible cultural heritage” was inscribed in United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s list of “programmes, projects and activities for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage considered to best reflect the principles and objectives of the convention” (see http://www.unesco.org/culture/ ich/en/Art18/00515). What began as an urban youth phenomenon had become institutionalized and internationally recognized for its success. Although it is often referred to as a “revival” in English, I will generally use the Hungarian language term “dance house movement,” which is both broader in the scope of activities it might encompass and more open in how it might characterize attitudes toward the music/dance practice at its core. Between these two events (the inaugural Budapest meeting of 1972 and the UNESCO inscription of 2011) lie forty years of a movement that maintains its engagement with musicians and dancers in rural Transylvania whose practice provided inspiration and from whom the movement’s founders took their model for that first dance house gathering. During those same years, the movement spawned a network of enthusiastic participants among Hungarians in all the surrounding countries, among diaspora Hungarians in Western Europe and North America, and among non-Hungarians there, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Japan. This far-flung yet closely linked and networked community of practice shares affinity for an aesthetic that refers itself to the traditional music/dance idiom of the Carpathian Basin (Quigley 1998). Béla Halmos’ essay “The Táncház Movement” (2000) is the most accessible general and first-hand account in English. He identifies táncház as “a form of recreation not for some homogeneous Transylvanian village community, but for the very heterogeneous urban populations of Hungary’s towns and cities”; that is, as a kind of folklorism (Halmos 2000: 33). The musicians organize dance house events, and a dance house band usually manages a weekly event. These events are held in the city’s cultural centers, and an entrance fee supports the use of the facility. The number of Budapest dance houses grew from two weekly in 1974 to “one or two táncház every day of the week” in the 1980s—a high level of activity that continued, with some decline, up to the time of his writing in 2000. There were provincial towns with weekly or monthly meetings as well, and “60 or 70 táncház orchestras,” to say nothing of the folk singers, the solo instrumentalists, and the dance instructors engaged in related activities across the country (Halmos 2000: 39). According to Halmos, “since the fees do not cover the expenses, the operation of practically every táncház depends on state subsidies” (Halmos 2000: 34). In 2012, however, a common complaint to be heard among the leaders in a variety of institutions promoting traditional Hungarian dance and music was that “there were simply no grants to apply for,” a situation perhaps marking a new phase in the institutional support for táncház (Éva Héra, interview, April 12, 2012, Budapest).3

184   Colin Quigley The fortieth-anniversary dance house “jubileum conference and exhibit” in 2012 took stock of the movement’s current state. Elders of the movement fondly recalled their halcyon days, celebrated their successes, and called for a continued commitment to the core values of the movement. Representatives from Hungarian minority communities in all the surrounding states reported on its steady growth among them, as did representatives from Germany, Canada, and Japan (Halmos et al. 2012). The movement was centrally led by participants from its founding days, supported by a number of state and civil organizations, and serviced by a full battery of ancillary commercial enterprises. The challenge faced by its many enthusiasts at this time was how they might continue in a self-sustaining way in the face of mounting economic crisis.

A Music/Dance Revival Although this chapter focuses on dance house as a music revival, it is simply not possible to ignore its dance components because it is public participatory dancing that most distinguishes the dance house movement from earlier periods in Hungarian folk music interest (Frigyesi 1996). The transformations in folk music performance practice that the movement ushered in are directly due to the needs of its dancers. The following brief history of the movement thus includes music and dance, introduces key participants, and notes important changes that took place, all the while focusing on those aspects relevant to its distinctive features. In common with other folk dance groups, the folk dance performance ensembles that incubated what became the dance house approach had, prior to the 1970s, rehearsed and performed stage choreographies to composed folk music pieces written and played by schooled musicians. Indeed, rehearsals were usually held with piano accompaniment. The choreographies used folk dance steps within a theatrical dance presentational framework. Dancers performed largely in unison or in large groupings moving through floor patterns designed as audience spectacle. There was little room for individuality in the dancing, much less any improvisation. These choreographies were set to composed suites of folkloric music played by large ensembles of professional musicians in an orchestral manner; they could also be, and often were, rehearsed and performed to recordings. This was a style well known throughout the Eastern block countries that owed much to Soviet models. The dance house approach originated with a few of these ensembles at the end of the 1960s. One in particular, the Bartók Ensemble, under the direction of Sándor Timár, was particularly committed to this new way of dancing, and it was the members of this ensemble who established the first dance houses in Budapest between 1972 and 1974. Two musicians from the Bartók Ensemble, Béla Halmos and Ferenc Sebő (who both went on to play for the first dance house meetings), led a change in music performance practice concomitant with the dance. They began learning to play in what could be called a social-dance functional manner, in the context of a shift in that ensemble’s

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choreographic approach and concomitant dance training methods. To dance in this natural way, to use their language, it was necessary for the music to be played in a spontaneous manner rather than from composed scores. The live connection of music and dance, with musician and dancer performing together, facilitates the dancer’s creative expression within the structure and aesthetic of the participatory dance idiom. Timár, both choreographer and director of the ensemble, discussed this “music problem” in an interview (Abkarovits 2002: 136). He explained that the ensemble had been using musicians who played Hungarian folk music in a rather stereotypical, urban “gypsy” manner based on classic recordings heard on the radio, a common practice among ensembles throughout the 1960s. As an alternative, the group’s pianists suggested that they create an ensemble of accompanists made up of student musicians from the Bartók Béla music school. These musicians were trained in the Bartók and Kodály style of folk music composition, and they created arrangements in this style and then performed the music with stage choreographies, thus producing a Hungarian folk association between music and dance that was perceived as being more authentic. Between 1968 and 1970, several things came together to change this practice. Timár recalled encountering village “tradition maintaining” dance groups in the framework of festival events sponsored by the Folkculture Institute (Népmüvészet Intézet). These festivals were part of a system of competitions and awards that established the status of different ensembles (Maácz 1981). At one such event, Timár relates, the Bartók Ensemble played their composed music for a choreographic presentation of Szatmár dances and “the villagers [from there] began to dance freely, completely naturally, and were a great success” (Abkarovits 2002: 137). In contrast to the village dancers’ freedom, however, the ensemble’s performance seemed “mechanical” and more like Western European-style ballet. Timár decided to try this “natural dancing” style with his ensemble. Although they started with the Szatmár repertoire, which they had already been performing, they soon turned their attention to the music/dance of the Transylvanian village of Szék/Sic, where Timár’s colleague György Martin and others had collected both music and dance (Martin 1982). I will return later to dance folklorist and scientist György Martin’s contributions to this project, which were to prove profound for the movement as a whole. The Szék repertoire was appealing for several reasons, not least because the existing collections of its instrumental music made by László Lajtha (d. 1963) were among the few available sources of traditional instrumental dance music at that time. Sebő and Halmos were not alone in having recourse to Lajtha’s transcriptions: in the Transylvanian city of Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca, young urban Hungarian intellectuals also attempted to use these transcripts before making connections with the traditional players themselves. In Kolozsvár, many young people from Szék sometimes gathered to dance in a square by the post office; the local dance house founders met there and began to dance with these youngsters. Timár recalled that Szék villagers in Budapest were easily identifiable by their distinctive dress; seeking models for his dances, Timár brought these villagers to the rehearsals. In the years leading up to their involvement with the Bartók Ensemble, Sebő and Halmos had been following their own trajectory. The two young musicians knew each

186   Colin Quigley other from their days with the symphony orchestra of the Technical University where they had been students. As a duo—as Halmos related—they performed a variety of folk songs with guitar accompaniment. Halmos had become well known as “the guitar boy” on a televised singing competition program; he didn’t win, but he made a strong impression and was very popular with the audience, who voted weekly for their favorites. In addition to singing less well-known songs, he experimented with traditional accompaniment, having been a violin player since the age of seven. Sebő likewise was experimenting at that time, setting Hungarian poetry to guitar accompaniment and composing for avant-garde theater (Béla Halmos, interview, April 5, 2012, Budapest). Whether Martin invited them to his home after hearing them or it was suggested to them that they seek him out as a source for such music, all sources agree that during 1969–1970 Martin introduced Halmos and Sebő to his Szék collections of dance and music and, together with folklorist Lajos Vargyas, provided access to the archive at the Academy of Sciences. Martin (as Timár’s friend and colleague) then brought the young musicians along to the Bartók Ensemble rehearsals and, according to Timár, “the first time we used ‘living music’ for the dances, we were very happy! After that we invited them and they became our musicians” (Abkarovits 2002: 137). The Bartók, however, was not the only ensemble to make connections with village performers. In fact, it was the Bihari group that instigated the first dance house; its leader, Ferenc Novák, had not only been to Szék but had also written a thesis on its “dance life” (Novák 2000). As for other choreographers of the time, however, what mattered was the impressions they took from seeing village dancing and how they incorporated these impressions into their own artistic visions. For most choreographers, the focus was on theater dance, and their engagement with village traditional dancing was brief. Dancers in these ensembles similarly found their satisfaction through stage performance, not through the freer style of dancing as performed in the villages. It was the Bartók Ensemble that made its mission the discovery of live dancing to living music, its practice, and its presentation on stage. The original dance house repertoire thus drew from the village of Szék, in the Mezőség region of Central Transylvania. The music/dance idiom of this region is performed in suites of changing rhythms and choreographic forms that are generally of increasing tempo (Lortat-Jacob 1994: 109). The musical repertoire consists of locally known pieces, together with melodies of wide distribution. The suites are performed to suit dance preferences as they evolved in particular communities. As a result, melodies are often, in the first instance, known by dance title together with a village name, by musician, or by dancer. Even within one small area of adjacent villages, the subtle rhythmic differences between shared dances and their music can be significant. The music is played by string ensembles led by a prímás, playing violin, often with supporting melody players. Bass instruments, usually somewhat smaller than the full size orchestral bass and sometimes more in the cello size range, provide the underlying pulse, while a three-string kontra of viola size provides chordal accompaniment and a powerful off-beat pulse, as well as more subtle rhythmic shadings. Thanks to the expressive possibilities of these bowed instruments, the rhythms distinctive to particular

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communities—and even, in the case of the men’s solo dancing, individual dancers—can be fully articulated.4 In Béla Halmos’ view, the dance house could not have happened without this Mezőség music and dance repertoire; it was different enough from műzene (art music) and vendéglői cigányzene (urban restaurant Gypsy music) to be interesting, yet not too “primitive” for modern ears, unlike some other Hungarian music played in Romania (Abkarovits 2002:  12). The dance cycles of Mezőség and especially Szék were ideally suited for adoption into the new dance house setting. Participants danced freely; the close interaction of the turning figures was appealing to young couples, and the solo dancing appealed to the young men. Although not much remarked on in all the writing about the heady early days of the movement, personal conversations with participants from that era, and even casual observation of the contemporary “folk pub” dancing that accompanies dance house festivals, confirms that socializing among young men and women lends the dancing energy and excitement. For participants this was and probably remains the most immediate source of motivation and satisfaction. And this is what animated dancing in Szék as well, where dance house events were purely the domain of the unmarried young adults. The skills needed to be an effective prímás in the social setting had to be learned at first-hand from its masters. So, whereas Halmos and Sebő were introduced to the music through recordings collected in the field, as aspiring practitioners, they quickly turned to traditional musicians themselves for instruction—at first in Hungary proper, to the leading prímás of a Romanian minority community, but very soon thereafter to the prímás in Szék and to other musicians in Romania. This paradoxical turn to sources outside of Hungary helps to account for the recurrent and continuing concern over the “Hungarianness” of the dance house repertoire, the distinctive feature to which I now turn.

The Politics of Identity: Dance House and Transylvania The changing political context of dance house practice is inescapably part of its history and is the theme that has most engaged social-scientific interest in the movement. From its earliest days, its possibly national character has been a bone of contention. Sebő tells us that when he and the other Bartók Ensemble members established the second dance house in Budapest, at the Fövárosi Művelődési Ház (Municipal Culture House), the director was worried that it might be in some way “nationalist” and therefore risked being sanctioned (Abkarovits 2002: 176). Eventually convinced otherwise, he supported the new activity. Concern continued to be expressed over the possible nationalist character of dance house activities, although its political connotation changed over time. In the 1970s, organizers were worried that authorities might see dance house music as an

188   Colin Quigley expression of national sentiment, undesirable in that socialist period. In the 2000s, concern shifted to its potential right-wing connotation. As early as 1972, we find the question of whether the dance house is or is not, should or should not be, national framed in a different but equally important way in a text by Sándor Csoóri titled “Mi kell a külföldieknek” (with the sense here of “What do foreigners expect”) (1972: 19–20). Commenting on the reception of a Bartók Ensemble performance abroad, Csoóri recalled the multilingual and cultured foreign director who said of the Szék music, “It’s Romanian!” About the performances of two groups composed of Romanians from within Hungary, he commented, “It’s as if we weren’t in Hungary.” Obviously, Csoóri continues, this foreigner could have known “nothing of Mezőség or old Somogy dances” or he would have realized how Hungarian much of the music/ dance in Romanian Transylvania was (Csoóri 1972 quoted in Sebő 2007: 20). Csoóri’s discussion conveys perfectly the entanglement of the dance house repertoire with ethnic-national identification. Although members of the Bartók Ensemble leading the early dance houses were willing to incorporate dances of varied origin as long as they shared the core aesthetic, in performance, such ensembles are framed as ethnic (or national) in character. Csoóri’s well-justified response to the comments cited, in which he asserts the commonalities of the Hungarian and Romanian repertoire, is, however, itself incorporated into a nationalist frame through the legitimation of the Romanian Hungarian performance as being no different from the clearly Hungarian “old Somogy.” This kind of nationalized perception of repertoire is not only one-sided. I was told, with some outrage, by the director of the prize-winning Someşul Napoca Romanian ensemble from Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca that they had lost first place in an international competition because a foreign adjudicator judged their dance to be Hungarian, rather than properly Romanian. Mary Taylor’s 2008 dissertation, “The Politics of Culture:  Folk Critique and Transformation of the State in Hungary,” is the most comprehensive investigation of the dance house movement in these terms. She thoroughly documents its uneasy relationship with state bodies and their ambiguous attitudes toward it. Despite the stigma of its unofficial status and a perception of it as perhaps dangerously nationalistic, many cultural managers supported the cause and “struggled for its validation.” She further documents internal debates in these state bodies that argued for the value of dance house’s socialist “community building” dimensions (Taylor 2008: 135; 150–151). A possible contributor to its continued ethnic-nationalist association—and, one must say, occasional flirtation with nationalist sentiment—that Taylor does not explore is the consequence of its turn to the Hungarian minority villages of Transylvania for inspiration, models, and material.5 This direction brought with it a stronger association with Hungarian identity. Certainly, in Romania, dance house was intimately bound up with the expression of a minority Hungarian ethnic identity. It has been noted that although there are sources from within Hungary that played an important part in shaping the music and dance repertoire and practice at dance houses, the bulk of it was taken largely from Transylvania, across the border, in Romania. Although travel was possible between these two Warsaw Pact states, the focus on

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Hungarians that collectors, both amateur and professional, brought with them was not a happy one for Romanian authorities. Going to Romania was always something of an adventure before 1990, and much subterfuge, trickery, and misdirection were required to bring equipment into the villages and recordings back to Hungary (Laszlo Felföldi, interview, April 4, 2012, Budapest). More important, changing attitudes and policies toward this minority not only affected access but also the national connotation of its practice. Debate over the “Hungarianness” of the Mezőség repertoire in particular focuses on the Romanian-Hungarian divide. Paradoxically, the degree of its “Gypsiness” is less often raised, despite the fact that almost all the source musicians are Rom.6 On the ground in Romania, knowledge of one another’s dances across ethnic lines in mixed villages seems common. The music, perhaps even more so than the dancing, is so mixed as to constitute a shared repertoire from which it is nearly impossible to separate out its different ethnic components (Pávai 1993). In Transylvania:  Remote Borderland (2001), László Kürti examines the important place of Transylvania in the national imaginary of intellectuals in both Hungary and Romania. Both, he argues, located referents for their national identity constructions in this periphery, displacing them to a place where those at the centers of power did not have to confront the complex realities of life but were free to imagine them as they wished. Folklore was an important touchstone in this process, as, of course, it has been throughout the history of European nationalisms. The region of Central Transylvania is an area of mixed population and rather scattered settlement. There are ethnically Hungarian-only villages, Romanian-only villages, and mixed villages with differing ratios of Hungarians and Romanians together with Gypsies. Village musicians who play professionally—that is, for hire—are generally Rom, although there are non-Rom musicians as well, usually in ethnically mixed ensembles. The instrumental dance repertoire of the region is thus quite varied and largely shared. Precisely because it is the most uniform interethnic repertoire to be found throughout Transylvania (Kelemen 1998: 25–26), the contingency of its putative ethnicity is particularly apparent. In contexts of everyday sociality, the ethnicity of music/dance need not necessarily be marked as such.7 In many social situations of village life that call for music and dance, the participants are largely of one ethnicity, and there is no need to foreground that identity. It is unmarked and taken-for-granted. It is not the ethnicity of the musicians or dancers that is the most relevant determinant of musical form and style but rather the cohesiveness of the dance community. In a social setting, music/dance performance enacts the social relations that animate the occasion and contribute to their transformation. Use of the well-known local repertoire facilitates the performance of individuality and individual relationships through improvisation. In such local settings, relatively free of the constraints that come with a requirement to enact or display ethnicity, this domain is open to changes in musical culture brought about by the opening of the Romanian media markets. New instrumentation, new styles, and new repertoire are easily adopted within these social occasions.

190   Colin Quigley The most common ensembles use electric keyboards, guitars, and drum kits to support the prímás. This allows the usually younger backing players to perform popular music genres in sets that alternate with the traditional dance suites. This domain of everyday, ethnically unmarked music making proceeds according to its own dynamic, in principle independent of the highly charged domain of public ethnic display and elite nationalizing discourse. This sense of everyday ethnicity exists together with the highly charged ethnicity of public discourse. The most obvious nationalizing and ethnicizing of music and dance occur in the gross appropriation of such performance by political spokespeople. The rhetoric is often much the same, regardless of which group is being referenced. To paraphrase a Gypsy party spokesman at a Romanian Gypsy Friendship Society-sponsored concert held at the Hungarian Opera House in 1997: “This music tells us that we have culture! That our culture has value! As much or more value than anybody else’s!” The complexities of the repertoire, ethnic or otherwise, are simply ignored by such opportunistic politicization. A political message is slapped onto the performance. The sentiments of a speaker from a Romanian-Hungarian minority party, for example, recorded in 1998 at the performance of a visiting Hungarian ensemble from Budapest in a small Hungarian majority village, exemplify the impact that what Brubaker calls “homeland nationalism” can have (Brubaker 1996). The appeal to the sense of a “Hungarian nation” extending beyond the borders of the Hungarian state is clearly articulated by this politician, in phrases such as “This is Hungarian dance without borders.” Together with language and song, he continues, dance shows that where there is dance such as that being performed, “There live Hungarians!” Meanwhile, at a competition for Transylvanian “Trio” ensembles that I attended in Gherla in 1998, under the auspices of Romanian cultural authorities, the presenter instructed the audience to applaud these “diamonds of our Romanian culture.” During the socialist era in Romania (1947–1989), so much of the support for cultural performance was controlled by the state through cultural institutions that were explicitly charged with the imposition of the state ideology that nationalized music and dance practically replaced the social forms I have been discussing. As elsewhere in the eastern bloc, much of this style emanated from the Soviet Union, often in the guise of musicians and choreographers who came to teach locals their techniques for constructing such folklorism. Managers of the culture houses, found in nearly every village and directed by county branches of the national Center for Popular Arts (Centrul creatii populare), facilitated the penetration of ideologically informed performance models into even the smallest communities. The expressly “national” repertoire of ensembles in Romania, however, was drawn largely from the southern region of Wallachia. The Transylvanian repertoire was never a state symbol of choice. The closest approximation of this is seen in the imposition of the state aesthetic of political symbolism on it. This produces unison, stylized male solos in dance, and “folk orchestra” arrangements in musical performance. The freedom and individuality espoused in the dance house movement was thus more starkly opposed to official norms in Transylvania than in Hungary, where the “new approach” was adopted into folk dance stage choreographies generally by the late 1970s.

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Although the system that supported the ensemble form rapidly collapsed after 1989 in both states, institutionalized celebrations, competitions, festivals, and interpersonal networks persisted in both Hungary and Romania. After all, their organizers remained the people who found value in the preservation and promotion of traditional arts, even if they had been forced to work within the system. The aesthetic legacies of the pre-1989 policies persisted more strongly in Romania as a consequence of the dance house movement’s influence in Hungary, once again reinforcing the opposition between them. This point would not be so important if it were not for the pervasive appropriation of music/ dance into ethnic-nationalist discourse in Romania and, by implication, to some extent in Hungary. I have written elsewhere on the broader theme of the politicizing of musical heritage and of this string band idiom in particular (see Quigley 2001 and 2012), arguing that central Transylvania is a region where two established nationalizing ideologies have long been in contention over a music/dance tradition shared among three ethnic groups: first, a Romanian majority with a national ideology supported by institutionalized state policies; second, a Hungarian minority whose national ideology draws from Hungary and its institutions; and third, a Gypsy/Roma marginal minority (that is itself rather diverse) with an emergent transnational ideology now in search of representations in music/dance and institutional frameworks for their presentation. Thus, despite the often unmarked and certainly not contentious character of everyday interethnic relations among those whose music/dance culture inspired and was taken up by the dance house movement, the movement itself is subject to a continual nationalizing pressure. The intrusion of national ideology into the domain of traditional music and dance was not limited to the official and unofficial social life of villagers. The world of scholarship was hardly immune. Again, I have written in more detail elsewhere on the politicization of ethnochoreology in Transylvania from both Hungarian and Romanian perspectives (Quigley 2008). Romanian ethnomusicologist Marin Marian-Bălaşa drew attention to this phenomenon in ethnomusicology in a contentious issue of the journal European Meetings in Ethnomusicology titled “Transylvania: Music, Ethnicities, and Discord” (2002). Fellow Romanian ethnomusicologist Speranţa Rădulescu has written that the “unequivocal delimitation (of Romanian from Hungarian music) was stimulated by the nationalist-communist regimes in Bucharest and Budapest whose concern was to demonstrate the specificity, anteriority and/or superiority of their respective music,” so that, until recently, scholarship has continually reinscribed nationalist interpretations on this music. Rădulescu asserts in her notes to the 2002 release of Romanian and Hungarian Music from Central Transylvania that, to the best of her knowledge, “so far the music of Romanians and Hungarians has been presented only separately on record and in volumes or articles” (Rădulescu 2002). An extensive series of ethnographic recordings (totalling sixty-eight CDs) published in Hungary between 1998 and 2010 also made a strong move in the direction of publicly representing the multi­ethnic character of Transylvanian instrumental dance music. (See further Heritage of our Future XX–XXI, http://utolsoora.hu/en/final-hour.) Nevertheless, a strong

192   Colin Quigley separation persists, as reflected in several failed attempts to institute an interethnic dance house in the Transylvanian town of Kolozsvár (for example, see Könczei 2004: 65–69). Whereas at the village level repertoire is both mixed and shared, it has not functioned as common ground in the more ethnically marked dance house movement context. This domain is clearly Hungarian. Although dance and music scholarship is implicated in the ideological manipulation of Central Transylvanian music/dance, its contribution to the dance house movement is more fundamental and based on its nonideological, scientifically analytical approach to the material. I turn now to this crucially distinctive feature of the dance house movement revival.

Interaction with Scholars Both the quantity and quality of preexisting documentation and scientific investigation of traditional dance and music among Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin were extraordinarily high by the time the dance house generation encountered it in 1970. Hungary was and remains unusual in the degree of scientific attention paid to traditional music and dance, even within Eastern Europe, thanks to the powerful legacy of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967)—a legacy carried on by the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Musicology Institute (MTA Zenetudomány Intézet). Indeed, the work of publishing the complete definitive collection of Hungarian folk song heritage envisioned by Bartók continues to this day (Domokos 2011; Paksa 2011). In a similar manner, publication of the dance material of the Archive has continued over generations, building on the foundational work of György Martin. The young musicians and dancers who were to spearhead the movement, however, knew little of this musical storehouse. Among folk music scholars, a younger colleague of Bartók, László Lajtha, was to have a particular impact on the dance house music through the legacy of his promotion of folk music, his leadership in producing the Pátria recorded survey of Hungarian musical heritage (this 1942 series was re-released in 2007 as part of a collection edited by Ferenc Sebő), his scientific work at the Museum of Ethnography, and his work as an important field collector in his own right. According to Halmos and others, the only “traditional village” music that they knew at the start was what they had heard on the radio, material that owed much to Lajtha from his influence as Director of Music for Hungarian Radio (Pávai 2009). Sebő recalls that it was on a program broadcast by Balint Sarosi that he first heard music from Szék and suggested to Halmos that they learn it (Abkarovits 2002: 176). So, although the first dance house movement musicians had no direct contact with Lajtha, what they knew of “village” music was largely through his work. As we have seen, the early catalyzers of the movement were in close contact with the established folk music and dance researchers of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who, by and large, were supportive and helpful to them. György Martin, a charismatic

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and prodigious dance collector and scholar, provided the initial personal connections that the would-be revivalists needed to make with living practitioners—the “sources”— who became their teachers. But, more importantly, perhaps, and apropos of the scholarly influence in the revival, Martin provided a more direct link to this scientific tradition by sharing his analytical insights into the dance and musical life of the villages. The dance house activists’ efforts were, from the start, informed by a sophisticated understanding of dance morphology and structure. Martin’s analyses of dance were moreover closely linked to that of their accompanying music. The teaching methods that Timár used in the Bartók Ensemble and later made popular with a wide public were carefully designed in collaboration with Martin to transmit the knowledge needed by dancers to perform competently, even at an elementary level, in the improvisatory social manner (Martin 1983; Timár 1999). The success of the dance house in this regard is striking. Transmission of the skills needed by instrumentalists was slower to be systematized. Returning to the moment of catalysis in 1972, one can appreciate how crucial the scientific input was to the success and future course of the movement. The emergence of an approach to teaching would seem to mark a crucial moment in the development of revivals generally. Once the idiom in question is transplanted into its new setting, so to speak, the traditional processes of transmission within a community cease to operate and replacements need to be found. Differences in the revival practice and that of the sources quickly appear. Dance house, beginning with a sophisticated approach to the transmission of music/dance as social practice, was particularly successful at training the “disciples” who went on to recreate the practice elsewhere. Furthermore, it was largely Martin’s appreciation for village dance practice on its own terms, as a complex musical/movement system with its own integrity and aesthetics, that launched the dance house movement down what people like Béla Halmos now called “the right path” (Béla Halmos, interview, April 5, 2012, Budapest). We have seen that the Bartók Ensemble became so central to the dance house movement in part because of the attitudes of the other dance troupes’ artistic directors and choreographers. Martin, however, although being an accomplished dancer with experience in high-level folk dance ensembles, dedicated himself to understanding the artistry of the villagers’ dancing.8 He shared this attitude with Timár, and together they instilled it in the musicians and dancers of that ensemble. Following on from initial interactions among Martin, Timár, Sebő, and Halmos, there has been a continuing exchange between the scientific and practical spheres of work. Many of the movement’s most influential figures chose to pursue higher degrees in ethnography or musicology. Halmos completed his diploma work with a thorough and detailed analysis of the repertoire and technique of Szék prímás István Adám “Icsán” (Halmos 1982). Sebő earned a music academy degree and collaborated in the production of scholarly works such as the Bartók folk song collection (Kovács and Sebő 1991). István Pávai, a founder of the Transylvanian dance house, has worked extensively as a collector, cataloguer, and analyst. László Kelemen, a dance house musician from Transylvania who studied ethnomusicology in Kolozsvár, went on to lead the Hungarian Heritage House as its director. The list could go on, continuing with younger examples such as

194   Colin Quigley Csongor Könczei (son of Transylvanian minority culture activist Ádám Könczei and younger brother of Transylvanian dance leader Árpád Könczei), whose dissertation in ethnography on the social networks of Kalotaszeg Gypsy musicians appeared in 2011. For a long time, the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Musicology Institute eschewed the topic of revival, except under the rubric of folklorism, and considered revival practice outside its institutional remit. It has, however, gradually come to encompass such research. Many, if not most, of its members have first-hand dance house experience, value the applied work of their colleagues in this domain, and lend what support they can. A  project to make high-quality amateur field recordings available through the internet is but one example. The theoretical arguments needed to achieve the UNESCO recognition were largely the responsibility of this cohort.

Institutionalization In the 1970s, Mary Taylor argues, the Hungarian state cultural authorities had a stake in the work of the stage ensembles and so tolerated the amateur and recreational dance house on the side. The Institute for Culture was particularly active and influential in relation to the dance house movement (Taylor 2008: 144). It supported publication of a small journal for the Sebő club and organized a dance house leaders’ course in 1976. This two-year course met monthly, as well as in intensive summer training camps; Timár, Sebő, and Halmos were the chief instructors. This position of tolerance and intermittent support continued into the 1980s, as the movement gained in size and respectability. After the multiplication of Budapest regular weekly dances managed by the bands, summer camps became the next form of dance house institution. The Sebő club held the first in 1975 and 1976, in connection with folk architecture survey work (both Sebő and Halmos had been Technical University architecture students at one time). 1976 marked the first official Cultural Institute-sponsored leader training camp, at which some of the first organized teaching of the skills needed to play for social dancing took place. The first camp for dancers in general was the 1981 Jászberény Camp. Several of the established dance house bands then followed suit by sponsoring their own camps; the camp sponsored by the Téka Ensemble, for example, ran successfully from 1985 to 1999 (Taylor 2008: 163–165). In addition to those camps that emphasized teaching, learning, and participation, a second major institution developed in these years: the annual Táncháztalálkozó (literally Dance House Meeting, but usually rendered as Dance House Festival). First held in 1981, by the mid-1990s it drew 25,000–30,000 people yearly. This large organizational undertaking brought together several groups under the umbrella of the Dance House Chamber. In 1990, this became the Dance House Guild, which, in addition to coordinating the production of the annual festival, began to publish the quarterly FolkMAGazin, organize an annual dance house “season opener” in the autumn, and organize the Budapest Folk Festival. Importantly for the development of dance house music, the

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Guild began to release yearly CDs for which the dance house bands applied and competed (Taylor 2008: 165–167; István Berán, interview, April 11, 2012, Budapest). The final steps that Taylor documents are the establishment of the Hungarian Heritage House in 2001. Its English language home page describes it as follows: The Hungarian Heritage House is a national institution founded in 2001 by the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Cultural Heritage with the purpose of preserving and promoting Hungarian folk tradition. The HHH is comprised of three units, each of which contributes to this aim in its own unique way. Founded in 1951, the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble is devoted to collecting the folklore treasury of the Carpathian Basin and presenting it on stage. The Ensemble’s repertoire encompasses all genres related to folk tradition: historical music, authentic folk music and dance, as well as world music and traditional-based contemporary dance-shows. The “László Lajtha” Folklore Documentation Center aims to make the vast and precious collection [of the] Hungarian folk treasury available to all who [are] interested in it. The Documentation Center is accessible on-line as well as in hard copies at the Corvin tér seat of the HHH. The Applied Folk Arts Department organizes courses, conferences, dance houses and play-houses, as well as inviting applications, publishing music and dance CDs and DVDs and judging works of contemporary applied folk art. (http://www.heritagehouse.hu/, accessed November 19, 2012)

Taylor comments on the importance that leaders of the new Heritage House placed on its status as distinct from the Institute for Culture, which might well have housed the new initiative. The founders of the Heritage House, according to Sebő, who was once again among the institutional leaders, wanted the state to acknowledge the importance of its distinct mission: whereas the Culture Ministry follows a philosophy of “cultivation,” the Hungarian Heritage House values “heritage” (Taylor 2008: 167–170). In her account, Taylor emphasizes the continuity of Hungarian cultural management. She is right to counterbalance the tendency to starkly oppose the socialist and post-socialist periods that is concomitant with an interpretation of the dance house movement as an oppositional, countercultural, and anti-authoritarian youth movement of the early 1970s. She documents much continuity in the cultural management of the dance house movement with earlier periods and institutions of Hungarian cultural management. One striking image of this is the continuous occupation of the same building on Corvín tér in Buda by a succession of cultural “ministries” up to and including the current Hungarian Heritage House. Nevertheless, significant changes were brought about by the political, economic, and cultural upheavals that followed 1989. New strategies within the institutional framework supporting Hungarian traditional music and dance had to be found in the newly capitalist and privatized world. Several civil organizations took over various activities of the Cultural Institute: the Muharay Confederation for village-based tradition-preserving groups, the Martin Foundation for amateur adult folk dance ensembles, the confederation of children’s folk dance groups, and the Dance House Guild were among the most important. If in Hungary the immediate impact of economic change was a reduction of resources, in Transylvania the power of entrepreneurial capitalism was unleashed—not always

196   Colin Quigley successfully but, over the following fifteen years, by and large effectively. The collapse of the state-run folk cultural support system was even more sudden and catastrophic in Romania for longstanding institutions like the big dance ensembles. Very few of these managed to survive the transition. But, at the same time, the immediate appearance of the dance house week-long summer camps and the cultural tourism they brought began to establish new systems of support. Over time, these originally Hungarian initiatives were successfully copied by communities less closely tied to dance house practice.

Music Revival and the Dance House Movement Having characterized some of the distinctive features of the Dance House Movement, we may now examine in more detail the music revival that it fostered. This music is well represented in several recording series (see the Web Resources file on the companion website for links to representative examples). The examples that follow serve to document the development of the musical scene, its participants, and their music for the purposes of the final part of my discussion. The dance house movement created a public for its live music that is estimated by the Dance House Association to be about 200,000 in Hungary alone. This audience supports a not insignificant cohort of musicians that has grown steadily from those based first in Budapest, then throughout Hungary, Romania, and elsewhere in the Western world. As we have seen, the direct links between this burgeoning scene and the village musicians in Romania whose music was being revived were at first quite limited. During the later 1970s and 1980s, amateur collecting and dance house tourism, as documented by Taylor, increased significantly. Since the early 1990s, it has become relatively easy for those joining this cohort to meet musicians from the families of traditional village musicians in Transylvania. In the Kalatoszeg region in particular, dance events are held in community halls and are attended by locals, dance ensemble groups, and tourist groups such as the group of American “education abroad” students that I brought to a crowded event there in 2006. But occasions where locals, Hungarians, and internationals mingle can be found in any of the Romanian regions with a significant Hungarian population. Likewise, younger musicians from these regions, as well as long-established favorites of the movement, travel freely to play throughout Hungary and further afield. The separation between dance house musicians and village musicians is no longer as clear as it once was. The international dance house music network, including musicians from all along this spectrum, has evolved its current range of practice largely within the frame of globalization processes. The Hungarian ethnoscape and an associated aesthetic affinity network of practice provide the primary routes from local to global and back (Quigley 1998). Musicians who operate within this sphere of action are primarily amateurs

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(nevertheless highly skilled and professional in that sense) who play regularly for both dance house events and performance ensembles. The history of Hungarian folk music recording is a long one, stretching back to the earliest such examples in Europe, Béla Vikár’s 1895 recordings. The public commercial distribution of such recordings was largely fostered by László Lajta, notably in the 1942 Pátria series mentioned earlier. The first commercially released recordings to focus on musicians of the dance house movement itself were the Hungaraton series, Living Hungarian Folk Music. Muzsikás released an album of Táncházi Muzsika in 1974, and others of the first dance house bands soon followed suit. Hungaraton also released a number of albums in the Magyarorszagi Táncháztalálkozó (Hungarian Dance House Meeting) series in cooperation the Országos Közművelődési Kőzpont (National Center for Public Culture and Education); after 1989, the project was taken over by the now independent Culture Institute (Albert Mohácsy, interview, April 13, 2012, Budapest). These albums, the first of which was released in 1982, were compilations featuring musicians playing at the annual Táncháztalálkozó festival. The 1980s recordings hold few surprises among the featured bands and singers: the compilation from the Seventh Dance-House Meeting Festival in 1988, for example, includes Márta Sebesteyén, Téka, Kalamajka, Méta, Varsanyi, and Kalman Balogh (Országos Közművelűdési Kűzpont 1988). The 1994 release of the Thirteenth Festival reveals a few changes (Magyar művelödési intézet 1994). English-language notes are prominent, and the selections include dance tunes identified as “Rumanian” and several Balkan songs. The 1995 release continues these trends, featuring more extensive notes for the tracks (Magyar művelödési intézet 1995). The series was later taken over by the Heritage House and renamed Táncház Népzene (Hungarian Dance House—Folk Music) to distinguish it from the Új Élő Népzene (New Living Village Music) series produced by the Dance House Association, which had become responsible for the organization of the festival. Both series employ a “jury of professionals” to evaluate recordings submitted by applicants. For the New Living Village Music recordings, fifteen to twenty groups are selected from some fifty or sixty applications. When the series began, Berán (Director of the Dance House Association) noted that it was much more difficult for bands to make their own releases. So, this series gave “the young musicians the opportunity to record in good studio conditions, hear criticism of their music, get used to the recording process.” In other words, the purpose was to support the professional development of less experienced dance house ensembles. What guides the judges’ selection? According to Berán, “Authenticity is the direction preferred; this is not particularly the place for arrangements and new paths, ideas, fusions” (István Berán, interview, April 11, 2012, Budapest). Several of the first dance house bands in Budapest professionalized early on and have become institutions of their own: Muzsikás is best known internationally, but this is true for others as well, whose members are often active in other leadership roles. Márta Sebestyén is best known in this regard, having achieved a high profile after her “lullaby” was used in the film The English Patient (1996). Her identification with this genre was indicated by the title of her 2000 release, World Star of World Music. In the process of producing for this consumer market, these groups have given their music the polish and

198   Colin Quigley precision demanded of this commodity. A comment in the notes to a four-CD compilation of world music in Hungary—that one of the breakthrough recordings of this type, Muzsikás’ “Hidegen Fujnak a Szélek” (Cold Blows the Wind), has the “tightness of a rock song”—is telling in this regard (Marton 2007: 11). Once launched down this career pathway, musicians and their ensembles tend to experiment in ethnic-fusion and cross-genre projects: Sebestyén performing a Hungarian-Irish combination, for example, and Muzsikás appearing with classical musicians such as the Takács Quartet and pianist Jenő Jandó. In Transylvania, the influx of dancers, listeners, learners, and enthusiasts has had an impact on the course of musical life there. Some of the Gypsy source musicians have found a new public through the dance house network, notable among them Sándor Fodor “Neti” who toured extensively as a professional folk musician, often performing with colleagues from the professional revival bands. Iconic source bands, such as the Kodoba family from Magyarpalatka/Pălatca, are represented by numerous recordings, but seem to have remained in a more “ethnographic” presentational idiom. The more recently successful village-based Szászcsávás Band might be placed in somewhat the same category, although they have tended to move away from an ethnographic packaging strategy, as can be seen in the cover of their Live in Chicago album (2000). The younger members of these bands, sons and nephews of the leading musicians, are now taking their elders’ place as a new generation who perform the older repertoire but also have a wider range of musical experience and flexibility. Two musical groups who featured at the 2012 Dance House Festival show a consequent blurring of the source versus revival musician dichotomy and illustrate the penetration and integration of the revived dance house music into the ongoing development of the idiom in the villages. The Zerkula Emlék Zenekár are a group of young people from the small mountain valley of Gyimes, remote from major towns. All attend high school or university in Transylvania. They had musical training in the nearest town but apprenticed themselves to one of the great local musicians, blind prímás János Zerkula. They began playing at home for children’s balls but have now begun to perform further afield and in adult contexts. They acknowledge the support they had over the years from Balázs Vizeli, a fine Hungarian dance house fiddler who also learned from Zerkula. Two talented dance house dancers from Hungary, Ferenc Sára and his wife Zsuzsanna Varga, also settled in Gyimes in the late 1990s and became very active in supporting and encouraging dance and music tradition in the area (see http://www.phantomranch.net/folkdanc/teachers/sara_fz.htm). A second group at the 2012 Festival was the Csűrös Banda, a group of younger musicians from the region of Kalotaszeg. They all have family ties to well-known musical families in the region and play together with István “Kicsi Csipás” Varga, who gets separate billing as a virtuoso descended from a better-known musical “dynasty.” A short musical biography reveals how his musical life has been intertwined with the dance house presence in Kalotaszeg and, with access to education unavailable, to his teachers in traditional music from the earlier generations (Kovalcsik 2008). A somewhat older mentor, László Lengyel “Türei,” a native of the Kalotaszeg region and veteran of the Transylvanian dance house

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movement, has been “helping the band from the very beginnings and made them known throughout Transylvania, Hungary and elsewhere” (Henics 2012). Many of the tracks of their 2012 CD release Csűrös Banda: Kalotaszegi Népzene (Village Music from Kalotaszeg) show virtuosic technique and innovations in the arrangement of dance suites geared to a listening audience, but the CD also includes a live recording from a dance event. The Új Pátria Final Hour series of CD recordings released by the Heritage House with the Fonó and support from the European Union and Norway Fund offer insight into what is happening among village musicians in Transylvania. “The first objective,” we read in the liner notes, “was to try to record the complete repertoire of Transylvanian instrumental folk music” (http://utolsoora.hu/en/final-hour), thus the selection of musicians focused on village musicians. This choice tends to favor older musicians, those who have less exposure to schooled playing, and ensembles that maintain what could be called a participatory dance-accompaniment aesthetic. One finds, in the musical developments accompanying the career paths of Transylvanian string-band musicians, strong evidence that the dance house movement has, if not revived a moribund idiom, at least contributed to its continued practice. Könczei’s study of Gypsy musicians in Kalotaszeg concludes that while one pattern of musical life is ending, another is surely taking its place (Könczei 2011: 192–197, 219– 221). In particular, the dance house movement’s commitment to maintaining a close dance-music connection that was founded on and sustained by the vision of the ethnochoreology researchers has provided a place for a participatory dance-accompaniment aesthetic among the diverse musical worlds into which Transylvanian string band music has found its way. In present-day Budapest, however, the trend is for young bands of dance house musicians (several of them offspring of the first generation of Budapest dance house musicians) to be hired to play mainly for listening in pubs where dancing only happens if one or two dancers in a good mood happen to show up; although there are still “classic” dance houses for adults (with dance teaching) and live music functioning weekly at three different community centers and at the Fonó Music Hall (Sue Foy, personal communication, May 19, 2012). Critical writing on the dance house movement emphasizes some of the often unacknowledged contradictions that plague music revival projects, among them ethnic-nationalist associations, moribund institutionalization, loss of musical functionality, and conflicts among revivalists, academics, and sources. Analysis of their consequences is seen to expose the ideology of revival for what it is. This chapter likewise has addressed these issues as specific to the consequences of revival for Transylvanian string band music. I am led, though, to a rather different conclusion. A sustained commitment to the core participatory social-aesthetic experience that sparked the movement among its founders and their success in creating a durable social institution, the dance house, for its practice demonstrates the appropriateness of its UNESCO designation as a model for the “safeguarding” of this music-dance idiom. The discontents of its social and cultural positioning are of course inescapable. The persistence of its participants may, however, manage to sustain it. An often-heard comment first made by Sebő captures the

200   Colin Quigley dance house movement attitude toward Transylvanian string band music: “We didn’t save the music, the music saved us.”

Notes 1. I have chosen to use English versions or translations of common Hungarian titles and terms throughout. Translations into English are my own. My thanks go to my family, many colleagues, and those who have helped me in Romania and Hungary in particular. 2. My thanks to the archivist Bakó Katalin for her help in finding and sending me several ephemeral sources. 3. Interviews were facilitated and conducted by Sue Foy, who also provided translations. 4. The details of this musical repertoire and its performance are thoroughly examined in Virágvölgy and Felföldi (2000). 5. Taylor does note that the Transylvanian dance house movement “deserves a dissertation in its own right” (Taylor 2008: 162). Könczei (2004) goes some way to answering this need. 6. On the paradoxical place of Rom musicians in the dance house movement, see Hooker (2006). 7. On the concept of “everyday ethnicity,” see Brubaker (2006). 8. Martin’s great work in this domain can be found in his comprehensive study (2004) of one dancer’s “dance knowledge.”

References Abkarovits, Endre. 2002. Táncházi Portrek. Budapest: Hagyományok Háza. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2006. Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Csoóri, Sándor. 1972. “Cégér és szellem: Mi kell a külföldieknek?” In A táncház sajtója: Válogatás a korai évekből 1968–1992, edited by Ference Sebő, 19–23. Budapest: Hagyományok Háza, Timp Kiadó. Domokos, Mária, ed. 2011. A magyar népzene tára, . . . XI népdaltípusok 6. (Collection of Hungarian Folk Music, established by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, XI Types of Folksongs 6). Budapest: Institute for Musicology, Balassi Kiado. Frigyesi, Judit. 1996. “The Aesthetic of the Hungarian Revival Movement.” In Retuning Culture:  Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Slobin, 54–75. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halmos, Béla. 1982 (2000). “Tizenkét széki csárdás: Egy tánczenei folyamat vizsgálata.” In A széki hangszeres népsene, Márta Virágvölgyi and László Felföldi, eds, 274–350. Budapest: Planétás. ——. 2000. “The Táncház Movement.” Hungarian Heritage 1: 29–40. ——, Mihály Hoppál, and Emese Halák, eds. 2012. Meg kell a búzának érni: A magyar táncházmozgalom 40 éve. Budapest: Európai Folkór Intézet. Henics, Tamás. 2012. “Preword.” In liner notes to Csűrös Banda: Kalotaszegi Népzene (Village Music from Kalotaszeg). Magyar Hagyományok Háza, Győr—Alapítvany.

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Hooker, Lynn. 2006. “Controlling the Liminal Power of Performance: Hungarian Scholars and Romani Musicians in the Hungarian Folk Revival.” Twentieth-Century Music 3: 51–72. Kelemen, Lászlo. 1998. “The First Decade of the Hungarian Dance House Movement in Transylvania: A Subjective History.” Hungarian Studies 22: 25–26. Kovács, Sándor, and Ferenc Sebő. 1991. Magyar népdalok egytemes gyűjtemény. Bartók Béla I. Kötet. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Kovalcsik, Katalin. 2008. “Még van sok kalotaszegi nóta, amit itt nem tudnak.” http://www. amarodrom.hu/archivum/2008/09/30.html, accessed March 10, 2010. Könczei, Csongor. 2011. A Kalotaszegi cigányzenészek társadalmi és kulturális hálózatáról. Kriza könyvek 36. Kolózsvár: Kriza János Néprajzi Társaság. ——, ed. 2004. Táncház:  Irások az erdélyi táncház vonzásköréből. Kolozsvár:  Kriza János Néprajzi Társaság. Kürti, László. 2001. The Remote Borderland:  Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Lortat-Jacob, Bernard. 1994. Musiques en Fête. Nanterre: Societé d’ethnologie. Maácz, László. 1981. “A magyar néptáncmozgalom a hetvenes években.” In Tánctudományi Tanulmányok 1980–1981, edited by András Beres and Olga Szentpál, 71–105. Budapest: A Magyar Táncművészek Szövetsége Tudományos Tagozata. Marian-Bălașa, Marin. 2002. “Transylvania: Music, Ethnicities, Discord.” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 9: 4–165. Martin, György. 1982. “A Széki hagyományok felfedezése és szerepe a magyarországi folklorizmusban.” Ethnographia 93 (1): 73–83. ——. 1983. “A férfitáncok pedagógiai és táncházi alkalmazásáról.” In Zene, tánc . . . Zene- és táncosztály módszertani kiadványa, edited by Judit Nagy, 56–67. Budapest: Népmuvelési intézet. ——. 2004. Mátyás István Mundruc:  Egy kalotaszegi táncos egyéniségvizsgálata. Budapest: Planétás. Marton, László Távolodó. 2007. Liner notes for Vetettem Gyöngyöt, Világzene Magzarországon 1972–2006/Hungarian World Music, I Sowed Pearls. ETNOFON Records ER-CD 094. Novák, Ferenc. 2000. “Szék táncai és táncélete a 20. század első felében.” In A széki hangszeres népzene, edited by Márta Virágvölgyi and László Felföldi, 29–78. Budapest: Planétás Kiadó. Paksa, Katalin, ed. 2011. A magyar népzene tára, . . . XII népdaltípusok 7. (Collection of Hungarian Folk Music, established by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, XII Types of Folksongs 7). Budapest: Institute for Musicology, Balassi Kiado. Pávai, István. 1993 (2000). “Interetnikus kapcsolatok az erdélyi népi tánczenében.” In Magyar Népi Tánczene, edited by Márta Virágvölgy and István Pávai, 363–378. Budapest: Planetás. ——, ed. 2009. Lajtha László, a Zenefolklorista—László Lajtha, the Music Folklorist. Budapest: Hagyományok Háza. Quigley, Colin. 1998. “Táncház: Networked Socio-Aesthetic Communities in the Post-Modern Global Cultural Environment.” ECTC (European Centre for Traditional Culture) Bulletin 4: 33–34. ——. 2001. “Revival, Presentation, and Identity Representation through Dance in Transylvania.” In Proceedings of the 21st Symposium of ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology, edited by Trvtko Zebec, 248–250. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore.

202   Colin Quigley ——. 2008. “Nationalism and Scholarship in Transylvanian Ethnochoreology.” In Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching, edited by Anthony Shay, 116– 129. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ——. 2012. “Táncház revival és a vonós zenekarok muzikája Közép-Erdélyben.” In Meg kell a búzúnak érni: A magyar táncházmozgalom 40 éve, edited by Béla Halmos, Mihály Hoppál, and Emese Halák, 82–88. Budapest: Európai Folkór Intézet. Rădulescu, Speranța. 2002. Liner notes for Romanian and Hungarian Music from Central Transylvania. Ethnophonie CD-005. Ronström, Owe. 1998. “Revival in Retrospect: The Folk Music and Folk Dance Revival.” ECTC (European Centre for Traditional Culture) Bulletin 4: 39–42. Sebő, Ferenc. 2007. A táncház sajtója:  Válogatás a korai évekből 1968–1992. Budapest: Hagyományok Háza, Timp Kiadó. Siklós, László. 2006. Táncház. Budapest: Hagyományok Háza and Timp Kiado. Taylor, Mary. 2008. “The Politics of Culture: Folk Critique and Transformation of the State in Hungary.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Timár, Sándor. 1999. Néptáncnyelven: A Timár-módszer alkalmazása a jatékba és táncra nevelésben. Budapest: Püski. Virágvölgyi, Márta, and László Felföldi, eds. 2000. A széki hangszeres népzene: Tanulmányok. Budapest: Planétás.

Discs Cited Csűrös Banda. 2012. Kalotaszegi Népzene /Village Music from Kalotaszeg. Compact disc. Magyar Hagyományok Háza, Győr—Alapítvany. Magyar művelödési intézet. 1994. Táncháztalálkozó ’94. 13th Hungarian Dance-House Meeting. Cassette tape. MMi MK 001. ——. 1995. Táncháztalálkozó ’94. 14th Hungarian Dance-House Meeting. Cassette tape. MMi MK 002. Muzsikás Együttes. 1974. Táncházi Muzsika. Compact disc. Hungaraton HCD18037 197. Országos Közmövelödési Központ. 1988. VII. Magyarországi táncház találkozó Antológia. Cassette tape. Hungaraton MK 18152. Romanian and Hungarian Music from Central Transylvania. 2002. Compact disc. Ethnophonie CD 005. Sebestyén, Márta. 2000. World Star of World Music. Compact disc. Hungaraton HCD 37979. Sebő, Ferenc, ed. 2007. Pátria: Magyar népzenei gramofonfelvételek. (Gramophone recordings of Hungarian folk music on 1 CD Rom: 1210 songs, sheet music, lyrics, photos and info.) CD Rom. Budapest: Fonó Budai Zeneház-Fonó Music Hall FA-500–33. Szászcsávás Band. 2000. Live in Chicago. Compact disc. Thermal Comfort CD. Táncház höskora. 2007. DVD. Hagykományok Háza HH01.

A supplementary bibliography with recommendations for further reading and an annotated guide to web resources (including extensive databases of archival recordings) can be found on the companion website. (See Further Reading and Web Resources. )

PA R T I V

NAT IONA L R E NA I S S A N C E A N D P O STC OL ON IA L FUTURES

C HA P T E R  10

NAT I O NA L P U R I T Y A N D P O S T C O L O N IA L H Y B R I D I T Y I N I N D IA’ S K AT H A K DA N C E R E V I VA L M A RG A R ET E . WA L K E R

In the course of the twentieth century, India moved decisively from British colony to independent nation-state to emerge as one of the world’s global powerhouses. Through these shifts in governance, the arts, and in particular the performing arts, have emerged as international cultural markers, representing an energetic and creative new nation with a magnificent and venerable past. Music and dance, however, exist within their societal contexts, reflecting and reinforcing the values and norms surrounding them. The adoption of certain performance genres as quintessentially Indian cultural treasures therefore necessitated that they, like the emergent nation they would represent, adjust to new circumstances, new patrons, and a new role. This process of artistic adjustment in the mid-twentieth century is widely acknowledged as a cultural revival, a reclamation of Indianness in the wake of centuries of occupation. Literature on music and dance commonly calls the period leading up to independence in 1947 a time of “cultural renaissance,” “regeneration” (Bhavani 1965: xvi), or even “resuscitation” (Singha and Massey 1967: 27), during which the arts were resurrected and rejuvenated (see also, among many others, Banerji 1982; Sinha 2000; Vatsyayan 1974). Rescued from a supposed period of decline due to foreign influence and control, dance in particular was seen as an ideal representative of India’s ancient and Hindu past, offering a pure and essentially spiritual way of connecting with cultural mores and traditions uncontaminated by West Asian or European contact. Yet, suggestions that aspects of the performing arts may have been reconstructed as part of the revival process are still often met with little tolerance from performers themselves. When I began in the 1990s to study kathak, the classical dance of North India, and was told that I was learning a dance of ancient temples and devotional practice, it

206   Margaret e. Walker initially never occurred to me that this might not be so.1 As my research went on, however, I realized that all was not as it seemed, choreographically, historically, or socially, and eventually built up substantial evidence supporting an alternate history that refuted much of what is disseminated as the story of kathak dance (Walker 2014). My journey from belief in the purity of the dance’s ancient roots to a type of shock and consequential righteous indignation about its potential inaccuracy is not unique. This disaffection with supposed impurity of alleged ancient traditions can range from disappointment to denial (as in the “defensive attitudes” experienced by Tamara Livingston in reaction to her work on the Brazilian choro revival; see Livingston 1999: 78). In academia, it can also result in a hesitation on the part of scholars to engage with this aspect of research at all. One of the particular difficulties in accepting that the Indian classical performing arts were reconstructed as they were reclaimed during the early twentieth century is that so much of their identity rests on their being ancient and timeless and thus genuinely “Indian.” Not only does the connection to ancient artistry offer a sense of confidence in the art’s authenticity, the identification of the various genres of music and dance as “classical” sets them apart from the modern and the innovative; to consider much of what we are studying, as performers or scholars, as effectively “new” would mean having to reassess the entire aesthetic framework. Furthermore, revivals, as Livingston points out (1999: 68), have occupied an ambiguous position as legitimate areas of study until recently, an observation particularly true in Indian musicology. Those of us prepared to engage in critiquing the revised histories of Indian dance still feel a need to defend our position, either by linking the critical voice to indigenous heterodox thinking (Chakravorty 2008: 189–190), appealing to the reader’s observation of historical paradox (Walker 2004: 229), or drawing attention to the beauty of the dance, its “creative potential beyond the imagined ritual fiction” (Lopez y Royo 2007: 173). Once one moves beyond the perception that discussion of cultural change somehow contributes to a denigration of the dances, however, the emergent issues offer rewarding avenues of enquiry. The shift from colonial to postcolonial nation and the effects of modernity and globalization have affected Indian performing arts as they have profoundly affected Indian society, and South Asian postcolonial scholars such as Bhabha (1994), Gandhi (1998), and Gupt (2008) openly discuss India’s multiple transformations. There is also now a growing body of scholarly work on Indian music (including Allen 2008; Bakhle 2005; Kippen 2006; Qureshi 1997; Subramanian 2006; Weidman 2006) and dance (for example, Chakravorty 2008; Lopez y Royo 2007; Meduri 2005 and 2008; Soneji 2004, 2008, and 2010) that offers substantial critical analysis regarding the revival, its privileging of ancient origins, and its resultant revision of histories and identities in the performing arts. These studies move towards an approach that embraces revival as part of an inevitable process of change that has always been an integral part of each genre of music or dance’s character and charm. Accepting the normalcy of revival may also lead to the acceptance of reconstruction as an “authentic” part of traditional performance practice. Furthermore, the examination of revivals in postcolonial contexts such as twentieth-century India should offer insights into broader questions of cultural change through the multiple societal shifts that accompanied the move to political

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autonomy. Identifying what is uniquely Indian or what might be seen as characteristically postcolonial will potentially lead towards a fruitful comparison of revivals on a global scale.

Colonial Past and National Future: Revival and Restoration Before moving on to any evaluation or possible expansion of revival theories, it is useful to understand kathak’s particular revival in the context of Indian independence and nationalism, and the nation-wide music and dance revival. The end of British imperial rule in India and the accompanying cultural repossession took place after a complex history involving centuries of exchange and influence. Periods of Muslim rule in North and central India began in the late 1100s and led to six hundred years of Indo-Islamic integration that gave rise to a rich syncretic culture with distinctive architecture (including the famed Taj Mahal), literature, and music. The decline of centralized administrative control in the 1700s, however, left a power void that the British were eventually to fill. European presence in South Asia had evolved from the curiosity of explorers in the 1500s to the ambitions of powerful trading companies who were by the 1700s vying for control of the fabled “riches of the East.” British interests in India, originally centered in Kolkata (Calcutta), expanded through the subcontinent in these years. Eighteenth-century relations between Indian rulers and the officials of the British East India Company were mixed, with violent clashes and broken treaties contrasting with sincere exchanges of refined behavior and mutual interest in trade. By the early 1800s, however, the policy of “Orientalism,”2 which encouraged British administrators to learn Indian languages and cultural norms, was giving way to a policy of “Anglicism,” which focused on teaching English to Indians and recognized little of value in anything indigenous. In 1858, after the First War of Independence (or Sepoy Mutiny), an act of British parliament shifted political and military control of India from the Company to the British crown and marked the beginning of the Imperial colonial government called the Raj. But in the structure of the Raj lay the seeds of its eventual destruction. In order to administer this part of the empire, especially after decades of Anglicism made knowledge of Indian languages and customs rare, the British needed to create a layer of indigenous bureaucrats to mediate imperial control of the Indian population. Sent to Britain for higher education, multilingual, and armed with both European and Indian intellectual traditions, this increasingly empowered middle-class formed the basis of the independence movement, Congress Party, and “quit India” campaigns. They also initiated a gradual reclamation of Indian identity and sense of cultural pride that grew from localized intellectual and artistic movements like the Bengali literary renaissance of the 1800s to culminate in the founding of national institutions like the Museum and Archeological Survey. Interestingly, the British Orientalists had left a tangible legacy

208   Margaret e. Walker through their interest in ancient languages, architecture, and Hinduism, and significant parts of the cultural restoration were built on these foundations. This substantial past, wherein Sanskrit was easily as sophisticated as Classical Greek and the great epics Mahabharata and Ramayana surpassed the Iliad and the Odyssey in length, revealed an India that was the equal if not the superior of Europe. As ancient indigenous literature was translated and published, sculptures and paintings were studied and displayed, and palaces and ruins became protected monuments, a surge of interest in Indianness and a subsequent sense of national dignity became a characteristic of the freedom-fighting mood. Yet, the focus on antiquity, although providing nationalists with a culture to be proud of, also contributed to a pro- or neo-Hindu philosophy and encouraged activists to evade the complex realities of colonial and postcolonial culture (Chatterjee 1993; O’Shea 2006; Sen 2003). The process of reclamation in the performing arts grew out of these political and philosophical roots and took place in the fertile context of nation building. Just as the larger cultural revival based itself on foundations of ancient, indigenous achievements, the performing arts needed also to link their contemporary manifestations to an untainted Hindu past, one that was “pure, distinctive, and unaltered by colonial hybridity” (O’Shea 2006: 169). Artistic reformers explored a range of means including using music and dance descriptions from the newly accessible Sanskrit treatises, adopting movements and postures inspired by temple sculpture, and connecting existing practice to elite Hindu devotional traditions. Yet, contemporary performance practice in both North and South India presented realities that contradicted this vision of purity. To this day in North India, most hereditary musicians with substantial lineages are Muslims, a social fact that continues to compromise the ideals of indigenous Hindu tradition. South Indian music and dance practices, although not supposedly influenced by West Asian or Muslim culture, often have quite humble roots with little connection to elite practice. Non-Brahman and indigenous Dravidian traditions in the south and Muslim traditions of the north were thus both marginalized or subsumed into the nationalist agenda (Kippen 2006; Qureshi 1997; O’Shea 2006; Soneji 2004). In addition to the musicians’ class affiliations, the gender of most dancers also posed a problem for the reformers. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the twin influences of Victorian prudery and eventually Edwardian suffrage gave rise to a series of organizations and movements advocating improvements to the position of women in Indian society. The “Wrongs of Indian Womanhood” (originally the title of a publication by the wife of a British missionary) became a rallying point as both British and Indian reformers turned to the plight of child brides, widows, and prostitutes. Hereditary female singers and dancers were ranked among the latter, and became symbolic of the deterioration of the performing arts under occupation and colonialism. The reclamation of “pure” Indian arts, so necessary in the process of rebuilding national esteem, could therefore not be accomplished without first removing or somehow controlling the “impure” in their contemporary reality. Chief among these impurities was the exotic spectacle of the “bayadères” or dancing girls (Figure 10.1; Figure 10.01 on companion website ). These so-called “public”

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FIGURE  10.1  “A Nautch” by Mrs Belnos. © British Library Board. From:  Twenty four plates illustrative of Hindoo and European manners in Bengal. London:  Smith and Elder; James Carpenter and Son (1832?). Shelfmark 1781.b.18.

women, now most often called devadasis (temple women) or tavayafs (courtesans), were members of a variety of social groups in which the performing arts were both a livelihood and a way of life. Although their sexual activities ranged from open prostitution to discrete and monogamous relationships with a single patron, all hereditary women performers occupied a liminal position in “respectable society.” As they by and large did not marry, they could not be legitimate wives and mothers in the patriarchal social structure, yet as they also could never be widowed, they and their performance practices were often seen as auspicious (Lopez y Royo 2007; Soneji 2004). As performing artists, these women were often renowned and played significant roles in the development and preservation of both North and South Indian music and dance. Their artistic skill and status, a societal position closer to the role of the geishas in Japan than anything in contemporary Europe, were completely misunderstood by the British, who saw all female entertainers as prostitutes. Using the term nautch, from the Hindi word nach (dance), for all types of dances, and “nautch girl” for all classes and categories of female performers, they essentialized performers and performances into one stereotypical and

210   Margaret e. Walker disreputable social category (see further, among others, Bor 1986/1987; Post 1989; Rao 1990 and 1996). This telescoping of several complex social layers of people and activities into one homogeneous group facilitated its vilification and rejection. The “anti-nautch” movement, which began at a public meeting in Madras (now Chennai) in 1893, combined the forces of both British and Indian reformers and gained momentum across the country. Political leaders and socialites were requested to cease their patronage of events where dancing would be performed, and men were asked to take personal pledges that they would never visit the establishments of courtesans. Hereditary female performers were thus censored and eventually silenced. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the refined world of the North Indian courtesan was almost gone, and the culture of the South Indian devadasi was going underground. The most musically accomplished hereditary female performing artists ceased dancing and became “amateur” singers. Others found new places in society by marrying and retiring from performance. Yet others slipped into poverty and prostitution. A final blow was dealt in 1947 when one of the first Acts of the new Indian Parliament was the passing of the Devadasi Abolition Bill banning the dedication of girls to temple service (see, among others, du Perron 2007; Forbes 1996; Maciszewski 2001; Rao 1996; Sundar 1995). The same decades during which the hereditary female performers were pushed to the margins of society saw the music and dance revival gain momentum. Indeed, it can be argued that the revival of dance in particular was made possible in large part through the disenfranchisement of the hereditary women. Acceptance by the educated, bourgeois classes who both led India to independence and were also central players in the cultural reclamation necessitated distancing the performing arts from this context. The move away from the courtesan’s salon was further facilitated by the interest shown in Indian performing arts by Western dancers like Anna Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. This short period of choreographic exchange gave rise to the modernist European genre of “Oriental Dance,” the original choreographies of Uday Shankar (Erdman 1995 and 1998), and a new performance context, the proscenium stage. Validated by attention and imitation from the West and performed in a context free from prior associations, dance was thus gentrified as it was revived, and the separation of dancing from sexuality allowed it slowly to become a respectable pasttime and eventually a career for middle-class girls and young women. The initiators and constructors of the music revival were largely men, and included highly educated reformers like Rabindranath Tagore, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. The dance revival, on the other hand, was largely the result of female effort and agitation, and the establishment of dance training in institutions with formal curricula was by and large the work of upper- and middle-class women (Meduri 2005; Walker 2010a). The processes of institutionalization, gentrification, classicization, and varying degrees of Sanskritization were generally characteristic of the revivals of all Indian classical dance genres. In the context of what Janet O’Shea terms “neo-Hindu metropolitan nationalism” (2008:  173), kathak, kathakali, bharatanatyam, manipuri and eventually kuchipudi and odissi all moved onto the urban proscenium stage and into

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schools offering formalized training. Through this shift, each dance’s choreographic repertoire was modified through cleansing it of connections to the performing arts of hereditary women or lower caste entertainers, emphasizing connections to Sanskrit treatises, and creating new repertoire based on treatises, temple sculpture, and Hindu ritual. Its presentation was then further adjusted in order to communicate effectively from Western-style stages into large halls. The first institutions for teaching these new traditional dances were set up by the revivalists themselves, most often to train performers for their own dance troupes. The choreographic material, musical aspects, and necessary physical skills for performance were then organized into progressive curricula, most often created by the female, non-hereditary reformers who founded the schools. These curricula functioned both to train professional dancers and to legitimize the dance by offering certification and graduation diplomas. This in turn contributed to classicization through the adoption and dissemination of codified performance standards. Just as music festivals and conferences had played an important role in the slightly earlier classicization of music (Allen 2008; Bakhle 2005), dance festivals and symposia then continued the process set in motion by the schools and performance companies. One final feature in the revival as a whole has been the construction of revised histories, explanations that reinforce classicization by connecting current dances to the ancient past while distancing them from lower castes, sexuality, or foreign influence. It is limiting, however, and probably inadvisable, to attempt any further analysis of the Indian dance revival depending on generalizations. The details of each dance genre’s history differ enough that one would need to insert constant qualifications. Furthermore, research into the revisions that accompanied the dance revivals is emergent and ongoing, with scholars such as Alessandra Lopez y Royo (2007), Avanti Meduri (2005 and 2008), Davesh Soneji (2004 and 2008), Janet O’Shea (2006, 2007, and 2008), and Pallabi Chakravorty (2006 and 2008) producing thought-provoking and substantial work on a variety of dance styles and contexts. I will now turn to my own research into the history of kathak dance, which offers a particular case study through which to examine not only the issues of tradition and authenticity that seem common to all revivals, but also questions of class, gender, and embodied authority that perhaps speak more specifically to the Indian context.

Kathak: The Classical Dance of North India Kathak dance today is a virtuosic genre performed in professional productions by highly trained dancers. Although the dance is in many ways more suited to smaller venues, most performances today by star dancers and musicians take place in large theaters and concert halls (Figure 10.2; Figure 10.02 on companion website ). The dance is said to have originated as a solo form; learning the repertoire and dance items that

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FIGURE  10.2  Birju Maharaj and musicians at the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Golden Jubilee Festival. © Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi,  India.

make up the “traditional kathak solo” still comprises the majority of dancers’ training and although kathak dance performances today more commonly present original choreographies and group productions, these new works are still largely based on the solo dance material. The kathak solo includes short and often quite vigorous dance compositions closely related to the North Indian drumming repertoire, rhythmic footwork, and dazzling sequences of swift spins executed on the left heel. This dynamic repertoire is then contrasted with graceful, quite sensuous movements executed for the most part in the upper body, hands, and arms. Enhanced by alluring glances and facial expressions, these flowing gestures are used in the slow numbers that begin the presentation and in narrative sections that illustrate poetry or tell stories. In a solo performance, the dancer strings these individual sections and items together, gradually building in speed and intensity. In the hands of a great dancer, the flow from one number to the next will appear seamless and the gradual increase through the solo matches a similar progression of tempo in classical music performances, but the range of moods, movements, and gestures still stands as witness to the dance’s syncretic origins. As discussed above, kathak is one of six or seven Indian dances identified as “classical,” all of which moved onto the professional stage and into the public eye during the first half of the twentieth century. This period between roughly 1920 and 1960 is the revival or renaissance of Indian dance, when these dances underwent a process of classicization involving institutionalization and varying degrees of reconstruction. Kathak seems to stand apart as it was by and large not re-choreographed as other “classical”

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dances were and thus largely does not conform to the postures and gestures found in treatises or sculptures. On the contrary, since it is the dance of North India, where elite culture was formed in the courts of the imperial Mughals, kathak is in part the choreographic and aesthetic descendent of West and Central Asian cultural forms. Another unique aspect is that the dance is historically associated with a caste of hereditary men, rather than women, who are themselves called Kathaks, sharing their name and identity with the dance itself.3 Kathak did, like the other revived dances, become classicized and institutionalized largely through the efforts of middle-class female reformers and its history was (re)created in order to conform to the revival’s expectations of ancientness and purity. Yet, in spite of kathak’s shift to large cities like Delhi and Mumbai in the mid-twentieth century where it became part of the curricula of national music and dance schools, authority over the style has by and large remained in the hands of the Hindu clan who call themselves Kathaks. The widespread belief among dancers and many scholars that kathak originated in the devotional story-telling activities of ancient performers also called Kathaks, however, supports the revivalist agenda, distancing the dance from its more immediate roots and connecting it with the ancient and Hindu past.

Multiple Roots, Multiple Histories The connection of today’s North Indian dance with Vedic narrative traditions, while typical of revivalist South Asian performing arts history, is rather difficult to verify. Rather than the descendent of an ancient performance practice, as the revisionist narrative claims, the dance now called kathak is much more probably one current manifestation of a process of ongoing artistic change and exchange that has been part of the North Indian cultural landscape for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There does not seem to be any single identifiable tradition or dance from the remote past that is the clear ancestor of contemporary kathak, but rather a number of streams and contexts with varying degrees of association. Descriptions of rhythmic footwork, spins, and expressive gestures that are very likely the ancestors of today’s dance can be found in treatises dating from as early as the 1200s, yet none of these dances are called kathak or performed by people called Kathaks (Walker 2010b). It is only by the mid-nineteenth century that the hereditary performers called Kathaks come into view and descriptions of dances bearing quite close resemblance to today’s kathak appear. A number of these emerge in the performance practice of the courtesans. As discussed above, the artistry of hereditary women singers and dancers was central to Indian cultural continuity and their presentations as court performers or independent artistes in their own salons contained unique repertoire and a distinctive style. Certain items in kathak seem clearly descended from this context; perhaps the most striking is the rendering of the evocative song genre thumri with fetching glances, gestures, and mimetic dance, but a number of other repertoire items and many of kathak’s characteristic postures can also be traced to the dance of hereditary women in past

214   Margaret e. Walker centuries.4 Another related stream of influence comes from the hereditary male performers who taught the women and provided rhythmic and melodic accompaniment for their performances. These musical families, organized in biradaris or endogamous clans, are usually identified as Mirasis, who are Muslim, or Kathaks, who are Hindu (see Neuman 1980). Both the rhythmic compositions and footwork in kathak dance can be connected to this heritage, although crossovers (for example, a young courtesan dancing a rhythmic piece) must have been common. A third root of kathak dance comes from the rural theatrical profession. Although not clearly described in the historical record, many rural members of the Kathak biradari today are involved in various types of presentations involving dramatic mixes of words, music, dance, and acting (Walker 2006). These range from devotional activities like kathavachan, expressive story-telling enhanced through a mixture of song, gesture, and rhythmic movement, and Ram Lila, the enacting of the story of the Hindu deity Ram, to secular theater genres like Nautanki, in which men dress as women. Yet another type of devotional theatre, Ras Lila, which presents stories and scenes of the Hindu deity Krishna’s childhood, contains dance movements and sequences directly related to material in kathak dance. The actors and musicians who currently perform Ras Lila do not claim to belong to the hereditary Kathak clan, but there is some data in the literature that suggests that they might (for example, Banerji 1982: 63; Natavar 1997: 147fn and 154). Many other folk styles and genres share elements with kathak dance such as footwork or spins, which indicates a relationship with a movement vocabulary characteristic of North Indian performance at large rather than a unilinear descent from a single temple tradition. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a series of political and social shifts combined to bring aspects and items from these various performance practices together to form a single dance, eventually called kathak, in a process that culminated with the genre’s legitimization through the revival. In particular, as hereditary women and their performance contexts were marginalized through the anti-Nautch movement, a gradual separation of music and dance took place. Courtesans who were able to pursue careers in the new world of classical performing arts focused on singing and ceased to dance or even gesture. In North India, their retirement from the world of dance left their repertoire, movement vocabulary, and expressive gestures solely in the hands of their accompanists, the hereditary Kathaks. Yet, the Kathaks had effected a change of their own in the nineteenth century. Upwardly mobile at least since the late 1700s, the Kathaks had by 1900 accomplished what is called a caste shift. Such changes in status, usually precipitated by some kind of economic gain, allow a part of a lower caste to dissociate itself from the rest of its original group. With the adoption of a new name and thus a potential new identity, the emergent group can then cultivate higher social standing, including adopting more refined behaviors, sophisticated ritual practices, and eventually a revised history that supports their new place in society (Pandian 1995). Although it is difficult to pinpoint when the group adopted the name “Kathak,” the Kathaks as a caste can be observed gradually climbing through the categories of the British census reports. In one of the earliest surveys from 1832, the Kathaks are described as singing and dancing masters, and enumerated among

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the humblest caste groups, the shudras (Princep 1832: 485). In 1872, they “affect to be high caste” (Sherring 1974: 273–274), then by 1885 are identified as Brahmins whose ancestors used to perform in temples (Nesfield 1885: 44–45). Today, the Kathak biradari is dispersed across north-central India and includes dancers, singers, musicians, and actors who perform both secular and devotional folk theater. Their identity and status seems as varied as their specializations: Some members of the biradari identify themselves as Brahmins, while some do not; some call themselves “Kathaks” and others do not. Yet, there is no controversy regarding the endogamous structure of the group at large, and there is an interesting fluidity and interchange between the various performance proficiencies and the rural and urban groups when it comes to both musical training and marriage. While there is nothing that conclusively or even vaguely connects the Kathak biradari to ancient Vedic narrators of sacred books, its flexible nature has absorbed this identity as smoothly as it adopted others through the past centuries.

Kathak: A Classical Dance Thus by the early twentieth century, the “dance of the Kathaks” comprised a type of juxtaposition of the footwork and rhythmic repertoire that was part of the male practice, some of the theatrical traditions still practiced by parts of the biradari, and the expressive dance-songs and graceful movements of courtesan performance. It was the revival that would fuse them together. By the 1930s, a few last centers of private patronage existed, but as music and dance were adopted as expressions of Indian pride and nationalism, the future lay in Kolkata, Mumbai, and especially Delhi. As their previous livelihood accompanying courtesans continued to decline, the hereditary Kathaks began migrating to large cities to take advantage of new opportunities. Elite female cultural reformers like Nirmala Joshi and Sumitra Charat Ram established institutions like the Delhi School for Hindustani Music and Dance, founded in 1936, and the Sriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, originally founded in 1949 as the Jhankar Music Circle, and hired hereditary Kathak dancers to teach dance to young women from respectable families (Khokar 1998). These institutions and others that followed provided a fertile ground for another series of exchanges as hereditary male musicians and dancers worked side by side teaching this new generation of non-hereditary middle class male and female students. After independence, the new Indian government provided scholarships to bring promising students to the new national arts institutions, thus facilitating the transmission of these cultural treasures to the youth of the new nation. Institutionalized and validated, the “dance of the Kathaks” thus became kathak dance, one of the classical dances of the newly independent ancient nation. The cultural revival in India had as much to do with linking to the ancient and Hindu past as it did with reclaiming cultural practices marginalized or debased by the British. Kathak dance, historically and physically, posed some problems. Its reputation linked it to mujra, the dance-shows of the red-light districts, and its use of subtle gestures, a

216   Margaret e. Walker swaying upper body, and inviting eye contact evoked the sensuous performances of the courtesans. Furthermore, the Kathaks, who shifted from their role as teachers and accompanists of the hereditary women to become teachers of the non-hereditary women, remained the authorities of the dance, inextricably linked to it by name as well as expertise. The revival of kathak and its positioning as a classical dance needed therefore to be as complex as its origins. The repertoire, movement vocabulary, original contexts, and the role of the Kathak community all had to be gentrified, yet also tied together in a way that connected dance and dancers to a Sanskritized past. The rhythmic or “pure dance” repertoire did not pose any particular problem socially, although the question of its origins and secular nature needed to be addressed. The material connected to courtesan performance, however, required a more creative approach. Much too integral a part of the “dance of the Kathaks” to be omitted (and arguably too attractive and substantial a dance style to be discarded), the suggestive dance songs and their seductive movement vocabulary had to be distanced yet further from their original context and intent. First of all, the movements themselves were curtailed. Instructions in nineteenth century treatises tell the dancer to keep a constant, flowing movement through her body; sixteen body parts including the buttocks, breasts, eyebrows, and hands are to be kept in fluid motion (Khan 1884: 161). In the urban kathak classes of the 1940s and 1950s, however, the young female students were constantly admonished not to move their hips while dancing, and the movements of the upper body became refined into a subtle swaying called kasak-masak. The performance practice itself was also purposefully modified. Whereas the courtesan performer would present her dance songs while seated, singing and gesturing to her audience, then subsequently rise to dance, the non-hereditary female performers of the twentieth century only danced and did not sing, and some, like Dayamanti Joshi, made a point of never performing expressive dance while seated as a courtesan would have (Lakshmi 2004). Furthermore, the new setting in Western-style concert halls that separated performer and audience also reinforced the dance’s gentrification by minimizing the effect of facial expressions and alluring use of the eyes. Although kathak did not generally adopt the “temple stage” and its symbolic connections to an ancient Hindu past as bharatanatyam did (Meduri 2008), its transformation nevertheless included some Sanskritization. Early kathak performances in the 1930s and 1940s were often group choreographies based on Hindu epics and mythologies. Some, like those of Leila Sokhey (better known by her stage name, Madam Menaka), used the repertoire in the hands of the male hereditary Kathaks (Joshi 1989), but many other presentations, like those of Ram Gopal (Gopal 1957; Shah 2005) or the vast Ram Lila programs at the Sriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra (Khokar 1998), freely mixed kathak vocabulary with “Oriental” and other emergent dances. The older dances of both hereditary men and women were thus reinterpreted, rather than re-choreographed, and Sanskritized through association with ancient literature rather than through imitation of ancient sculptures or treatises. Furthermore, some of the scholarship students in the 1950s and 1960s were highly educated young women who were already experienced performers. Faced with the somewhat jumbled assortment of dance styles cobbled together

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as kathak, they set out, with the approval of both their hereditary teachers and the cultural reformers, to organize its presentation both on stage and in the classroom. It was Maya Rao, the first scholarship student of hereditary Kathak guru Shambhu Maharaj, who established the order and progression of dances in the now “traditional” kathak solo (Khokar 2004). She and Reba Vidyarthi, who came to Delhi soon after, both played key roles in developing teaching material and curricula leading to exams and diplomas, which in turn lent credibility to the institutions, the dancers, and the dance itself. Moreover, Rao with her guru’s approval created new choreographies to Sanskrit verses. These vandanas, shlokas, and stutis, named after the poetry and prayers they interpret, are now considered some of the most “traditional” items in the kathak solo. Rao and Vidyarthi also used Sanskrit terminology in their classes, applying the names of gestures and postures from the third-century treatise Natyasastra to the hybrid dance they were disseminating (Figure 10.3; Figure 10.03 on companion website ). Yet, the culture-makers of the mid-twentieth century needed to do more than fuse past and present on the stage and create a coherent pedagogy for the classroom. If kathak were a substantial, classical dance (and there remained lingering controversy, as expressed in Banerji 1942, that it perhaps was not), then it must have some roots, some origin, that predated the Mughal courts and the courtesans’ salons. Some dancers, like Maya Rao and her classmate Rina Singha (Singha and Massey 1967), immersed themselves in the libraries and archives of Delhi, searching the Sanskrit treatises for the dance they were learning. Other post-independence writers, while admitting that there was little in the treatises, nonetheless made a point of asserting that kathak dance’s essential character was Hindu and devotional, sometimes resulting in strings of conditional phrases that attempted to link the dance with music, religion, and the temple: If the dance suggested by the Keertanas [devotional songs] is constructed out of the details given in them, it will be the classical dance that is Kathak. And if the Kathak dance is to be viewed in the light of Vaishnavism, it will seem to be essentially a temple dance with Radha and Krishna as its principal deities. (Vyas 1963: 7)

The suggestion that kathak originated as a temple dance fitted in nicely with the broader template of the Indian dance revival and can, like the caste shift in the census reports, be traced as it emerged in the mid-twentieth century literature (Walker 2004 and 2014). Kathak, it is now stated, had its genesis not in the performances of courtesans, or rural actors, but in the activities of the ancient Kathakas, “originally a caste of story-tellers and rhapsodists who were attached to temples in certain regions of North India” (Khokar 1984: 132). The received history thus traces kathak dance from its devotional birth in the Hindu temple and the narrations of the Kathakas, through a shift to a more secular style as it supposedly migrated to the Mughal courts sometime between 1500 and 1800. The dance subsequently is said to have lost any remaining decency as it was adopted and corrupted by the “nautch girls.” Finally, in the mid-nineteenth-century court of an

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FIGURE  10.3  Reba Vidyarthi teaching at the Kathak Kendra, New Delhi in  1993. © Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India.

enlightened patron, a few hereditary male Kathaks (who were perhaps not surprisingly the ancestors of the gurus teaching in Delhi) are claimed to have resurrected the dance by returning it to its former devotional intent, although not necessarily its original choreography (see, among many others, Khokar 1984; Singha and Massey 1967; Srivastava 2008). The link between dance and dancers (kathak and Kathaks) itself became part of history, as searches through Sanskrit treatises and epics revealed performers referred to as “Kathakas.” Since the word kathak is a cognate of the Hindi word katha, which means a story or a tale, to call oneself a Kathak is thus to state that one is a story-teller or narrator rather than a musician or dancer. Furthermore, katha and its root word kath (to tell or to narrate) are derived from Sanskrit and the Sanskrit noun Kathaka indicates a narrator or expounder of sacred tales and books. This etymological relationship has provided both dancers and scholars with a way to connect kathak dance with an ancient devotional past and simultaneously to distance the Kathaks from other hereditary musicians and dancers (Walker 2010b). Although a few authors point out that the connection between the ancient story-tellers and present-day hereditary performers has never been substantiated (see Banerji 1982: 9), generally the development of today’s kathak dance from this narrative beginning is considered common knowledge with no need for further research or even references. Yet, how could this ancient tradition be “revived”? Not only are whatever gestures the “ancient Kathakas” might have used undocumented but a single performance

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practice associated with people called Kathakas arguably never existed. What is officially “authentic” or “pure” kathak dance is therefore left up to the authority of the central families of hereditary Kathaks, who are today considered the owners of the dance. These hereditary dancers, however, are as involved with creativity and innovation as any non-hereditary dancer, and this has given rise to a situation in which what is “authentic” is often simply what the family leaders say is authentic, and what is “inauthentic” is merely that which conceivably threatens the hegemony. Authenticity and purity, central to revivals of all sorts, thus rest on aural rather than written authority and in some ways have become as hybrid and fluid as the identities of the hereditary dancers and the dance itself. The “revival” of kathak therefore can be argued to be a process of colonial and postcolonial fusions rather than the resurrection of a lost art form. Yet, the creation of a unilinear history to support the revival and attendant telescoping of the past in support of “the practice’s timelessness, unbroken historical continuity, and purity of expression” is characteristic of other revivalist discourses (Livingston 1999: 69; see also Bohlman 1988) and is one of several features shared with other revival cultures.

Caste, Class, and Shifting Centers of Power One of the most central of these shared features is the observation made by Livingston that “music revivals are middle-class phenomena,” created and maintained by “middle class people in consumer capitalist and socialist societies” (Livingston 1999:  66). Revivals ostensibly involve the rediscovery or reclamation of performance styles linked not only to the past, but also to a sense of past purity, authenticity, and legitimacy. Yet, the process of revival by necessity remakes the arts as they assume forms and manifestations suitable to their new performance contexts. Thus, revival also involves the commodification and objectification of music and dance as these “pure and traditional” styles, whether garnered from ancient documents or current rural practitioners, are gentrified, formalized, and eventually standardized. The revived art forms are then reinforced by dissemination through festivals, schools, recordings, publications, and eventual government support with middle-class enthusiasts as primary creators and consumers (Baumann 1996: 76–79). This is, of course, precisely what happened in the Indian cultural revival where middle-class activists were the core of the nationalist movement and its attendant cultural reclamation. Middle-class male reformers collected, transcribed, and systematized the repertoire of hereditary musicians, while middle-class women played key roles in the institutionalization and classicization of dance. Ongoing government patronage in the form of national institutions like the Sangeet Natak Akademi has guaranteed the continuity of the revived performing arts as national treasures and international symbols.

220   Margaret e. Walker The Indian government’s essential role in the maintenance of the revived arts reflects not only their cultural centrality in the nation’s identity, but also a status uncharacteristic of most Euro-American revivals. The national performing arts of India, it has to be remembered, are considered “classical” music and dance genres. While there are certainly governments of other nations that sponsor “folk” festivals or archives of traditional material, such projects are generally separate from the funding of symphony orchestras or ballet schools. Although in the movement of repertoire from hereditary to non-hereditary practitioners and from former feudal centers to modern urban contexts, Indian music and dance underwent an exchange similar to the process of “feeding music from the margins into the centre,” from “working-class people of very little means” to “urban and suburban middle-class people with relatively greater education and more disposable income” as described by Rosenberg (1993: 5), this is only part of the story in India. It is tempting to equate the “mainstream versus authentic” paradigms that frame many folk revivals (see Livingston 1999) to the opposition of colonizer and colonized, but in India, the revival became the mainstream and indeed had that goal from its inception. After serving as “cultural opposition” (Livingston 1999: 67) to the Raj, the classicized performing arts became the cultural center of independent India and their revised histories became the country’s hegemonic narrative. In the case of kathak, the practitioners themselves also moved from the margins to the center, physically by migrating to the capital city of Delhi and other large urban locations, and personally through their caste’s gentrification and Sanskritization. The Kathaks’ current position as the authentic bearers of the dance tradition bearing their name is a type of embodied authority that stands in some contrast to other standards of authenticity. What is, or is not, kathak is defined by the leaders of the Kathak families and their own innovative work quickly becomes “traditional” as it is disseminated. The Kathaks’ ownership of the dance is further supported by the obedience and deference students are expected to show to their gurus, and by the oral rather than textual dissemination and authority that are characteristic of North Indian music and dance at large (Chakravorty 2008; Neuman 1986). Yet, the current stylistic hegemony is itself largely a product of colonial and postcolonial social forces. The embodied authority of the Kathaks began with the caste shift, which was facilitated by the British census reports and then finally validated by the revival as the non-hereditary reformers sought to connect the dance of the Kathaks to a remote and devotional past. These issues of caste and class with their shifts between margin and center thus seem to go far beyond the characteristic oppositions of revival to contemporary culture, which privilege tradition over modernity and historical purity over contemporary synthesis.

Conclusion: Thoughts on Postcolonial Revivals The dance revival in India thus shares many characteristics with other revival cultures including middle-class participation, institutionalization, gentrification, and

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commodification. It has also included the creation of a revised history that links the reclaimed arts to an ancient, pure, and indigenous past, is strongly associated with nationalism, and played an important role in building cultural pride and identity during and after the struggle for independence from Britain. The Indian revival provided cultural opposition to the Raj and supported the political opposition of the independence movement. Yet, this “oppositional character . . . common to all revivals” (Livingston 1999: 97) swiftly disintegrates into multiple oppositions and hybrid dichotomies in the postcolonial Indian context. Furthermore, in India the revival has become the mainstream and in large part, through its claims of ancient, indigenous authenticity, has become hegemonic. What was marginal is now central and this shift has comprised people as well as artistic material. Although aspects like the caste shift and the various attempts to link music and dance to treatises from thousands of years ago may seem uniquely Indian, the larger issues of social mobility, boundary crossings, and shifts in control are potentially representative of broader trends, particularly in postcolonial revivals. Cultural reclamation as part of freedom struggle and postcolonial nation building is not only characteristic of India. In many postcolonial contexts, in addition to fostering national identity and self-worth, the process of classicization also filled a defensive role, providing a reconstructed cultural character “fortified against charges of barbarism and irrationality” (Chatterjee 1993: 127). This was effective in large part because the philosophical roots of the revivals, including the construction of the nation-state and its cultural canon, were based on the intellectual ideals of the European colonizers (Moro 2004). Orientalist visions of ancient, timeless cultures combined with Romantic notions of nationhood were part of the intellectual world of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although not all cultural reformers pursued educations in Europe like the instigators of the Indian independence movement, blended ideas about high culture, ancient purity, and national essence were widespread in those parts of the globe under colonial control. Also, as European-style schooling was common within the occupied countries themselves, the adoption of curricula, exams, and diplomas as the arts were institutionalized was also due to the colonial context. National reclamation, ancient roots, and classicized arts thus all need to be understood within the multifaceted context of forced cultural exchange characteristic of postcolonial societies. To claim that Indian music and dance were essentially untouched by the British presence (as in Khokar 1998: 15) is as inaccurate as to argue that the revived dances were simply the product of Orientalist and colonial influence. I have presented kathak dance above, not as the inexorable heir to an ancient temple tradition as it is claimed to be, but as a syncretic genre that fused into a single dance in the early decades of the twentieth century and was subsequently authorized and classicized through its adoption by the nationalist revival. The emergence of the “dance of the Kathaks” has been a hybrid process, involving identity shifts and choreographic exchanges spanning two centuries. This same period, between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, also saw the rise of the British Raj, the freedom struggle, independence in 1947, and postcolonial nation building in the decades that followed. Postcolonial scholars like

222   Margaret e. Walker Bhabha (1994), Chambers (1994), Gandhi (1998), and Roy (2007) have drawn attention to the inevitable multinational collisions and resultant fusions that are part and parcel of colonial occupation and postcolonial resistance and rebuilding. In the struggle for independence, however, the emphasis of racial and cultural difference becomes as important to the colonized as it is to the colonizer. This articulation of difference, according to Homi Bhabha, “is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (Bhabha 1994: 2). Precisely how various types of multicultural hybridities are authorized and understood, however, is dependent on the historical moment that defines them. While in today’s global and transnational world we often embrace the idea of syncretism as inclusive and dynamic, in colonial contexts any publicly acknowledged blending would have most likely led to a “contaminated or mongrel status” (López 2001: 5). For any builders of national culture under the yoke of colonial domination, the inescapable hybridization of the recent past needed to be denied or minimalized. In India this was done by connecting to a past that was both ancient and Hindu, thus purifying the present’s contaminated arts by removing any stain of foreign influence. It is easy to place kathak’s hybrid elements in this framework. The identifiable courtesan, Kathak, and Sanskrit performance items in kathak are the descendents of the dance’s multiple roots, strung together into the “traditional kathak solo” through the process of the revival. The Kathaks’ identity shift, although not entirely dependent on the colonial setting, was documented by the colonizers and thus more easily legitimized in the revised history. The removal of the hereditary women from legitimate performance practice was, on the other hand, entirely due to colonial attitudes and social reforms. The revival itself, while sharing characteristics with other revivals, cannot be removed from the context of freedom-fighting and postcolonial periods as the intellectual inheritance from Orientalist and Romantic scholars, political activism of the educated Indian middle class, and national reclamation of identity and pride were all crucial factors in the cultural reconstruction examined here. The remaining question is whether the characteristics of the kathak dance revival, most of which are broadly applicable to the Indian revival, can be accurately applied to other postcolonial settings and even, in some way, enlighten us regarding revivals as a global phenomenon. Certainly the issues of class, gentrification, and movement between margins and center seem universal enough. The fluctuations between male and female pre-eminence, on the other hand, beg for further research in the Euro-American context. The importance of gender in the Indian context suggests that similar issues have perhaps remained under the radar in many other examinations of revival. Seemingly more characteristic of postcolonial revivals are classicization, upward mobility, and in particular the replacement of the colonial cultural norm with the new indigenous authenticity offered by the revival. The period of shifting power, the defining moment of “historical transformation” offered through the colonial struggle and postcolonial triumph, first arms then reinforces the intentions of the revival, giving it the potency to become the new center and mainstream. Extensive opportunities for shifting identities, perhaps unimaginable in more stable times, accompany the move to independence.

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There is a temptation, however, to see the move from marginal to hegemonic, observable in the kathak dance revival, as typical only of postcolonial settings and never visible in Euro-American contexts. Certainly one cannot claim that the Appalachian folk revivals of Cecil Sharp and Maude Karpeles in the early 1900s, or the later, more popularized folk movements in the 1950s or 1960s, led to a centralized canon of “classical” performance art; we do still call them “folk” revivals, after all. Yet, the idea of finding new meaning in the rediscovery of the performing arts of the past is strongly based in nineteenth-century Europe. Not only were folk traditions being documented and reclaimed for the future, but a simultaneous interest in the art music of prior centuries began a revival of European music that led to the canon of the twentieth century’s Western classical concert repertoire. Perhaps because this did not occur in the tumultuous and politicized context of struggle for freedom from colonial oppression, it is easy to ignore the impact it has had on our study, dissemination, and consumption of Western art music (Applegate 2005). Should revival and reconstruction then ever be seen as separate from the inevitable process of musical and societal change? Revivalists often set themselves apart from what they perceive to be mainstream, and certainly revivals in former colonies developed in opposition to occupation and oppression. Yet, if it is not uncommon for post-revival cultures to become the new center and the new norm, the process of cultural renaissance may well be more ordinary than any self-respecting revivalist would ever care to admit. Furthermore, if revivals seem to be becoming more and more prevalent, the impetus may well be grasped through understanding the motivation of revivalists in postcolonial settings. Just as colonial hybridity made ideals of racial and cultural purity a necessity, increasing global hybridity makes the “authentic” an increasingly desirable entity. More and more often, the process of “othering” in Western cultures involves a veneration of the seeming authenticity and cultural legitimacy of the other. Faced with our own undeniable impurities and increasingly indefinable cultural identities, we turn to seek validity in a recreated tradition within an imagined past. Thus, perhaps revivals can only truly be understood as global phenomena, initiated most often in response to the inevitable process of hybridization and a consequent need for elusive authenticity. Paradoxically, it is in our search for the pure and the genuine within ourselves that we only connect ourselves more closely to hybrid humanity.

Notes 1. Kathak is one of six or seven dances in India deemed “classical.” Bharatanatyam, kathakali, kuchipuri, odissi, and manipuri are the other most accepted genres, although manipuri is omitted from some lists. Other dances like mohini attam, sattirya, and chhau are sometimes included. 2. This is an older understanding of “Orientalism” that contrasts with Edward Said’s widely disseminated 1978 book of the same name. Said’s redefinition of the term proposed that what had largely been a scholarly field should be seen as the cultural arm of colonialism, an essentialization of difference that made knowledge production part of the colonial power

224   Margaret e. Walker structure. Said’s arguments offer valuable insight into the political foundations of colonial scholarly interest and artistic creation, but it is also important to remain cognizant of the historical meaning of the term. The “Orientalists” of eighteenth-century India were scholars and administrators who had profound influences on the intellectual shape of both revival and post-revival cultures (see also Niyogi 2006). 3. As the two meanings of the term kathak can lead to confusion, I am using kathak to refer to the dance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and Kathak to refer to the hereditary clan of performing artists. 4. This material is documented in some detail both in European travel writings (see, for example, Dyson 1978:  336–356) and in a number of treatises from the mid-nineteenth century including Sarmaya-i Ishrat by Sadat Ali Khan, Madun-ul Musiqi by Mohammad Karam Imam, and Saut-ul Mubarak by Wajid Ali Shah. For further information and analysis, see Walker 2004, 2010a, and 2013.

References Allen, Matthew Harp. 2008. “Standardize, Classicize, and Nationalize:  The Scientific Work of the Music Academy of Madras, 1930–52.” In Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, edited by Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji, 90–129. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Applegate, Celia. 2005. Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Bakhle, Janaki. 2005. Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. Banerji, Projesh. 1942. Dance of India. Allahabad: Kitabistan. Banerji, Projesh. 1982. Kathak Dance through Ages. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications. Baumann, Max Peter. 1996. “Folk Music Revival:  Concepts between Regression and Emancipation.” The World of Music 38 (3): 71–86. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bhavani, Enakshi. 1965. The Dance in India: The Origin and History, Foundations in the Art and Science of the Dance in India—Classical, Folk and Tribal. Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons. Bohlman, Philip V. 1988. The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bor, Joep. 1986/1987. “The Voice of the Sarangi: An Illustrated History of Bowing in India.” National Centre for the Performing Arts Quarterly Journal 15 (3–4) and 16 (1): 1–183. Chambers, Iain. 1994. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge. Chakravorty, Pallabi. 2006. “The Limits of Orientalism:  Classical Indian Dance and the Discourse of Heritage.” In Reorienting Orientalism, edited by Chandreyee Niyogi, 89–101. New Delhi: Sage Publications India. ——. 2008. Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments:  Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. du Perron, Lalita. 2007. Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre: Thumri Lyrics. Oxford: Routledge. Dyson, Ketaki Kushari. 1978. A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoires of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765–1856. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Erdman, Joan. 1995. “Dance Discourses: Rethinking the History of ‘Oriental Dance’.” In Moving Words: Rewriting Dance, edited by Gay Morris, 288–305. New York: Routledge. Erdman, Joan. 1998. “Towards Authenticity: Uday Shankar’s First Company of Hindu Dancers and Musicians.” In Dance of India, edited by David Waterhouse, 69–99. Toronto: The Centre for South Asian Studies. Forbes, Geraldine. 1996. Women in Modern India. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Gopal, Ram. 1957. Rhythm in the Heavens: An Autobiography. London: Secker and Warburg. Gupt, Bharat. 2008. India: A Cultural Decline or Revival? New Delhi: D.K. Printworld. Joshi, Damayanti. 1989. Madame Menaka. New Delhi: Sangit Natak Akademi. Khan, Sadiq Ali. 1884. Sarmaya-i Ishrat. British Library 14119.f.27. Khokar, Ashish. 1998. Sriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra:  A  History:  Sumitra Charata Ram Reminisces. New Delhi: Roli Books. ——. 2004. Guru Maya Rao. Pioneers of Indian Dance. Bangalore: Ekah-Bios. Khokar, Mohan. 1984. Tradition of Indian Classical Dance. Revised Edition. New Delhi: Clarion Books. Kippen, James. 2006. Gurudev’s Drumming Legacy:  Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mrdang aur Tabla Vadanpaddhati of Gurudev Patwardhan. Aldershot: Ashgate. Imam, Mohammad Karam. 1869. Madun-ul Musiqi. British Library. Urdu 143. Lakshmi, C. S. 2004. “A Life Dedicated to Dance.” The Hindu. Sunday November 4 Online Edition. Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. López, Alfred J. 2001. Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lopez y Royo, Alessandra. 2007. “The Reinvention of Odissi Classical Dance as a Temple Ritual.” In The Archaeology of Ritual, edited by Evangelos Kyriakidis, 155–181. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California. Maciszewski, Amelia. 2001. “Stories About Selves: Selected North Indian Women’s Musical (Auto)biographies.” The World of Music 43 (1): 139–172. Meduri, Avanti. 2005. Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986):  A  Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. ——. 2008. “Temple Stage as Historical Allegory in Bharatanatyam: Rukmini Devi as Dancer Historian.” In Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, edited by Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji, 133–164. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Moro, Pamela. 2004. “Constructions of Nation and the Classicisation of Music: Comparative Perspectives from Southeast and South Asia.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35 (2): 187–211. Natavar, Mekhala Devi. 1997. “New Dances, New Dancers, New Audiences: Shifting Rhythms in the Evolution of India’s Kathak Dance.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nesfield, John. 1885. Brief View of the Caste System of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, together with an Examination of Names and Figures Shown in the Census Report, 1882. Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press. Neuman, Daniel. 1980. The Life of Music in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1986. “Indian Music as a Cultural System.” Asian Music 7 (2): 27–58.

226   Margaret e. Walker Niyogi, Chandreyee, ed. 2006. Reorienting Orientalism. New Delhi: Sage Publications India. O’Shea, Janet. 2006. “Dancing through History and Ethnography: Indian Classical Dance and the Performance of the Past.” In Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, edited by Theresa Jill Buckland, 123–152. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ——. 2007. At Home in the World:  Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ——. 2008. “Serving Two Masters? Bharatanatyam and Tamil Cultural Production.” In Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, edited by Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji, 165–193. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pandian, Jacob. 1995. The Making of India and Indian Traditions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Post, Jennifer. 1989. “Professional Women in Indian Music:  The Death of the Courtesan Tradition.” In Women and Music in Cross Cultural Perspective, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 97– 109. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Princep, James. 1832.“Census of Population of the City of Benaras.” Asiatic Researches 17: 470–498. Qureshi, Regula Burkhart. 1997. “The Indian Sarangi: Sound of Affect, Site of Contest.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20: 1–38. Rao, Vidya. 1990. “Thumri as Feminine Voice.” Economic and Political Weekly 25 (17): 31–38. ——. 1996. “Thumri and Thumri Singers:  Changes in Style and Life-style.” In Cultural Reorientation in Modern India, edited by Indu Banga Jaidev, 278–315. Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993. “Introduction.” In Transforming Tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil Rosenberg, 1–25. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Roy, Srirupa. 2007. Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Sen, Geeti, ed. 2003. India: A National Culture? New Delhi: Sage Publications. Shah, Rina. 2005. Movement in Stills: The Life of Kumudini Lakhia. Ahmedabad: MappinLit. Sherring, M.A. 1974. Hindu Tribes and Castes as Represented in Benaras. Delhi:  Cosmo Publications. First published in 1872. Sinha, Manjari. 2000. “Kathak.” In Indian Dance:  The Ultimate Metaphor, Shanta Serbjeet Singh, ed., 59–83. New Delhi: Bookwise. Singha, Rina and Reginald Massey. 1967. Indian Dances: Their History and Growth. London: Faber and Faber. Soneji, Davesh. 2004. “Living History, Performing Memory:  Devadasi Women in Telegu-speaking South India.” Dance Research Journal 36 (2): 30–49. ——. 2008. “Memory and Recovery of Identity:  Living Histories and the Kalavantulu of Coastal Andra Pradesh.” In Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, edited by Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji, 283–312. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——. ed. 2010. Bharatanatyam: A Reader. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Srivastava, Ranjana. 2008. Kathaka:  The Tradition:  Fusion and Diffusion. New Delhi:  D. K. Printworld. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 2006. “Embracing the Canonical: Identity, Tradition, and Modernity in Karnatak Music.” In Performing Pasts:  Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India,

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edited by Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji, 43–70. New Delhi:  Oxford University Press. Sundar, Pushpa. 1995. Patrons and Philistines: Arts and the State in British India, 1773–1847. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Vatsyayan, Kapila. 1974. Indian Classical Dance. New Delhi: Publications Division. Vyas, D. G. 1963. “The Background of Kathak.” In Classical and Folk Dances of India. Part III: Kathak, 5–7. Bombay: Marg Publications. Walker, Margaret E. 2004. “Kathak Dance: A Critical History.” PhD diss., University of Toronto. —— 2006. “Ancient Tradition as Ongoing Creation:  The Kathavacaks of Uttar Pradesh.” Canadian Journal for Traditional Music 33: 48–63. —— 2010a. “Courtesans and Choreographers: The (Re)placement of Women in kathak Dance History.” In Dance Matters: A Reader on South Asian Dance, edited by Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta, 279–300. New Delhi: Routledge. —— 2010b. “Kathak Log ya Kathak Nrtya: The Search for a Dance Called Kathak.” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 40: 168–190. —— 2013.  “Wounded by the Arrows of her Eyelashes:  Seduction and Sensuality in North Indian Dance.” In Music, Dance, and the Art of Seduction, edited by James Kippen and Frank Kouvenhoven, 303–316. Delft: Eburon Academic Press. —— 2014. India’s Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate. Weidman, Amanda. 2006. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

C HA P T E R  11

C H O R E O G R A P H I C R E V I VA L , E L I T E NAT I O NA L I S M , A N D P O S T C O L O N IA L A P P R O P R IAT I O N I N S E N E G A L H É L È N E N EV E U K R I NG E L BAC H

In the late 1930s, in the small town of Sébikotane in Senegal, the students who had come from all over Francophone West Africa to the William Ponty School to be trained as schoolteachers and colonial administrators prepared for the holidays with a task: They had to go back to their “villages” and research their cultural “traditions.” The following school year, they would have to stage plays to illustrate the stories they had been told. One of these students was a young man from Guinea, Fodéba Keita, who showed talent for music, drama, and poetry. By 1957, Keita was the artistic director of one of Africa’s first professional dance troupes, the Ballets Africains. Soon to become the national dance troupe of independent Guinea, Keita’s Ballets toured the world with musical plays consciously created to revive the memory of pre-colonial Senegambia. Following tremendous success in Paris in the early 1950s, the troupe was invited on a West Africa tour in 1956–57, the high point of which was a series of performances in Dakar. The Dakarois shows made a deep impression on the political and artistic elite of late colonial Senegal, and were to have a major impact on the emergence of a regional genre of revival musical theater best described as “neo-traditional” performance. More than half a century later, the hundreds of dance troupes that have flourished in Dakar and other Senegalese cities continue to draw inspiration from the Ballets Africains and its codification of selected ceremonial practices from across the region. These practices, dances and rhythms in particular, are marketed as a corpus of “traditions” echoing the memory of a glorified pre-colonial past. Though historical research seldom enters the creative process, the invocation of tradition legitimizes what these troupes do. This is a legacy of a time when, following Senegal’s independence in 1960, President Léopold Sédar Senghor (hereafter “Sédar Senghor”) and the intellectual elite

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in his entourage created a discourse on tradition to help establish their power both at home and abroad. In the early twenty-first century, choreographers and experienced performers continue to compete for the most authentic historical knowledge or the best training in proper traditional rhythms. The neo-traditional choreographic genre, however, draws on West African musical theater as it was performed across West Africa, Europe and the United States between the mid-1930s and the late 1960s. Was this a revival movement? Who revived what, and what did the movement achieve? Drawing on the Senegalese case, in this essay I suggest that the revival of performance (dance, music, drama) was particularly powerful as a medium through which post-colonial elites sought to legitimize their power, and imagine a future for the new nation. This was done in large part by creating the illusion of continuity between the pre-colonial past and the present. Indeed, the ways in which post-colonial regimes have sought to establish their power by assuming control over a dominant version of history is well documented (Appadurai 1986; Diouf 1992), but less well documented is the role played by musical and choreographic theater in creating seductive versions of history. Revival, however, is never static, and as Livingston (1999:74) points out, “many revivalists [ . . . ] change their stance over time.” It is not just that revivalists change, it is also that the way in which revival movements develop often slips out of the control of those who promoted it in the first place. From an anthropological perspective, it is precisely the way in which different forms of power shift over time that matters. Studies of revival or revitalization movements have had a tendency to focus on a single historical moment or a group of individuals. Yet the gradual transformation of revival as its patrons “changed their stance,” or as new generations enter the scene, is equally important. But is it appropriate to speak of “revival” in this context? The term is not commonly used in studies of dance, even though many dance forms have been promoted as the conscious revivals of past practices1. Yet ethnomusicologists and anthropologists studying revitalization movements have long recognized that such movements always involved the creation of new cultural forms (Wallace 1956). Dance, like music, exemplifies the creation of something new by virtue of the fact that it is different every time it is performed. Changes in the bodies of dancers over time and generations introduce an additional layer of change, and no choreographic element may travel through time in its original form. Choreographic revival projects are therefore illuminating instances of what it means to invoke the past while creating something new. Senegalese neo-traditional performance may be qualified as a “revival” genre because its practitioners consistently invoke an imagined past as a source of inspiration, and describe what they do as a re-staging of “tradition”. In the first part of this essay, I look at the development of Senegalese neo-traditional performance in continuity with colonial school theater, and as element in the politics of nation-building in postcolonial Senegal. In the second part, I move on to the appropriation of the genre by Casamançais migrants as having inadvertently fostered the emergence of a culturalist, separatist discourse in Senegal’s southernmost region. Ultimately, in this essay I argue that revival is best studied diachronically, as a process.2

230   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach

Musical Theater in Senegal During the Colonial Period In this section, I chart the emergence of the modern theatrical genre that eventually provided an idiom for the construction of a revivalist discourse on the Casamance region. Musical theater in Senegambia did not begin with French colonization. Modern theater involving drama, music, and choreography largely developed on the basis of already strong performing traditions.3 But it was during the colonial period that elements from these diverse traditions were combined with European theater in a kind of artistic bricolage to form a codified expressive form. As suggested in the introduction, an important turning point was the promotion of theater in colonial schools. Naturally, musical theater was being made outside modern schools, too, as Karin Barber (2000) has shown in brilliant detail with the emergence of traveling popular theater in the Yoruba-speaking parts of Nigeria in the late colonial period. In Senegal, it was the French authorities who made the conscious choice of including theater in the training of African schoolteachers and administrators. Central to this project was the Ecole Normale William Ponty4, which had been set up in Gorée in 1915 before being moved to Sébikotane, east of Dakar, in 1938. In 1935 Frenchman Charles Béart, who was soon to become director, introduced the staging of plays to the curriculum. The aim was to encourage the students to preserve a connection with rural life. Indeed, while they epitomized the successful évolués5, there was also fear that they might lose touch with the populations they would have to teach or administer. This was evident in Béart’s writings at the time: Some of the students have asked the Director of the William Ponty School to lend them the costumes made for the [end-of-year] party so that they may “play” during the holidays. Tomorrow, as civil servants, they will meet their village brothers with sympathy, they will study the art forms neglected for so long and they will return them to their rightful place. It will be precious for those of us who care about Africa, because we will know it better; it will be precious for those who will find comfort from the minor worries of the profession in this unselfish and generous activity,— the schoolteacher who will have discovered a new and enchanting legend or who will have transcribed an old epic song will soon forget that he has quarreled with the major’s interpreter. (Béart 1937:14)6

The Ponty training probably exceeded French expectations in producing a local elite of schoolteachers who were close to the populations they worked with. Foucher (2002) says of the growing engagement of schoolteachers in politics after WWII that this was due in part to their coverage of the territory and their good relations with the local populations. They were even “mobilized by the local populations as intermediaries to communicate with the colonial state, and, not infrequently, as counterweights to the

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territorial administration” (Foucher 2002:148). This was an unexpected outcome of the French colonial policy. Though there are contested interpretations of the role theater played in this political awakening in the 1930s (Cohen 2012), and though the student body at Ponty was heterogeneous in its political orientation, it is almost certain that theater provided some of Francophone Africa’s future elites with opportunities to express anti-colonial sentiments. This was done through imagining and staging the lives of deceased resistance heroes. Bigolo, for example, was staged by a Ponty student of Casamançais origin, Assane Seck, who later became a Minister of Foreign Affairs in independent Senegal (Foucher 2002). After being demobilized from the French army in 1945, Seck studied in Paris, where he re-staged Bigolo with an amateur troupe of African students (Sonar Senghor 2004). Colonial school theater, then, contained the seeds of revival from the beginning. Imagining the past served to contest power in the present, but in more subtle ways than through overt speech. The Ponty plays were interspersed with musical interludes which the colonial administration perceived as innocuous folklore. Mbaye (2004) notes that the French staff controlled and sometimes censured the plays, but this rarely affected the musical interludes. French actor Henri Vidal, who had witnessed the play Téli Soma Oulé by Lompolo Koné, echoed this view in a commentary written for colonial magazine Traits d’Union: This is an exclusively folkloric play, which allows the incorporation of men and women dancers who, as direct descendants of the legendary characters, will dance what their grandparents danced in front of the glorious chiefs of their time. (Vidal 1955:66 in Mbaye 2004)

The Ponty plays fostered the development of revival performance in Senegal later on, but this happened through unexpected detours through Western Europe, North America, and neighbouring Guinea. Indeed Ponty student Fodéba Keita, born in 1921 in the Maninka district of Siguiri in what was then the colony of French Guinea, was to help transform this youth theater into national “heritage” throughout Francophone West Africa. At Ponty between 1940 and 1943, Keita already displayed unusual musical and verbal skills: he composed poetry, sang, and played banjo in a student orchestra (Cohen 2012). In subsequent years, he taught in the colonial capital of Saint-Louis, then returned to Guinea, where he worked as a schoolteacher and youth leader (Goerg 1989; Straker 2009). He soon made his way to Paris to study law (Cohen 2012), where he socialized with a cohort of black students, including Sédar Senghor and other founders of the international Negritude movement. Senegalese students who had moved into theater, such as Assane Seck, Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, and Féral Benga, were also part of the festivities. Benga had risen to fame earlier as one of Josephine Baker’s lead dancers at the Folies Bergères, and in shows at prestigious venues like the Casino de Paris and the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. By the time Keita arrived in Paris, Benga was staging shows at the cabaret-restaurant he had opened in 1938. Sédar Senghor had arrived in Paris in 1928, at a time of excitement and experimentation in the theater world. Diaghilev had brought his Ballets Russes to Paris following the Russian revolution, where they had

232   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach become the talk of the town with avant-garde choreographies. Theater and staged choreography, then, reflected the struggle around the radical political changes that were taking place throughout Europe, including the contested rise of communism. We do not know whether future president Sédar Senghor saw these performances. Struggling to make ends meet and deeply absorbed in his studies in the first half of the 1930s as he was (Vaillant 2006), it is unlikely that he would have indulged in expensive theater tickets. Nevertheless, this formed part of the intellectual milieu in which he forged his ideas on the inextricable link between arts and politics, and these ideas would later lead him to support musical and choreographic performance as an essential cornerstone in nation-building. It was in this highly politicized, cosmopolitan environment that Keita set up his first musical troupe, le Théâtre Africain, in Paris in 1949 (Straker 2009). He had joined forces with musician Facelli Kanté, whom he had probably met in Saint-Louis (Cohen 2012), and six former students from West Africa. He benefited from the support of Sédar Senghor’s nephew, Maurice Sonar Senghor (hereafter “Sonar Senghor”), himself a former student who had given up his studies for a career in theater. Benga helped with venues and contacts, and Keita’s skills as a stage director, combined with Kanté’s music, produced almost immediate success. In the early 1950s, as the troupe began to tour around Europe and North America under the new name of Les Ballets Africains de Fodéba Keita, the choreographic and musical dimension gradually displaced spoken dialogue (Straker 2009), most probably because this was more appealing to international audiences. The repertoire featured choreographed versions of ceremonial practices and everyday movement styles from West Africa, with “special emphasis on the Mandinka folklore of Guinea and Casamance” (Kaba 1976:202), tinged with a Parisian touch. Profoundly influenced by the Negritude movement, Keita conceptualized his artistic production as an exercise in cultural revival: If it is true that any civilization worthy of this name must be capable of both “giving and receiving,” it is in the interest of Africans to preserve that which has universal value in their heritage, while borrowing from the outside world that which is necessary to their current evolution. But may they refrain from letting themselves be guided by mercantile interests, thus forgetting the social and utilitarian role of their art. [ . . . ] May the Africa of tomorrow refrain from losing the secret of its dances and songs! [ . . . ] May She [Africa] still know how to dance, because for Her this means knowing how to live, and for a thousand years Her life has been one long dance with innumerable figures, a true dance of life which constitutes her message today. (Keita 1955:55–56)

The success of these first years led to the 1956–57 West African tour, at the invitation of the Governor of French West Africa. This was a turning point during which the Ballets recruited a new generation of young performers who were to replace the first Paris-based students. At Guinea’s independence in 1958, the group was renamed Ballets Africains de la République de Guinée and toured the world as the nation’s “cultural ambassadors” under Kanté’s leadership. Keita was appointed Interior Minister in Sékou

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Touré’s first government, and although Touré later turned against him,7 he played a large part in designing Guinea’s cultural policy up to the “cultural revolution” launched by Touré in 1968. This was also a time of growing rivalry between Touré and Sédar Senghor over political and moral leadership in the region. But the artists in their entourage knew each other well from the Parisian years, and there was therefore direct continuity between the Ballets Africains and the creation of the National Ballet of Senegal in 1961, a year after Independence and Sédar Senghor’s election as the nation’s first President. I will now examine the role of neo-traditional performance in Senegalese cultural revival and nationalist politics from 1960 onwards.

Revival, Nation-building, and the Emergence of a Modern Performing Profession In Senegal as elsewhere in Africa in the decade following the independences, governing elites felt the urgency of gathering linguistically and culturally diverse populations around the idea of a single nation. To establish a stable working state, they needed people to “imagine” the new political entity to which they now belonged (Anderson 1983). Senegal’s cultural policy at the time was almost entirely dedicated to the nation-building project and the concomitant strengthening of Sédar Senghor’s moral authority. Alongside the visual arts, the performing arts became the flagship of this policy. Drawing on her ethnography of music in postcolonial Tanzania, Askew (2002) has argued convincingly that musical performance played a much bigger role in postcolonial nation-building than Eurocentric theories of nationalism had done justice to. The political uses of performance, however, have varied according to musical histories and according to the personal preferences of postcolonial leaders. In Senegal, the involvement of musical and choreographic performance in the nation-building project was heavily shaped by the rivalry between Sédar Senghor and Sékou Touré. Behind the scenes, it was also shaped by the trajectories of individuals like Sonar Senghor, who had been steeped in the cosmopolitan milieu of Parisian theater. One of the major projects of the period was the creation of the National Theater, which consisted of the National Ballet, the National Drama Troupe and the Traditional Instrumental Ensemble. The Daniel Sorano Theater, a modern building inaugurated in 1965 ahead of the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts, would later house the three troupes. Sonar Senghor, who had returned to Senegal in the late 1950s, was appointed director. He and Keita remained friends, and by the early 1960s, the Ballets Africains had performed in Dakar three times, lastly in March 1961 (Paris-Dakar 1961c). In 1959, in this twilight period of French colonialism, future President Sédar Senghor wrote a long commentary in the Socialist Party magazine L’Unité Africaine, in which he praised Keita for his faithfulness to African rhythms and movement patterns. This was clearly an

234   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach opportunity for Sédar Senghor to articulate his ideas on “Black African dance”, which he saw as embodying the “emotional” nature of African cultures: Black African dances stay very close to the sources. They express dramas. For the Black African, dance is the most natural way of expressing an idea, an emotion. When taken by an emotion—joy or sadness, gratitude or indignation—the Black African dances. Dance so different from European ballet. Nothing intellectual. Neither pointe shoes nor straight lines nor elaborate arabesques or entrechats. These are earth-bound dances, bare feet flat on the ground, pounding the ground without either exhaustion or rest. (Léopold Sédar Senghor, quoted in Sonar Senghor 2004:66)

Two years later, the creation of the Senegalese National Ballet was clearly designed to outshine the Guinean troupe. Sédar Senghor believed he could win the upper hand over Touré on his own turf, the arts. He had already built up a strong legitimacy as an intellectual and a connoisseur of the arts by virtue of his engagement in the Negritude movement, his poetry and a higher degree in French grammar. Though he was not much of a dancer himself (Vaillant 2006:204), it is evident from Sédar Senghor’s poetry that he regarded dance as a quintessential African art. His Prières aux Masques Africains ends with an allusion to Africans as “people of the dance”: Nous sommes les hommes de la danse, dont les pieds reprennent vigueur en frappant le sol dur (“We are the people of the dance, whose feet regain strength by pounding on the hard ground”) (Senghor 1956). In official discourse, the National Ballet was meant to recover the regional history, and to celebrate the nation’s diversity. The idea of “performing” history was appealing to local audiences used to the verbal art of praise-singers, or griots8 (géwël in Wolof), whose performance traditionally centered around West African epics like the oral history of thirteenth-century Mande king Sunjata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire. In practice, however, there was never a simple transposition of performing practices, past or present, to the stage. The choreography was the product of Sonar Senghor’s theatrical ideas, heavily shaped by his Parisian years, of the dances his young performers had grown up with, and of the troupe’s creative work. Dancer Ousmane Noël Cissé, who was with the Ballet in the late 1960s and throughout much of the 1970s, remembered a typical working day: The day would start with a class taught by Sonar Senghor. Then every dancer, from Dakar or from elsewhere, would take turns to teach the others some of the steps they knew from home. Sonar Senghor would then select and re-arrange the moves into a choreographic sequence. Later in the day, we’d rehearse for the shows. (Ousmane Noël Cissé, interview, April 2011, Dakar)

This could not have been a simple work of historical recovery, since the dancers were usually young and did not possess great knowledge of the region’s history. They came from various Senegalese regions, but mainly Dakar (including members of the long-established Cape Verdean community and students from the School of Arts),

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as well as Casamance, the Louga region in central Senegal and the Sereer-speaking Siin-Saalum south of Dakar. The diversity of the nation was thus de facto celebrated. But there was also an implicit hierarchy among the different ethnicities. Following the Ballets Africains, a substantial proportion of the dances were inspired by ceremonial practices from Casamance, from where talented performers were recruited during Sonar Senghor’s scouting trips. His first trip, in fact, had been paid for by French Director of Information Services Pierre Fromentin a couple of years before Independence (Sonar Senghor 2004:57). After 1961, the idea that the key to a new Senegalese theater was to be found in the southern region was therefore in direct continuity with late colonial cultural policy. However, this was also because Casamance was perceived to be at the margins of a nation dominated politically and economically by northern Wolof speakers. As a forest-covered, wet tropical zone in a country made up mostly of dry savannah, and being separated from northern Senegal by the Gambia, the southern region had already suffered from a lack of easy access to the French colony’s coastal cities in the north.9 For nation-building to succeed, those linguistic minorities at the margins had to be co-opted into the nationalist project and be imagined by the Wolof-speaking majority as forming part of the nation. Something similar was happening in Guinea with the rise of militant theater during the “demystification” campaigns of 1958–62 in Guinea’s forest and northern coastal areas (McGovern 2004; Sarró 2009). Like in Guinea, the forest areas were not only marginalized in the development of infrastructure, they were also regarded as resisting modernization because Islam had not yet succeeded in displacing traditional religious beliefs and practices. Emphasizing these practices in national revival performance therefore served the double purpose of symbolically including them in the nation-building project, while at the same time displaying the “backwardness” of their traditions. This implicitly pushed the idea that the model for a modern future lay in northern Senegal’s strongly Muslim society. But unlike in Guinea, as we shall see later, the Senegalese revival genre was later appropriated by urban migrants from these very forest areas to serve their own purposes. Meanwhile, how was the national revival genre constructed for the stage? The work of the Senegalese Ballet had two main components: the first was a series of tableaux that combined music, song, drama and choreography, with a conscious emphasis on re-creating images of past Senegambian rural life, but without necessarily involving a coherent narrative. The tableaux included such recent introductions to the region’s musical repertoire as guitars and banjos. The backdrops were made of rural landscapes painted in Paris (Paris-Dakar 1961b) and West African printed fabrics (Paris-Dakar 1961a), probably manufactured in Dakar by the Sotiba factory established in 1958. The choreographic tableaux, in short, displayed a rather modern outlook. By contrast, the work of revival was made most evident in the second component, choreographic sequences in full-length plays staged by the National Theatre. In the 1960s the plays explicitly aimed at salvaging the nation’s historical memory from the destructive influence of colonialism. Just as with the Ponty theater, this was very much an imagined rural life. Urban life rarely appeared, and when it did, it was done in such

236   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach a way as to expose the moral ills city dwellers had inherited from French colonialism: greed, corruption, and a taste for mimicking European lifestyles at the expense of hard, honest work. Those who shaped Senegalese neo-traditional performance, therefore, unintentionally prolonged the colonial vision of rural Africa as timeless (Castaldi 2006). Past and present were collapsed in a single fantasy centered on the lives of historical figures of the old Wolof kingdoms. The iconic play of the period is Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s L’Exil d’Alboury (1967), which Sonar Senghor describes as “the first great encounter of the Daniel Sorano Theater team with Senegalese epic theater” (2004:101). His recollection of the play, which he helped to stage, illustrates the post-independence emphasis on salvaging the past from the “lies” of the colonial period: Following the enthusiasm that greeted this work, we can say that it has strengthened the rehabilitation of our national heroes initiated by Amadou Cissé Dia in Les Derniers Jours de Lat Dior. Colonial biographers had distorted their faces to the point of painting our authentic history as kinglets and other operetta characters. This was the rehabilitation of the men who have made our country’s tradition, but also a celebration of the virtues which have always guided our people: courage, a sense of honor. (Sonar Senghor 2004:101–102)

Just as the Ponty theater had included musical sequences, the postcolonial plays often included musical and choreographic interludes. There had been other urban dance troupes since the 1950s, and common to all “ballets” at the time were recurring references to the ceremonial practices of a distant, timeless past. Historical references to collective farming with musical support from griots, or to the authority of the elders over the youth, were contrasted with a negative portrayal of “witchcraft” and other pre-Islamic beliefs. This contrast displayed one of the aims of the revival genre promoted by the Senegalese state:  to legitimize the power of educated, mainly Muslim urban elites by showing the urban youth what to leave behind to transform Senegal into a modern, yet morally strong nation. The local and regional competitions held on a regular basis in the presence of Youth Ministry officials provided many opportunities to glorify the work of these troupes in the national printed press. Unsurprisingly, prizes were often awarded for plays praising the hard work of rural farmers and fishermen, their struggle with supernatural powers, or the moral superiority of pre-colonial kings (e.g. Dakar-Matin 1961). The early audiences were often the French-educated youth and the urban middle class. Livingston (1999) suggests that revival movements are usually middle-class projects. This was certainly the case in Senegal, where, at least initially, the urban elite paid to congregate in the cushioned seats of the National Theater, elegantly dressed in suits, evening gowns and Senegalese festive dress, in one gesture showing off their taste for the high arts and their commitment to the Senghor regime. If this strategy seems to have worked well with the elite, at least in the first decade that followed independence, the resonance of this theater with ordinary citizens is more difficult to assess. Sonar Senghor (2004) writes at length about the National Theater’s efforts to popularize its work by

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staging performances in workplaces and in Senegalese towns outside the capital, but these very efforts betray the elitist character of the institution. The National Theater did, however, foster the performing arts as an attractive profession for youths with the right skills. As opposed to the first generation of Ballets Africains performers, by 1970 one no longer needed to be articulate in French to join the National Ballet or one of the many Dakarois troupes that had multiplied in the 1960s. Recruitment was not restricted to educated youths, even though much of the audience was urban and educated. Whereas musicians and singers tended to come from griot families, dancers came from more diverse backgrounds, including high-status families who were often opposed to a dancing career. Opposition was especially strong in the families of Muslim clerics. Yet from the 1970s onwards, neo-traditional performance attracted increasing numbers of youths who sought an alternative route to “the good life”: a traveling lifestyle, a stable income, and unrestricted opportunities to socialize with the other sex. For, in addition to the pleasure of dancing, the National Theater represented the opportunity of acquiring the status of a civil servant modeled on the state-employed status enjoyed by the actors of the Comédie Française in Paris. There was also touring around the world several months per year, and daily allowances on top of a very decent salary. In addition to promoting images of rural Africa as timeless, the genre was a collage of performing practices borrowed from different parts of the region, and therefore also “placeless.” This way of using dances from various parts of West Africa as metonym, as small parts signifying a coherent whole, is intensely visible in a 1954 book by photographer Michel Huet and Fodéba Keita. Opening with a single verse from the poem by Sédar Senghor mentioned earlier and a preface by Keita, Les Hommes de la Danse features photographs of ceremonial life across West and Central Africa, all the way to Chad. But the captions consist mainly of Keita and Huet’s poetic reflections on the role of dance in African rural life. The bibliography at the end suggests an inspiration from the writings of known European anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, colonial administrators, art critics and travel writers. The book renders visible Keita’s and Senghor’s fantasy of a pan-African essence, a vision that was at the heart of choreographic revival as it was conceived in the 1950s. Paradoxically, the pan-African outlook in revival, by virtue of its openness and flexibility, paved the way for the appropriation of the genre for alternative agendas. As we will see, this flexibility enabled urban migrant troupes to construct their own version of revival from the 1980s onwards, once the state had lost much of its capacity to control cultural production.

Performance and the Emergence of Casamançais Regionalism As with so many nationwide projects throughout Africa after the independences, what transformed the Senegalese cultural revival project was the economic downturn of the

238   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach 1970s, following the first “oil crisis” in 1973. In 1981–1991, the first Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as a condition for the loans meant to prevent the country from complete economic collapse were being implemented. Sédar Senghor passed on the presidency to his Prime Minister, Abdou Diouf, in 1981, and Diouf ’s successive terms in office until the election of Abdoulaye Wade in 2000 could be described as the governance of economic austerity. Most importantly in relation to our theme, the neo-liberal agenda contained in the “adjustment” did not make space for cultural and artistic state patronage on the scale of the previous two decades (Diop 2004). The weakening of the state would create resentment from those parts of Senegal whose economic development was cut short by the new policies, and make space for Casamançais regionalism to flourish. As we shall see, the revival theater of the 1960s and 1970s provided urban migrants from Casamance with the tools to fill this growing regionalism with cultural contents. In the process of appropriating this theater, Casamançais migrants transformed it into a subtle, multifaceted, yet powerful revival movement. But rather than a consciously planned strategy, I suggest that this happened as a gradual process over several generations of performers. Given the history of school theater in the region, it is no coincidence that Casamançais are over-represented in the Dakarois performing world. My own estimates in 2002–03 put the proportion at approximately one-third, whereas Casamance only represented 12.5 percent of the country’s population at the time (ANSD 2006). This is related to the popularity of school theater in Casamance as early as the 1940s (Foucher 2002), following the appointment of Ponty-trained schoolteachers throughout the region. As a result, many of the migrants who came to work in Dakar in growing numbers from the 1950s onwards already had first-hand experiences with theater. Over time, they emphasized the musical and choreographic dimension of theater, in part because this removed the problem of the choice of language in dialogue-based plays, and in part because the dances and rhythms which were being codified in neo-traditional ballets were regarded as the most distinctively Casamançais elements in this youth theater. As I  hinted earlier, one of the most pressing challenges in post-independent Senegal has been the integration of Casamance into the nation. Casamance is a linguistically, culturally and religiously diverse area where Jola speakers are dominant in Lower Casamance, in the Ziguinchor region. But the middle and upper parts of the region, around Kolda and Velingara, are more diverse, and there Mandinka- and Pulaar-speakers are in a majority. The region has suffered from a low-intensity separatist conflict since 1982, launched by the MFDC (Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de Casamance) in Ziguinchor. By 1990, the movement had mobilized armed forces and started a conflict, still to be resolved at the time of writing in 2012. Despite its claims to stand for the whole of Casamance, the MFDC is mainly a Jola movement (Foucher 2002), an important point in relation to the representation of the region’s ethnicities in Casamançais revival performance. The idea of separatism in Casamance is not new, however:  A movement named MFDC had already been formed in 1949 in Sédhiou, but scholars of the region disagree

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on whether or not the current MFDC is in direct continuity with the old one, as well as on the movement’s root causes.10 One of the most common explanations is the marginalization of the region in the French colonial system, followed by the Senegalese government’s neglect of its economic development. Though these factors have undoubtedly generated huge resentment, they do not, on their own, account for the rise of a strong regionalist discourse and an armed rebellion. Drawing on Anderson’s (1983) notion of imagined communities, Foucher (2002) argued that it was schooling and massive migration to Dakar that allowed a Casamançais, and particularly Jola, consciousness to crystallize in Lower Casamance. These two latter factors also explain the rise of Casamançais neo-traditional performance from the 1950s onwards, which points to a strong link between schooling, migration, and regionalist revival as constructed through performance. By the 1950s, migrants from the Lower Casamance to Dakar were actively organizing into hometown associations. Migrants from the rural settlement of Thionck Essyl, for example, set up the ARTE (Association des Ressortissants de Thionck Essyl) in 1952. Now considered a commune in its own right, with a population of more than 8,000 inhabitants, Thionck Essyl is a wet-rice farming area, and mainly Muslim (De Jong 2002, 2007). Thionck Essyl is also in the heartland of the separatist movement. According to an older member whom I interviewed, by the late 1950s, the migrant association included young men and women organized into two separate structures, each gathering members from the different Thionck Essyl wards representing the families (identified by patrilineage) considered to be indigenous to the settlement. Whereas many of the women worked as house employees or stayed home with their children, the men worked as civil servants, often in the police or the army, or as employees in the private sector. Throughout the 1960s, the ARTE organized family ceremonies and other festivities in Dakar for Jola-speakers from all over Casamance. The most gifted performers among them led dance events which included different styles depending on the context and the participants: Jola bugarabu dances for family ceremonies, Cuban styles for youth dance evenings. Those who had attended secondary school at the Lycée Djignabo in Ziguinchor in the 1960s had already developed a passion for Cuban rhythms there. Saliou Sambou, who was to become a prominent national politician and Governor of Fatick, then Dakar much later, remembered these dances so vividly that he performed an entire song by Johnny Pacheco during our interview in April 2011. Pacheco’s Pachanga dance craze was all the rage in Ziguinchor and in Dakar in the 1960s, and Sambou remembered his Saturday evenings at the Djignabo boarding school as boys-only Cuban dances. When Sambou and others moved to Dakar to become university students or state employees, the Jola-style Pachanga swung all the way to the capital. In Dakar in 1972, in the midst of the performing effervescence created by the National Ballet and the other urban troupes, the ARTE decided to set up its own troupe, Bakalama. Original plays were written by Sambou and other students from Thionck Essyl, and those with dancing skills choreographed versions of the dances they had been performing for Jola audiences. Several of the members had already done theater

240   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach at Thionck Essyl’s primary school. Just as the National Theater was staging the nation’s past, so Bakalama would stage Jola history for much wider audiences. Sambou was explicit about the aim of the new troupe: The problems between Casamance and Senegal are fundamentally problems of cultural misunderstanding. If the Senegalese knew us, they would like us. We need to show who we are. We set up Bakalama at the time so that people would come to understand us. (Saliou Sambou, interview, April 2011, Dakar)

But what form did revival take in this regional genre? Men who belonged to the first generation of performers say they knew many dances from village festivities, from their time as initiates, and from attending women’s dances as children. Indeed according to these men, before the male Jola initiation, a boy is not yet fully gendered, and as a child is allowed to watch some of men’s as well as women’s secret rituals (cf. De Jong 2007 on the male initiation in Thionck Essyl). The music included regional rhythms performed on Jola drums, as well as some of the cherished Cuban styles played on modern instruments, including a saxophone. By the early 1980s, the younger performers were the children of the founders, and some of them had tried their hand at modern dance, American jazz, and American street dances. They created new steps which integrated these movement styles to the troupe’s Jola choreographies, and according to some of these performers, their creations are now regarded as “traditional.” The troupe performed in various public spaces in Dakar, including school yards and during theater competitions. But it was important to the group that they also performed in Thionck Essyl, where a substantial share of the earnings was redirected. Not everyone was happy with the troupe’s work, however: Some of the young men’s parents feared that their engagement with the troupe would compromise their university education or wage-earning jobs, even more so because some of the youths were also active in football teams. In addition to the distraction from education, some of the families feared that the young women would become difficult to control. The young migrants responded by demonstrating their loyalty to Jola “traditions.” Over time, the Casamançais neo-traditional genre became less experimental and more explicitly focused on Jola history and traditions. In Bakalama’s case, Cuban rhythms and modern dance moves receded to the background to make space for distinctively Casamançais (mainly Jola and Mandinko) instruments and rhythms. The movement style made increasing space for the characteristic Jola dances, in which both legs alternate in a rapid and powerful stomp, feet flat, with the knees bent and the body leaning forward to a 45-degree-angle. In this style, the arms are held away from the body and, by contrast with the aerial style of the Wolof sabar, the energy appears directed to the ground. In short, the themes, cultural practices, and movement styles reworked for revival performance emphasized the Jola-ness of the genre. Just as with the neo-traditional genre promoted by the National Theater, images of the past were used to comment on the present. Also, the mode of secrecy cultivated

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by people from Lower Casamance to maintain their distinctiveness within the nation (De Jong 2007) was invoked as proof of the authenticity of this urban genre. The real origin of Bakalama’s name, for example, became shrouded in mystique. According to the most common contemporary explanation, bakalama means “calabash” in Jola. It is an analogy with the calabash tree, with its strong core and with far-reaching roots, and is meant to symbolize the members’ attachment to the hometown. But according to another version, retold by one of the founders, the troupe was named after a griot who used to come and entertain the Thionck Essyl youths as they worked in cassava fields on Sundays. He used to carry a small calabash, and the name stuck, he said. Yet other individuals have told me that no uninitiated person could know the real meaning behind the troupe’s name. In a way which mirrors De Jong’s (2007) analysis of Jola ways of being modern, secrecy is always assumed to form an important part of the troupe’s cultural production. Though the aesthetics of the plays have changed over time, the idea of revival still runs through the repertoire in the form of a celebration of historical resistance heroes and a selection of regional traditions. A closer look, however, points to a different kind of revival from the national and pan-African performance that was originally promoted by the state. Indeed while the National Theater staged epics on Wolof-speaking heroes like Alboury Ndiaye in Cheikh Aliou Ndao’s play, the Casamançais plays placed regional figures at the center of the region’s history. One of Bakalama’s most successful creations, for example, was La Reine de Kabrousse, a play on Aline Sitoe Diatta, a Jola prophetess whose cult was violently suppressed by the French in 1942. The choice of a Jola martyr, who has often been invoked by the separatist movement as embodying the region’s historical refusal to accept any political or spiritual domination from either Europeans or northern Senegalese (Foucher 2002), is significant here. The choice of a young Jola woman as a heroic fighter for the autonomy of the Casamance region as a whole is also a highly political choice, which legitimizes the version of history according to which the Jola are the region’s real autochthones. The practices represented as “authentic” in Casamançais plays are also, often, subtly portrayed as essentially Jola. Bakalama’s 1980 play Gambacc, for example, staged the inter-generational tensions that continue to affect Jola male initiation in a context of Islamization, rising levels of formal education, and migration.11 One of the key plays in the troupe’s repertoire is Kañaalen, named after a Jola sorority of women who have had difficulties bearing many healthy children beyond infancy. By contrast with the fluid character of these practices in social life, there was active selection and exclusion of elements for their stage versions. Songs and texts were thus performed in Jola and in French, and the Wolof language was consciously excluded. In fact, over time, the language problem was solved by removing spoken text altogether: In a trajectory strikingly parallel to the Ballets Africains in the 1960s, choreography gradually displaced drama. But this also reflected a generational change in the troupe, and the fact that with decreasing levels of education following the “adjustment” policies mentioned earlier, by the 1990s many of the younger performers struggled with the

242   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach French texts from the plays written by students in the 1970s. Moreover, when the troupe performed abroad in non-French speaking contexts, choreographic pieces were more appealing than verbal plays. Work in the rice fields, an important marker of Jola culture in Lower Casamance, featured prominently, but groundnut cultivation was seldom alluded to, despite the fact that groundnut farming had been widespread in the region since the 1930s (Mark 1977). Some of Bakalama’s founders had even worked seasonally in groundnut farms before coming to Dakar. But groundnut farming was associated either with the Wolof-dominated Senegalese state or with Mandinko farmers. In the few plays when groundnut farming appeared, therefore, as in Toumani Camara’s Manding Mousso, la Révolte de la Femme Mandingue (The Rebellion of the Mandinko Woman), it was represented disparagingly, as a factor in the oppression of women. The implication was that, as an experienced Bakalama performer told me, the rice field cultivation that is at the heart of Jola economic and spiritual life was superior because men’s and women’s work in the rice fields is complementary. Among the Mandinko, he explained, only women own rice fields; men own groundnut fields, and are idle most of the time, he continued. The implication, of course, is that societies who do not have the cultivation of rice as a central structuring activity are less morally and spiritually fulfilled than those who do, like the Jola. Islam did not appear explicitly in the performances either, despite the fact that Thionck Essyl is mainly Muslim and that most of the troupe members over the years have been Muslims. Practices perceived as essentially Jola, such as the male initiation, have consistently been portrayed as timeless and untouched by world religions, despite the incorporation of Islamic dimensions throughout the twentieth century (De Jong 2007; Thomas 1965). Costumes, by contrast, have often been less the result of conscious choice than they have reflected the multiple experiences traversing the lives of troupe members. Costumes may be handed down from previous generations of performers, or designed by urban tailors with little knowledge of Casamançais history. There are nevertheless distinctive Jola elements. In Kañaalen as I saw it performed in Dakar in 2003 during the Kaay Fecc international dance festival, the main character, a young woman who turned to the sorority after getting married and failing to get pregnant, was seen on stage carrying a calabash decorated with a hanging fringe of beads (see video e­ xample 11.1 ). This is characteristic of the calabash carried by real-life añaalena, the sorority initiates, during community-wide family ceremonies (see Figure 11.1). In other plays, women dancers wore an indigo-cloth outfit and long necklaces of beads criss-crossing their chests (see video ­examples 11.1 and 11.2 ), both being strongly associated with Jola female ceremonies. But there are also older costumes inspired by the Guinean Ballets Africains, as well as Mandinko and urban Senegalese styles. Though Casamançais performers often present what they do as standing for a single Casamançais identity, in continuity with the regionalist discourse, Jola performance is subjected to much less aesthetic manipulation than rhythms and dances from the region’s other linguistic groups, a point already noted by Peter Mark (1994)

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FIGURE  11.1  Casamançais wedding in Dakar, January 2004. An añaalena wearing her beaded calabash can be seen among the guests dancing behind a mask on stilts. Photograph by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach.

in his fine ethnography of a performing arts festival in Mlomp, Lower Casamance, in the early 1990s. When Bakalama performed a Mandinko piece called MBalia for a Dakarois audience at the 2007 Kaay Fecc festival, for example, the choreography featured Mandinko rhythms and the dancers wore light blue satin outfits of a modern design; thigh-length tunics and wrap-around skirts for the women, tunics and baggy trousers for the men. The general impression was that of a modern, urban Senegalese style with inflections of Wolof elegance (the “shiny” aspect of the fabrics). When the same piece was performed at the Thionck Essyl festival the same year, the performers wore simpler batik-decorated outfits which gave the piece a rural, rather than urban, feel. Such fluidity rarely applies to those elements of performance constructed as distinctively Jola. This visual collage was paralleled by a sonic impact on urban audiences who had come to know Casamançais rhythms and instruments from the ceremonial practices of their migrant neighbours. By the early 1980s, dozens of Casamançais troupes existed in Dakar, and the popularity of their choreographic and musical production was such that this was what most northern Senegalese knew about the region. Success during tours abroad heightened the genre’s popularity back home. In short, the Casamançais plays created during the decade leading up to a full-blown separatist movement in the region differed from state-sponsored revival theater in that despite a visual collage that made them appealing to national audiences, they celebrated distinctively Casamançais, and often Jola, cultural practices. The genre’s success in Dakar and other Senegalese cities has contributed to the articulation of a unified Jola identity, in

244   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach contrast to the heterogeneous character of Jola communities until the mid-twentieth century. It has also reinforced the perception that the Jola were the original inhabitants of at least parts of the Lower Casamance region, and that the neighboring populations were “strangers”. There is indeed striking continuity between the culturalist discourse of the MFDC separatist movement analyzed by Foucher (2002) and Casamançais revival performance. This is evident in the contents of the plays and dances as well as in the performers’ constant slippage between Jola identity and a broader Casamance regional identity. Several authors working in the region have suggested that the framing of the MFDC as a regional rather than an ethnic movement served to legitimize the separatist discourse in a state where ethnicity carried little political weight (Faye 1994; Lambert 1998). In his analysis of the MFDC’s manifesto, Darbon (1985) also noted that although the authors make a point of explaining the marginalization of the Casamance as a whole, the references that permeate the text are Jola: Jola heroes, Jola movements of rebellion, the destruction of forests, rice fields and fishing environments. He notes that Mandinka- and Pulaar-speakers are never mentioned, even though they are in a majority east of Ziguinchor. Similarly, when performers spoke to me about their work, they used “Jola” and “Casamançais” interchangeably. Yet, the stories they bring to the stage are first and foremost Jola stories associated with a very particular geographic environment: the forest and wet-rice fields. Those linguistic groups perceived as not indigenous to the forest areas, such as the Pulaar-speakers (Fulani) or the Mandinko, are either absent, or represented in subtly unflattering ways and in choreographic tableaux of everyday life rather than in historical or epic form. Revival performance by Jola troupes in Dakar draws on a discourse of Jola autochthony and provides substance to it at the same time. But there is also a malleable side to the genre that makes it appealing to very diverse audiences. On the one hand, it appeals to local audiences in the hometowns, and this is important to the performers. Bakalama members have told me how moved they were whenever they performed Kañaalen in Thionck Essyl, and women from the sorority spontaneously joined in the songs. This was one of the reasons why it was important to preserve rhythms people would recognize. On the other hand, Casamançais performance has consistently engaged with Senegalese nationalist imagery, which is unsurprising given that it developed as an appropriation of nationalist theater. The plays, for example, often use the narrative progression common in European classical ballet, which also informed the work of the National Theater during the making of its repertoire in the 1960s: the setting of the scene and introduction of the characters, followed by drama, and a joyful dénouement during which all the participants dance together. Casamançais performers have often moved back and forth between the National Ballet and regional troupes, and Bakalama has represented Senegal at folklore festivals abroad on several occasions. A Wolof sabar programme was even introduced to the company’s repertoire in the early 2000s. The best instance of the malleability of the genre is a type of performance called animation, a choreographic sequence without a narrative, modelled on the National Ballet’s tableaux (see Figures 11.2 and 11.3). An animation could be crafted at short notice to suit the length of time available, the space and the audience. The various

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FIGURE  11.2 Bakalama women dancers performing in Dakar, April  2003. Photograph by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach.

FIGURE  11.3 Bakalama women dancers performing in Dakar, April  2011. Photograph by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach.

246   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach elements of performance, from the dress to the spatial arrangements, instruments, songs and costumes, were also put together in a flexible manner depending on the context. Thus in April 2011, Bakalama performed an animation for the International Dance Day held at one of the state-owned cultural centers in Dakar. The event had been sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, and in a context of growing opposition to the Abdoulaye Wade regime ahead of the 2012 presidential elections, Bakalama’s dominating presence seemed to signal its allegiance to the Ministry. There was noticeable difference from earlier animations I had seen by the group, however: in this tense political context, the Jola character of the performance had been toned down through a choice of urban Senegalese outfits (Figure 11.3), rather than the more distinctively Jola elements (the headdress in particular) worn by the troupe on the exact same occasion in April 2003 (see Figure 11.2 and video ­example 11.2 ). Despite the urban, Wolof dress style, the movement style and the rhythms were distinctively Jola, to the great enjoyment of a standing audience composed of young performers from other urban troupes, media people and local residents. In this politically sensitive context, the troupe momentarily broke down existing boundaries of ethnicity and political orientation through a skillful arrangement of elements of performance. The enjoyment of audiences also contributes to the genre’s effectiveness in important ways, and there are always moments when young audience members from very diverse ethnicities feel compelled to join in for a brief spell of dancing (see video ­example 11.2 ). Indeed it is largely the ability of Casamançais performance to engage diverse audiences and interests in that makes it so powerful.

Conclusion: Transnational Mobility and Revival The final point I wish to make is that revival is a process that stretches not only in time, but also in space. Revival movements are often fostered by the mobility of the actors, and one needs to take their full trajectories into account to understand how revival changes over time and space. In the present case, it is significant that Casamançais neo-traditional performance emerged with massive migration to Dakar, and to a certain extent also to Ziguinchor. Casamançais mobility within Senegal has been well documented by scholars of the region.12 What is less clear is what happens to the cultural work of hometown associations when people continue to move further away from Senegal. More research is needed to provide substantial answers to these questions. As far as Bakalama is concerned, the troupe has been a transnational organization since the mid-1990s at least, and increasingly so in the 2000s. There are now former Bakalama performers settled across Europe, North America, and Australia. Yet the troupe has retained its links with Thionck Essyl and its emphasis on Jola tradition. The organizational form has shifted however, and the troupe is now able to present multiple

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faces to the world. Inwardly, it remains an extension of the original troupe, and those members who have managed to establish stable lives abroad help the Senegal-based troupe to find touring and teaching opportunities in their countries of residence. Outwardly, however, it appears more as a loose network of well-trained artists capable of traveling across the various countries of residence to teach workshops in drumming and dancing. This is facilitated by the use of the Internet, Facebook, and Youtube in particular. But does this affect the regionalist consciousness the genre has helped to foster? In recent years, the regional character of the performers’ work abroad has in fact become more explicit than it was when Casamançais performers started teaching and performing away from Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s. During those years, following the pan-African model described earlier, neo-traditional performance was marketed as “African” or “West African” to audiences and students who often knew little about these cultural forms. But the global resurgence of discourses of local belonging (Meyer and Geschiere 1999) and the emergence of networks of European and American amateurs has encouraged Casamançais performers to reassert their regional identity. This is mainly done through dance and drumming workshops, described with ever more regional specificity. This is evident, for example, in the way in which Bakalama members living abroad present their artistic network and workshops: Jamo Jamo Arts is a collection of professional artists, musicians and craftsmen who aim to provide an excellent cultural experience at home and abroad. Led by Fodé Mané in Australia, and his brother Landing Mané in the UK, we aim to educate, entertain and inspire!! We invite you to experience the energy and soul of Senegal with Jamo Jamo Arts. Fodé Mané is a dynamic and inspirational teacher and performer of West African drum and dance. Formerly a lead dancer, drummer and choreographer with the award winning traditional performing arts troupe Bakalama of Thionck Essyl, based in Dakar, he is renowned for his graceful and energetic style of dance, his exceptional teaching abilities and his infectious smile. [ . . . ] With a repertoire of Guinean and Senegalese rhythms, songs and dances, specialising in Bougarabou rhythms native to the Casamance region and to his culture, he is an exceptionally talented artist with a rich cultural tradition of dance and music. (Jamo Jamo Arts Australia website 2009)

In many cases, it was only after performers had spent years abroad that they realized how powerful the regional culture discourse could be within the growing global concern for disappearing local worlds. Over time, the effect of successful Casamançais performance abroad may have been a further strengthening of regional consciousness back home. This is an essential factor in understanding the resurgence of regionalism in all its complexity. The choice by migrants from the Lower Casamance to Dakar in the 1960s and 1970s to imagine and stage “tradition” came from the influence of colonial school theater and

248   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach Senghorian post-colonial cultural policy. What was being staged in theatrical and choreographic form was a crafted collage of ceremonial dances from the region, combined with epic narratives and autobiographical elements from the lives of the troupe members. The plays and choreographic pieces of troupes like Bakalama contributed to creating representations of the Jola as the rightful and autochthonous inhabitants of the region, and of Casamançais society as a diverse, yet bounded, timeless whole. What started as youth theater gradually became the very image of regional culture, both in Casamance and outside the region. But why did performance encounter such success with migrants, and why did the revival movement grow over time rather than dwindle? After all, the performers currently working with Casamançais troupes have never experienced colonial school theater. Many are under 30, with no living memory of the Senghor years, and only limited experience of living in rural Casamance. Yet, Casamançais revival performance is thriving, both in Dakar and among the Senegalese diaspora. The key to this, I suggest, is to be found in performance’s ability to encapsulate a multiplicity of messages (Askew 2002). This malleability helps us to understand why revival movements tend to be performed rather than fixed in written or material form, even though text and objects may well form an important part of the performance. In this case, creative performing work has provided several generations of migrants with the social and symbolic capital they needed to become successful and respected citizens in all the contexts their lives traversed, from Casamance to Dakar and beyond. It has also enabled them to pursue a regionalist agenda that was not fully explicit in the early days of the hometown associations in Dakar. Unlike overt political action, performance has enabled the same people to derive power from positioning themselves differently in different contexts. Looking at revival movements over time and space also helps to challenge the notion that revival movements necessarily involve a conscious strategy shared by all actors from the beginning. Not all actors participate with the same degree of consciousness, and much of what happens is conceptualized as revival in retrospect, once the movement has gained momentum.

Notes 1. Among the best known examples of dance revival are a range of Indian classical dances revived by Indian middle classes in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Bharatanatyam (Meduri 2005). 2. This essay draws on material gathered over 18 months of fieldwork in Senegal, France, and the United Kingdom between 2002 and 2011. Part of this research was generously funded by an ESRC postdoctoral grant in 2005–06. While in Dakar, I followed several neo-traditional dance troupes, had informal conversations with and conducted interviews with performers, their families and audience members. I was also part of the organizing team of the Kaay Fecc biennial dance festival in 2003 and 2007, which facilitated access to dance troupes. The archival research was greatly facilitated by the digital newspaper database “When States Use Culture” on Bob White’s webpage (www.atalaku.net).

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3. See, for example, Labouret and Travélé (1928) on Koteba comedy theater in Mali, Diop (1990) on traditional theater in Senegal, Samb (1975) on the mbànd traveling theater, Charry (2000) on Mande music, or Kaba and Charry (2000) on the Mamaya music genre in the Kankan region in Guinea. 4. For an excellent study on the role of the Ponty plays in the formation of an elite urban culture in Francophone West Africa, see Jezequel (1999). 5. The term referred to African individuals who were literate, educated in the French system, wore European clothes and displayed modern lifestyles. 6. All quotations from French sources are my own translation. 7. Touré had Keita arrested for alleged complicity in plotting a coup in 1969. Keita was later executed alongside several other former regime officials at the Camp Boiro military jail which he had helped to establish. 8. In Wolof, Haalpulaar, and Mande societies, praise-singers (griots in French) belong to the men-of-skill categories, alongside artisans. Their status in relation to the “freeborn” majority is highly ambiguous. 9. During the colonial period, the “four communes” of Dakar, Rufisque, Saint-Louis, and Gorée benefited from privileged access to French citizenship, education, and resources for trade and economic development. 10. For a comprehensive review of the different approaches, see Foucher (2002). 11. See De Jong (2007) for an illuminating ethnography of the male initiation process in Thionck Essyl as a way of incorporating modernity. 12. See, for example, Hamer (1981), Linares (1992, 2003), Lambert (2002), and Foucher (2002).

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London & New York: Verso. ANSD (Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie du Sénégal). 2006. Résultats Définitifs du Troisième Recensement Général de la Population et de l’Habitat—2002. Dakar: Ministère de l’Economie et des Finances. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Askew, Kelly. 2002. Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barber, Karin. 2000. The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Béart, Charles. 1937. “Le théâtre indigène et la culture franco-africaine.” L’Education Africaine, numéro spécial: 3–14. Castaldi, Francesca. 2006. Choreographies of African Identities:  Négritude, Dance, and the National Ballet of Senegal. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Charry, Eric. 2000. Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Cohen, Joshua. 2012. “Stages in Transition: Les Ballets Africains and Independence, 1959 to 1960.” Journal of Black Studies 43 (1):11–48. Dakar-Matin. 1961. “Les Ballets Sérères ont remporté le trophée Bayard.” Dakar-Matin, 10 May 1961, p. 3.

250   Hélène Neveu Kringelbach Darbon, Dominique. 1985. “La voix de la Casamance . . . une parole diola.” Politique Africaine 18: 125–138. De Jong, Ferdinand. 2002. “Politicians of the sacred grove: citizenship and ethnicity in Southern Senegal.” Africa 72 (2): 203–220. ——. 2007. Masquerades of Modernity:  Power and Secrecy in Casamance, Senegal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute. Diop, Alioune O. 1990. Le Théâtre Traditionnel au Sénégal. Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines du Sénégal. Diop, Momar-Coumba. 2004. “Essai sur ‘l’art de gouverner’ le Sénégal.” In Gouverner le Sénégal: Entre Ajustement Structurel et Développement Durable, edited by M.-C. Diop, 9–39. Paris: Karthala. Diouf, Mamadou. 1992. “Fresques murales et écriture de l’histoire: le Set/Setal à Dakar.” Politique Africaine 46: 41–54. Faye, Ousseynou. 1994. “L’instrumentalisation de l’histoire et de l’ethnicité dans le discours séparatiste en Basse Casamance.” Afrika Spectrum 29 (1): 65–77. Foucher, Vincent 2002. “Cheated Pilgrims: Education, Migration and the Birth of Casamançais Nationalism (Senegal).” Unpublished PhD thesis. London: SOAS. Goerg, Odile. 1989. “Les mouvements de jeunesse en Guinée de la colonisation à la constitution de la J.R.D.A.” In Le Mouvement Associatif des Jeunes en Afrique Noire Francophone au XXe Siècle, H. d’Almeida-Topor and O. Goerg, eds, 19–51. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hamer, Alice. 1981. “Diola women and migration: a case study.” In The Uprooted of Western Sahel, edited by Lucie Colvin Phillips, 183–203. New York: Praeger. Jamo Jamo Arts Australia website. 2009. Available from http://www.jamojamoarts.com.au, accessed March 12, 2012. Jezequel, Jean-Hervé. 1999. “Le ‘théâtre des instituteurs’ en Afrique Occidentale française (1930–1950): practique socio-culturelle et vecteur de cristallisation de nouvelles identités urbaines.” In Fêtes Urbaines en Afrique: Espaces, Identiés et Pouvoirs, O. Goerg, ed., 181–200. Paris: Karthala. Kaba, Lansiné. 1976. “The Cultural Revolution, Artistic Creativity, and Freedom of Expression in Guinea.” Journal of Modern African Studies 14 (2): 201–218. ——. & Eric Charry. 2000. “Mamaya: Renewal and Tradition in Maninnka Music of Kankan, Guinée (1935–45).” In The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, I. Monson, ed., 187–206. London: Routledge. Keita, Fodéba. 1955. “Les Hommes de la Danse.” Trait d’Union 39:53–56. Labouret, H., and M. Travélé. 1928. “Le théâtre mandingue (Soudan Français).” Africa 1 (1): 73–97. Lambert, Michael C. 1998. “Violence and the War of Words: Ethnicity v. Nationalism in the Casamance.” Africa 68 (4): 585–602. —— 2002. Longing for Exile: Migration and the Making of a Translocal Community in Senegal, West Africa. Portmouth, NH: Heinemann Linares, Olga. 1992. Power, Prayer, and Production:  The Jola of Casamance, Senegal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ——. 2003. “Going to the City . . . and Coming Back? Turnaround Migration among the Jola of Senegal.” Africa 73 (1): 113–132. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Mark, Peter. 1977. “The Rubber and Palm Produce Trades and the Islamization of the Diola of Boulouf (Casamance, 1890–1920).” Bulletin de l’IFAN 39B (2): 341–361.

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——. 1994. “Art, Ritual and Folklore: Dance and Cultural Identity among the Peoples of the Casamance.” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 136: 563–584. Mbaye, Alioune. 2004. “L’autre théâtre historique de l’époque coloniale: le ‘Chaka’ de Senghor.” Ethiopiques 72. McGovern, Michael. 2004. “Unmasking the State: Developing Modern Political Subjectivities in 20th-Century Guinea.” Unpublished PhD thesis. Atlanta: Emory University. Meduri, Avanthi. 2005. Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986): A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Meyer, Birgit, and Peter Geschiere. 1999. Globalization and Identity:  Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Oxford: Blackwell. Ndao, Cheikh Aliou. 1967. L’Exil d’Albouri [Play]. Paris-Dakar. 1961a. “La presse allemande ne tarit pas d’éloges sur les Ballets du Sénégal qui viennent de triompher en Allemagne Fédérale.” Paris-Dakar, 17 April 1961, p. 3. ——. 1961b. “Le départ des Ballets Africains pour l’Europe.” Paris-Dakar, 25 February 1961, p. 6. ——. 1961c. “Les Ballets Guinéens sont passés à Dakar.” Paris-Dakar, 14 March 1961, p. 3. Samb, Amar. 1975. “Folklore Wolof du Sénégal.” Bulletin de l’IFAN t.37 (série B):41. Sarró, Ramon. 2009. The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast. Iconoclasm Done and Undone. London & Bloomington:  International African Institute & Indiana University Press. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1956. Chants d’Ombre. Paris: Le Seuil. Sonar Senghor, Maurice. 2004. Souvenirs de Théâtres d’Afrique et d’Outre-Afrique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Straker, Jay. 2009. Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press. Thomas, Louis-Vincent. 1965. “Bukut chez les Diola-Niomoun.” Notes Africaines 108:97–118. Vaillant, Janet. 2006. Vie de Léopold Sédar Senghor: Noir, Français et Africain. Paris: Karthala. Vidal, Henri. 1955. “Nos victoires dans les compétitions théâtrales.” Traits d’Union 8. Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–281.

C HA P T E R  12

REVIVED MUSICAL P R AC T I C E S W I T H I N U Z B E K I S TA N ’ S E VO LV I N G NAT I O NA L P R O J E C T TA N YA M E RC HA N T

In the realm of folk music, revival movements generally involve the self-conscious performance of what is considered by practitioners to be old, historic, or traditional music.1 Such projects are often connected to ideology; this is especially true when the government motivates, sponsors, and controls the production of revived traditions. What happens to state-revived music when that government changes? Such a question is relevant throughout the former Soviet Union, but is especially salient in Uzbekistan, where revivals that could be considered as grassroots (such as the Pokrovsky ensemble in Ukraine and others like it)2 are markedly absent. Rather, there are two different revived musical styles that are promulgated largely through state-run institutions in Uzbekistan: “arranged folk music” and “traditional music.” Both styles have roots that predate the foundation of the USSR in 1917 and had very different trajectories during the Soviet period, despite shared presence in institutions like state radio and television, music schools, and conservatories. The discourse surrounding both styles has continually responded to shifts in state ideology, and this is most noticeable during and after Uzbekistan’s transition from Soviet republic to independent nation in 1991. Understanding the connections between revival moments and nationalist ideology in Uzbekistan requires unpacking the changing narratives and the interpersonal tensions that arise as musicians grapple with the institutional and ideological shifts of the post-Soviet era. Performers employ a variety of rhetorical strategies to emphasize the continued relevance of their musical practices, and in doing so, beyond simply justifying their need for a share of institutional resources, they reveal a great deal about the importance that arranged folk music and traditional music have had within Uzbekistan’s national project.

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This essay draws on over eighteen months’ worth of fieldwork conducted in Uzbekistan’s capital city, Tashkent, from 2002 to 2009.3 It puts the two revival genres of an’anaviy musiqasi (traditional music) and halq cholg’u musiqasi (people’s performance music/arranged folk music) in dialogue in order to better understand the connection between revival movements and nationalist ideology in Uzbekistan. To do so, it draws on interviews with practitioners like Faizulla Karomatov (renowned musicologist), Feruza Abdurahimova (director of the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra), Faruq Sodiqov (director of the Tuxtasin Jalilov State Folk Orchestra), Malika Ziyeeva (dutarist and honored artist of Uzbekistan), and Ro’zibi Hodjaeva (director of the Uzbek State Young Women’s Dutar Ensemble), as well as other experiences while in the field. After a description of the sound of these two musics and an account of their histories, this essay explores how both musical styles are socially located within the same institutions, but draw on different performance styles, pedagogical practices, and discourses to posit their importance and relevance in post-independence Uzbekistan.

Musical Sounds of Arranged Folk Versus Traditional Music One of the most noticeable differences between arranged folk music and traditional music is the sound of each style. Timbre, texture, and intonation differ significantly. Arranged folk music is polyphonic, most often played using Western chord progressions to create a sense of melody and accompaniment. Arranged folk music is played in large symphonic ensembles of reconstructed instruments that have been modified to conform to equal temperament.4 Folk orchestras in Uzbekistan are primarily comprised of plucked lutes (dutars and rubabs) that are built in multiple sizes that mimic the violin family of the Western symphonic orchestra. Multiple instrumentalists double on each type of instrument, including prima, secunda, alt, tenor, and bass (corresponding to the first and second violin sections, viola, cello, and bass). Such divisions are maintained for the gijak (spike fiddle) section as well, though they often only have soprano and alto versions. Other instruments in the ensemble include the nay (flute), chang (hammered dulcimer), and a range of percussion instruments, each of which are not usually doubled or converted into courses. This makes the timbral vocabulary of Uzbek folk orchestras unique and fairly diverse, when compared to other Soviet-derived folk orchestras, like the Russian ones that often feature balalaika, domra (both plucked strings), and accordion (for more detail see Olson 2004). These orchestras perform folk or Western classical tunes that are arranged with harmonic accompaniment that often shifts between tutti sections and those that foreground specific instrument families. Orchestras often accompany choirs and vocal soloists as well. Traditional music is also commonly played in ensemble format when performed in institutions like the conservatory and the state radio stations. Theodore Levin notes

254   Tanya Merchant that such focus on ensembles came from the Soviet period, and calls it “the grandomania of socialist culture” (Levin 1996b: 51). He presents this in contrast to the general understanding that traditional music, especially the various maqom (modal art music) traditions from the region, developed out of the court music that was primarily performed solo or in very small chamber ensembles. The traditional music ensembles that I observed in Tashkent generally included around a dozen performers and included bowed fiddle (gijak), plucked lutes (dutar, Kashgar rubab, tanbur, and occasionally ‘ud), hammered dulcimer (chang), and frame drum (doyra). In these traditional ensembles, instruments are sometimes played in pairs, but rarely doubled further than that, and melodies are performed in heterophonic style. Traditional instruments are not tuned to equal temperament, though they do generally conform to the division of twelve notes per octave. The resulting sound is often described as “shimmering,” as there are often slightly different pitches voiced at the same time, since each instrumentalist performs his/her melodic line with variation that is idiosyncratic to his/her instrument and individual aesthetic. The timbre of such instruments are also more diverse, since the materials diverge more than those of the folk orchestra, which uses primarily metal and nylon strings for its instruments and involves a greater level of standardization. Traditional instruments also use metal strings (e.g. tanbur, gijak) and nylon as well (e.g. Kashgar rubab), but the silk strings of the dutar add a unique timbre to the ensemble. Indeed, the dutar and tanbur are considered a matched pair (often described as masculine—tanbur and feminine—dutar) and those two plus the doyra frame drum comprise the most basic traditional music ensemble. Vocal timbres, when employed in this style are more strident than is typical in either Western art or pop musics. The singing style uses a very wide range and involves the extension of the chest voice for the highest notes, which are usually sung with the most volume and emotional intensity.5

Shared History, Shared Revival Tropes, and Diverging Narratives Along with the differences in musical sound, practitioners of arranged folk music tell very different stories about their music when compared to those that traditional musicians tell. Indeed, the kinds of language and terminology that musicians of each genre employ highlight the different attitudes towards notions of history, modernity, and national identity. This is especially true as those broader concepts intersect with ideas of what is Asian, Uzbek, Eastern, Western, and European. Both traditional and arranged folk music have consciously revived musical practices that are linked to Central Asian practices throughout history; both also engage with Western notation and with notions of musical literacy that align with European art music. Yet even as musicians who perform in either genre acknowledge a shared history (discussed further in the next section), at the same time they also set out clear markers of what differentiates their

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respective style beyond the musical details. Many of the stories that musicians tell about their musics center on nationalism, which is hardly surprising, given the pervasive and prominent national project that has been ongoing since Uzbekistan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Whether involved in arranged folk or traditional music, musicians acknowledge shared historical roots in the folk and art musics of Uzbek and Tajik people before Russian colonization. Their stories also tend to focus more on the Uzbekness of these genres, rather than multi-ethnic and multi-religious contexts.6 Despite so much in common, musicians generally focus their stories on the differences between the musical practices, with traditional musicians often discussing historical roots and long-held traditions, while arranged folk musicians tell stories of modern music with academic rigor that meets international musical standards (by which they are usually referring to arranged folk music’s employment of Western tuning, harmonic language, and notation systems). As such, ideology plays an important role in separating these two revived musics: arranged folk music is presented as “academic,” and oriented toward certain European aesthetics, while still acknowledging (and reifying) a basic grounding in Uzbekness through the use of (reconstructed/modernized) Uzbek instruments, and by performing Uzbek repertoire that has been arranged in symphonic style. Traditional music, as it has been standardized and institutionalized in the state run media, schools, universities, and the conservatory, is presented as preserving Uzbek national musical heritage and eschewing reconstruction and sonic markers of modernity. Even so, many instruments have changed, and all performers of traditional music educated in musical institutions are required to pass examinations in harmony and solfège, and to read Western notation fluently. Even as traditional musicians engage with these practices that do not fit with the histories that they describe about their music, they are careful to explain how the most important practices that tie them to this sense of historical relevance still exist. Examples of these practices include learning repertoire via the oral-imitative master-apprentice method, even if such methods are now supplemented with notation, as well as the importance of maintaining traditional musical characteristics (i.e., non-tempered intonation, heterophony, strident vocal timbres, and small performing ensembles). Tropes prevalent in current musical discourse surrounding both styles include notions of traditional music’s “golden legacy,” ideas about modernization and contemporaneity, appeals to international and universal standards, and the importance of musical literacy. As one might surmise, the practitioners of each style feel great loyalty to their chosen mode of performance, making claims of the superiority of their chosen style very common. While conducting fieldwork, I often heard musicians describe their music as the most complex, as a “treasured pearl of the Uzbek people,” and as “priceless valuables from ancient times.” In fact, practitioners of arranged folk music and traditional music both described their music to me as “by far the most complex, such that any other genre of music is easy to learn, like a plaything.” Institutional boundaries and interpersonal tensions often leave musicians feeling at odds with one another, since they emphasize the differences between the two genres that share instrumentation, locality,

256   Tanya Merchant and so much history. Performers employ these rhetorical strategies to emphasize their relevance in the post-Soviet era; by doing so, they reveal much about the importance of arranged folk and traditional music to Uzbekistan’s national project, made evident by the prevalent national media presentations of musical practices that can be mapped to Uzbek identity. Despite interpersonal and institutional tensions and divisions between the two styles of traditional music and reconstructed folk music, both styles draw upon ingrained notions of national heritage and pride to find contemporary value and meaning in their music. While one style strives for modern and internationally savvy representations of Uzbekness, and the other idealizes a pre-Soviet, pre-industrial golden past, both are invested in re-creating an essentially Uzbek music that can contrast with other musical styles that are well-known and well-respected in the region (such as Arabic maqom, Western art music, or the folk orchestra traditions from other former Soviet Republics). As such, both musical styles are responding to the cultural and institutional charge that music represent and reify the separate national identity of Uzbekistan.

Historical Development Shared Pre-Soviet History Uzbek musical history is generally traced to music that was played in the courts of cities on Silk Road trade routes as far back as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The court music of that time is considered to be related to the maqom repertoires that centered around the cities of Khiva (Khorezmian maqom), Bukhara (Shashmaqom), and those in the Ferghana valley (Tashkent-Ferghana maqom). Although it is difficult to trace a continual performance practice to that time, scholars do trace traditional musical practice back to manuscripts from the eighteenth century and performers in the nineteenth century (Matyoqubov 2004, Levin 1984). In this sense, traditional music and arranged folk music share a common history before the twentieth century (when various modernization/reconstruction projects began). This history of the music that forms the basis of each revival style is one of the primary ways in which both musical styles are presented as valuable national practices. The following section will trace key moments and note key figures in the diverging paths of arranged folk and traditional musics.

Reconstruction Projects: The Development of Arranged Folk Music The projects of reconstruction mark the split of the two styles from one another (though even traditional musicians now prefer to use certain reconstructed versions of instruments like the Kashgar rubab). The most well-known project to re-work Uzbek traditional instruments was a large government-sponsored reconstruction

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spearheaded in the 1930s by Ashot Petrosiants (1910–1978). Reconstruction projects, termed rekonstruktsiya (reconstruction) or modernizatsiya (modernization) in the Russian language and zamonaviylashtirgan (contemporized or modernized) or takomillashtirgan (developed or perfected) in the Uzbek language, occurred throughout the republics of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.Vasiliy Andreev had created the first of this type of project, which resulted in the creation of Russian folk orchestras comprised of balalaikas, domras, (plucked fretted lutes) and bayans (accordions) in the late nineteenth century, in the decades leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 (Olson 2004: 16–17). In the 1930s, folk orchestras comprising altered instruments that used equal-tempered tuning systems and that were made of materials that could project on a concert stage were created specifically to promote Soviet ideology throughout the newly founded pan-ethnic nation. A  vital aspect of this project was to support the notion of an ethno-national identity that was supposed to map onto each of the separate Soviet republics, all while uplifting the artistic capabilities of the folk. Musicologists Izaly Zemtsovsky and Alma Kunanbaeva discuss the many government projects of the 1930s in terms of their ideological importance: The 1930s saw the beginning of “innovations” introduced into folklore as a response to the appeal for “revolutionary men of culture” to take an active participation in creating new forms of folklore, in developing a new folklore, and in cultivating it . . . All-Union assemblies were held for folksingers to encourage them in all possible ways, especially by presenting them with the highest State awards. (Zemtsovsky and Kunanbaeva 1997: 11)

The creation of such folk orchestras from various republics was thus an important political act. It created a common genre that could be showcased on concert stages in pan-Soviet festivals and dekadas (10-year celebrations) to celebrate diversity with common musical vocabularies. The development of this musical style was a key part of Soviet policy in the 1930s, which sought to diminish the importance of class and to elevate the music of the peasants in line with communist ideology. Historian Laura Olson notes this, saying: According to official rhetoric [in the 1930s], socialism had been achieved and class no longer existed as a legitimate category. However, one remnant of the pre-socialism days was allowed to remain—nationality. Socialism now included the “brotherhood of the peoples,” the idea that all (except the Russians) were equal. The Soviets invested enormous time and energy into the production of national consciousness among the citizenry. (Olson 2004: 37)

The concept of one nationality/ethnicity per republic was highly problematic in Uzbekistan, which (as mentioned above) has a long history of multi-ethnic and

258   Tanya Merchant multi-religious musical culture (this is especially relevant as regards the heritage of Central Asian maqom traditions like the Shashmaqom, which are shared by Uzbeks and Tajiks and by Muslims and Jews). This importance placed on ethno-national identity throughout the Soviet era has had long standing repercussions. For example, historian Ronald Grigor Suny notes the continued problem of listing nationality in Soviet and post-Soviet passports, saying The practice of fixing nationality in each citizen’s internal passport on the basis of parentage rendered an inherently liquid identity into a solid commitment to a single ethnocultural group. Young people with parents who had different national designations on the their passports were forced to choose one or the other nationality, which then became a claim to inclusion or an invitation to exclusion in a given republic. (Suny 2001: 867)

Nonetheless, the nationalities policy that developed in the Soviet era has transformed into a widely publicized national project in the post-Soviet era. This connection of Soviet cultural and national policy with arranged folk music creates a difficult situation for musicians who continue performing it with great enthusiasm in the post-Soviet era. However, the emphasis on the Uzbek nature of such folk orchestras certainly aids the efforts for such ensembles to maintain relevance to present-day national projects. Indeed, the strong national identifiers associated with Soviet-era standardized versions of both arranged folk music and traditional music continue to serve these genres in the present day.

Yunus Rajabi—Codifying and Standardizing Traditional Music Although traditional music was largely absent from educational institutions in the early- and mid-Soviet era, traditional music sounded throughout the country via the state radio station.7 Renowned scholar-performer Yunus Rajabi (1897–1976) founded a maqom/traditional music ensemble at the state radio station in 1927 and led it for many years. The radio ensemble played versions of traditional music that maintained its heterophonic performance style and that were played mostly on non-reconstructed instruments (the Kashgar rubab mentioned above and the gijak are the most visible exceptions). This radio ensemble became the primary vehicle for the dissemination of traditional music in the Soviet period, and many of the most famous traditional musicians performed and continue to perform in it (the state radio station also had a folk orchestra associated with it, as well as ensembles that performed Western art music). The traditional music ensemble at the state radio (often called the radio maqom ensemble) provided a performance venue for the music that Rajabi collected, codified, and standardized via his two famous collections: Shashmaqom vol. 1–6 and O’zbek Halq Musiqasi (Uzbek Folk Music) vol. 1–8 (1970–1976 and 1955–1959, respectively). These volumes contain versions of traditional repertoires from Bukhara in the case of the Shashmaqom, and from various

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regions in Uzbekistan in the case of O’zbek Halq Musiqasi, that Rajabi collected and transcribed into Western notation beginning in the 1930s. Both of these sets are now considered standard versions of Uzbek traditional music and are often consulted by faculty and other performers at the conservatory. It is difficult to quantify the level to which he changed melodies as they were performed at the time, beyond the fact that he created a single standard version that resulted from his transcriptions of multiple performers’ versions of the pieces within the repertoires. It persists as the standard version in Uzbekistan, and musicians are in constant dialogue with the Rajabi standard, even though many choose to play versions of the melodies that are significantly different from the Rajabi transcriptions. Musicians usually cite the oral tradition and the value of their teacher’s version (or a version that their teacher learned from a master). As such, the major change in regard to the revival of maqom practices in Uzbekistan is the engagement with a standard codified version. Rajabi is considered the twentieth-century forefather of traditional musical practices as they exist in various state institutions, and is treated as a national hero for his work preserving and performing what is presented in Uzbekistan as national traditional music. His house has been converted into a museum, and his family is often described as having a musical dynasty, since his son and grandsons are also well-respected musicians. This renown is not just the result of the Soviet-era project to bolster separate national identities within its republics. Indeed, Rajabi remains an important aspect to Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet national project. The bi-annual maqom competition in Tashkent is named in his honor and in 2001, when the city of Tashkent opened a new metro line (the Yunusobod line), one of the stations was named after him. There is an overt placement of Rajabi in the public sphere as an important historical figure, one who helped the proliferation of Uzbek traditional culture. Beyond the various efforts to honor him, Rajabi’s transcriptions of traditional music and the recordings associated with them that he made with the maqom ensemble at the state-run radio station are considered to be his most valuable legacy for the Uzbek people. Many musicians have expressed their appreciation of these codified and standardized collections, citing the convenience of not having to memorize a vast repertoire like the Shashmaqom that is comprised of six large suites of music each in its own mode. This process of preservation and standardization is of key importance to the revival of traditional music, especially considering the fetishization of musical literacy and of written music in music educational institutions. Beyond the volumes’ status as important objects that makes this tradition tangible, Rajabi’s transcriptions have become the standard by which soloists and ensemble in the traditional music department of the conservatory are judged, and musicians are constantly engaged in dialogue with this legacy.

The State Conservatory Beyond the state radio station and Yunus Rajabi’s ensembles, the Uzbek State Conservatory is the flagship institution for Uzbek music. It is one of the primary sites

260   Tanya Merchant where these revivals are enacted.8 The first conservatory in the Turkestan Republic (the Russian colonial territory of Central Asia that existed until the 1930s and encompassed the region comprising what is now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) was founded in Tashkent in 1918. It later closed and was replaced by the opening of a conservatory founded by the Soviet government in 1936. This Turkiston People’s Conservatory (Turkiston Halq Konservatoriyasi) was the first of four institutes of musical higher education opened in the early years of the Soviet Union: 1919 saw the opening of conservatories in Samarqand (now in central Uzbekistan) and Ferghana (in eastern Uzbekistan) and another opened in Bukhara (also in central Uzbekistan) in 1920 (Odilov 29). These music schools included traditional music in their pedagogy, but that practice largely ceased around 1937 when the reconstruction project gained prominence. Musicologist Faizulla Karomatov (1925–) remembers this time, saying: Until 1937 there was very strong traditional music [in Uzbekistan]. In general there was only traditional music. In the ’20s, in 1926, there was a school of music system opened in the provinces. The first school was national traditional performance based. I was also part of that in the beginning. Then. . .after [World War II], slowly [only] the arranged folk instruments that had been reconstructed [were left]. At that point they called [traditional music] “backward,” and asked whether or not it was still needed. (Interview, July 21, 2005, Tashkent)

This description of traditional music as “backward” was a key aspect of Soviet cultural policy and left traditional music in a very tenuous place. Institutions (the state radio station and the conservatory especially) helped to codify and make meaningful the split between arranged folk music and traditional music. The Tashkent State Conservatory (renamed the Uzbek State Conservatory after independence and referred to by musicians simply as “the conservatory”) was founded in 1937 and originally provided education only in Western art music. While teaching at both institutions, Petrosiants officially founded the Uzbek Orchestra of Folk Instruments at the Tashkent Musical Technicum and also created the department of arranged folk music opened in what was then the Tashkent State Conservatory in 1949 (Sobirova and Abdurahimova 1994: 36). The state conservatory offered education in Western classical music and arranged folk music to students, and most music schools and secondary level kollejs/uchilishs9 followed suit, keeping traditional music out of the educational system from 1937 until the 1970s. However, that does not mean that traditional music did not receive attention or institutionalization from the Soviet government. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, musicologists and musical folklorists like Yunus Rajabi set about transcribing and collecting traditional repertoires, some of which provided material for arrangements for orchestras and others of which became standardized models for the performance of traditional music. Additionally, the radio maqom ensemble provided some confusion for young performers who began studying music before traditional repertoires

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were institutionalized into the conservatory. My teacher of traditional music and dutar, Malika Ziyeeva, often told the story of beginning her studies at a music school in the Ferghana valley on the Kashgar rubab. She would hear great masters like Yunus Rajabi and Faxriddin Sodikov (who later became her teacher) playing in the maqom ensemble on the radio and would wonder why the music that she was learning at the local music school sounded so different (Ziyeeva, interview, June 15, 2005, Tashkent). The Kashgar rubab was considered an ideal instrument to start girls on in Soviet-era music schools, since it fit small hands well. (This contrasts with the traditional association of femininity with the dutar, the only non-percussion instrument that women played historically.) Many of the women that I interviewed over the course of my research (who developed careers as performers of either traditional or arranged folk music) began their studies on the Kashgar rubab in Soviet music schools. During Ziyeeva’s early childhood in the 1950s and ’60s (unbeknownst to her at the time), there was a great push to include traditional music like that played by the radio maqom ensemble in the pedagogy of the conservatory. Faizulla Karomatov spearheaded this movement and spent a great deal of time pushing the director of the conservatory, Muxatar Ashrafiy, on the subject and getting in arguments with Ashot Petrosiants over the suitability of including traditional music in the state conservatory. Karomatov remembers this time, discussing his early idea to include traditional music pedagogy in the arranged folk music department: I was thinking that the department of arranged folk instruments should combine with traditional. . .The head of the department was Petrosiants. I began to talk to him about the project. “It needs a change, if your program doesn’t change, it won’t last,” I said . . . Two days later we’d meet again and he’d have returned to his original thoughts. He’d say, “no, we’ll continue on our path.” Again I’d explain, and again he’d soften . . . Finally he said “We will [have academic/ethnographic contact] with folk musicians, that’s our work.” I said that folk musicians aren’t staying— they’re disappearing [i.e. the traditional bearers are dying out] . . . When I understood that [he wouldn’t budge], I decided to work on opening a department of Eastern Music. (Interview, July 21, 2005, Tashkent)

In this, Karomatov is describing his fight to make a place for the revival of traditional music in a way that didn’t the involve significant changes to instruments or musical texture that occurred in folk orchestras. It is worth noting that Karomatov was originally willing to try to find a space for both revived traditions under the auspices of the same department, and that it was Petrosiants who resisted that unification. After arguing with Petrosiants for inclusion in the arranged folk department and failing, Karomatov went to Muxatar Ashrafiy, the director of the conservatory, and “invited” him to open a separate department. We opened the department ourselves. . . . I  didn’t ask, I  invited! “Do this.” I  said, “if not, I won’t come to the conservatory” (laughs). . . I invited the director of the

262   Tanya Merchant conservatory. He wanted to create a small folklore expedition department. I  said “No! Not like that, you need to do it like this, and then I can come be a part of it.” (Ibid.)

It is worth noting that it took someone of undeniable renown like Karomatov to push this project through and make space for a second folk revival practice in the conservatory. He was very clear that this project would not simply involve ethnographic collection (and performance) of folklore but would instead focus on engagement with maqom repertoires and related pieces academically and in terms of performance (in fact, familiarity with other maqom-like traditions like Arabic maqam and Persian dastgah is encouraged in the traditional music department). Thus, in 1971, the department opened amid much scandal (it was then known as Vostochnaya Muzyka Kafedra or the Eastern Music Department and is now known as the An’anaviy Musiqa Fakulteti or the Traditional Music Department). This system of two separate departments mirrors the situation in the state radio station, which supports both a folk orchestra and a traditional ensemble, as it has since the early Soviet period. With the conservatory mimicking the same divisions, the current generation of musicians has never known anything other than this institutionalized division between arranged folk music and traditional music.

The Post-Soviet Situation The bulk of the state-sponsored ensembles and institutions in which arranged folk and traditional musics are played were founded during the Soviet Period.10 The outlets for learning and performing these styles were shaped in the Soviet era, as well as the rhetoric surrounding each style. The shift from Soviet republic to independent nation required some ideological negotiations, including a shift in focus for many cultural practices, so that they could better support a national project focused on Uzbekistan’s independence.

The Golden Legacy The focus of national pride changed with independence, from an emphasis on the panopoly of ethno-national identities that were to serve the larger Soviet nationalism (within this context, being overly nationalistic was a suspect stance), to a state in which nationalism is framed as specifically (and ethnically) Uzbek, and it is difficult to imagine there being such a thing as too much nationalism. Despite the shifts in national sentiments, much of the aesthetic presentation of both musical styles remained constant for both traditional and arranged folk music. Indeed, both are still marked by the Soviet valorization of ensemble work, written music and literacy, and stage performance. While these aspects of musical performance and aesthetics have remained largely constant, the rhetoric supporting their existence and value has

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continued to adjust to the political situation. One of the major transitions in terms of discourse has been the way that the national project thrust traditional music into the spotlight after independence. The approach to nationalism in the Soviet era, as noted by Tomoff (2004), was one of great suspicion. As such, although Soviet nationalities policy from the 1930s onward focused on creating a separate national identity for each republic, it was important that these national identities were always supportive of a primary Soviet identity (similar to the way that monophonic folk tunes were collected and arranged to perform in folk orchestras that represented both Uzbek national identity and the larger Soviet folk orchestral context). An interview that I conducted with Faizulla Karomatov and Malika Ziyeeva confirmed this sense of the word in the Soviet Union as late as the 1970s: FK : There was the department of folk instruments (laughs) yes, yes, yes, and they were

interested in closing [the Eastern Music Department]. I had nothing to say on the subject, but then the director finally came out and everyone had put a black mark on it, saying this is national, nationalist. . . TM: National, this was something bad, right? FK : Nationalist, as they called it, this was a big, big black [i.e. reprehensible] term. M Z: But only in the Soviet period. FK : Nationalist! (Interview, July 21, 2005, Tashkent)

This interview is similar to comments made in many private conversations that I have had with traditional musicians who performed during the Soviet era; many who worked before the glasnost era were worried about being considered suspicious or nationalist. Currently, traditional musicians speak a great deal about the value of their music, not just in aesthetic terms, but also in terms of relevance to nationalism; nationalist is no longer an epithet, but a moniker of pride. Playing nationalist music during the Soviet era made one suspect and dangerous, but in the post-Soviet era nationalist musicians are celebrated for performing their valuable heritage. This heritage is something not entirely tangible and always connected to pre-Russian times and with an Uzbek essence, usually one that is carried through blood ties from generation to generation. During an interview at one of my dutar lessons, Ziyeeva made the following illustrative comment: The most [basic] thing is in the blood, regardless. Traditions exist in the blood . . . Whether you like it or not, they have a hold on you regardless. Because our fathers and grandfathers said, regardless, it is in the blood. (Interview, March 22, 2005, Tashkent)

This makes tradition something that is almost passive in its continuation and a national identity one that cannot be escaped. The importance of heritage connection to musical tradition in Uzbekistan is often mentioned in terms of the traditional master-apprentice

264   Tanya Merchant system and also in terms of the music being “in the blood.” Once I gained enough proficiency on the dutar, many people began enquiring about Uzbek blood in my ancestry. Many students in the traditional music department with whom I spoke mentioned elderly relatives who may have played instruments or had enthusiasm for music, even if those foremothers and forefathers were not musicians themselves, they contribute to the notion of a blood heritage to this musical tradition. Individual musicians as well as media representations often connect music, traditional music specifically, to nationalist sentiments. In 2005, I interviewed two of Ziyeeva’s students, Mehrihon Muminova and Ilyos Arabov, about the music that they played. The conversation quickly turned to a discussion of music’s connection to national pride: TM:

This traditional music, is it necessary for society? Of course, of course; it is very necessary, for example . . .. I A : It’s our nationalism. TM: And what exactly is nationalism? M M: Nationalism is, nationalism is Uzbekistan. For example, every nation state has nationalism. For example, the culture of our people, that is nationalism. Our priceless valuables from ancient times, those are nationalism. (Interview, February 13, 2005, Tashkent) M M:

This idea of priceless ancient valuables is very prevalent in media representations of Uzbek traditions, especially those not connected with Soviet reconstruction projects (even though traditional music was of course standardized and greatly affected by Soviet projects). This idea of a pre-Soviet legacy has been very important to traditional music’s rise in public acclaim. Ziyeeva’s students speak of their music with great pride and associate it with other genres more associated with village culture than with the urban elite of Silk Road cities. In the same interview quoted above, Ilyos Arabov made this comment about national genres and music’s connection to nationalism: So at our nationalism’s foundation, there is music. There are lullabies and yallalar [folk songs], our lapar [singing and dancing genre], the yor yor we sing at weddings. Then there is our style of playing—all of it at its basic level is music. The way people sing at weddings with ohang [melodic style] is part of nationalism. (Interview, February 13, 2005, Tashkent)

In this comment, it is clear that folk songs as well as melodic style are considered vital for the expression of unique national character. As mentioned earlier, this national character to traditional music is the result of a nationalizing project beginning in the Soviet era and continuing in the post-independence era. These connections to an ancient past are often somewhat tenuous, since it is difficult to connect many aspects of performance practice to the pre-Soviet era. Indeed, traditional music is most noticeably traditional in its stark contrast with folk orchestras, which display their modern interactions explicitly.

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The instruments used in traditional ensembles are much closer to historical versions than their reconstructed counterparts, but they have also undergone changes in the twentieth century, such as the use of nylon tied frets on various plucked lutes like the dutar and tanbur that are made of material similar to fishing line rather than traditional gut. It is worth noting that the dutar has maintained its silk strings in the traditional version (the reconstructed versions use nylon strings), which is seen as a very important tie to traditional practices, since nylon strings alter the timbre significantly (and also allow performers to play with louder volume). As such, traditional musicians are engaged deeply with modernity and in choosing which aspects of performance style and instrument materials to alter and which to preserve. Although the national rhetoric depends on the presentation of maqom and traditional music as wholly rooted in tradition, musicians are actively making choices about which aspects are flexible without losing important ties to what is seen as traditional practice (instrumental and vocal timbre is seen as highly important for both emotional expression and traditional sound by maqom performers). During the Soviet period, traditional ensembles in institutions grew larger, while still maintaining a heterophonic performance style. Instruments were often doubled in these ensembles and solo vocalists were often replaced by choruses, sometimes allowing groups of men and women to share a melodic line with an especially large tessitura. Further, the codification process that Rajabi engaged in (both by publishing the transcriptions and recording his versions at the state radio) can be seen as an important way in which this traditional music has sustained its revival practice with modern/non-traditional methods. These methods are not often criticized, rather they are often vaunted as highly practical and even vital to the continuation of the repertoire, both by musicians interested in continuing an important national tradition and its supporting government institutions and by the media interested in presenting Rajabi as a national figure.

Modernizing Ancient Traditions Traditional music is not the only genre to capitalize on the notion of ancient heritage. Certainly, arranged folk music places a great deal of importance on Uzbek music’s ancient traditions. However, most arranged folk musicians that I’ve spoken with claim that simply preserving a tradition is insufficient. They describe the music that they play in terms of modernizing traditions and making them relevant to the contemporary situation. Founding director of the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra, Feruza Abdurahimova, posited the importance of allowing music to develop and be modern: Even many of our musicologists and a few of our musicians look at us [i.e. arranged folk musicians] like enemies. You understand me, right? You’ve noticed, right? They say “there, they’ve ruined Uzbek music,” but it’s not so. I simply can’t agree with that. Why? Because ancient traditions, of course they are our foundation, but at the same

266   Tanya Merchant time we have such riches of musical instruments. To keep these ancient traditions under locks, that means that we refuse to develop. (Interview, January 4, 2005, Tashkent)

This is an especially interesting argument, when considering the roots of arranged folk music in the Soviet Era. On the one hand, musicians have felt pressure to link their music to a historical legacy, yet on the other hand, arranged folk music was developed during a time when Soviet institutions valued innovation, modernity, and Western forms. As such, a melding of the two ideologies occurs, and musicians represent arranged folk music in a way that highlights the roots in Uzbek folk tunes and folk instruments, at the same time that those instruments and musical roots are not kept static. This idea that old or traditional musics need to develop and modernize is a main aspect of the adversarial relationship between traditional music and arranged folk music. This notion also falls back on Soviet era rhetoric surrounding the updating of “backward” musics (like the music of the peasants and of non-European peoples). Indeed, the arranged folk musicians with whom I spoke are often searching for ways to discuss the continued relevance of their music in the post-Soviet era (some of which are discussed in the following section). This is especially difficult, since framing the issue in terms of modernity harkens back strongly to Soviet rhetoric. This notion of modernizing tradition, however, does fit with some of the scholarly work on folk revivals that note that revivals often are selective of how music is presented on a concert stage. Eyerman and Jamison would probably frame arranged folk music as still being part of a tradition, since they posit that: “a tradition, for us, is a process of connecting a selected or ‘usable’ past with the present—with ongoing, contemporary life” (1998: 29). Both traditional music and arranged folk music engage in the selection of the parts of history that are “usable.” Indeed, traditional musicians often trace their musical traditions to master musicians in the courts of Bukhara, while ignoring musical histories of other classes. Beyond the selective use of history, Eyerman and Jamison’s description of tradition as a process rather than a static practice allows arranged folk music to be viewed clearly as a revival practice. Arranged folk musicians describe their connections to tradition as a starting point for musical innovation, rather than as a valuable legacy that must be preserved authentically. Even as arranged folk music can be viewed within the framework of tradition as process, there are tangible differences between the relatively natural development of genre as directed by its practitioners (as Eyerman and Jamison describe) and the very explicit project to modernize a tradition, such as occurred during the creation of folk orchestras in the Soviet era. Scholars during the Soviet era placed great importance on the project of reconstruction as a way of uplifting various peoples and their cultures into modernity. S. Zakrzhevskaya’s quote about the importance of harmonizing Uzbek music is indicative of that approach: “The problem of harmonization in Uzbekistan is extraordinarily important, for harmony is tied to the formation of a modern Uzbek national musical style” (1968:  212). In this, the direct link between modernity and harmony (i.e. Western-style harmony) is made explicit. Those who continue to find performing in or

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listening to folk orchestras to be a fulfilling and meaningful experience appreciate participating in such a well-defined modernizing project. Musicians and enthusiasts praise arranged folk music that is marked by harmony and equal temperament as a way to participate in the global modern. However, as Abdurahimova noted above, many people are uncomfortable with such ideologically motivated changes in musical structure and practice. Zemtsovsky and Kunanbaeva describe the creation of folk music by the Soviet government as deeply connected with a modernization process that created a sense of state control and led away from authentic practices. The Party waged a fierce campaign against old customs and traditions. New socialist festivals and ceremonies were continuously created and forced on people, with accompanying music, songs, and instructions distributed all over the country. The motto was, “new times—new songs—new customs—new traditions—new human beings, the builders of communism.” In fact, it was a movement from genuine folklore to, let us say, “trade-union folklore,” i.e., a new and artificial tradition organized from above as a means of “improving” the style, texts, melodies, and musical instruments, and aimed toward general unification, control, and administration. (Zemtsovsky and Kunanbaeva 1997: 19)

This commentary illustrates the sentiment that Abdurahimova rails against: the idea that reconstruction “ruined” Uzbek music. Indeed, many people feel that way, but the people who continue to perform in folk orchestras and study reconstructed instruments in schools and conservatories are actively creating a meaningful place for arranged folk music in a post-Soviet context. Musicians who specialize in reconstructed instruments maintain that innovation is vital for any living tradition and emphasize arranged folk music's importance in the post-Soviet era in terms of international appeal and legibility, because of its shared harmonic language with Western art music and other European genres.

Internationalism/Universalism In order for arranged folk music to continue to develop out of its perceived ideological roots in Soviet political discourse, many musicians now discuss the priorities of the genre in terms of striving to appeal to international audiences and reach a universal standard of beauty (which is assumed to be one aligned with Western art music). In light of this priority shift, goals of musical performance have changed in the post-Soviet era. The desired audience is now comprised of citizens of Uzbekistan (whose national pride is meant to be bolstered by receiving such performances) and international audiences, who are said to receive performances of both genres as publicity for and education about Uzbekistan’s valuable culture and rich history. This perceived shift toward the international arena exists for both traditional and arranged folk musicians. Indeed, leading performers of traditional music are very proud of their tours in Europe, the Middle East,

268   Tanya Merchant and other former-Soviet republics; they often describe with pride their sold-out tours and standing ovations received abroad. Conductors of folk orchestras like Feruza Abdurahimova (of the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra) and Faruq Sodiqov (of the Tuxtasin Jalilov State Folk Orchestra) ignore the popular international tours of traditional musicians like Munojat Yulicheeva, Malika Ziyeeva, and her students, and claim that a primary charge of their orchestras is to translate Uzbek traditional legacy into an auditory language that non-Uzbeks can comprehend. Sodiqov made this point very explicitly in a 2005 interview, where he strongly suggested that Westerners who were not specialists would not be interested in traditional music as more than exotica, since European audiences are only accustomed to tempered tuning: FS: You’re a musicologist—to you [traditional music] is interesting. It’s interesting

the first time, the second time, or you’re a specialist therefore you are doing it, so traditional performance is [always] interesting to you. But the general listener is interested the first time, but the second time, it already sounds like out of tune playing, and it’s already uninteresting because the general listener’s ears are adjusted to hearing tempered tuning. . . TM: Now audiences are more interested in equal tempered things or in traditional ones? FS: In Uzbekistan, we have some of each kind [of audience]. . . But if you go to European countries, all the strings are tempered, and there’s nothing traditional. They say it’s out of tune. (Interview, May 22, 2005, Tashkent)

This perception that European or Western audiences can’t appreciate Uzbek intonation is a very common trope in the conversations of arranged folk players. They take pride in the folk orchestra’s ability to play in equal temperament that allows them access to the performance of European classical repertoire as well as the benefit of being able to translate Uzbek folk music into a pitch collection that they see as internationally valued. Feruza Abdurahimova echoed this sentiment when discussing performances of her Sog’diana Orchestra, emphasizing the orchestra’s modernity and its “universal value” that could be understood by all: “[The folk orchestra] is the most universal collective, which can converse with every country of the world and no one will consider such a collective foreign or alien” (interview, January 4, 2005, Tashkent). (See web Figure  12.1 for a photograph of Abdurahimova conducting the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra.) This seems to shift the argument of the Soviet era about music in need of equal temperament and harmony in order to transform from “backward” into modern, to music that still needs such transformation in order for international audiences to appreciate it. Abdurahimova continues to successfully court international attention for her Sog’diana Folk Orchestra. Over the course of my fieldwork, I’ve seen her give concerts in conjunction with consulates and embassies from Italy, France, and Korea. Usually these concerts involve her orchestra performing a program comprised of compositions

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and arranged folk tunes from the nation that has an embassy sponsoring the concert. Such concerts are often attended by consular officials stationed in Tashkent, as well as supporters of the folk orchestra, and are touted as opportunities for international understanding and appreciation. During the opening remarks at the concert for the Korean delegation, Abdurahimova made the following commentary that links both the nationalist sentiment so prevalent in the arts in Uzbekistan and the positioning of folk orchestras as agents for international understanding: “the first order of the orchestra is to play Uzbek folk music, then music by Uzbek composers, and finally, music of other peoples” (speech given at the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra Concert, April 7, 2005). Despite words that prioritized Uzbek music, the concert offered primarily repertoire from the third category, including an arrangement of the famous Korean folksong “Arirang” and various compositions by Korean composers of Western art music. The concert for the Italian delegation included works by Verdi and Puccini, and the concert for the French delegation included works by Bizet and Saint-Saens. These concerts display the connection between notions of modernity, of international value, and of the final issue discussed in this essay, academic rigor and literacy. The competence with which folk orchestral musicians can perform works from the Western canon is a source of great pride and is taken as a sign that they are gramotnyj or musically literate. Although there is currently a great deal of pride placed on national musics, in terms of both traditional and arranged folk music, to a great extent, musical literacy is still presented in Western terms.

Academic/Literate Music The notion of musical literacy is one that is very important to musicians in order to legitimize their status as educated professionals. Performers of both traditional music and arranged folk music take great pains to highlight their ability to read notation and understand solfège and harmony. Arranged folk music is especially embroiled in the discourse of academic status and musical literacy. Most arranged folk musicians emphasize the academic nature of their discipline and demonstrate this by performing music by European composers on their instrument; by reading Western notation during performances; and by performing complex solos with harmonic accompaniment. During my fieldwork, the most dramatic illustration of the idea that arranged folk is an academic musical practice that differentiates it from other music occurred in 2003, when I attended a concert in the large concert hall of the conservatory. I sat down in my seat in the audience and a conservatory student whom I did not recognize sat down beside me. “I know you! You play the dutar,” she said to me, “you’re a student of Malika Ziyeeva.” I replied that yes, I was a dutar student of Ziyeeva and that I had travelled from the United States to study Uzbek music. This student was quite enthusiastic and mentioned that she too was a dutar player. When I asked who her teacher was and why I hadn’t met her before, she replied that she studied in a different department, in the akademik fakulteti (the academic department). At the

270   Tanya Merchant time, I had never heard arranged folk music referred to as “academic” and was confused by the term. I asked if she was a musicologist. No, she wasn’t a musicologist, she studied dutar, but in the department that was academic where she learned harmony and studied notation. I found this quite curious, since she was clearly evoking what she perceived as a meaningful contrast with the traditional department. As my research continued, I found further references to arranged folk music as academic that implied a contrast with non-academic folk and traditional music. Feruza Abdurahimova provided one of these references to academic style: Our collective Sog’diana, this is an academic collective . . . it is a new contemporary style, which was born in the twentieth century. Suddenly to perform harmony with the ancient Uzbek instruments, of course it was a very complicated task for us. (Interview, January 4, 2005, Tashkent)

Abdurahimova combines the discourse of academic playing with modernization and contemporaneity. Faruq Sodiqov combined the same notions to describe the importance of Ashot Petrosiants’ project of reconstruction: The playing style—it’s a different manner of performing. It needs to be academic. . .Petrosiants went down that path to academic performance; he went down a new and very progressive road for his style of playing. (Interview, May 22, 2005, Tashkent)

Both Sodiqov and Abdurahimova are staking their claim for the legitimacy of folk orchestral performance as a modern academic pursuit. This framework of academic status is deeply connected with the ability to perform the music of European composers and such priorities have existed since the Soviet era. Theodore Levin noted a similar emphasis on European composers in the conservatory during his research in the 1970s, which he described as “the idolization of European masterpieces as a kind of musical rite of passage in the training of young ethnic music performers” (Levin 1980: 154). This idolization pervades the conservatory as an institution, such that students in all departments are taught to look to what is perceived as the universal value of the Western canon. Although students and faculty in the arranged folk music department are more explicit about the value and priority placed on one’s facility in interpreting Western notation, it is certainly a valued skill for traditional musicians as well. The authenticity of one’s performance practice depends upon one’s lineage to great teachers who transmit traditional music via oral-imitative methods (which they point out, is just as rigorous and academic as learning from written music). However, in institutions like the conservatory and state radio, the ability to read a score is very much required. Students in the conservatory (including those in the traditional music department) take courses in Western harmony and solfège, and all are required to be fluent readers of Western notation. This is important even for traditional music students, since the standard versions

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of traditional tunes are currently preserved in volumes like those by Rajabi that exist in Western notation. Levin noted the importance of these volumes of notations in conservatory pedagogy even in the 1970s and 80s: The transcriptions [of the Shashmaqom] were in standard staff notation and provided a single melodic line that gave the core pitches of each song and tune. Details of interpretation—dynamics, melodic ornamentation, tempo—were conveyed by teachers during private lessons with such unerring exactitude that they may as well have been inscribed in granite. (Levin 1996b: 47)

Throughout my fieldwork, I  found the standard transcriptions just as prevalent, although most instructors seemed to encourage more flexibility in interpretation than the situation that Levin described from his fieldwork. Students in private lessons and in the conservatory’s traditional ensembles were often given photocopies of relevant pieces from these volumes and told to look at them for reference and as a memory aid. Repertoire in the traditional department is taught primarily via the oral imitative method that is thought to hearken back to the master-apprentice tradition associated with Central Asian maqom. Performances and jury examinations are given from memory in the traditional department, as opposed to those in the arranged folk department where students often read off scores. Despite the importance placed on musical literacy in the lessons and rehearsals that I observed in the traditional music department, the previously mentioned photocopied transcriptions were rarely referred to except to check on lyrical texts for vocal pieces. One glaring exception to this trend happened while I  was observing the freshman maqom ensemble’s rehearsals as it prepared for the Yunus Rajabi Maqom Competition in fall 2003. The ensemble was comprised of approximately a dozen freshman students who majored in traditional music. One of the pieces that the ensemble was preparing was “Muxamassi Nasrulloi,” a complex instrumental piece in buzruq, the first maqom of the Shashmaqom’s six maqoms. The rhythmic mode for this piece is especially complex, with one cycle comprising 32 beats. At one point during a rehearsal, one of the performers experienced a memory lapse that the director, gijakist Salohiddin Azizboev, noticed. He had the students begin again and when that musician repeated his lapse, Azizboev spoke very sternly and asked one of the students to pull out their photocopied scores. He placed the score in front of the student and asked him to read it through. This was, of course, further complicated by the fact that the students performed a version of the piece that was not completely aligned with the version that Yunus Rajabi transcribed in his volume. As the student struggled to resolve the conflict between the written version and the version that group was rehearsing, Azizboev asked what the problem was and if this student could read music. He went on to warn the entire ensemble that they needed to read fluently, that they had such a bounty of riches preserved by Rajabi, and that they no longer had to have the epic memories that their forefathers required. All along, he was emphasizing the need for good music literacy and reading skills. This emphasis on

272   Tanya Merchant literacy clashed with the bulk of traditional musicians’ musical education involving rote learning and memorization. Nonetheless, the valorization of written music is very much present in the traditional music department and is one of the ways that traditional musicians posit their high status as professional and educated performers. Indeed, Malika Ziyeeva emphasized that her students could play anything that people in the department of arranged folk music, or the department of popular music (estrada) were asked to do. She went on to emphasize that all her students could read music and knew solfège, but were also very fluent in the complex structures of maqom and that maqom was much more complex a system, such that it rendered all other genres simple (interview, July 14, 2009, Tashkent). With such overlap in training, but diverging practices and ideological stances (valorizing modernization versus tradition, prioritizing written scores versus teaching lineage in the oral tradition, and harmonic versus heterophonic textures), the lines of tension between performers of arranged folk music and traditional music are highly contested, despite their many shared practices. The divisions between the two genres seem to be very much fueled by coexistence in state-run institutions like the conservatory and the radio station, which places them in competition for resources within those establishments.

Conclusion Although the divisions between these two revival genres seem very well defined, there are areas of connection and commonality. Despite divergent musical aesthetics, both styles are involved in the larger practice of revival and musicians are engaging in these revival practices as a way of performing meaningful, beautiful music, and also as a way of participating in the larger national project. The tensions between practices using oral imitative methods as opposed to written transmission seem trivial, when their larger function is the same (i.e., when both provide their musical styles with a greater sense of historical legacy and national relevance). Indeed, as much as one style focuses more on notions of tradition and the other on notions of the modern, each style is negotiating space for simultaneous engagement with both. As such, there are musicians who wish to emphasize common ground and diffuse perceived tensions between the two factions. Often, such musicians point out that the general public does not delineate between reconstructed instruments and traditional instruments; further, they often emphasize that traditional ensembles have incorporated the reconstructed instruments that they find useful, like the four-stringed gijak and the reconstructed Kashgar rubab. Ro’zibi Hodjaeva is one of these who wish to emphasize the utility of having knowledge of both traditions: It’s necessary not to divorce the two [styles]. Traditional performance and [arranged] folk style shouldn’t be separated from one another. Traditional performing style is

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needed and folk style is also needed. If they say “you don’t mess with us and we don’t mess with you,” they’ve already become enemies—this is my thought on the subject. We don’t need adversarial relationships. We need . . . to learn from one another. We need to take the things that we don’t know and need to give the things that they don’t know. Performance needs to be rich; it needs to grow richer. (Interview, August 5, 2009, Tashkent)

Hodjaeva, with whom I also studied dutar, sought to underscore the continuity of dutar performance from traditions that predate the Soviet Union through to the variety of performance styles in the post-Soviet era. (See web Figures 12.2 and 12.3 for comparison: photos of Hodjaeva playing the reconstructed tenor dutar versus Ziyeeva playing the traditional dutar—note the different right hand position when playing, the slightly different size of the instruments, the machine tuning pegs on the reconstructed dutar, and the differently shaped sound holes .) Hodjaeva has consistently worked to find new outlets for her music, including by teaching dutar at a Japanese cultural center. She contextualizes the music that she plays and teaches within a narrative that includes traditional music and pre-Soviet history. For Hodjaeva, Ziyeeva, Abdurahimova, and all the musicians with whom I interact, the act of remembering various pasts is a contentious and emotional endeavor, one that brings up the tensions between academic disciplines and performing styles. As Svetlana Boym notes, “longing is universal, nostalgia can be divisive” (2001: xiii). The divisions between folk orchestral musicians and traditional performers are often vast, mainly as a result of the stories that they tell about their music. It is not only arranged folk musicians who acknowledge the commonalities between both practices. Although traditional musicians may be wary of having their music co-opted by arranged folk musicians, many emphasize that they hold no enmity for musicians who specialize in arranged folk music. They simply continue to experience tensions related to the struggle to have their music accepted in state institutions. As such, traditional musicians are also involved in a very modern project of presenting historical music in contexts that didn’t exist when the music originated. Levin notes this, saying that the Shashmaqom “is an elite music designed for an elite that no longer exists” (Levin 1993: 56). Staged performance in concerts and weddings are now the primary outlet for maqom and related traditional genres. Especially when filtered through institutions and performed on the concert stage, traditional musicians are actively reinforcing notions of Uzbek history that are vital to the current national project and to contemporary nostalgia for a non-Soviet Uzbek history. They are actively presenting music that is considered old and historical as continuously relevant even when not arranged. Music is so powerful within this national narrative because of “the idea that folk music represents the true music of a nation [that] came into being with the rise of the modern nation-state and the desire to identify national characteristics of cultures” (Livingston 1999: 75). Both styles of music are implicated in the creation of a pre-Soviet national narrative for which there is much nostalgia. This

274   Tanya Merchant nostalgia and reimagining that arranged folk and traditional music engenders connects with Svetlana Boym’s definition that Nostalgia . . . is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. (Boym 2001: xiii)

This nostalgic remembering of the past is a vital aspect of both revival movements, as they seek to find relevance for their practices within current contexts. It is not necessarily important whether the history that performers and listeners of traditional music or arranged folk music imagine is thoroughly accurate; it is important that both revived folk musics provide a meaningful way to access a sense of history that has relevance to performers’ lives and to their current post-Soviet and newly nationally independent situation.

Notes 1. I take this definition from Tamara Livingston’s (1999) article, where she describes revivalists as “align[ing] themselves with a particular historical lineage. . .[with] legitimacy [that] is grounded in reference to authenticity and historical fidelity” (66), and from Neil Rosenberg’s definition of revival as a twentieth-century phenomenon involving the presentation of new or renewed music as old (1993: 17–21). My consideration of Uzbek music within a revival framework is also influenced by Chris Goertzen’s account of Norwegian folk revivals, where he describes “more-or-less self-conscious revivals structured around calendars of festivals . . . each ‘revives’ selected cultural goods in ways representing the modern needs of those sponsoring the revival, needs that may change as one set of sponsors succeeds another” (1998: 99). 2. See Levin (1996a) and Olsen (2004) for accounts of the Pokrovsky Ensemble and others throughout Russia and Ukraine. 3. Various organizations provided grants that funded my field research, including:  the American Councils for International Education, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, UC Santa Cruz’s Committee on Research, and UC Santa Cruz’s Arts Research Institute. 4. The term reconstructed was the most common used to describe the instruments employed in folk orchestras and taught in the halq cholg’u departments in educational institutions. The term is not favored by all, especially those who embrace the idea that constructing such instruments with equal temperament and non-traditional materials is an important way to allow Uzbek folk music to continue to grow and change. Such people often favor the term modernized instead. 5. For examples of Uzbek/Tajik maqom, listen to At the Bazaar of Love (1997), Invisible Face of the Beloved (2005), Tajikistan (1997), and Uzbekistan, Mâqâm Dugâh (2002). (Unfortunately, there are no readily accessible commercial recordings of Uzbek arranged folk orchestras.)

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6. Traditional music’s importance within the project of maintaining separate ethno-national identities between Soviet republics and later independent nations in the region is evidenced by the focus on standardizing both an Uzbek and a Tajik version of the Shashmaqom (“six modes,” a repertoire of court music associated with the city of Bukhara, traceable to the fifteenth century), despite the bilingual, multicultural nature of the repertoire in practice. Yunus Rajabi’s creation of the Uzbek version (and his resulting fame) is discussed later in the essay. Boboqul Fayzullayev and other scholars were engaged in a similar codification/ standardization process version in the Tajik SSR that resulted in a five-volume collection of the Shashmaqom with Tajik song texts, that represents the Tajik canon currently used in Tajik institutions (Fayzullayev, et al. 1957-1967). Although the Fayzullayev and Rajabi versions are similar in content and function, Fayzullayev does not seem to enjoy the same renown in Tajikistan as Rajabi does in Uzbekistan, even though his volumes are as much in use in Tajik institutions as Rajabi’s are in Uzbekistan. For an excellent account that traces the history of Central Asian maqom and other urban musical practices, as well as unpacking the shared nature of the tradition between Tajiks and Uzbeks, as well as Muslims and Bukharan Jews, see Levin (1996b). 7. One primary exception to this lacuna was the traditional ensemble that Rajabi founded at the Tashkent Musical Technicum in 1925, but which was short-lived due to the creation of the conservatory and the importance placed on the reconstruction projects of the 1930s (Odilov 1995: 34). 8. State-run musical institutions were the primary locales for revival practices, but traditional music and non-arranged folk music did continue outside of institutions to a certain extent. Turgun Alimatov (1922–2008) is the most famous traditional musician of the twentieth century who was educated outside of Soviet music education institutions. He was largely self-taught, learning mostly by listening to musicians and copying them in private. Levin (1996b) describes his musical history, including his role performing in the traditional ensemble associated with the Muqimiy Theater (56–69). He also taught lessons and adjudicated traditional music competitions at the Uzbek State Conservatory, while I was doing fieldwork there. 9. Kollej is the Uzbek word for the Russian term uchilish that refers to specialized high schools attended often for two years either as a terminal degree or before continuing on to higher education at a conservatory or institute. 10. There are a few exceptions, most notably the Sog’diana Folk Orchestra, which Feruza Abdurahimova founded in the early years of Uzbek independence, with the orchestra’s official debut in 1994. Sog’diana is a unique case also in that it began as a private enterprise (virtually impossible in the Soviet era) and later gained state support.

References Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Goertzen, Chris. 1998. “The Norwegian Folk Revival and the Gammeldans Controversy.” Ethnomusicology 42(1): 99–127. Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. 1998. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fayzullayev, Boboqul, Shokhnazar Sakhibov, and Fazliddin Shakhobov. 1957–1967. Shashmakom, vols. 1-5, edited by Viktor Beliaev. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Muzyka.”

276   Tanya Merchant Levin, Theodore. 1980. “Music in Modern Uzbekistan: The Convergence of Marxist Aesthetics and Central Asian Tradition.” Asian Music 12 (1): 149–158. ——. 1984. “The Music and Tradition of the Bukharan Shashmaqam in Soviet Uzbekistan,” vols. 1 and 2. Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University. ——. 1993. “The Reterritorialization of Culture in the New Central Asian States: A Report from Uzbekistan.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 25: 51–59. ——. 1996a. “Dmitri Pokrovsky and the Russian Folk Music Revival Movement.” In Retuning Culture:  Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Slobin, 14–35. Durham: Duke University Press. ——. 1996b. The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens New York). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Matyoqubov, Otanazar. 2004. Maqomot. Tashkent: “Musiqa” Nashriyoti. Odilov, A. 1995. O’zbek Xalk Cholg’ularida Ijrochilik Tarixi. Tashkent: O’qituvchi. Olson, Laura J. 2004. Performing Russia:  Folk Revival and Russian Identity. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Rajabi, Yunus. 1955–1959. O’zbek Halq Musiqasi, vols. 1–8. Tashkent: O’zbekiston SSR Davlat Nashriyoti. ——. 1970–1976. Shashamaqom, vols. 1–6. Tashkent: Gafur Gulom Nashriyoti. Rosenberg, Neil, ed. 1993. Transforming Traditions:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sobirova, Sofiya and Feruza Abdurahimova. 1994. Ashot Petrosiants. Tashkent: Murabbiy. Suny, Ronald Grigor. 2001. “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations.” The Journal of Modern History 73: 862–896. Tomoff, Kiril. 2004. “Uzbek Music’s Separate Path:  Interpreting ‘Anticosmopolitanism’ in Stalinist Central Asia, 1949-52.” Russian Review 63: 212–40. Zakrzhevskaya, S. 1968. “K Voprosu o Stanovlenii I  Kharaktere Garmonii v Uzbekskoj Professional’noj Muzyke.” In Ocherki Istorii Muzykal’noj Kul’tury Uzbekistana, edited by I. Rusanova and I. Akhmedova, 212–223. Tashkent: Uqituvchi. Zemtsovsky, Izaly and Alma Kunanbaeva. 1997. “Communism and Folklore.” In Folklore and Traditional Music in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by James Porter, 3–23. Los Angeles: UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology.

Discs Cited At the Bazaar of Love. The Ilyas Malayev Ensemble. 1997. Shanachie. 64081. Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. 2005. Music of Central Asia, vol. 2. Smithsonian Folkways SFWCD40521. Tajikistan: Maqâm Navâ. 1997. Ocora Records PID6541. Uzbekistan, Mâqâm Dugâh: Uzbek-Tajik Shash-maqâm. 2002. Maison des Cultures du Monde W260111.

C HA P T E R  13

T WO R E V I VA L I S T M O M E N T S I N I R A N IA N C L A S S I C A L  M U S I C L AU DA N NO O SH I N

The social history of Iranian classical music in the twentieth century has been inexorably shaped by Iran’s complex relationship with the outside world, particularly with Europe and—post World War II—the United States. In this chapter, I focus on two periods of recent Iranian history in order to explore notions of musical revival and their applicability to Iran. A number of scholars have proposed theoretical models for understanding the nature of musical revivalism and different kinds of revival. What is interesting in the case of Iran is that the two historical “moments” that I examine—the first in the 1960s and 1970s, the second following the 1979 Revolution—appear to represent the far ends of a continuum perhaps most clearly set out by Max Peter Bauman in his discussion of “conflicting models” of “purism (with a tendency towards stabilizing or even regressive preservation) and of syncretism (with a tendency towards reinventing the past by emancipatory creation to the point of breaking the local and regional frontiers” (1996: 80). Although these two trajectories might seem diametrically opposed, both emerged from essentially the same impulse: a reaction against the progressive encroachment of Western music and culture in Iran during the twentieth century. For my discussion of these two historical periods, I draw primarily on extant historical sources (including the very few scholarly writings that address issues of revival in this tradition), as well as on published and personal interviews with musicians and others. I conclude by considering the postrevival implications for contemporary Iranian classical music practice.

Musical Modernizers: 1920s–1940s The first period of revival discussed is that of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the processes of modernization and Westernization started by the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza

278   Laudan Nooshin Shah (r. 1925–1941), gained increased momentum under the rule of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941–1979). Because it was primarily a reaction against these processes that constituted one of the main drivers of the first revival, I begin by outlining some of the earlier changes and the key figures who helped to bring them about. From the early decades of the twentieth century, music was impacted first by the arrival of sound recording and later by broadcasting, the establishment of formal public concerts, the institutionalization of music education, the adoption of music notation, and the increasing popularity of imported instruments such as piano and violin. Coinciding as such changes did with the early attempts of the Pahlavi regime to forge a distinctly Iranian form of modernity, such developments became imbued with what later came to be termed qarbzadegi,1 an “intoxication” with the West and things Western.2 The most prominent musical “modernizer” of the first half of the twentieth century, and perhaps the most controversial figure in Iranian music history, was Ali Naqi Vaziri (1887–1979), a former army colonel who, in the period following World War I, traveled abroad for the purpose of studying music, the first Iranian to do so. After several years in France and Germany, Vaziri returned to Iran in 1923, the same year that Reza Pahlavi assumed control as Prime Minister following the 1921 coup d’état. Many of the new ideas that Vaziri brought with him from Europe resonated strongly with the hegemonic discourses of the time that promoted the (rapid) transformation of Iran into a modern, secular nation-state. Vaziri became immensely influential in musical circles in the 1930s and 1940s, not least through his position as principal (from 1928) of the Madreseh-ye Musik, the first music school in Iran (run under the auspices of the Ministry of Education; this school became the Honarestan-e Ali-ye Musiqi conservatory in 1938). Although not a central figure in the later discussion here, many of those who will be considered saw themselves as standing against the reforms set in train by Vaziri and his followers, and it therefore seems pertinent to outline certain aspects of his work that came to be viewed as particularly problematic in later decades. Essentially, Vaziri set about modernizing Iranian music according to models he had encountered abroad: establishing large ensembles of traditional instruments, composing pieces for those ensembles in which Western functional harmony was applied to Iranian melodies, holding public concerts where these and other pieces were performed, promoting the use of staff notation and “modern” forms of music education, and so on.3 With the gradual rise of a Western-oriented middle class (increasingly educated abroad), among whom Western ideas and products were both fashionable and status symbols, Western music—and Iranian music refashioned according to Western models—came to accrue significant cultural capital. This was also the period when the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, the first orchestra in Iran, was founded as the Municipality Symphony Orchestra in 1933 by Gholamhossein Minbashian. The significance of Vaziri’s work for the current discussion is that it was embedded within a growing debate around the nature of modernity in Iran and the place of traditional values and culture within it. For Vaziri and his followers—including author and musician Ruhollah Khaleqi, who wrote the first and perhaps still best-known history of Iranian music (two volumes originally published in 1954 and 1956, respectively)—the

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future lay in following Western models in order to “improve” Iranian music, and they drew on a number of discourses to articulate this position. Perhaps the most problematic was the notion of musiqi-ye ‘elmi (“scientific music”), an expression used by Vaziri and his associates to refer to Western (European classical) music. Hence, Western music was “scientific” and Iranian music was its opposite—“unscientific” (qeyr-e ‘elmi), thus setting up a polarized binary from which many things followed: everything that Western music had—notation, large ensembles, harmony, and so on—was “scientific”; any music that lacked these attributes was not. This “self-othering” of Iranian traditional music (at that time generally known by the term musiqi-ye sonnati) was regularly invoked by musicians and others and became so deeply embedded in local discourse that, even though such terms later became largely discredited, one still comes across them. As with Reza Shah, the verdict of history on Vaziri’s work is that he was a man of his time, a time when government policies autocratically sought to position Iran on a trajectory of modernization and Westernization, and he should be understood in that context.4 For the discussion that follows, the revivalism of the 1960s and 1970s can only be understood relationally since it was principally concerned with reacting against the kinds of reforms initiated by Vaziri and thereafter strongly promoted by the government. Owe Ronström characterizes revival movements as being “engaged in struggles of one kind or another” (1996: 9). Among the examples he gives, the first beautifully epitomizes the form of revivalism that emerged in Iran in the 1960s, particularly in relation to moral aspects of the debate: Fight against modernity. Tradition is often used as a natural opposition to modernity. Modernity is seen as the distorting power, the agent of cultural entropy; tradition is history, stability, continuity. Often the struggle against modernity is expressed as a moral obligation to save the world, country, region or whatever from cultural demise and from unwanted change, or at least to change the direction of change into a morally better path. The moral aspect is important in understanding the passion of the fighters and the presence of so many “burning souls” within revival movements. (Ronström 1996: 8–9)

In the battle against musical modernity, Vaziri became the embodiment of the modernizing “evil” against which revival moralizing was directed. Among the many changes occurring at this time, perhaps the most significant was the arrival of broadcasting in 1939 and the establishment of Radio Tehran, the programming of which included a significant amount of music and which became available for the first time to a mass audience, thus helping to shift traditional music out of its previously elite circles. Vaziri assumed directorship of the Music Department at Radio Tehran in 1941 and, from this time onward, gathered together a group of musicians who became closely associated with the radio; it is noteworthy that many of these were Vaziri’s own pupils or associates. And it was this “radio generation” that the revivalists later became particularly critical of, invoking discourses that represent variations on the “struggles” described by Ronström, including the “fight against commercialization” and against foreign incursions into national musical expression. For instance, former head of the

280   Laudan Nooshin Music Department at the University of Tehran, Majid Kiani, comments on radio programming during this period, claiming that the music did not adhere to the canonic radif repertoire, but that musicians instead played freely (“be radif nemipardākhtand va be soorat-e āzād minavākhtand”) (2004: 152).5 Kiani criticizes Radio Tehran for not seeking to preserve (hefz) Iranian culture and for broadcasting music that is “pleasing to the public” (āmeh pasand) and “non-Iranian” (qeyr-e Irāni), particularly that drawing on Turkish and Arab influences. Thus, some musicians came to regard the radio as producing a somewhat acculturated form of Iranian music, and, of course, it was this music that was reaching the largest audience, many of whom were experiencing traditional music for the first time. More broadly, alongside changes within the traditional music culture, during the 1950s, Western music of various kinds became increasingly available through the import of recordings (at this time, still on vinyl disc). The high symbolic and cultural capital attached to such music, combined with a certain view that traditional music was increasingly incompatible with a modernizing nation, led to a decline in interest in traditional music.

The First Revivalist Movement: Return to the Qajar Ancestors Revivals are a coming together, a convergence of various circumstances and personal motivations centring on the fascinations and emulation of a music culturally and historically distanced from the present. Music revivals are a product of both specific historical circumstances as well as the general intellectual and social trends. (Livingston 1999: 81)

What, then, were the main circumstances and motivations that led to the emergence of the first revivalist movement in the mid 1960s? Some of these have been mentioned: the growing marginalization of traditional music at a time when the social and political landscape was marked by the relentless march toward modernization and Westernization; and, alongside this, the wide availability of mediated forms of music (most obviously through the radio), increasingly viewed by some musicians as deviating from the “authentic” tradition. There was another important driver that I discuss later: The influence of certain Western scholars and musicians who visited Iran from the late 1950s and whose writings also became available in translation, most notably as articles in the magazine Majaleh-ye Musik (Music Magazine). Many of these individuals promoted a strongly preservationist agenda. In the mid-1960s, then, a number of musicians became interested in researching and promoting historical playing styles as a means of returning to an idealized, more “authentic” past. And it was the pre-Pahlavi Qajar period (1785–1925) that became the focus of such idealization, this particular period having been denigrated since the 1920s

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as a symbol of regressive tradition and “backwardness” through the discourses of the modernizing Pahlavis.6 This was the start of what music sociologist Mohammad Reza Fayaz (one of the few Iranian scholars to have written critically about this period) calls “the journey back to history . . . [as] one old technique after another was revived and Qajar musicians experienced a renaissance” (1998: 103). And it was not just Qajar music, but specifically the court repertoire of the period between c.1850 and 1900 which came to be presented as the historically “pure” (asil) tradition. To be validated as asil, music’s historical pedigree had to be traceable directly to the Qajar ancestors and a time before the modernizing excesses of the Pahlavis. The paucity of historical records prior to this, particularly between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, rendered other possible (earlier) authentic pasts inaccessible—this was as far back a journey as the historical record would permit. Talking to musicians and others about this period, sources are divided on the question of whether this began as a deliberate turn to Qajar practice or simply as an attempt to ground the music in less acculturated forms, thus leading to a search for historical rootedness that inevitably found expression in earlier, “purer” (that is, pre-Pahlavi) forms. Indeed, the extent to which local discourses explicitly framed what was happening in terms of revival is unclear: It seems that the equivalent term, ehyā, was not widely used (although some sources suggest that it was used by Dariouche Safvate, regarded by many as the spiritual leader of the revival movement; one also finds occasional references to bāz-sāzi [“reconstruction”/“rebuilding”]),7 and musicians tended to explain their practice as a search for “authenticity” and “purity,” rather than a return per se (Sasan Fatemi, personal communication, August 2012). Local discourses will be considered further later. The revivalists would perhaps not have gained such prominence without the framework of institutional support within which they worked and from which they were inseparable. The most important development in this regard was the founding, in 1970, of the Markaz-e Hefz o Eshāeh-ye Musiqi-ye Irani (Center for the Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music, henceforth Markaz), a year after the establishment of the first university Music Department in Iran, at the University of Tehran. The Markaz operated under the auspices of the state-run Iranian Radio and Television Organization and was intended to be a center of research and teaching through which the tradition of Iranian classical music would be preserved. The co-founder and director until 1980 was Dariouche Safvate, and it was Safvate who became one of the primary figureheads of the revival movement. The work of the Markaz nicely illustrates Livingston’s observation that “revivals almost always have a strong pedagogical component in order to pass on the tradition in a controlled manner” (1999: 73), and it did this by gathering together musicians not involved with the radio (and therefore not generally known to the public) including, in the early years, such masters as Nur Ali Borumand (1905–1978), Said Hormozi (1897–1976), Yusef Forutan (1891–1978), Asghar Bahari (1905–1995), Abdollah Davami (1899–1980), and Mahmud Karimi (1927–1984). Promising young musicians, many of whom were students at the University of Tehran, were invited to study at the center, to carry out research, and later to teach there. This included several who went on to become prominent musicians, including Mohammad Reza Lotfi (b. 1947), Hossein

282   Laudan Nooshin Alizadeh (b. 1951), Parviz Meshkatian (1955–2009), Majid Kiani (b. 1941), Dariush Talai (b. 1953), Jalal Zolfonoun (b. 1937), and Parisa (b. 1950). Significantly, as will be discussed later, it was some of these very musicians who spearheaded the second revival of the early 1980s. The Markaz became a magnet for those concerned with the preservation of traditional music in Iran, since it gave young musicians direct access to some of the most knowledgeable individuals of the older generation—described by Dariush Talai (Head of the Music Department at the University of Tehran at the time of writing in 2012) as “masters in possession of the heritage” (ostādān-e mirāsdār)—many of whom would not under normal circumstances have agreed to teach at a public institution. The Markaz was marked by its focus on tradition, and teaching therefore took place without notation, an approach that contrasted with other institutions at this time, most notably the University of Tehran, where musical literacy was a requirement. The current director (in 2012), Majid Kiani, describes the Markaz in the early days as being an environment in which: students would consult completely historical [kāmelan qadimi] sources and they would play on the basis of those until that music would find continuity [with the present; tadāvom paydā bokonand]. (Kiani 2004: 153)

The Center was well-resourced, housing an archive, rehearsal and recording facilities, and an instrument-making section. Students were even provided with funding to enable them to focus on their studies and research (Talai in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 19).8 As well as the institutional support provided by the Centre, the prestige of working within a well-resourced, government-sponsored organization was an important factor in the influence exercised by revivalist ideas. However, it should be noted that this influence was felt almost exclusively within the relatively closed circles of musicians rather than among the general public. The latter continued to experience Iranian classical music primarily through the “acculturated” media of radio (and, by the early 1970s, television) and commercial recordings (mainly on cassette), including recordings of radio programs such as the Golhā series.9 The older masters who taught at the Markaz generally shunned public musical life, preferring to follow traditional modes of amateur connoisseurship. The activities of the Markaz rarely included public performances or recording, but instead focused on education and research; recordings that were made were largely for study purposes (Kiani 2004: 154). In hindsight, it becomes clear that the Markaz played a dual role in those early days, one intended, the other not: first, as a center for preserving the traditions of Iranian classical music from the acculturating forces of modernity; and second, as an incubator for a new generation of innovators who emerged into the public arena in the mid to late 1970s, before transforming the classical music in the 1980s. A central feature of the return to Qajar “authenticity” was the increased attention afforded to the canonic repertoire known as radif. This collection of several hundred pieces arranged according to mode, memorized during training, and subsequently

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forming the basis for improvised performance, was formalized by the Qajar court musicians from the mid-nineteenth century onward, most likely drawing on earlier, less formalized collections of pieces and melodic fragments. Providing a framework for creative performance and existing in variant forms, the radif took on a new (quasi-ideological) role in the 1960s as a way of measuring musicians’ adherence to tradition, motivated in part by the perception that knowledge of the radif was being lost. Moves were also made at this time to standardize the radif, the most grandiose scheme being the government’s attempt to publish a definitive version of the repertoire, for which purpose a committee of prominent musicians was appointed that was ultimately unable to reach agreement.10 However, one particular version of the radif, that of Qajar court musician Mirza Abdollah (1843–1918), did gain ascendancy, mostly through the teaching of Nur Ali Borumand, who, through his positions at both the University of Tehran and the Markaz, arguably became the most influential teacher at this time. It was largely through Borumand’s efforts that the radif of Mirza Abdollah, as taught by himself, became presented and promoted as the most authentic version of the repertoire.11 Somewhat ironically, then, in setting himself up as a representative of the authentic premodern tradition, Borumand was obliged to draw on the very modernizing processes of standardization in order to validate this particular version of the radif over others, in contrast to earlier practices in which different versions coexisted.12 This is a clear example of how “revivals are both a reaction against and a product of modernity; that is, they partake of the discourse of modernity even as they set themselves in opposition to certain manifestations of modernity” (Livingston 1999: 81). In the promotion of the radif and the emergence of a more rigid approach to the repertoire, we can clearly see the processes of objectification, commodification, and reification that Ronström argues are central to revival movements: “We separate a piece of the ever-changing flow of life and hold it up for ourselves as an object for appreciation, for study and as a model for action” (1996: 11). As musicians became increasingly judged on their connection with the past—implicitly understood as the Qajar past and demonstrated through knowledge of and adherence to the radif—and as discourses around notions of authenticity became increasingly moralistic, polarized binaries emerged in which the work of earlier musicians such as Vaziri became discredited and branded as “inauthentic.” In particular, the quality of esālat (“purity”) became associated with music at this time and references to “traditional music” (musiqi-ye sonnati) were gradually replaced by “pure” or “noble” music (musiqi-ye asil). “Purity” came to index “authenticity” and a powerful discursive network emerged, eventually rendering these terms the most value-laden concepts in Iranian music.13 By the late 1960s, concepts of “authenticity” and “purity” had become firmly embedded in the discourses of Iranian music culture: To be authentic meant being in touch with the music’s nineteenth-century roots, and music came to be judged on its relationship with this particular segment of the past. From this time onward, the “atmosphere of Iranian music became full of the past” (Fayaz 1998: 104), and what Kiani calls the “currency of purity” (nerkh-e esālat, 2004: 153) became the most valued aspect of music. Performances, recordings, and publications were dominated by retrospection,

284   Laudan Nooshin including the revival of old playing styles and the collection, reconstruction (bāz-sāzi-e āsār-e qadimi, Kiani 2004: 153), and publication of old pieces. This nostalgia for the Qajar past has continued through several decades, evidenced, for instance, in the proliferation of recordings entitled “in memory of . . .” (be yād-e . . .) in recent years. Nostalgia has become an immensely marketable commodity; as Bigenho observes, “Nostalgia for any kind of authenticity is a repetitive theme in questions of modernity” (2002: 167). Once again, we can note a central irony: that whereas the preoccupation with “authenticity” emerged in direct response to the rise of modernity, perceived loss of tradition, and so on, and the resulting discourses positioned tradition and modernity as antithetical, “the very categories of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ are themselves productions of modernity,” thus highlighting one of the “paradoxes of modernity, the ways in which the ‘traditional’ takes on a profile precisely in relation to the ‘modern’ ” (Bigenho 2002: 165).14 Thus, although many musicians of the 1960s saw themselves as standing against modernity, they drew on discourses that were very much part of modern thinking; indeed, the music itself was arguably as much a product of the processes of modernization and Westernization as that of Vaziri, so strongly criticized by traditionalists (see also Talai in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 19). In many ways, the appeal to Qajar practices and repertoires constituted a return-toroots form of revivalism familiar elsewhere: the reaction to a perceived loss of musical traditions—specifically knowledge of the radif—and the desire to resurrect a musical past with a strong focus on retrospection and nostalgia. According to Livingston, this is the “centrepiece of music revivals, around which all else is secondary”: In all musical revivals, the most important components for the formation of the aesthetic and ethical code are the ideas of historical continuity and organic purity of the revived practice. The term “authentic” is most commonly employed to distinguish the revived practice from other musics and to draw attention to its supposed “time depth” . . . . In revivalist discourse, historical continuity is often used to imply authenticity and vice versa. “Authentic” music is believed to have been passed on through the generations outside of (or in spite of) mainstream markets. (Livingston 1999: 74)

Much of this characterization aligns nicely with the case of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, despite the fact that, as noted, the term “revival” (ehyā) itself was not widely used; and, indeed, “movement” is perhaps too strong a term for what was a relatively small number of musicians, notwithstanding their immense influence. Fayaz describes the “return to the fundamentals of purity” (bāzgasht be mavāzin-e asil, 1998: 96) as a search for a lost identity, and Talai similarly explains that there was a strong sense among musicians of “something which had been lost [az dast ratfeh] which needed to be regained [bāz-yāft] and rebuilt [bāz-sāzi shavad]” (personal communication, August 2012). Certainly, an important element of the discourse was preserving Iranian national identity in the face of incursions from abroad, mostly from Europe and North America but also from neighboring Middle Eastern

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countries. Musicians were no doubt influenced by the general preoccupation among Iranian intellectuals for several decades previously with notions of nativism and racial purity (see Boroujerdi 1996 and Manafzadeh 1999), the latter most starkly evidenced in Reza Shah’s alignment of (Aryan) Iran with Nazi Germany during World War II, eventually leading to his removal from power by Allied forces. Parallels with revival movements elsewhere can also be seen in the discourses used by contemporary musicians to talk about the role of the Markaz in the 1970s, including the element of “struggle” highlighted by Ronström and discussed earlier. Consider the following from an interview with Talai: The Markaz defended music and informed people about real [vāqei] and pure/noble [asil] music. It trained a generation of musicians who had aims, who believed in what they were doing; and because of this at the time of the revolution, they could establish a better connection with so-called “events of the day” and music was able to play an important role in this process. (Quoted in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 20)

This was a battle in which “real” music was to be defended against its acculturated Other (i.e., Vaziri et al.). And, like other revivals, this one was in part an appeal to a largely constructed past. As Slobin notes, “it’s clear to many trained observers that even when people seem to be reviving things, that is, exhuming them and breathing life into them, what they get is something new” (1983: 37). Other than a few recordings of Qajar masters from the early twentieth century (generally of poor quality) that students at the Markaz were able to study, the tangible historical evidence for revivalist claims is tenuous. Even in the case of the radif, against which so many appeals to authenticity are made, there is no unbroken chain of transmission from the Qajar court musicians to the mid-twentieth century. However, approaching this from a different perspective, and viewing revival as “an overt and explicit act of authentication” (Bohlman 1988: 130), one can understand the “purity” movement as concerned not so much with validating a Qajar past, but rather as appealing to that past in order to validate new practices of the present.

The Influence of Western Musicologists In exploring the various factors that led to the emergence of revivalist ideas in the 1960s, it is interesting to consider the increasing number of foreign musicians and musicologists who visited Iran at this time and whose writings became available in translation. Mohammad Reza Fayaz is one of the few scholars to have written about the influence of these individuals on ideas about the preservation of Iranian music—ideas that were quite new to Iran—arguing that they helped legitimate the stance of traditionalists. In

286   Laudan Nooshin particular, he considers the work of French ethnomusicologist Alain Daniélou, who visited Iran several times and who became known through translations of articles and speeches published in Majaleh-ye Musik. For instance, a conference paper presented in Venice in 1957, in which Daniélou appealed to the people of Asia to preserve their musical traditions and denigrated “hybrid” music (“hybrid” translated into Persian as dorageh, lit. “two-blooded” or “mixed race”), was later published in Majaleh-ye Musik (issue 29). Daniélou also played a central role in the 1961 International Musical Congress, which was held in Tehran and focused on issues of preservation.15 Fayaz examines the impact in Iran of the conference and the resulting publications. In his summing-up speech—published in Majaleh-ye Musik 54—Daniélou called on musicians to keep their traditions pure, countering the arguments of those who accused traditionalists of ossifying the music. One of the outcomes of the conference was a set of recommendations to avoid “hybrid” music and promoting traditional methods of teaching. Daniélou was not alone: Other musicians also visited Iran at this time and contributed to the discursive trope according to which “Easterners” were spoiling their musical traditions whilst “Westerners” tried to save those same traditions (Fayaz 1998: 96–97). According to Fayaz, Daniélou’s ideas generated much debate in Iran, and he identifies two broad responses. The first is exemplified by Ali Mohammad Rashid (a writer for Majaleh-ye Musik), who, in an article in issue 32 (in response to the Venice paper published in issue 29), suggested that some musicians objected to Daniélou’s assumption that “development” in Iranian music would necessarily lead to “mixed race” music, whilst others accused Westerners of seeking to hold back the development of Iranian music and create a fossilized museum culture in order to maintain their oriental Others. Many asked by what authority an outsider like Daniélou could make such recommendations. Fayaz also reports on a roundtable discussion on the subject of acculturation, which took place during the Shiraz Arts Festival in 1968, at which Iranian composer Shahin Farhat argued that change is inevitable, against the views of ethnomusicologist panel members Daniélou and Trần Văn Khê. On the other hand, there were local musicians who supported the views of Daniélou and other foreign ethnomusicologists and welcomed the attention given to what they saw as the plight of Iranian classical music.16 And it was just at the time when such debates were taking place that Nur Ali Borumand and other “forgotten” musicians emerged onto the scene. I am not arguing here that ethnomusicologists such as Daniélou played a defining role, but that their presence was one of a number of factors that helped foster conditions conducive to the nurturing of revivalist thinking.

“The Pastness of the Present” The discussion so far has suggested a number of reasons for the emergence of revivalist ideas in Iran in the 1960s and how these resonated with revival movements elsewhere. In this section, I probe further into the notion of historical veracity, drawing

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on Livingston’s observation that revival movements are often as much about creating “a new ethos, musical style and aesthetic code in accordance with [their] revivalist ideology and personal preferences” (1999: 70), as an “accurate” construction of the past. Similarly, Bohlman notes that “revival relies heavily on new symbols masquerading as the old” (1988: 131). Setting aside for the moment the question of why music from the Qajar period should necessarily be “purer” than that of any other period of Iranian music history, the fact is that there is little tangible evidence of Qajar performance practices before the arrival of sound recording in Iran in the first decade of the twentieth century; moreover, surviving recordings from this time bear little relation to “traditionalist” performances of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the revivalist idea that performance should adhere closely to the radif seems not to be evidenced through early recordings but was largely a later construction. Comparison with other revival movements may be illuminating. Consider, for instance, the rather striking parallels between Iran in the 1960s and 1970s and the “Early Music Movement” (or “Authentic Music Movement,” more recently Historically Informed Performance [HIP]) in Europe and the United States: one finds the same moralizing and emotive debates, similar counterarguments about fossilization and the creation of a museum culture, and similar appeals to historical authority to authenticate something that is thoroughly contemporary. Of particular relevance here is the work of Richard Taruskin, who points to the close aesthetic and historical parallels between the twentieth-century phenomenon of “authentic” performance and something apparently far removed from it: musical modernism, exemplified (he suggests) most clearly through the music of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971). As Taruskin observes, Stravinsky had close personal links with some of the pioneers of the early music movement, most notably (visionary/elder statesman/“prophet”) Arnold Dolmetsch, and he argues that the musical sounds promoted as “authentic” had little to do with historical accuracy and much to do with modernist aesthetics, in both composition and performance. For Taruskin, so-called authentic performances of early music lie firmly within the domain of modernity; from this perspective, one can understand revival as “a process of traditionalisation that goes on in the present, to create symbolic ties to the past, for reasons of the future” (Ronström 1996: 18), or what Taruskin describes as “the pastness of the present and the presence of the past” (1988). As Bohlman observes: The past is consciously invoked to serve as a surrogate for the present . . . . The practice of constructing continuity by selectively choosing, and not infrequently selectively inventing, the past is a particularly modern phenomenon. (Bohlman 1988: 130)

Similarly, in Iran, what were arguably thoroughly contemporary musical practices in the 1960s and 1970s were validated through appeals to historical continuity. Perhaps one of the most disturbing tropes to emerge at this time was that centered around notions of racial purity, often expressed through metaphors of pure-bloodedness,

288   Laudan Nooshin as seen both in the specific discourses of musicians and scholars and in the general preoccupation with historical extraction and nativism. As noted earlier, for instance, Daniélou’s “hybrid” was translated as dorageh (“mixed race,” lit. “two-blooded”), a term used in a negative sense to refer to music that had lost its purity and thereby its national and cultural identity. Indeed, terms such as dorageh have become part of a well-established discursive network in which notions of purity, authenticity, and identity are indexically linked. Such linkages depend on an underlying and unquestioned understanding that being pure blooded is a good thing for music, the opposite being invoked through terms such as “bastard” (harāmzādeh) or “contaminated” (āloodeh, Kiani 2004: 150). This position was voiced most polemically by Borumand, for example, in the following extract from a speech presented at the 1968 Shiraz Arts Festival:  When we talk about a thoroughbred horse, we mean a horse whose mother and father and entire genealogy is known—and is distinguished. Musiqi-ye asil is the same. (Quoted in Fayaz 1998: 103)17

This parallel between “pure” music and a thoroughbred horse is intriguing, invoking as it does notions of good breeding and distinction. So naturalized and embedded did such discourses become in Iran that even contemporary musicians who have distanced themselves from the ideological rhetoric of authenticity continue to use them. For instance, discussing a piece previously criticized by Kiani, Hossein Alizadeh validates the music by referring to “the piece’s exact birth certificate” (shenāsnāmeh-ye daqiq-e āsār), thereby indexing its history and pedigree (in Shahrnazdar 2004b: 216).18 In seeking to understand where such discourses come from, Livingston’s observation that “many revivalists seem to be in search of a personal authenticity in historical forms” (1999: 74) may prove particularly revealing if one explores the motivations of those who spearheaded the cleansing of Iranian classical music from its purported impurities. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of revival movements is “the central role played by a few individuals” (1999: 70). Livingston suggests that “ ‘core revivalists’ are not unlike the prophets and visionaries integral to Wallace’s 1956 model of the cultural revitalization process who communicate their vision to, and organize, a select group of converts” (1999: 70). Wallace’s pioneering work on “revitalization movements” focuses on religious movements, but his writings are especially relevant in understanding the central role of charismatic individuals in music revivals, who often play a similar prophetic role and lead a small but committed core of followers.19 In the case of Iran, the two central “visionaries” were the co-founders of the Markaz: Dariouche Safvate, its first director, and Nur Ali Borumand, who can easily be identified as “elder statesman/repository of traditional repertoire” (Slobin 1983: 39), the latter enshrined in the radif. Indeed, the religious analogy can be taken further in the sense that the radif arguably acquired a status akin to a sacred text by the late 1960s. Safvate was the more publicly influential and polemical of the two, with his often outspoken views on musicians working at the radio and other followers of Vaziri. Already in 1959, in a published interview entitled “Goftogoo dar bareh-ye Dirigism-e Honari” (“Discussion About Dirigisme in Art”),20 Safvate was

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advocating a new brand of centrally controlled management of music activities. This kind of approach became strongly evident in later years, in his somewhat doctrinaire directorship of the Markaz. Eventual differences between Safvate and Borumand led to the latter’s departure from the Markaz in the mid-1970s. Borumand’s influence, however, was felt primarily through the large number of pupils who studied with him, many of whom went on to become influential figures in their own right. A closer focus on Borumand, and specifically on certain aspects of his biography, may be illuminating in relation to some of the discourses reported above. Born into an aristocratic family, Borumand was raised in a household frequented by musicians, poets, and artists, and, at the age of twelve, he began studying tār (long-necked plucked lute) with the renowned Qolam Hossein Darvish Khan (1872– 1926). In 1922, he was sent to Germany, where he attended secondary school and also became familiar with European music, taking piano lessons for two years. While studying medicine, Borumand continued to pursue his musical interests, but failing eyesight and eventual blindness led to his return to Iran in 1938, from which time he devoted himself entirely to Iranian music. Borumand spent the next thirty years living a rather secluded life and continuing to study tār and setār. It wasn’t until the 1960s that he emerged into public life, after being invited to advise on and participate in a number of government-sponsored activities and—from the mid-1960s—to teach radif at the University of Tehran’s Fine Arts Faculty (before the formal establishment of the Music Department in 1969) and later at the Markaz. Borumand was not primarily a performer and was therefore little known to the general public; however, he became highly regarded as a teacher, largely through his detailed knowledge of the radif, accumulated through many years of study with several prominent masters. Borumand’s significance lies largely in the fact that he studied with masters who were in direct receipt of Mirza Abdollah’s radif (see During et al. 1991: 62; Nettl 1987: 142–143), his main teachers— Esma’il Khan Qahremani and Haji Aqa Mohammad—being among the most highly regarded of Mirza Abdollah’s pupils. In particular, as noted, many consider the radif that Borumand studied intensively with Qahremani over a period of about twelve years (During et al. 1991: 63) to be the version closest to Mirza Abdollah’s original, particularly since the route of transmission through Qahremani and Borumand was not affected by Darvish Khan’s attempts to popularize the tradition. As Fayaz observes: Borumand had all the qualities to make him suited for this [leading the revival movement]. Raised in an aristocratic and art-loving family, studied with the best masters of the time; attachment to pre-Vaziri music and great knowledge of that; ability as a performer and teacher . . . and good memory. (Fayaz 1998: 95)

With its historical roots in the royal courts, Iranian classical music has long been associated with privilege, authority, and power. Revivalists of the 1960s and 1970s effectively sought to recreate a time before modernization and Westernization, before the 1906 Constitutional Revolution set in train the processes of disempowering royalty, a time when the aristocratic order was in place, and with Iranian classical music firmly within

290   Laudan Nooshin that order. Borumand’s analogies with horses and “pure blood” start to make sense when one considers his own extraction and the fact that he was one of the last of a long tradition of the leisured aristocratic amateur musician before Iranian classical music moved into the public domain and the realm of the middle classes and intellectuals. In his incisive analysis of Borumand’s role at this time, Fayaz suggests that “for someone of noble or aristocratic birth [asilzādeh], proving purity [esālat] as the most important value is tantamount to proving himself ” (1998: 108), and he asks whether Borumand’s approach to historical purity might be partly understood as a form of personal validation. While such discussion highlights the potentially defining role of key individuals in any social movement, and no matter what Borumand’s personal motivations might have been, it is important to understand that his ideas became influential primarily because he was in a position to promote them through his role as instructor of radif at both the University of Tehran and the Markaz; no other musician had such a profound impact as a teacher in the late 1960s and 1970s. Returning to the work of Taruskin, there are some interesting conceptual parallels between Borumand and Stravinsky that I believe are worth noting briefly. Borumand may have encountered Stravinsky’s music during his time in Europe, but there is no evidence that he was familiar with his writings. Still, there are some fascinating similarities between these two musicians. As a self-appointed guardian of “pure” music and “objective” performance, Stravinsky adopted a quasi-ideological approach in his writings and performances. His sharpest rhetoric was directed at the performer, who he believed should be a transmitter of music with the minimum of interpretation, as set out in the series of lectures that were later published as the Poetics of Music (first English-language edition, 1947): It is the conflict of these two principles—execution and interpretation—that is at the root of all the errors, all the sins, all the misunderstandings that interpose themselves between the musical work and the listener and prevent a faithful transmission of its message. (Quoted in Taruskin 1988: 181)

He continues by invoking similarly loaded terms such as “criminal assault,” “conscience,” and “betrayal.” Such statements are strongly reminiscent of Borumand’s views regarding the interpretive freedom of the performer and the sanctity of the radif text. Like Stravinsky, Borumand’s ideal performer is a transmitter of what already exists, with the minimum of interpretive intervention, and he regularly commented negatively on the practice of improvisation. In light of these observations, it is interesting to note certain similarities between these two men in terms of their social backgrounds and the possible implications for their views on music. For instance, Taruskin discusses Stravinsky’s complaints, in relation to performances of Bach’s music, about the “lack of understanding of the interpreter’s obligations, this arrogant pride in numbers, this concupiscence of the many, [that] betray a complete lack of musical education” (from Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, quoted in Taruskin

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1988: 182). Taruskin observes, “we need not . . . hire a psychologist to investigate what the phrase ‘concupiscence of the many’ would have meant to a Russian aristocrat uprooted by the Bolshevik revolution” (Taruskin 1988: 182). Likewise, Borumand was from an aristocratic background (and indeed had close links with the Pahlavi royal family) and lived through a period in which the aristocracy lost much of its power in Iran. From this perspective, his somewhat doctrinaire position might be understood as a more or less conscious act of reliving an archaic aristocratic status quo, an ideologically driven preservation of the tradition for a musically informed elite. Although the context is very different, the case of Borumand seems to illustrate well the “view of revival as social elite” as discussed by Neil Rosenberg (in relation to the American folk song revival movement of the 1950s and 1960s), “in which revivalists, in transforming traditions, represent the established political and social agendas of the group from which they emerge” (1993: 19). Rosenberg contrasts this with the “view of revival as social consensus,” which accords more closely with the post-1979 period to be discussed shortly. In this sense, the first revival aligns with yet another of the “struggles” listed by Ronström—that of class (1996: 9). Ultimately, I  would suggest that the revivalism of the 1960s and 1970s was not just about the music—I might venture to suggest not even about the music—but was rather a means of validating a particular contemporary position arising from a complex set of social and personal circumstances. Seeking to reclaim the notion of “purity” from those who set themselves up as the “authenticity police” (pāsebān-e sonnat va esālat, 1998:  100), Fayaz suggests that “[i]‌n truth, the direct result of increased sensitivity to historical purity was a decreased concern with artistic purity . . . the price paid for historical purity was to injure, change and even lose the tradition” (Fayaz 1998: 106). Although relatively little research has been undertaken on the reception of Iranian classical music during this (or any other) period, such evidence as there is suggests that lay audiences in the 1970s were largely uninterested in matters of historical veracity. According to Fayaz, many became alienated by discourses of purity, and Iranian classical music became marginalized as audiences dwindled (Fayaz 1998: 106); but perhaps that was the intention. At the same time, however, what the purists regarded as “acculturated” radio programs, such as the Golhā series, remained popular.

Postrevolutionary Renaissance: Revival as Renewal By the mid-1970s, there began a process of bifurcation led by the new generation of graduate musicians, including several who had studied at the Markaz. Combining a strict classical training with a widening of musical horizons, many of these musicians began to question the pursuit of tradition for its own sake and started to create music

292   Laudan Nooshin that resonated with and responded to contemporary issues and which extended the repertoire in new directions. As Livingston observes: After a tradition has been “revived” the question always arises as to the balance between “preservation” of the tradition (i.e. strict adherence to revivalist stylistic parameters) and innovation, even innovation that is intended to win over a greater audience for the tradition. Frequently this tension is responsible for the breakdown of the revival. (Livingston 1999: 71)

This characterization nicely sums up the situation in Iran at this time; and indeed, the tension between preservation and innovation remains a site of contestation. What is interesting is that the first (“purist”) revival sowed the seeds for what was later to emerge as another, very different kind of revival following the Revolution of 1979. Several classical music groups were formed at this time, and many of the changes were led by the two most prominent: the Sheyda Ensemble, established in 1974 by Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Parviz Meshkatian (and named after the prominent Constitutional Period poet, Mirza Abbas Khan Sheida, or Sheida-ye-Esfahani 1873–1949); and the Aref Ensemble, established in 1977 by Parviz Meshkatian, Hossein Alizadeh, and Mohammad Reza Lotfi. As with the first revival, a number of factors contributed to the second, perhaps the most significant being the sociopolitical climate of the time, particularly in the lead up to and aftermath of the Revolution of February 1979, an important aspect of which was the assertion of national sovereignty after decades of external interference in Iran’s affairs. The Revolution thus triggered a widespread “return to roots” interest in traditional arts and culture, and, as part of this, Iranian classical music experienced an extraordinary renaissance, attracting mass audiences for the first time in its history. Despite the often crippling restrictions that artists faced under the new Islamic Republic, this period is widely regarded as one of renewal, but of a kind that was very different from that of the 1960s and 1970s, one closer to the “syncretic” end of Bauman’s continuum, in which musicians seek to “reinvent[ing] the past by emancipatory creation to the point of breaking the local and regional frontiers” (1996: 80). Further, Bauman’s observations with regard to the Swiss situation are very apposite to Iran at a time when “the escape into the utopia of the past was replaced by hope for a better future” (Bauman 1996: 80). Alongside the general postrevolutionary fervor and the sense of entering a new era of possibilities, there was a feeling of release among musicians, both from the moralizing of traditionalists and from the previous regime’s kowtowing to the West. This was a time of experimentation—experimentation that had started in the mid-1970s—as musicians used new formal structures and new instrumental colors and drew on influences from regional traditions, particularly from Kurdish music, since a number of prominent classical musicians at this time were of Kurdish heritage. Kurdish influences included the introduction of the daff frame drum (not hitherto used in the classical music) and the widespread use of additive meters (5, 7, 13, and so on).21 It was also at this time that

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instrumental music began to gain independence from the voice for the first time, largely through the work of musicians such as Hossein Alizadeh (see Nooshin forthcoming). The early to mid-1980s was certainly an extraordinary time for Iranian classical music, as described by prominent vocalist Shahram Nazeri: It was as if a nation that had been asleep for centuries had woken; as if a fire had been lit in a reed-bed and each of these reeds, since they are burning, was obliged to think about itself, its society, its history. People gradually became interested in their own culture, because the reality is that for many years in Iran, there was a long period of loss of identity [bihoviyyat]. (Interview, August 21, 1999, Tehran)

This grassroots “awakening” drew in many who had hitherto been largely excluded from the classical tradition, including many women musicians and those from conservative religious backgrounds whose participation in music was previously rare. As such, the movement arguably brought about a gradual democratization of the tradition, in contrast with the strongly elitist nature of the first revival: Even religious families started listening to the radio and television; cassettes came, tape recorders came. Many families sent their sons and daughters, under the age of twenty, to music lessons. For example, there was a cassette called Gol-e Sad Barg published in 1363 [1984; a recording by Nazeri himself]. When it was published, believe me, there was a revolution in setār, such a story [ye dāstāni shod], in the space of eight or nine months, I’m not saying one million people, but something around this number came to participate in classes, girls and boys. (Interview, August 21, 1999, Tehran)

I have written elsewhere about this period and the impact of the cultural policies of the new Islamic government on music and other areas of artistic activity (Nooshin 2005: 235–245).22 In the early 1980s, there was little music on radio and television other than revolutionary anthems and military music, certain types of music—most notably popular music—were banned outright, and concerts more or less stopped. Yet, despite government restrictions, cassette recordings (the main medium of music circulation) of Iranian classical music were produced and distributed widely and were eagerly anticipated, in some cases becoming an emotive focal point for the new mood of national and political consciousness. Indeed, Iranian classical music assumed a dual anti-hegemonic symbolism at this time: first, in relation to Western culture and second with respect to government restrictions on music making, particularly in the context of tensions in the early 1980s between, on the one hand, the politicized pan-Islamic tendencies evident in government discourses and nationalist discourses on the other. Classical music (and poetry) represented an important challenge to government discourses at this time and, for many, provided an important means of affirming national identity. This movement also had its visionaries, individuals such as Shajarian, Nazeri, and Alizadeh, who, unlike those of the earlier revival, became well known to the public and, in some cases, akin to national heroes. Most significantly, for the first time in many decades, musicians set

294   Laudan Nooshin poetry that resonated with the historical moment, both from the same body of Medieval mystical poetry traditionally set, but also drawing on the work of contemporary poets such as Hooshang Ebtehaj (pen name Sayeh, lit. “shadow”), Javad Azar, Aslan Aslanian, and Mojtaba Kashani. In this way, classical music found a social relevance that it had arguably not had since the time of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Significant recordings at this time included a series of cassettes produced by the Chavosh Institute featuring prominent musicians such as vocalists Shajarian and Nazeri and composer-instrumentalists Alizadeh, Mohammad Reza Lotfi, Parviz Meshkatian, and members of the Kamkar family, among others.23 Although this discussion of the second revival is necessarily more cursory than that of the first, there are some points to note. First, some of the key innovators of the second revival were musicians who had studied at the Markaz with masters such as Borumand and who, in the early 1980s, found themselves in a directly contradictory position to those who continued the preservative work of the Markaz during this period. This was a generation of socially engaged and broadly educated musicians trained in the traditional repertoire but also attuned and responsive to the national mood. I would argue that they could only have become the innovators that they did through their rigorous training and in-depth knowledge of the radif gained at the Markaz; it was this that gave them the firm foundation on which to create, or to “fly,” to use a metaphor of Shahram Nazeri’s: In reality, the radifs came about so that a musician could place his foot on a firm basis [bastar] from which to fly. Like an architect who wants to construct a building needs a firm and correct foundation [pāyeh] . . . or like a light that guides you and doesn’t allow you to deviate [monharef]. (Interview, April 23, 2010, Tehran)24

In an important sense, then, the first revival can be seen as having (inadvertently) laid the groundwork for the second. The second important factor was the resurgence of national consciousness that followed the Revolution and that led to a new social receptiveness and audience for classical music. Whether the second revival could have happened without either is debatable. What the two revival movements shared was a concern with national identity and a rejection of Iran’s strong cultural (and political) dependency on the West that marked the prerevolutionary period. Where they differed was that the first appealed to the past to legitimate practices of the present, whereas the second was determinedly forward-looking in its understanding of revival as renewal of the tradition through creation. Further, the second revival became an important part of the postrevolutionary social arena, in contrast to the first, which worked against the tide of social change in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s.

Conclusion: Postrevival Bifurcation Bauman describes the “escaping into the utopia of the past on the one hand and escaping into the utopia of the future on the other” as “two sides of a Janus head” (1996: 80). What,

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then, does the Janus-like nature of the two revival movements described in this chapter—the first looking firmly to the past, the second to the future—tell us about musical revivals and their ideological underpinnings? And what have the postrevival implications been for the trajectory of Iranian classical music since the 1980s? Although the second revival grew out of conditions partly made possible by the first, I have hesitated to frame the former as a postrevival manifestation because each revival phase emerged from radically different social circumstances and with distinct discursive positionings. Certainly, this raises questions about the notion of postrevivalism and how we understand the relationships between revival moments. To some extent, the movement of the 1980s might be regarded as a reaction against the kind of adherence to radif orthodoxy and notions of musical purity that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s. And yet, there was no explicit framing of the second revival in these terms at the time; indeed, the radif remained firmly in place as the underlying basis of the music. Further, I  have been struck by the respectful tone with which those musicians who trained at the Markaz talk about the work of the masters there in the early 1970s, even where their current practice diametrically opposes the approach of that time. Since the 1980s, however, the Iranian classical music scene has nonetheless been marked by a fairly clear divide between musicians who somewhat trenchantly follow the path of the first revival and those who see themselves as extending the work of the postrevolutionary period.25 In this sense, we are currently in a period of postrevival, in which the continuing strands of both movements are clearly evident in the schisms that mark Iran’s musical landscape; indeed, the tension between them provides a space of public contestation, often aired in the national and musical press, over competing “authenticities,” particularly in relation to role of the radif—either as a text to be adhered to more or less strictly or a source that provides a starting point for creative practice and a form of personal authenticity that is more to do with the spirit of the text than its letter. The first position is primarily to be found in some of the more prominent educational establishments and in the views of musicians such as Majid Kiani and Dariouche Safvate; one sees the second both among those postrevolutionary pioneers mentioned earlier who have continued their work over the past thirty years and among younger musicians who have, in recent years, become increasingly confident in developing a voice that goes beyond orthodoxy, and more recently even beyond the radif (see Nooshin forthcoming). If anything, these two postrevival “strands” seem to be moving further apart, the one presenting itself as the guardian of national heritage and identity, the other appealing to a rather different understanding of nationhood and “Iranian-ness,” one that depends on the idea of tradition not so much as stasis but rather as something creative and organic. Whether these very different manifestations of (post)revival can be reconciled, and what shape any future post-postrevivalism might take, remains to be seen.

Notes 1. A term reportedly coined by University of Tehran philosopher, Ahmad Fardid, and the title of a highly influential book by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, published in 1962 (English translation

296   Laudan Nooshin 1983) and subsequently banned under the Shah’s regime. Transliteration from Persian to Roman script in this chapter follows conventionally accepted spellings of words where applicable; elsewhere, I have sought to convey the sound of spoken (standard) Persian as closely as possible. 2. For further discussion on the debate over modernity in Iran, see Milani (2003) and Mirsepassi (2000). 3. For further discussion of Vaziri’s life and work, see Darvishi (1994, ­chapter 4), Khaleqi (1983a,b), Milanloo (2011) and Nooshin (forthcoming, c­ hapter 3). 4. Similar processes were happening more or less concurrently in the new Turkish Republic under the rule of another military officer, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (see Atabaki and Zürcher 2004). Vaziri continues to evoke strong views among Iranian musicians, some of whom believe his reforms to have been ultimately damaging to Iranian music. See, for instance, Alizadeh in Shahrnazdar (2004b: 23). 5. All translations from writings and interviews in Persian are by the current author. 6. Again, there are clear parallels with the rejection of Ottoman culture in Turkey after the establishment of the Republic in 1923 under the leadership of Atatürk. 7. A term commonly used nowadays by musicians to talk about musical practices of the 1960s and 1970s. 8. See Kiani (2004), Miller (1999: 37–56), and Talai (in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 18–19) for further information on the history and activities of the Markaz. Sources give differing dates for the establishment of the Markaz, but the most reliable indicate the Autumn of 1349 (1970) as the correct date. 9. These highly popular music programs were broadcast on National Iranian Radio from 1956 to 1979. For further information, see the work of Jane Lewisohn, including http://www. golha.co.uk and Lewisohn 2008. 10. The lavish volume eventually published by the government was compiled by Musa Ma’rufi (see Barkeshli and Ma’rufi [1963]; also discussion in Nooshin forthcoming). 11. Kiani goes as far as to claim that Borumand was the only musician in receipt of Mirza Abdollah’s radif as transmitted through Qahremani, with whom Borumand studied (2004: 149). In contrast to such discourses of stability, Borumand himself is reported to have told his pupils that he “corrected and improved” the radif as learned from Qahremani before teaching it; other sources have suggested that he deleted recordings of Qahremani to hide the fact that the radif taught by him was different from that of his master (Talai in Shahrnazdar 2004a: 93). Either way, there is no extant notated or recorded version of Mirza Abdollah’s original radif, nor of that taught by Qahremani. Outside Iran, Borumand became known through the writings of two of his pupils, Bruno Nettl and Jean During. 12. Particular mention might be made here of another influential teacher, Ali Akbar Shahnazi (1898–1985), grandson of prominent Qajar court musician Ali Akbar Farahani (1810–1855), who taught a number of contemporary musicians, including Dariush Talai and Hossein Alizadeh at the Honarestan-e Melli (secondary school) national music conservatory before they went on to study with Borumand and others at the University and the Markaz. Talai reports that it was through Shahnazi that he and his peers first became interested in the radif, since no-one else at the Honarestan taught radif at this time, the general trend being to play in the style of “radio musicians” (Dariush Talai, personal communication, August 2012). Shahnazi taught his own version of the radif, and his approach was reportedly much less doctrinaire than that of Borumand.

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13. Elsewhere, I  have discussed the ideological issues surrounding the increasingly iconic position and authority of the radif from the 1960s onward (Nooshin forthcoming). This authority has recently been given added impetus internationally by the addition of the radif (in 2009) to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. See http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00279. 14. See also Ronström (1996: 17), who makes a similar point with reference to the work of Norwegian folklorist Anne Eriksen and her proposition that “ ‘traditional folk culture’ is in fact not a heritage from the past, but a product of modernity, an idea that has evolved as a conscious point of opposition to modernity, and therefore an organic part of it (Eriksen 1993).” 15. See Archer (1964). A number of speeches and papers from this conference have been published in the Persian-language journal Mahoor Music Quarterly (established 1998). 16. Baumann also notes the role of cultural outsiders in promoting revival processes, referring specifically to the case of Swiss Alpine traditions (1996: 74). 17. During also quotes from Borumand as follows: “Authentic music means the music that, like everything else that is authentic, embodies qualities and is graced with a sound lineage” (1991: 201, my emphasis). 18. Of course, it is not only in Iran that genetic metaphors have been used in relation to music. Kartomi notes that “terms such as cross-fertilized, hybrid, creole, mestizo and mulatto have sometimes been confused in their meanings with negative attitudes to illicit breeding and interracial liaisons” (1981: 229), such that “pejorative expressions that seem to punish the offspring for the ‘sins’ of the parents spring from or lead to a disrespect for the qualities of the musical offspring” (228). There are fewer examples in which the genetic analogy is deployed positively to refer to “ ‘hybrid strength’ [that] may work to the advantage of the offspring” (229). One example can be found in contemporary Brazil, where metaphors of musical “mixing” and “hybridity” are most often positively valenced—as something that strengthens rather than weakens music—to the extent of symbolizing modern Brazilian nationhood (see Moehn 2008: 171–172). 19. Slobin (1983: 38–39) gives several examples of revival movements initiated by, and revolving around, a small group of individuals, sometimes just one person. 20. See Rashidi (1959). I am grateful to Mohammad Reza Fayaz for bringing this article to my attention. 21. For further discussion of the Kurdish influence on Iranian classical music at this time, see During (1984: 21–22) and Simms and Koushkani (2012: 24). 22. See also During (1984) and Simms and Koushkani (2012). 23. The Chavosh recordings included two that featured female vocalists Hengameh Akhavan and Sima Bina, with music by Lotfi. These were banned shortly after release because the use of the solo female voice became prohibited soon after the revolution (except at all-female concerts). 24. Ronström makes a similar point but using a different metaphor: “Traditions can function as a springboard for rapid cultural change. By conjuring stability and continuity, solid groundwork is laid for radical modernization” (1996: 17). 25. The Markaz continues to operate, but under rather different circumstances. It has been renamed Markaz-e Hefz o Pajoohesh-e Musiqi-ye Irani (Center for the Preservation of and Research on Iranian Music).

298   Laudan Nooshin

References Al-e Ahmad, Jalal. 1983. Occidentosis: A Plague from the West [Gharbzadegi], translated by R. Campbell. Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press. First published in Iran, 1962. Archer, William Kay. 1964. “International Congress on the Preservation of Traditional Forms of the Learned and Popular Music of the Orient and the Occident: International Congress, April 6–12, 1961, Tehran, Iran.” International Music Council and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Institute of Communications Research, Center for Comparative Psycholinguistics. Atabaki, Touraj, and Erik Jan Zürcher. 2004. Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization Under Atatürk and Reza Shah. London: I. B. Tauris. Barkeshli, Mehdi, and Musa Ma’rufi. 1963. Radif-e Musiqi-ye Iran. Teheran:  Fine Arts Organization. Bauman, Max Peter. 1996. “Folk Music Revival:  Concepts Between Regression and Emancipation.” The World of Music 38 (3): 71–86. Bigenho, Michelle. 2002. Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bohlman, Philip V. 1988. The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. 1996. Iranian Intellectuals and the West:  The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Darvishi, Mohammad Reza. 1994. Negah be Qarb. Bahsi dar Ta’sir-e Musiqi-ye Qarb bar Musiqi-ye Irani. Tehran: Mahoor Institute of Music and Culture. During, Jean. 1984. “La Musique Traditionnelle Iranienne en 1983.” Asian Music 15 (2) 11–31. —— with Zia Mirabdolbaghi and Dariush Safvat. 1991. The Art of Persian Music. Washington DC: Mage Publishers. Eriksen, Anne. 1993. “Den nasjonale kulturarven—en del av det moderne.” Kulturella perspektiv 1: 16–25. Fayaz, Mohammad Reza. 1998. “Bazkhooni-ye Esalat.” Mahoor Music Quarterly 1: 93–112. Kartomi, Margaret J. 1981. “The Processes and Results of Musical Culture Contact: A Discussion of Terminology and Concepts.” Ethnomusicology 25 (2): 227–249. Khaleqi, Ruhollah. 1983a. Sargozasht-e Musiqi-ye Iran, volume 1, 2nd edition. Tehran: Safi Ali Shah Publishers. ——1983b. Sargozasht-e Musiqi-ye Iran, volume 2, 2nd edition. Tehran: Safi Ali Shah Publishers. Kiani, Majid. 2004. “An Interview with Majid Kiani (Interviewer: Aynollah Mosayyebzadeh).” Mahoor Music Quarterly 22: 149–157. Lewisohn, Jane. 2008. “Flowers of Persian Song and Music: Davud Pirniā and the Genesis of the Golhā Programs.” Journal of Persianate Studies 1: 79–101. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Manafzadeh, Alireza. 1999. La Construction Identitaire en Iran. Paris: L’Harmattan. Milani, Abbas. 2003. Lost Wisdom:  Rethinking Modernity in Iran. Washington, DC:  Mage Publishers. Milanloo, Hadi. 2011. “Challenges and Difficulties Toward an Indigenous Modernity in Iran: Iranian Music and the Case of Ali Naqi Vaziri.” MA thesis, University of Tehran. Miller, Lloyd Clifton. 1999. Music and Song in Persia. The Art of Avaz. Richmond, VA: Curzon Press.

Two Revivalist Moments in Iranian Classical Music  299

Mirsepassi, Ali. 2000. Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization:  Negotiating Modernity in Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moehn, Frederick. 2008. “Music, Mixing and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro.” Ethnomusicology Forum 17 (2): 165–202. Nettl, Bruno. 1987. The Radif of Persian Music:  Studies of Structure and Cultural Context. Champaign, IL: Elephant and Cat. Nooshin, Laudan. 2005. “Subversion and Counter-subversion: Power, Control and Meaning in the New Iranian Pop Music.” In Music, Power and Politics, edited by Annie J. Randall, 231–272. New York and London: Routledge. ——Forthcoming. Iranian Classical Music:  The Discourses and Practice of Creativity. Farnham: Ashgate Press. Rashidi, Ali Mohammad. 1959. “Goftogoo dar bareh-ye Dirigism-e Honari.” Interview with Dariouche Safvate. Majaleh-ye Musik 33, Khordad 1338 (May/June): 28–32. Ronström, Owe. 1996. “Revival Reconsidered.” The World of Music 38 (3): 5–20. Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. 1993. Transforming Traditions:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shahrnazdar, Mohsen. 2004a. Goftogoo ba Dariush Talai dar bareh-ye Musiqi-ye Irani. Tehran: Nashr-e Ney. ——2004b. Goftogoo ba Hossein Alizadeh dar bareh-ye Musiqi-ye Irani. Tehran: Nashr-e Ney. Simms, Rob, and Amir Koushkani. 2012. Mohammad Reza Shajarian’s Avaz in Iran and Beyond, 1979–2010. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New  York Folklore 9: 37–44. Taruskin, Richard. 1988. “The Pastness of the Present and The Presence of the Past.” In Authenticity and Early Music:  A  Symposium, edited by Nicholas Kenyon, 137–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–281.

C HA P T E R  14

R E C L A I M I N G C H O C TAW A N D C H I C K A S AW C U LT U R A L IDENTIT Y THROUGH M U S I C R E V I VA L V IC TOR IA L I N D S AY L EV I N E

The revival of historic music and dance plays an integral role in reclaiming indigenous cultural identity. Like other First Peoples the world over, Native Americans have endured acute pressure to relinquish their cultural identities, which are often expressed most tangibly through performance. Constraints on Native American music and dance imposed by European colonists beginning in the early seventeenth century posed a serious threat to the survival of indigenous cultures. The U.S. government intensified this threat during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with oppressive policies including forced relocation, bans on ceremonial performance, termination of tribal governments, placement of Native children in boarding schools, and suppression of Native languages. Native peoples responded to the threat with various strategies. Some resisted government bans on performance by conducting sacred ceremonials in private locations or on federal holidays, when restrictions were relaxed. Some adapted certain repertories for performance venues vetted by the dominant society, such as Wild West shows, fairs, or tourist exhibitions. Some adopted Euramerican genres, including Christian hymns and fiddle tunes, indigenizing them through tribal musical and social processes. Some made the conscious decision to put ritual repertories to sleep temporarily or to put them away forever.1 By the 1940s, indigenous music and dance appeared to be in decline among Native Americans, but improved economic conditions following World War II gave rise to powerful social movements that had profound implications for American Indian music. Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act ushered in a period of social activism that galvanized Native Americans. Empowered by the Civil Rights movement, Native peoples created national activist organizations, including the American Indian Movement (AIM),

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founded in 1968. Other Native activist organizations followed, known collectively as the Red Power Movement. These groups focused public awareness on American Indian social, cultural, educational, economic, and health issues, and, by the late 1970s, federal Indian policy had undergone a sea change. New legislation reaffirmed Native American self-determination and religious freedom, protecting the rights of Native peoples to perform ritual songs and dances. Entitlement programs, such as the Indian Education Act of 1972, supported the incorporation of Native content in school curricula, including instruction in tribal performing arts. By the 1980s, the way had been paved for the return and repatriation of Native cultural materials held by museums and other repositories. Repatriated materials included archival recordings of tribal songs that had been collected on wax cylinders beginning in 1890 by ethnologists and comparative musicologists such as Jesse Walter Fewkes, Alice Fletcher, and Frances Densmore. In this milieu of changing legislation and public consciousness, revivals of Native American music and dance emerged as one mode of social action that reclaims cultural identity, expresses sovereignty, and transforms individuals and communities. The performance of music and dance is also, of course, a pleasurable activity with its own internal rewards. Native American music revivals share common characteristics with similar movements among other peoples. These include inception by an individual or a core group, reliance on source musicians and materials, specific revival ideologies, networks of individuals who constitute a revivalist community, organizations and festivals that nurture the revival movement, and enterprises that commodify the revived tradition (Livingston 1999). Yet Native music revivals manifest these characteristics in distinctive ways. Native music revivals are strongly localized and involve repertories still in collective, living, and generational memory. Authority on traditional music resides in elders who have taken an active role in ceremonial performance. Archival recordings, ethnographic reports, historic photographs, and film may be consulted for corroboration, but are less integral to the revival process than collective, living, and generational memory, which are considered to be the most legitimate sources of authenticity among Native Americans. Native ways of constructing history connect tribal experience to concepts of ritual time, which for many Native peoples is understood as having a spiraling, recursive contour. Therefore, Native singers often understand music revival as part of cyclic historical processes.2 Some repertories, especially those susceptible to recontextualization, may be discontinued for a time and renewed years later. What opens a repertory to recontextualization is its origin in a ritual whose spiritual ideology can be adapted or secularized according to changes in material conditions (cf. Swan 1998: 65). Finally, Native peoples are questioning who has the right to define Native cultural identity. Local communities answer that in part through music revival, bringing back repertories that oppose mainstream stereotypes. Native music revivals, therefore, emphasize social transformation, self-definition, and reclamation of repertories suppressed through colonization. Despite the significance of Native American music revivals since the 1970s, they have escaped the notice of many ethnomusicologists. This chapter draws attention to such movements by comparing the Choctaw and Chickasaw music revivals in Oklahoma. The Choctaw and Chickasaw are closely connected historically, culturally,

302   Victoria Lindsay Levine geographically, and linguistically. The Choctaw revived communal songs and dances (also called social dances) in 1975, during what could be considered the first wave of Native American music revivals. The Choctaw repertory provided a foundation for the Chickasaw revival, which began in 1992. Both groups reclaimed their communal songs and dances as central components of cultural identity. In reclaiming this particular repertory, the Choctaw and Chickasaw revived something that had already undergone centuries of transformation. The repertory probably originated as part of the Green Corn ceremony and its associated calendrical round, which both tribes appear to have practiced until the mid-1700s. During the nineteenth century, the Choctaw blended this repertory with songs and dances from other discontinued rituals, such as War and Victory Dances, and recontextualized them for performance during the nighttime portion of the Ballgame (also called stickball). By 1903, when the ancestors of one Choctaw community arrived in Oklahoma, the communal songs and dances performed during the Ballgame had come to symbolize interpersonal reconciliation and cultural renewal (Levine 1997a). Additional research on Chickasaw music may uncover a similar history. In any case, the communal songs and dances, reclaimed by both groups through revival, provide a potent expression of cultural longevity and survival. A comparison of the revivals explores the origins, musical and social processes, and outcomes of each, revealing the kinds of transformations that occurred. Following a brief history of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, each revival is addressed in turn. I should note that I use the term “revival” with considerable trepidation because it is controversial among Choctaw and Chickasaw dancers in the early twenty-first century. Some reject the term because it implies that they had lost their musical culture, whereas it had only been put to sleep temporarily, to be reawakened by a later generation. One dancer rejected the term because it does not adequately describe the strategy used to reclaim the repertory. Lengthy discussion failed to yield a more satisfactory term, and therefore I use “revival” here, while stressing the centrality of collective, living, and generational memory in reawakening and reclaiming indigenous performance repertories. By contrast, members of the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee used the terms “revival” and “revitalization” interchangeably during the 1970s and 1980s.

A Brief History of the Oklahoma Choctaw and Chickasaw Much has been written about the history, culture, and contemporary economic success of the Choctaw and Chickasaw (cf. Fitzgerald et al. 2006; Galloway 1995; Kidwell 2007; Lambert 2007a; Morgan, Fitzgerald, and Anoatubby 2010); a summary provides the backdrop for understanding their music revivals. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, and Cherokee became known among Euramericans as the Five Civilized Tribes because they lived in settled communities and practiced agriculture

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at the time of contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As descendants of Mississippian peoples (800–1500 C.E.), the Choctaw and Chickasaw speak mutually intelligible dialects of Western Muskoghean and share an origin narrative. Each group coalesced as a distinctive people during the 1600s; the Choctaw lived mainly in central Mississippi, whereas the Chickasaw inhabited northeastern Mississippi. Both groups developed extensive trade with Europeans during the 1700s, resulting in cultural exchange and intermarriage. After the American Revolution, Protestant ministers established missions and schools among the Choctaw and Chickasaw in order to promote assimilation while the United States aggressively pursued land cessions. Despite their efforts to accommodate, in 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing the Choctaw and Chickasaw, along with most other southern tribes, into exile in what was then Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi River. Some Choctaws remained in the Southeast, and their descendants continue to live in Mississippi and Tennessee. Those who underwent removal know that event as the Trail of Tears because of the devastating hardship and loss of life they suffered during the journey. The Choctaw and Chickasaw rebuilt their lives in Indian Territory by the late 1850s, forming constitutional democracies and establishing schools and churches while engaging in agriculture and other economic ventures. After the American Civil War, the United States dissolved tribal governments in order to open Indian Territory to white settlement; the Choctaw and Chickasaw lost control over their economic, political, and social institutions for the second time in less than a century. Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, and, following statehood, the Choctaw and Chickasaw struggled economically and politically. However, after World War II, they took advantage of emerging economic opportunities and the changing political climate to strengthen tribal organization and development. An activist movement initiated by Oklahoma Choctaw youth succeeded in repealing Choctaw termination legislation in 1970 and thereafter the United States restored the right of the Five Civilized Tribes to elect their own chiefs (Lambert 2007a: 75).3 Thus began a new era of self-determination and cultural self-definition for the Choctaw and Chickasaw. With some 150,000 enrolled members, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is the third largest Indian tribe in the United States; the Chickasaw Nation has enrolled about 40,000 people. Members of both tribes live throughout the world, but most reside in south-central and south-eastern Oklahoma. Both nations practice agriculture, and, since the 1970s, have developed highly successful business enterprises including casinos, family entertainment centers, travel plazas, hotels and motels, convenience stores, and manufacturing. In addition, the Chickasaw own a chocolate factory, bank, and two radio stations; the Choctaw own a shopping mall and horse-racing track and provide management expertise for United States military bases (Clark 2009: 93–94 and 107– 108). In part because of their economic and political success, the dominant scholarly narrative about Choctaw and Chickasaw culture is one of assimilation and acculturation (Lambert 2007b: 283), yet a new generation of scholars who are themselves Choctaw and Chickasaw are challenging that narrative (cf. Cobb 2000; Lambert 2007a,b). These scholars address the importance of heritage activities and expressions of tribal

304   Victoria Lindsay Levine distinctiveness in the process of reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw cultural identity since the 1970s. Extending their work, I hope to demonstrate some of the ways in which music revivals have contributed to the process.

The Revival of Choctaw Communal Dance Songs in Oklahoma The extensive literature on the Choctaw notwithstanding, little published information, and only a few sound recordings, document Choctaw music. The most important early sources on Mississippi Choctaw musical instruments, song repertories, dances, and performance contexts include Bushnell (1909), Swanton (1931), and Densmore (1943); Draper described Mississippi Choctaw musical culture of the 1970s (1980, 1983, 2009). Research on Oklahoma Choctaw music began in the 1970s (Howard 1978; Howard and Levine 1990; Levine 1993, 1997a,b, 2004; White Deer 1995). Archival recordings of Choctaw communal dance songs that are accessible to the public include field tapes made by Densmore in the 1930s and by Howard in the 1960s and 1970s. These sources show that by the early twentieth century, Choctaw musical life in both Mississippi and Oklahoma revolved around two traditional repertories: songs to accompany communal dances performed at night following a Ballgame, and Choctaw hymns for Christian worship. In addition, the Mississippi Choctaw played a traditional repertory of fiddle tunes known as house dances or fiddle dances, which have been revived in recent years (Chris Goertzen, personal communication, 2012). Although indigenous hymns continue to play a central role in Oklahoma Choctaw musical life, I focus on the communal dance songs. Some Oklahoma Choctaws categorize communal dance songs into several genres, including Jump Dances, Walk Dances, Drunk Dances, War Dances, and animal dances. The latter category includes several discrete genres, each with a distinctive choreography and musical style, such as the Duck Dance or Snake Dance. Choctaws generally perform communal dance songs in call and response, using a relatively relaxed and open method of vocal production. A male leader sings the call; in most songs, both men and women dancers respond in moderately blended unison, the women singing an octave higher. The songs generally feature an octave range and employ a variety of iterative, sectional, and strophic forms. Most song texts feature vocables, although Choctaw words occur in some songs. Until the late 1930s, the Oklahoma Choctaw performed communal songs and dances as part of the Ballgame. Multigenerational, intercommunity gatherings occurred at consecrated ceremonial grounds where the Choctaw played stickball during the day, shared a feast, and danced all night. Men took turns leading the songs and dances; they danced in a counterclockwise circle, men alternating with women in the dance line. The song leader played a pair of striking sticks to support the music’s pulse.

Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity  305

FIGURE  14.1 Buster Ned, Chairman of the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee, Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1975. (Photograph by Mac McGalliard. Courtesy of the McGalliard Collection, Ardmore Public Library.)

In Oklahoma, the Choctaw discontinued the Ballgame and its nighttime dances by the early 1940s, due to the social, economic, and political challenges the people faced as a result of the dissolution of the tribal government, the effects of the Great Depression, and subsequent out-migration. Buster Ned (1924–1992), who in 1937 witnessed the last Choctaw dance at the Yellow Hill ceremonial ground, told the following story. One night, he and his maternal grandfather, Logan Parker, saw a comet burning brightly in the night sky. Parker interpreted this as an omen that war was imminent. He advised the Choctaw to stop dancing so that the young people could spend time at home with their families before being called to military duty (Buster Ned, interview, February 1, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Parker had foreseen World War II, during which more than 44,000 Native American men and women served in the United States armed forces, including many Choctaws, Chickasaws, and other Native people from Oklahoma.4 After a hiatus of some thirty years, various Choctaw communities in Oklahoma began to revive communal songs and dances (Howard 1978). My focus here is the revival led by Buster Ned (Figure 14.1), who narrated his biography, family history, and details about the music revival during a series of interviews in 1983 and 1985 (Levine 1993, 2004). Born and raised about twenty miles east of Ardmore, Ned spoke Choctaw as his first language

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FIGURE  14.2 A Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee event held at the home of Buster Ned near Ardmore, Oklahoma, November 1975. (Photograph by Mac McGalliard. Courtesy of the McGalliard Collection, Ardmore Public Library.)

and participated in Ballgames at the Yellow Hill ceremonial ground. He attended an Indian boarding school through the eighth grade, returning home to work as a day laborer on neighboring cotton farms. Ned enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II and joined the Marine Corps in 1950; after retiring from military service, he worked as a civilian at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. He retired again in 1973 and returned to the Ardmore area, moved into his grandfather’s house, and reconnected with his community. In 1974, he attended a powwow in Ardmore that included an exhibition of Choctaw dances, and Ned joined the dance. Later, the elder woman seated next to him said, “Your grandpa used to [organize communal dances] all the time. If you do it, I’ll come dance” (Buster Ned, interview, February 4, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). With this encouragement, Ned formed the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee and the group held its first public gathering in June 1975 (Figure 14.2). The Heritage Committee ultimately became an organizing body for hosting community events, and because one of its goals was to educate the general public about the unique cultural identity of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, it also became a performance troupe. Thus, the committee recontextualized the communal songs and dances once again by creating new kinds of events unconnected to Ballgames and having shorter durations with flexible scheduling. Those at the core of the Heritage Committee included Choctaws who, like Ned, had been born and raised near Ardmore. Their ancestors belonged to a kin-based

Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity  307

community that migrated to Ardmore from Mississippi in 1903 during the late removals (Levine 2004). Ardmore is located within the Chickasaw Nation, and, until the early 1940s, the Choctaws and Chickasaws in the area engaged in reciprocal ceremonial ground visits, a customary social pattern among Native peoples from the Southeast (Jackson 2003; see also Brown 2004; Waselkov 2004). White neighbors also participated in dances at Choctaw and Chickasaw ceremonial grounds. Ned explained that when Chickasaws visited the Yellow Hill ceremonial ground, their men were invited to lead Chickasaw dances, which were interspersed with Choctaw dances after midnight (Buster Ned, interview, January 25, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). The reverse occurred when Choctaws visited the Chickasaw ceremonial ground, Twin Ponds (near MacMillan, Oklahoma). Because of this history, the Heritage Committee’s core group also included Chickasaws. Each of the core members had participated in communal dances at the Choctaw and Chickasaw ceremonial grounds until the early 1940s, but only a few men knew how to lead songs. Ned quickly discovered that his maternal uncle, Adam Sampson (Figure 14.3), remembered more than ninety Choctaw songs, and Sampson became the primary source musician for the group. A Chickasaw member, Bienum Pickens, knew one Chickasaw song—the Garfish Dance—which he often led at Heritage Committee performances. Beyond the core group, participants in the Heritage Committee included members of other tribes, a Native Hawaiian, and some whites. Thus, while the core revivalists consisted of Choctaws and Chickasaws, the wider membership was mixed, reflecting the social commingling at ceremonial dances during the early twentieth century. Ned’s revival ideology derived from his firm belief in the historical continuity of the Ardmore Choctaw community and of Choctaw communal dance songs. He asserted that the songs and dances had been given to the Choctaw by the Creator at the time of creation. He explained that his grandfather had said, “There is one above us all, and he’s the one that gave [the songs] to us as a way to rejoice in his honor and to praise him,” adding that “these dances were handed down for generations” (Buster Ned, interviews, January 22, 1985 and February 12, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma).5 Ned held that the songs and dances had not changed during his lifetime, nor had they changed since his ancestors’ removal from Mississippi in 1903. This ideology of historical continuity shaped the reconstruction of the Heritage Committee’s repertory. Ned also believed that humans could not compose new songs for Choctaw communal dances, asserting that “The Choctaws and Chickasaws have never tried to make new songs and never will; if our songs are lost, they’re gone forever” (Buster Ned, interview, February 12, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Furthermore, committee members resisted the impulse to revive songs such as the Bear Dance, Turtle Dance, or Quail Dance whose melodies and texts they could no longer perform spontaneously, even though it might have been possible to reconstruct these and other songs through the use of archival materials. Although Ned knew of publications on Mississippi Choctaw music, especially Bushnell (1909) and Densmore (1943), he did not use these as source materials, nor did he refer to Densmore’s archival recordings, which were not readily accessible at that time. Instead, he relied on collective, generational memory and source musicians, especially his maternal uncle,

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FIGURE  14.3  Adam Sampson, song leader for the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee, Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1976. (Photograph by MacMcGalliard. Courtesy of the McGalliard Collection, Ardmore Public Library.)

Adam Sampson, whose living memory of the songs and dances performed until the 1940s constituted the Heritage Committee’s musical canon. Sampson echoed Ned’s position, stating that all of the Heritage Committee’s songs were the same as those performed until the 1940s (Adam Sampson, interview, February 12, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Yet collaborative analysis of multiple recordings of the same song revealed that when Sampson led, he varied each rendition within well-defined parameters, never performing a song the same way twice. In the course of collaborative analysis, Ned commented: “The Choctaws go every which way. It’s not a repetition, it’s going in a new direction” (Buster Ned, interview, March 20, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Ned’s personal repertory included a War Dance song he described as “off the wall” because he adapted it from a song he had heard in Mississippi; he explained that he shortened it and deleted the lexical text (Buster Ned, interview, March 13, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Thus, although the core revivalists rejected the concept of new composition and did not attempt to revive songs no longer in living memory, they expressed individual style and creativity through spontaneous variations and limited borrowing from the Mississippi Choctaw repertory. Choctaw thought about the divine origin and immutable nature of the communal dance songs appears to contradict musical practice,

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but here ideology reflects the sacred foundation of the repertory, while musical practice reflects the social mechanics of collective, participatory performance within a predominantly oral tradition. Prior to 1940, the Ardmore Choctaw transmitted their repertory informally through participation and imitation within ceremonial performances. By contrast, the Heritage Committee used both formal and informal methods of instruction and both primary and secondary orality. The Heritage Committee held private evening dances, preceded by a covered dish supper, in order to teach the repertory through participation and to strengthen community relationships. In addition, Ned and others recorded cassette tapes of Heritage Committee performances to help new members learn the songs. At some dances, Sampson sang a song that the next leader imitated in an effort to learn it, and women drilled their husbands on the songs at home to help them internalize the repertory (Buster Ned, interview, March 7, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). During the late 1970s, Ned and Sampson served as guest artists in the Ardmore public schools, where they taught Choctaw songs and dances to ethnically mixed classes. They developed a systematic pedagogy, teaching song lyrics first, followed by the melodies. Ned made visual aids from construction paper to teach about Choctaw designs and symbolism (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Beyond cassette tapes, the Heritage Committee made two videos (1984 and 1985). Ned used the first video as an instructional tool when he served as a guest lecturer in the Carmichael, California public schools during the mid-1980s. He distributed the second video to Heritage Committee members for personal use. Most significantly, the Heritage Committee produced two long-playing vinyl discs during the late 1970s, titled Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs, Volumes I and II (Ned and McCoy n.d.). Although their distribution was limited, the discs played a vital role in local dissemination of Choctaw communal dance songs. It is hard to measure the impact of the Heritage Committee’s transmission methods on Choctaw music, but Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs played an integral role in shaping the Chickasaw music revival, to which I will return later. The Heritage Committee modified several aspects of Choctaw performance practice. Ned and Sampson remembered that, in the past, the Choctaw accompanied communal dance songs with a pair of striking sticks, but the Heritage Committee used a double-headed hand drum instead because they preferred its sound. Although Ned and Sampson disavowed intertribal influence, it seems likely that this, together with non-Native expectations, may have affected their choice.6 Until the 1940s, Choctaw song leaders in Oklahoma usually danced at the head of the line of dancers. The Heritage Committee modified this practice by placing the song leader, who also played the drum, in the center of the dance circle, while a different man led the dance line. Because he was hard of hearing, placing Sampson in the middle of the dance circle enabled him to see the dancers and therefore to time his calls appropriately. One dance, Stealing Partners, permitted dancers to “steal” their partners from elsewhere in the dance line. In the early days, only men stole women partners during this dance, but among the Heritage Committee, women stole male partners as well. Enhancing women’s roles in

310   Victoria Lindsay Levine performance responded to their desire for more visible female agency in heritage activities, while the use of a hand drum, for example, marked the dances as Indian for diverse audiences. Changes in performance practice therefore reflected practical considerations along with broader social changes. Loosely coordinated dance regalia played an important role in the Heritage Committee’s revival. Old photographs show the Ardmore Choctaw dancing at the Yellow Hill ceremonial ground in everyday clothes; the men wore cotton shirts, overalls, and store-bought shoes, while the women wore knee-length dresses in the style of the time with low-heeled pumps. Some men knotted a large bandana around the neck. Ned stated that during War Dances, men wore a leg rattle made of a terrapin carapace filled with gravel (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma), but this is not verified by early photographic evidence. Women sewed small bells onto their dresses or tied bells onto their shoelaces. Ned explained that the leg rattles and bells supported the song’s pulse (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). Heritage Committee members felt that Choctaw dance regalia enhanced their performances, although regalia was not required for participation (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). By the 1980s, Choctaw women’s regalia included a long, prairie-style dress in a solid color with ruffles at the hem and appliqué designs in a contrasting color above the ruffles and on the yoke. Women wore a contrasting apron over the dress as well as beaded collars (which are distinctively Choctaw), long ribbons attached to their dresses at the nape of the neck, and flat shoes or moccasins. Some women tied bells to their shoelaces. Men wore solid-colored shirts with appliqué designs, slacks or jeans, and a black felt hat with a beaded hat band and feather. Song leaders, such as Ned and Sampson, wore cloth bandoliers (which are distinctively Choctaw). Some wore clusters of bells at their sides, attached to their belts. The dancers expressed considerable individuality through their outfits; for example, one man had sequins sewn onto his shirt and slacks, while another wore a fringed shirt.7 Ned said that Chickasaw members of the Heritage Committee borrowed their dress designs from other Southeastern tribes, including the Choctaw and Seminole. Clearly, members of the Heritage Committee used their outfits as visual emblems of Choctaw and Chickasaw cultural identity. The Heritage Committee nurtured relationships with neighboring Southeastern Indians, which suggests that, beyond intergenerational bonding and community building, regional exchange constituted an important aspect of the group’s revival activities. Song texts indicate that, prior to removal, the Choctaw participated in communal dances at the ceremonial grounds of other Southeastern tribes (Levine 1997b), and until 1940 ceremonial ground visits occurred among the Choctaw and Chickasaw near Ardmore. Continuing this pattern, the Heritage Committee received invitations to perform for the Chickasaw Nation and to dance with the Absentee Shawnees and Oklahoma Seminoles; in turn, a delegation of Seminoles participated in a private dance held outdoors at Ned’s home. Heritage Committee members also connected with their counterparts in the Mississippi homeland when they performed at the Mississippi Choctaw Fair in 1977, 1978, and 1979.

Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity  311

The Heritage Committee frequently performed for diverse audiences between 1976 and 1985. Close to home, these occasions included family reunions, store openings, and library events, but the Heritage Committee also appeared in larger venues, such as the American Bicentennial celebration in Washington, D.C. (1976), the All Indian Fair in Ardmore (1977), and a Five Tribes Intertribal Council meeting in McAllester (1982). At these events, Ned served as master of ceremonies, speaking about Choctaw culture and the meanings of individual dances. He encouraged audience participation, especially in the Snake Dance, which closed each presentation. When the Heritage Committee performed for an audience, they requested reimbursement for travel expenses, but the remuneration usually did not cover costs; in other words, public appearances did not produce income. As a voluntary organization, the Heritage Committee emphasized community building through participation. Therefore, the group’s public performances provided an opportunity to demonstrate Choctaw and Chickasaw culture and, at the same time, to bridge ethnic and social boundaries through audience inclusion, uniting people who might not otherwise interact socially because of differences in ethnicity, occupation, or socioeconomic class. Ned believed that the Heritage Committee transformed the way its members felt about being Choctaw. He explained that “they knew the dances were there, but because they had not been performed for so many years, the people had not adhered to [them] as their heritage” (Buster Ned, interview, March 28, 1985, Ardmore, Oklahoma). He went on to say that the revival was especially meaningful for younger Choctaws, who in many cases had not known that a Choctaw repertory existed. The knowledge that the Choctaw, like other Native peoples, did indeed possess their own songs and dances instilled a sense of cultural pride in Choctaw youth. However, Ned expressed concern that young people exhibited little desire to learn Choctaw songs and dances, and also stated that the communal dances were not perceived by all members of the Choctaw Nation as a means of reinforcing cultural identity. Many Choctaw Christians, for example, initially resisted the revival of traditional music and dance because they opposed a return to the old ways, which they perceived as heathen and backward. This perception had begun to change by the late twentieth century, and Choctaw Christians have come to regard traditional music and dance as wholesome expressions of heritage and identity because participants do not seek to displace Christianity. The Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee remained active until the late 1980s, when the group disbanded due to the illness and demise of its source musicians. However, Ned and Sampson achieved iconic status within the Choctaw Nation, which displays their portraits in the tribal headquarters, and their work continues to inspire those interested in reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw cultural identity. Since the 1990s, the Choctaw Nation has worked to maintain communal songs and dances. For example, the tribe features performances of traditional music and dance at its annual Choctaw Labor Day Festival in Tushka Homma. In 1995, enrolled members of the Choctaw Nation who live in California founded the annual California Choctaw Gathering, at which they perform communal songs and dances as part of a two-day program of heritage activities and presentations. A large delegation of employees and officers from the

312   Victoria Lindsay Levine Choctaw Nation attends, including the chief, assistant chief, and members of the tribal council. Furthermore, members of the Chickasaw Nation initiated their own music revival soon after the Heritage Committee disbanded.

The Revival of Chickasaw Communal Dance Songs in Oklahoma If little written or recorded documentation exists for Choctaw musical culture, even less is available for the Chickasaw, probably because early scholars considered them to be assimilated and therefore not viable candidates for musicological research. Some information on Chickasaw ethnography appeared in Speck (1907) and Swanton (1928/2006), but no early sources on Chickasaw music exist, although Swanton lists song titles and the number of songs in each genre, briefly describing choreography and performance contexts. Cobb provides information on the concert music curriculum at the Bloomfield Academy, a Chickasaw boarding school for women (Cobb 2000), and discussions of the Chickasaw Garfish Dance appear in more recent literature (Hinson 2008; Jackson and Levine 2002; Levine and Nettl 2011). To my knowledge, there are no archival recordings of Chickasaw communal dance songs available to the public, although some field recordings exist of singers from other tribes performing Chickasaw songs.8 As a whole, these sources suggest that, by the twentieth century, Chickasaw musical life in Oklahoma involved songs to accompany ritual and communal dances, hymns for Christian worship, and performance of Euramerican musical instruments and concert repertories. Information is not yet available on how Chickasaws categorize their communal dance songs, but a compact disc recording produced by the Chickasaw Nation, titled Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances (White Deer 1994), includes six songs shared with the Heritage Committee’s repertory:  Jump Dance, Stealing Partners, Drunk Dance (titled “Drinkwater Dance”), War Dance, Duck Dance, and Garfish Dance. Swanton listed the latter four of these dances, although he translated some titles differently (Swanton 1928/2006:  85).9 In addition, Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances contains three songs learned from neighboring Southeastern tribes: Friendship Dance, Long Dance, and Stomp Dance. In contemporary Southeastern Indian musical culture, the Muscogee Long Dance is a cognate of the Cherokee Old Dance (Heth 1975, 1985; Howard 1984; Isaacs 1969, 1995). Since Swanton noted a Chickasaw Old Dance (1928/2006), their adoption of the Long Dance has clear historical precedence. As in Choctaw music, each Chickasaw dance has its own choreography and musical style, which is generally similar to that of the Choctaw. However, Chickasaw songs also share components of Muscogee music, including the use of moderate vocal tension, glottal stops, and pitch-bending ornaments known among Southeastern tribes as the “blues style.” Furthermore, Chickasaw leaders use a hand rattle to signal changes

Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity  313

in choreography, and women dancers wear leg rattles made of terrapin carapaces or evaporated milk cans. By the early twentieth century, a multiday healing ritual known as the Pashofa ceremony had become the most important venue for Chickasaw communal dances, although family histories indicate that some communities held communal dances at consecrated ceremonial grounds until the 1940s. The Chickasaw discontinued the Pashofa Dance and ceremonial ground events by the early 1940s due to the same hardships the Choctaw and other Oklahoma Indians faced at the time. Gary White Deer explained that “[My friend] would talk about old Chickasaw dance grounds. . . and he explained why they quit dancing. He said that the ceremonial ground started experiencing problems. People were getting drunk and so forth, so they just walked away from it. All this happened just before World War II” (Gary White Deer, interview, July 21, 2010, Sapulpa, Oklahoma). Then, in 1992, following a resurgence of interest in Southeastern Indian cultures, the Chickasaw Nation was invited to perform communal dances at a festival in Alabama. Yet, as the Chickasaw anthropologist LaDonna Brown explained, “Nobody here knew the dances” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). By this time, the Chickasaw Nation had developed the infrastructure necessary to support cultural revival (Morgan et al. 2010: 9); hence it established a dance troupe, sponsored and funded by the tribe, which debuted in 1992 at the tribe’s annual meeting in Tishomingo. As in the Choctaw case, the Chickasaw recontextualized communal songs and dances by creating new kinds of performance events unconnected to the Ballgame or the Pashofa ceremony. Members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe are employees of the Chickasaw Nation who participate in the group voluntarily; roughly 150 people receive e-mail announcements about Dance Troupe activities, but a core group of eight to twelve people regularly rehearse. Members of the core group are enrolled in the Chickasaw Nation, and their forebears took part in ceremonial ground activities until the 1940s. For example, Judy Thomas stated that “my grandmother [and I] were walking around and she saw a turtle shell. She picked it up and said, ‘we used to dance with these,’ and she started telling me about stomp dance. Later, I started going to the stomp dance and trying to dance” (Judy Thomas, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). The Chickasaw anthropologist Meredith Johnson added: “My grandmother knew about it but it wasn’t part of how she grew up. My dad’s mother was not Indian but she went to the Choctaw stomp dances in Ardmore back in the thirties. So it’s interesting that it isn’t any part of my Chickasaw background, but it’s my white grandma” (Meredith Johnson, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). These observations reveal the deep connection to historic music and dance created by generational memory among core members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe. The Chickasaw Nation hired Gary White Deer (b.1950), an internationally renowned Choctaw artist and professor at Bacone College, to develop and lead its dance troupe. White Deer, who was born in Idabel, Oklahoma, had begun to learn the Choctaw repertory during the 1970s. He first heard Choctaw songs as a student at Haskell Indian Nations University, and later began to learn them through secondary orality with the use of the Heritage Committee’s vinyl discs. He subsequently visited Buster Ned in

314   Victoria Lindsay Levine Ardmore, attended singing sessions with the Heritage Committee, and danced with the Heritage Committee when they performed at intertribal powwows. Eventually, Ned asked White Deer to lead dances. In the early 1990s, he expanded his knowledge of communal dances through contact with Choctaw singers in Mississippi and Tennessee. White Deer also visited Southeastern Indian ceremonial grounds in Oklahoma during the 1970s and 1980s, where he learned how to lead Stomp Dances among the Yuchi (Euchee), Muscogee, and Seminole. His extensive knowledge and experience of Choctaw and other Southeastern Indian music, dance, ceremonial life, crafts, ritual games, and apparel qualified him to guide the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe. In the absence of Chickasaw source musicians or recordings, White Deer reconstructed the repertory of Chickasaw communal songs and dances by combining components of the Choctaw, Seminole, and Muscogee repertories with the one Chickasaw song in living memory, the Garfish Dance (see Web Figure 14.01 ). He validated this strategy through collective, generational memory, explaining that: In the eighties, I went around with an old full-blood Chickasaw guy. He was very knowledgeable. He didn’t know any songs, he didn’t know any dances, but he was there when the Chickasaws last danced. [He] seemed to have a real Seminole sense of what Chickasaw way was.

In other words, the Chickasaw elder sensed a strong affinity between Chickasaw and Seminole musical and ceremonial life. White Deer continued: Fast-forwarding to when the Chickasaws asked me to help them, I thought, Buster Ned had told me the Chickasaws and Choctaws had danced with one another. They were different dances, not the same. And the Chickasaws, they were in that turtle shell-shaking tradition. We Choctaws were not. But Buster told me they shared our dances. [We] didn’t own them. I  thought, I’ll teach ‘em some Choctaw songs and dances and then I’ll throw in the Garfish Dance. I told the dancers this is your dance. The Yuchis and the Creeks, they have a version of this and they have a song that sounds similar, but it’s not the same. So this is your dance, this one dance. And I told them we’re gonna put all this other stuff around that dance and make it the centerpiece. (Gary White Deer, interview, July 21, 2010, Sapulpa, Oklahoma)

White Deer’s intercultural approach to reclaiming Chickasaw songs and dances may cause outside observers to interpret this as an invented tradition, but core members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe reject that perspective. White Deer remarked that the Chickasaw repertory had not disappeared; it had been “put to sleep” by Chickasaw traditionalists, to be reawakened by a future generation (Anonymous 1994: 1). Brown added: “It’s something that we’ve always had, something we know is ours. As you look back through the ages, you see that combination [of Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole dances]. We know these are the songs and dances we did” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Swanton’s 1928 list of Chickasaw

Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity  315

dances corroborates this viewpoint, since the list represents a composite of Chickasaw, Choctaw, and other Southeastern repertories. The Chickasaw revival ideology, therefore, is founded on concepts of the historical continuity of regional exchange, together with the knowledge that the Chickasaw repertory of communal songs and dances has always straddled that of the Choctaw and other Southeastern tribes. The salient point is that unlike many romantic nationalist folk revivals in Europe and elsewhere, the Chickasaw do not claim cultural purity for their revived repertory; instead, they embrace the mixed heritage of the past. Brown further explained that “the Chickasaw elders who saw this said it was how they remembered Chickasaw dances” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Confirmation from elders that the reclaimed repertory accurately represents the collective memory of songs and dances they themselves can no longer perform authenticates and legitimizes the Chickasaw music revival. Like the Heritage Committee before them, members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe transmit their repertory of songs and dances mainly through participation in rehearsals and performances. When the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe originated, White Deer asked a Seminole-Muscogee man to teach the Chickasaw men how to lead, and he asked a Seminole woman to teach the Chickasaw women how to shake shells. Therefore, learning the repertory initially involved collaboration with experienced ceremonial singers and dancers from neighboring Southeastern tribes. After White Deer left the Chickasaw Nation for another job, new members of the group learned to lead songs or shake shells through participation, direct instruction from established members of the troupe, and the use of cassette tapes and Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances. A video tape preserved at the Chickasaw Nation Library documents an early performance by the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe. Tightly coordinated regalia project a strong visual emblem of cultural identity for members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe. Before their removal to Indian Territory, Chickasaws dressed for ceremonial dances in the European or American fashions of the day, amply ornamented with silver jewelry, buttons, hair combs, buckles, and bells (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Furthermore, White Deer remarked that “Buster [Ned] had told me he used to be able to spot those Chickasaw women a long ways ’cause they wear a lot of ribbons” (Gary White Deer, interview, July 21, 2010, Sapulpa, Oklahoma). In reconstructing their dance regalia, the Chickasaw incorporated components of the apparel they have worn at various times since the 1830s. The outfits are similar to Choctaw regalia, but, as in the past, Chickasaw women wear an abundance of ribbons and silver accessories. White Deer explained: “I designed those women’s accessories around the Choctaw women’s ensemble. But I didn’t really Choctawize it too much. I didn’t want them to be too much like us” (July 21, 2010.). His comment reveals the challenge of negotiating a distinct cultural identity while borrowing material from other groups and underscores the Chickasaw revival strategy of embracing their regional heritage. Twenty years after its founding, the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe continued to adapt its regalia to ever-expanding intercultural influences. Brown noted that by 2010, the color palette for women’s regalia included highly saturated hues because they performed for diverse audiences conditioned to the

316   Victoria Lindsay Levine spectacular outfits worn by Plains-style powwow dancers. She commented that “lately [powwow dancers] have gone to bright, neon colors, and as their regalia gets brighter and more colorful, ours simply follows that trend” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). The Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe, like its precursor the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee, fulfills a dual role. One role is performative: the Dance Troupe demonstrates Chickasaw communal songs and dances at public exhibitions sponsored by the Chickasaw Nation as well as at schools, tribal festivals, and multicultural events throughout the United States, including the annual Intertribal Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico. The Chickasaw Nation provides members of the Dance Troupe with regalia, transportation, meals, and lodging for exhibition performances, although they receive no additional stipends for performances. The Dance Troupe’s second role is participatory: They attend community-focused stomp dances held at Kullihoma, the Chickasaw Nation dance ground near Ada, where they perform collectively with other Chickasaws. The Chickasaw Nation Cultural Resources Department advertises the Kullihoma stomp dances and pays for the food served there. Unlike stomp dances held in conjunction with Green Corn ceremonialism among other Southeastern tribes, dances at Kullihoma do not have a ritual or ceremonial function. Instead, they enable Chickasaws of different backgrounds and ages to share a meal, participate in a heritage activity, and socialize within a Chickasaw setting. Therefore, in performative contexts, members of the Dance Troupe enact Chickasaw cultural identity for an outside audience, whereas in participatory contexts, they embody Chickasaw cultural identity for their own community. Members of the Dance Troupe acknowledge the relevance of both activities, but some prefer the participatory, Chickasaw-oriented events. For example, Brown remarked that at certain kinds of exhibition performances, “you don’t get that open-mindedness, that wanting to learn about Chickasaw culture. [The audience just] wants to see some Indians dance” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). The most significant outcome of the Chickasaw music revival, although it was initiated and sponsored by the tribal government, is that the communal songs and dances have been naturalized. In other words, since it was reclaimed in 1992, the repertory has become established among a generation of Chickasaws who grew up seeing, hearing, and participating in tribal songs and dances at home, at public events, and at Kullihoma. For this generation, the reclaimed repertory constitutes an integral part of their heritage, a heritage they have known from early childhood. Older Chickasaws who were not raised with the tribal repertory have now seen and heard the songs and dances and are aware of their place in Chickasaw history and culture, whether or not they choose to participate. This shows how quickly and effectively the reclaimed repertory became established among the Chickasaw, transforming concepts of social identity. Members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe express a renewed sense of Chickasaw cultural identity through performance. Brown, who joined the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe soon after it formed, stated that learning Chickasaw songs and dances “was like discovering who I was, where I fit into the Chickasaw community. This is my heritage, this is my tradition. This is what everybody has been talking

Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity  317

about. It is more than just song and dance. It is who I am as a Chickasaw person” (LaDonna Brown, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Her remarks emphasize the profound impact the music revival has had on reshaping Chickasaw perceptions of personal and collective identity. Thomas added: “It was like a part of me that wasn’t there that I didn’t realize until I started. I can’t wait until my granddaughter is old enough to dance. I’m going to make her a set of cans” (Judy Thomas, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Other outcomes of the Chickasaw music revival include the reactivation of Chickasaw ties to the Southeastern Indian ceremonial network in Oklahoma and the incorporation of an iconic Chickasaw melody into a major symphonic work. Some Chickasaws have begun to visit Seminole, Muscogee, and Yuchi ceremonial grounds, where they participate in the stomp dances associated with Green Corn ceremonialism. In this way, they are absorbing the belief system that was integral to Chickasaw social and spiritual life in centuries past, while enjoying the fellowship and inspiration derived from active involvement in twenty-first-century ceremonial ground life. As the only surviving song from the historic Chickasaw repertory, the Garfish Dance has come to symbolize the legacy of Chickasaw music. The Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate quoted its lyrical introductory melody in the first movement of his concerto for flute and orchestra, Tracing Mississippi, which has been performed and recorded by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Bise 2008), thereby introducing the Garfish Dance song to an entirely new, eclectic and far-flung audience. Yet the Chickasaw music revival is not without controversy. Some Chickasaws believe that stomp dances should not take place at Kullihoma in the absence of sacred ritual. Furthermore, Johnson stated that “we get some people saying that what the Dance Troupe does is not the real culture, like there is a real culture” (Meredith Johnson, interview, July 20, 2010, Ada, Oklahoma). Her statement is especially revealing for the light it sheds on the complexities and contradictions inherent in the process of reclaiming Native American cultural identity. Particularly where indigenous culture has been suppressed, members of a given tribe may hold opposing views on what constitutes tradition and heritage, which become entangled with the expectations and interpretations imposed by outsiders. It is a challenge for many Native Americans to balance citizenship in a modern industrial nation with the deeply human drive to retain distinctive cultural identities, practices, and world views. Members of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe work toward achieving this balance, at least in part, through performance of communal songs and dances.

Conclusion The Choctaw and Chickasaw cases illustrate two approaches to reclaiming indigenous cultural identity through music revival. Because of their close historic, geographic,

318   Victoria Lindsay Levine and cultural connections, it is not surprising that these revivals share similarities, especially since one revival influenced the other. Both movements originated within an established descent community with a well-documented history in a specific location. Both movements developed during a time of political and social activism and economic resurgence. Both movements represented deliberate, self-conscious efforts to reclaim cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the forces of colonization. Neither group sought to reinstate communal dances as relics of the past; rather, they recontextualized the repertory as a means of performing indigenous identity while acknowledging contemporary social and cultural realities. Finally, both groups used music revival to oppose mainstream narratives of Choctaw and Chickasaw assimilation. But the two revivals also contrast in striking ways. Whereas the Choctaw revival began as a community-based, grassroots effort, the Chickasaw revival originated within the tribal government. Tribal support has enabled the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe to thrive despite changes in leadership and personnel, whereas the Heritage Committee disbanded when its leaders declined. The Choctaw Nation now sponsors performances of communal songs and dances, which, in light of the Chickasaw case, bodes well for the continuation of the repertory. Perhaps the most conspicuous contrast between the Choctaw and Chickasaw music revivals involves the different strategies used to reclaim the two repertories. Because Buster Ned had grown up with Choctaw ceremonial culture and had direct access to Choctaw source musicians, most of the material he needed was close to hand, and he imported outside influences only for specific purposes. He adapted a Mississippi Choctaw War Dance song, for example, to express a connection to the Choctaw homeland, whereas he adopted the intertribal hand drum to feature a Native instrument more easily recognized by the general public. In the Chickasaw case, only one song survived in living memory, and therefore White Deer had to import most of the repertory, along with some pieces of regalia, from closely related tribes—a strategy that was nonetheless viewed as being in continuity with past practice. At the same time, he highlighted quintessentially Chickasaw components, such as the Garfish Dance and characteristic personal adornment, to distinguish them within the regional repertory. Despite their different strategies, both groups authenticated and legitimized their revivals through collective, living, or generational memory, and both groups asserted an overriding narrative of historical continuity. Differing availability of source material therefore determined each group’s specific strategy but not their processes of authentication or perceptions of the past. As their histories indicate, the Choctaw and Chickasaw have long confronted social, cultural, and economic change through conscious and creative transformations. The story of their music revivals, therefore, is less about loss than it is about finding ways to reclaim cultural identity by integrating historic practice with contemporary experience. Despite their economic and political success, the Choctaw and Chickasaw never relinquished their identities as Native Americans. When the time was right, they reasserted those identities, reclaiming communal songs and dances as manifestations of cultural sovereignty and self-definition. On the individual level, music revival mitigates the stark

Reclaiming Choctaw and Chickasaw Cultural Identity  319

juxtaposition between cultural identity and business or occupational identity. On the community level, music revival encapsulates deep history while envisioning the future through layers of embodied meaning. In this way, music revival contributes to both individual and community transformation while communicating distinctive cultural identities within a plural society.

Acknowledgments I have presented information regarding the Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee’s revival elsewhere (cf. Howard and Levine 1990; Levine 1993, 2004), but offer a fresh interpretation here based on recent research on music revivals and on Choctaw and Chickasaw history. I am deeply grateful to Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill for their insightful suggestions, encouragement, and patience, and to my research partners, whose generous collaboration and friendship have made my work possible: LaDonna Brown, Jason Jackson, Meredith Johnson, Claude Medford (deceased), Buster Ned (deceased), Jim Rementer, Adam Sampson (deceased), Judy Thomas, Gary White Deer, and Aaron Wilkins. I  appreciate the research funds Colorado College has provided through Jackson Fellowships, Faculty Research Grants, and the Christine S. Johnson Professorship. Finally, I thank my children, Elizabeth and Scott Levine, who assisted me in Oklahoma during the summers of 2010 and 2011, respectively; Tabetha Katz, who transcribed the recorded interviews made in 2010; and my husband, Mark Levine, for his enthusiastic support.

Notes 1. Putting a repertory to sleep implies that it can be revived at a later time, whereas putting it away implies that there is no intention of reviving it at any time in the future. Some tribes have made the conscious decision to put away certain repertories of songs and dances because they were connected to rituals, social structures, and economic practices that were unsustainable under colonization (Jackson 2004: 193; Swan 1998). 2. Native Americans also think of time in linear ways (Krech 2006) and therefore it would be a mistake to suggest that all Native peoples perceive time as cyclic. Cyclic time is an important concept for the Choctaw and other Southeastern peoples, but Choctaws have also prophesied the end of time and the natural world (Mould 2004: 167, 173). The data presented here also suggest that the history of Choctaw and Chickasaw music is characterized by the gradual shrinkage of the song and dance repertories. 3. Termination legislation, enacted in 1953 by Public Law 280, discontinued federal recognition of tribal sovereignty and withdrew financial support of assistance programs for Native Americans living on reservations. Termination was intended to promote assimilation, but it resulted in deeper poverty and diminished access to education and health care for many Native people. Terminated tribes have fought to regain federal recognition, and some, including the Choctaw, successfully resisted termination.

320   Victoria Lindsay Levine 4. Logan Parker’s prophecy of World War II resonates with similar prophecies collected among the Mississippi Choctaw (cf. Mould 2003, 2004). 5. The belief that the Choctaw received ritual knowledge, songs, and dances from the Creator parallels the cosmology and beliefs of other Southeastern tribes (cf. Jackson 2004: 201). 6. The Mississippi Choctaw have long used Native-made drums inspired by European snare drums in other contexts; there is also historical evidence that Choctaws used other kinds of drums in the past, although not to accompany nighttime dances associated with the Ballgame (Howard and Levine 1990: 22–27). 7. More detailed information on Choctaw national dress appears in Howard and Levine (1990); see also Brescia and Reeves (1982). 8. I  thank Jim Rementer (Bartlesville, Oklahoma) and Claude Medford (Natchitoches, Louisiana) for bringing these recordings to my attention. 9. Swanton translates Itinsanali Hila as “dance in which they danced against each other,” but the Ardmore Choctaw knew this as a variant of the War Dance. Swanton mentions the Tick Dance, also called Walk Dance by the Ardmore Choctaw, and uses the title Drunken Man’s Dance instead of Drunk Dance (Swanton 1928/2006: 85).

References Anonymous. 1994. “Chickasaw Dancers ‘Awaken’ Cultural Traditions.” The Chickasaw Times 29 (8): 1, 24. Brescia, Bill, and Carolyn Reeves. 1982. By the Work of Our Hands: Choctaw Material Culture. Electronic resource distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse. Washington, DC:  Office of Elementary and Secondary Education Program. Brown, James A. 2004. “Exchange and Interaction Until 1500.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 14:  Southeast, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson, 677–685. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Bushnell, David I., Jr. 1909. The Choctaw of Bayou Lacomb, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 48. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Clark, Blue. 2009. Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Cobb, Amanda J. 2000. Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852–1949. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Densmore, Frances. 1943. Choctaw Music. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 136. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Draper, David E. 1980. “Occasions for the Performance of Native Choctaw Music.” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 3: 147–173. ——. 1983. “Breath in Music:  Concept and Practice Among the Choctaw Indians.” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 4: 285–300. ——. 2009. “Identity, Retention, and Survival: Contexts for the Performance of Native Choctaw Music.” In Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, edited by Tara Browner, 67–91. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fitzgerald, David G., Jeannie Barbour, Amanda Cobb, and Linda Hogan. 2006. Chickasaw: Unconquered and Unconquerable. Ada, OK: Chickasaw Press. Galloway, Patricia. 1995. Choctaw Genesis:  1500–1700. Lincoln and London:  University of Nebraska Press.

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Heth, Charlotte Anne Wilson. 1975. “The Stomp Dance Music of the Oklahoma Cherokee: A Study of Contemporary Practice with Special Reference to the Illinois District Council Ground.” PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles. Hinson, Joshua. 2008. “Naní kalló hilhá:  The Chickasaw Hard Fish Dance.” The Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture 11 (3): 56–62. Howard, James H. 1978. “Oklahoma Choctaw Revive Native Dances.” Actes du XLIIe Congrès International des Americanistes 5: 315–323. ——. 1984. Oklahoma Seminoles:  Medicines, Magic, and Religion. Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press. Howard, James H., and Victoria Lindsay Levine. 1990. Choctaw Music and Dance. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Jackson, Jason Baird. 2003. Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ——. 2004. “Recontextualizing Revitalization: Cosmology and Cultural Stability in the Adop­ tion of Peyotism among the Yuchi.” In Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, edited by Michael E. Harkin, 183–205. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Jackson, Jason Baird, and Victoria Lindsay Levine. 2002. “Singing for Garfish:  Music and Woodland Communities in Eastern Oklahoma.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2): 284–306. Kidwell, Clara Sue. 2007. The Choctaws in Oklahoma:  From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1970. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Krech, Shepard, III. 2006. “Bringing Linear Time Back In.” Ethnohistory 53 (3): 567–593. Lambert, Valerie. 2007a. Choctaw Nation:  A  Study of American Indian Resurgence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ——. 2007b. “Political Protest, Conflict, and Tribal Nationalism: The Oklahoma Choctaws and the Termination Crisis of 1959-1970.” American Indian Quarterly 31 (2): 283–309. Levine, Victoria Lindsay. 1993. “Musical Revitalization Among the Choctaw.” American Music 11 (4): 391–411. ——. 1997a. “Music, Myth, and Medicine in the Choctaw Indian Ballgame.” In Enchanting Powers:  Music in the World’s Religions, edited by Lawrence Sullivan, 189–218. Cambridge: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions. ——. 1997b. “Text and Context in Choctaw Social Dance Songs.” Florida Anthropologist 50 (4): 183–187. ——. 2004. “Choctaw at Ardmore, Oklahoma.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 14:  Southeast, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson, 531–533. Washington, DC:  Smithsonian Institution. Levine, Victoria Lindsay, and Bruno Nettl. 2011. “Strophic Form and Asymmetrical Repetition in Four American Indian Songs.” In Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music, edited by Michael Tenzer and John Roeder, 288–315. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Morgan, Phillip Carroll, David G. Fitzgerald, and Bill Anoatubby. 2010. Chickasaw Re­nais­s­ance. Ada, OK: Chickasaw Press. Mould, Tom. 2003. Choctaw Prophecy:  A  Legacy of the Future. Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press. ——. 2004. Choctaw Tales. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

322   Victoria Lindsay Levine Speck, Frank G. 1907. “Notes on Chickasaw Ethnology and Folk-lore.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 20: 50–58. Swan, Daniel C. 1998. “Early Osage Peyotism.” The Plains Anthropologist 43 (163): 51–71. Swanton, John R. 1928/2006. Chickasaw Society and Religion. Forty-second Annual Report to the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. (Reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press.) ——. 1931. Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 103. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Waselkov, Gregory A. 2004. “Exchange and Interaction Since 1500.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 14:  Southeast, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson, 686–696. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. White Deer, Gary. 1995. “Pretty Shellshaker.” In Remaining Ourselves: Music and Tribal Memory, edited by Dayna Bowker Lee, 10–12. Oklahoma City:  State Arts Council of Oklahoma.

Discs Cited Bise, Alan. 2008. San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Symphony Chorus: Works by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Cleveland: Thunderbird Records, Inc. (CD recording) Heth, Charlotte. 1985. Songs and Dances of the Eastern Indians from Medicine Spring and Allegany. New York: New World Records. (CD recording) Isaacs, Tony. 1969. Songs of the Muskogee Creek, Part 1. Taos, New Mexico: Indian House. (CD recording) ——. 1995. Tallahasse Ceremonial Ground of the Mvskokee Nation. Taos, New Mexico: Indian House. (CD recording) Ned, Buster, and Dale McCoy. N.d. Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs, Volumes I  and II. Oklahoma City: Sweetland Productions. (LP recordings) White Deer, Gary. 1994. Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances. Oklahoma City: Chickasaw Nation Cultural Resources. (CD recording)

An annotated guide to relevant websites and other online resources can be found on the companion website. (See Web Resources .)

PA R T V

R E C OV E RY F ROM WA R , DI S A ST E R , A N D C U LT U R A L DE VA STAT ION

C HA P T E R  15

R E V I VA L I S T A RT I C U L AT I O N S O F T R A D I T I O NA L M U S I C I N WA R A N D P O S T WA R C R OAT IA NA I L A C E R I BAŠIĆ

If traditional music revival is conceptualized as a movement arising from discontent with the present situation and an aspiration for change, as a movement that finds both justification and solution in referring to the past and that is predominantly politically driven and guided by the intellectual elite, then Croatia can be identified as an exemplary country of revivals. Streams of revivals occurred throughout the twentieth century, together with turbulent social and political upheavals. The Croatian folklore scene of the early twenty-first century continues to bear legacies from former revivals that occurred in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s, with the processes of safeguarding, reviving, and canonizing traditional music having been continuously present from 1930s onward. Thus, the evolution of tradition, which has often been imagined as following a “non-intentional, ingenuous course,” has become inseparable from revivalist articulations; that is, these revivalist streams have made a tradition of themselves. It is, however, possible to differentiate levels of persistence as regards revivalist efforts, their importance, and their ways of appropriating the past. Here, I deal with developments in Croatia during the Homeland War (1991–1995) and its aftermath (mostly up to the end of 1990s, but also into the new century), a period featuring heightened levels of revivalist efforts. In addition to looking at publicly highlighted revivalist production, I focus on revivalist articulations at the grassroots level, investigating them as a tool used by the common people to cope with war’s unsafeness and destruction. I focus on how traditional music has been allied with different ideologies and significances related to nationalism, patriotism, home and safety, coping and reconstruction, local identity and history, and shifting regional and ethnic portrayals. I also address how traditional music has been performed through different presentational styles, ranging from the so-called authentic folklore to stylized folklore in activities of contemporary kulturno-umjetnička društva (“cultural-artistic societies,” hereafter

326   Naila Ceribašić referred to by the acronym KUD), to traditional-pop fusions styles. Despite the influence of the war, the ethnographic material I present here has led me to conclude that traditional Croatian music continues to move forward as a continuity of articulations instead of as revivalist disjuncture.

Singing in the Template of National Spiritual Revival Already with the establishment of the first freely elected government in 1990, which was soon to guide Croatia through independence from Yugoslavia, the notion of “revival” (or “renewal,” in Croatian, obnova) gained a prominent position in public parlance,1 starting with President Franjo Tuđman’s call for a spiritual and moral revival of the nation and combining with rituals of social retraditionalization. Spiritual revival referred to the “revival of the Croatian national self-confidence,” the “commonality of all Croatian citizens, irrespective of history and worldviews,” and to “the removal of all ruinous divisions” (Tuđman 1990). In the field of music, “commonality” was manifested in the creation of all-embracing homeland music, an important part of which were new patriotic songs, in whose creation at the height of war in 1991–1992 almost every professional musician was involved, no matter the genres he or she was affiliated with. (For more on different aspects of wartime music, see Pettan [1998].) In addition to new patriotic songs, the media space was altered by revival in two senses of the term: as a resurrection of the old repertoire of national and patriotic songs from the past, and as a strong increase in the public visibility of already existing domains of tamburitza musicianship, klapa singing, and church folk singing.2 Both of these forms of revival were promoted as expressions of national identity, defining the important differences of Croatian tradition as opposed to the forcefully imposed shared legacy of socialist Yugoslavia and pro-Serbian militancy. Such expressions were recognized as being musically epitomized in the variously termed genre of turbo folk, newly composed folk music or, simply, narodnjaci (folkie music).3 The repertoire resurrected from the past encompassed patriotic songs composed in the period of the Croatian National Revival (Rejuvenation) of the 1830s and 1840s until World War II, songs that were mostly forgotten, existed outside of the public sphere, or were forbidden under socialist Yugoslavia. The albums Hrvatska pjesmarica (Croatian Songbook, 1989) and Hrvatska domovina (Croatian Homeland, 1990) by the tamburitza band Zlatni dukati were groundbreaking editions of this sort. The point of their revival was not to present a newly discovered ancient, unknown, or forgotten musical system, but rather to demonstrate how the lyrics of these songs reflected the social and political circumstances of their own times and their relevance to contemporary events. (See video ­example 15.1 .)

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As for (canonized) traditional music, similarly and predictably, it was officially seen as a means of protecting national self-consciousness. The 1992 address of Franjo Tuđman at the opening ceremony of the leading Croatian folklore festival Međunarodna smotra folklora (MSF) is illustrative in this respect: This festival is the proof and testimony of autochthony, riches and fascinating beauty of the thousand-year-old Croatian folk culture. It was so also in those days when the Croatian people were under the boot of foreign rule, and is so now, the proof of the existence of Croatian people, the proof that Croatian people stay faithful to their roots, that they protect even in the most apparent way the wealth of their ancestors, that all parts of Croatian people, here in the Croatian homeland and those strewn all over the far-away world, form the unity that is manifested particularly in these crucial days of the creation of the sovereign and free independent state of Croatia.4

Such reliance on historicism—on “the use of the past to imagine and construct the present,” with historical records as its tools (cf. Bohlman 2004: 70)—predominated throughout the 1990s. As regards revivalist activities, this focus on historicism can be recognized as placing perhaps too much trust on historical records, sometimes to the point of taking them for granted, literally. A telling example is the revival of the ceremonial decapitation of an ox as part of the custom of kumpanjija during the church holiday of Gospa Snježna (Our Lady of Snow), in Pupnat on the island of Korčula.5 With the help of a noted expert, the inhabitants of Pupnat revived the decapitation ceremony in 1997, relying on data about occasional decapitations in the past. This “most authentic,” word-for-word revival earned for them distinction from other kumpanjijas on Korčula, where this bloody part of the custom was not preserved. Such decapitations caused a huge public outcry two years later, in 1999, overflowing—as shown in the analysis of Jasna Čapo Žmegač (2000)—the narrow confines of a locally revived tradition and becoming a metaphor for the ideological and political rifts opening between Croatian traditionalists and modernists. For some, customs as they existed in the past are of unquestionable value in themselves; local, ethnic, and religious identities were preserved through them, and, consequently, they must be preserved or revived in modern times by literally following their script from the past (cf. the example of Corsican archaeologists in Bithell [2006]). This was the argument given by the people of Pupnat. For others, however, the value of customs lies in their correspondence with contemporary sensibilities and interests; merely preserving the forms of a tradition is not a valid argument. In this light, moreover, only those customs that are humane, good, and valuable for people of today (and for animals, too) should be brought forward from the past. (See video ­example 15.2  .) This example is interesting to use as a paradigm for discussing a network of related terms such as (the invention of) tradition (Phillips and Schochet 2004), selection of a community (Williams 1977), articulation (Clifford 2001, 2003), heritage (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2002), and revival (Atkinson 2004; Baumann 1996; Livingston 1999; Ronström 1996; Rosenberg 1993). Here, however, I sum up only those elements that acutely mark the Croatian concept of authenticity during the 1990s. These are the

328   Naila Ceribašić elements of the untouchability of historical records (in general and especially as regards pre-Yugoslav and pre-socialist records); of the disparate selection of the past (since historical records show partial and at times even mutually opposite truths); of tradition as a script (the beheading of an ox in this case), but not its functions and meanings; and of expert involvement in a revival project. It is telling that these elements, epitomized by the drastic example of decapitation, caused polemics at the end of the epoch marked by Tuđman’s leadership (he died in 1999).

Musicking in the War? From Music for Comforting to Music for Torturing in the War Zone Researchers of revival in the countries of the former socialist East, especially those who speak from Western addresses, deal mostly with government-directed programs and pockets of resistance, whereas researchers of revival in the West deal mostly with more grassroots cultural activities (cf., e.g., Rosenberg 1993; Slobin 1996). Such different foci undoubtedly follow matters on the ground, but might overinflate the impression that human feelings and the needs of individuals are reserved for revivals in the West, whereas the manipulations and pressures of power systems are reserved for the East. According to Alberto Melucci, social movements “are today more and more obviously located at precisely this border area between the individual and the apparatuses of the system” (1996: 146). Individual identities and experiences are, no doubt, socially constructed, but, at the same time, feelings, sensations, and bodily movements create the deepest and most intimate parts of human experience that culture can never entirely frame (151). Here I try to shed some light on a niche of individual feelings and needs that seem to elude construction, especially in wartime, when we allow ourselves more readily—both in personal experiences and while doing research—to make excursions into reflections on essence, core, or nature.6 We are accustomed to thinking about music in terms of bright perspectives. For Blacking, for instance, it is a “hard task . . . to love, and music is a skill that prepares man for this most difficult task” (1976: 103). War testimonies from areas of the former Yugoslavia affirm this in a certain way: When directly facing the dangers of war, people generally did not, on their own, as individuals, reach for the music that they intimately loved. For instance, when asked about the music he enjoyed during the war, one expelled from the city of Vukovar told me in 1994: You see, I’ll tell you one thing. I believe that you haven’t been in a war. In the war through which we had passed, you didn’t have time to think about [music], you wouldn’t get the slightest idea to listen to any song or anything else. Only people who

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were doing only that would let it play, only people . . . whose profession that was and who were given that task, who were working at that Radio Vukovar, to give [music] along with the news, along with all that, [give] something little to people and to upkeep them somewhat psychologically. However, in Vukovar itself, during the war in Vukovar, believe me, the biggest music was grenades, airplanes, bullets of all kinds and calibers and from them no music could be heard. (Interview, Zagreb, June 20, 1994)

The syntagma “to upkeep them somewhat psychologically” relates to the comfort and encouragement that music can provide even in wartime, which is congruous with Lomax’s thesis that “from the point of view of its social function, the primary effect of music is to give the listener a feeling of security” (2003 [1959]: 143). This applies mostly to music produced “from above” (in the cited example, by Radio Vukovar), but this does not mean that such music is not intimately felt or internalized. For instance, according to the editor of the Yellow Submarine radio station in Osijek: The people of Osijek used to say that the Yellow Submarine defeated the enemy’s artillery with its words and its music. “There is nothing they can do to us, just let them keep on firing.” Once we broadcast waltzes and invited our listeners to dance in their cellars. We checked later and found they really had responded by dancing. At the same time, the buildings were coming down around their heads. They really believed that the cannons could not hurt them. (Vrandečić 1993, cited in Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998: 172)

Patriotic songs especially—new, old, or revived—gave people in shelters encouragement and solace. Many persons I spoke with affirmed this. Even more, certain songs positively vibrated with specific identities and destinies. One woman expelled from Vukovar told me in 1994: The song “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” touches me personally, today, and will always touch me [“Leave my plains alone,” a song composed in the 1980s from the perspective of the émigré experience, but transposed in 1991 into the experience of displaced persons; Zlatni dukati launched it to become one of the most popular songs of the war era], and I cannot help but to cry nowadays, whenever I hear that song. And all those songs of ours about Slavonia [“the plains” mentioned in the song is a metaphor for Slavonia region that stretches to Vukovar in the east], about home, it is normal that we can think about it now and that they touch us and that emotions appear. But in the basement [where she sheltered while Vukovar was under siege], we didn’t have time—to let the emotions overwhelm us . . . We only listen to our songs nowadays. Maybe that is the only thing that can connect us, maybe that is so because we believe that this will tie us closer to our homes . . . everybody who can sing nicely and who touches your soul. (Interview, Zagreb, June 20, 1994)7

330   Naila Ceribašić In the public sphere, the intimate dimension of music as solace is replaced by the dimension of defiance. The MSF festival in 1992 was, for instance, held under the motto “I’m defiance,” “as an expression of resistance and moral strength of our people, regardless of suffering and war” (Rajković et al. 1992). This same template for defiant singing that was abundantly used in various official, politically driven circumstances was also used in popular culture of the earlier Yugoslav period. So, in one scene in the film Bitka na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva) from 1969 (Bulajić 2005), one of the most well-known Yugoslav movies about the partisan movement against German and Italian forces during World War II, the partisan army and its wounded are under strong attack by tank fire, their situation almost hopeless. When asked by a physician what to do (because “they are going to kill us all”), the commander replies that they should sing (“without panic, give a song, a song”); the wounded begin to sing the partisan song “Padaj silo i nepravdo” (“Fall oh force and injustice”) accompanied by an accordion. It is an expression of defiance, resistance, and strength, causing doubt among the enemy and encouraging partisan fighters to launch an assault and successfully resist a militarily superior enemy. The generations that grew up during the Yugoslav era absorbed such media images of music in war. This brings us to music as used in communication between adversaries, both at the frontlines and in captivity. Music is a lot more present in these places, judging from personal testimonies, than in shelters and among refugees. But this is the dark side of the tune, using music for terror and torture, for its “mercenary power” (Johnson and Cloonan 2009:  4), a use that goes completely against the “pervasive and often tacit assumption that popular music [and music in general] is inevitably personally and socially therapeutic” (1). As the war went on, more frequent narratives emerged from ex-prisoners describing how one form of torture to which they were submitted was to listen without pause to songs or be forced to perform songs textually aligned with the ideology of the torturer but musically formed in the style of narodnjaci (folkie) music. At the same time, such songs were an integral part of other types of torture such as beatings, rape, and forced sex among prisoners. The biggest reservoir of songs used for torture in prison camps and for terror at the frontlines were those revived from the Chetnik and Ustasha nationalistic movements of World War II, both saturated in hatred toward the opposed ethnicity, both musically formed on traditional templates, both using decasyllabic versification and new lyrics based on traditional models, and both employing the communicative, interactive, and participatory aspects of music. In his study of censorship of music in Afghanistan, John Baily stressed that “musicality and music making appear to be fundamental aspects of what it means to be human,” and that “a human society deprived of music is likely to become to some extent dehumanised” (2001:  44). How do we understand this in the contrasting contexts of the described shortage of music as intimate support and comfort in times of trouble and the quite vivid musicking in prison camps and at the frontlines? Deprivation of music can doubtlessly be an indicator of an inhuman society, but music itself can be a tool of dehumanization. With music used in such a role, is it more appropriate to talk about aural weapons instead? Or, is the relationship between music and humaneness short-lived, reserved only for stable, happy, and wealthy societies, and incorrectly thought of as

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universal? In other words, does the predominant lack of music as an intimate, individual comfort in wartime—a situation that is said to reach the bottom of what it means to be human—point to an idealized image of musicality and humaneness? Whatever the case, the example of wartime Croatia indicates that both cultural production from above and musical activities from below are characterized by the use of templates from the past and the argument of continuity, combined with an aspiration for an all-embracing homogenization. These provide people with a feeling of safety, which is a fundamental human need, especially during the uncertainty of war. As Čorkalo Biruški and Ajduković concluded in their research on the psychological profile of the traumatized Vukovar community, differences in peaceful times are irrelevant, whereas “the time of crisis demands simple and straightforward answers, because they are the way to establish safety as a basic human need”; in such times, “not only small [in the sense of Freud’s narcissism of small differences], but every difference becomes huge” (2009: 10; emphasis in original). In his pioneering text on revitalization movements, Anthony Wallace also wrote of the need for safety as a foothold for revival; he wrote that the society under stress undertakes emergency measures—such as switching to a revitalization mode—to preserve the constancy of a minimally fluctuating, life-supporting matrix (1956: 265, 279).

Moving Beyond War Baggage in Tradition-Based Popular Music After the War During the war, the plastic or nylon bag was “an inevitable spot in mass media reporting on the refugees,” “a remnant of their property and remembrance,” “a symbol of torment and loss which war reporters have obviously considered the strongest, and a point of formulaic discourse of the war-exhausted media” (Prica 1993: 62). Refugees’ bags usually contained documents, necessary clothes, and family photos, but sometimes also heritage items such as folk costumes or musical instruments. In the words of the leader of a postwar heritage revival project: It comes as a surprise to find out how much was preserved by people who were rushed out of their homes, in fear and [with] only [a]‌few bags of their belongings. Their few saved possessions often contained national costumes. It was impressive to find entire wardrobes filled with preserved garments in the newly restored homes of returnees, whose houses had been either set on fire or plundered. Many families have preserved that part of their heritage in various ways: some removed it in time [to] a place of safety, others buried it. . . . It is interesting to note that, on return to their villages, displaced persons felt an urge to restore their heritage despite many unsolved life problems. (Vitez 1998: 6)

332   Naila Ceribašić Regardless of the actual contents of these refugees’ bags, the bags themselves acted as symbolic containers for reestablishing one’s own place under the sky after the war. Generally speaking, everybody who experiences war brings with him or her “baggage.” It labels all of us, regardless of whether one insists on remembering the questionable values and wounds that war brought (as epitomized by the music of Marko Perković Thompson, discussed below), whether one tries to turn the page and put the war behind oneself as an unpleasant episode (as do the prevalent tamburitza bands, klapa groups, and other musicians in the ethnomusic genre), or whether one wants to renew some part of the cultural ties to one’s former homeland (as exemplified in the narodnjaci scene, but also in certain genres of rock and pop music that do not have direct connections with folk music). In examining media after the war, several scenes of tradition-based popular music exist in parallel. An extremely popular folk-rock singer, Marko Perković Thompson continues the right-wing nationalist narrative of the 1990s, using provocative Ustasha and Nazi insignias at his concerts. Yet his expression, paradoxically, is close to narodnjaci or turbo folk (which is generally understood as Balkan, Eastern, and/or Serbian, and incompatible with Croatia’s alleged Western and European leanings). Although Thompson’s concerts still fill the largest halls, heated discussions induced by his songs and performances fill YouTube, dissecting the truths of the war, history, Ustashas and Chetniks, and similar topics.8 Genres that during wartime occupied a large media space and served as official self-understanding for Croats—tamburitza, klapa, and church music—lost such position after the war. Indeed, church music, particularly Christmas songs and carols, became an integral part of the repertoire of many local folklore groups, tamburitza bands, klapa groups, and other tradition-based and tradition-inspired musicians, and these capture a prominent space in the postwar public sphere and discography, including major record labels. However, church music no longer epitomizes Croatia’s difference from Orthodox religion and atheists (i.e., Serbian and socialist Yugoslav affiliations). (See video e­ xample 15.3 .) Likewise, tamburitza bands returned to their north Croatian and Pannonian roots, which include tamburitza musicianship from across state and national borders (from northern Serbia to south-Slavic communities in the United States and elsewhere). By the early 2000s, klapa singing occupied the position of the foremost Croatian cultural product. It is, as its promoters believe, the most promising cultural product in economic terms, tourism, and the international music industry, and has been evoked as a national symbol in these contexts. The primary presumption about the “revival,” “new flourishing,” “new youth,” or “renaissance” of the klapa “movement” in the 2000s is that it refers to an exceptional commercial success: concerts in the largest halls and stadiums and a series of hits that do not fall from the popularity lists. The (re)creation of specific musical expressions—for example, the “new simplicity” of compositions that rely on a simple homophonic texture as the structural origin of klapa singing—have remained a secondary trend in the klapa domain.9 At the same time, postwar Croatia has been marked by the return of narodnjaci music, which was, as noted earlier, expelled from the public space during the war. This

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return stretched from clubs on the periphery of cities to the biggest concert halls and was marked by the gradual return of Bosnian (from the mid-1990s) and later Serbian musicians (since 2000s), as well as by the cooperation of Croatian musicians with musicians from other post-Yugoslav countries. (The most well-known example of such cooperation was Severina and Goran Bregović’s joint work on the Croatian song for the European Song Contest in 2006; see Baker 2008.) The public space during the entire postwar period has been marked by discussions of whether narodnjaci are simply imported to Croatia or whether they belong to its national musical identity. Thus, depending on how they are defined, narodnjaci continue to be the nidus of both resentment and appeal among Croats. It is telling that narodnjaci have never been spoken of as “revival,” but as “return.” “Revival,” either as a term taken from English or as the Croatian obnova, presumes a positively valued, “authentic,” ideologized past used as a tool in the present, whereas “return” lacks such overtones. (See Figure 15.1.) In the field of popular music, revival (the English term) appeared in the postwar era primarily in connection with the ethnomusic (etno-glazba) scene, which emerged in opposition both to narodnjaci (as in Serbia, cf. Čolović 2006: 5–6) and to the omnipresent commercialized tamburitza music. Ethnomusic is commercially less successful than either. Its backbone is in the revitalization of old Croatian tunes presented in modern arrangements with contemporary ways of singing and playing, contemporary instrumentation, and an accompanying discourse on the ethics and aesthetics of heritage. Starting in the mid-1990s, and working with limited materials from Croatia and Croatian communities in neighboring countries, ethnomusicians extended their sources of inspiration to include musical material from outside national borders. This phenomenon dovetailed, to a certain extent, with the appearance of voluntary communities or groupings devoted to other types of non-Croatian music, most obviously Macedonian and Irish music. In such cases, however, the term “revival” is never used: it is reserved to describe the “borrowing” of Croatian folk tunes for use in contemporary settings. These folk tunes, which are available as written and audio documents from the past or as part of the contemporary "authentic" and "stylized" folklore scenes, are performed by ethnomusicians in modern venues such as urban clubs, diverse festivals, and workshops, often with an alternative, student, human rights, and/or ecological slant. The discographic production of ethnomusic brings further visibility and popularity to such tunes. The tunes thus borrowed are mostly treated as fixed and immutable, but are built on with new arrangements (sometimes using old, neglected instruments such as bagpipes and dulcimer). Thus, traditional music is seen by many ethnomusicians as simply a repository of tunes suitable for presentational performance (irrespective of how immense, rich, and valuable they would label it). (See video ­example 15.4  .) The branch of the ethnomusic movement found in the Istrian Peninsula is an important exception to this model. Beginning as early as the 1980s, this movement was led not only by efforts to revitalize disappearing Istrian tradition (understood, practiced, and promoted as outstandingly multicultural and multiethnic), but by a belief in the vividness and changeability of tradition (instead of perceiving it as a repository of fixed tunes) and by a critical stance toward stereotypical presentational formats. One of the

334   Naila Ceribašić

FIGURE  15.1  Graffiti on a residential building from around 2007, photographed by the author in Zagreb, March 2012, is illustrative of how important narodnjaci are as an issue throughout Croatian society. This graffiti “slušajte sve samo cajke ne” instructs passersby to “listen to everything, except cajke.” Cajke is a pejorative term for female singers in narodnjaci music, and, in a broader sense, refers to the genre in general. Similarly, a nationwide radio station that airs only domestic music and is by its name directed to folk (narod), nevertheless (or perhaps precisely for these reasons) advertises itself with the slogan “Ne sviramo narodnjake” (“we do not play narodnjaci”).

pioneers of Istrian ethnomusic, musician and ethnomusicologist Dario Marušić, characterizes the Istrian revival of the 1980s and 1990s not only as opposition but as rebellion against the mainstream (in keeping with Istria’s overall character during that period; e.g., political opposition). Throughout their work, many Istrian musicians seek to erase the line between traditional music and ethnomusic; they define tradition more in the sense of its contemporaneousness and less in the sense of safeguarding the values of the past; more in the sense of its variability, creativity, absence of fixed models, and the freedom it gives musicians to mix various patterns and less in the sense of canonized values. Fidelity to tradition and creative freedom thus make an integral whole because freedom in approaching traditional templates is understood as fidelity to tradition; that is, the tradition is understood as a field that demands a creative approach (Baumann [1996] called this relation toward tradition “syncretism,” differentiating it from purism; on a comparable Finnish concept, see Hill [2009]). At the same time, Istrian musicians stress the importance of informal performance venues that draw a soft line between performers and audience, young and old, beginners and experienced musicians (similar to “pub sessions” in Irish music). These venues, more so than the usual festival presentations,

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contribute to the preservation and vividness of Istrian music (both traditional and tradition-based). (See video e­ xample 15.5  .) Besides Istrian musicians, after the war, young musicians in their 20s and 30s appeared throughout the country who understood revival as “looking backwards in order to go forwards” (Guffey 2006: 8; see also Ronström 1996, Atkinson 2004). These performers often retrieve from the past ancient instruments that very few know how to build or play, as was the case in the 1990s with gajde and dude (variants of bagpipes in northern Croatia) and lijerica (south Dalmatian three-stringed fiddle). The direction in which they are taking their music lies in improving technique, style, and repertoire and playing both traditional music and ethnomusic. Allen’s description of The New Lost City Ramblers (2010: 300–301) could fully apply to the most outstanding of these musicians because they occupy “an intermediate cultural space between regional . . . music and the urban folk revival” (i.e., ethnomusic in Croatian terminology) and position themselves “stylistically closer to the former, emulating, without slavishly duplicating, the instrumental and vocal music of their mentors who . . . grew up in rural . . . communities” (301). (See video e­ xample 15.6  .)

Postwar Articulations of Traditional Music Two main concepts permeate the Croatian folklore scene—authenticity and stylization—and both are nurtured by organized folklore groups (KUDs). The basis of KUDs that adhere to authenticity lies in the maintenance of an exclusively local or regional repertoire and in the conviction that safeguarding original forms taken from the past and presenting them without modifications are of the highest value. Thus, the permanent source of ambiguity in their work lies in the need to maintain values (templates, styles, and approaches) from the past that are, at the same time, supposed to be expressions and integral parts of contemporary local culture. Here, differences between past and present are hidden through claims about their sameness. Regular rehersals function as a means of effectively decreasing differences between past and present; the emulation of records from the past helps to foster a sense of continuity or sameness, so that “sameness” becomes not only a discourse but also, in a way, a reality of practice. The concept of stylization is, in contrast, characterized by an intentional departure from the past, through an open, unveiled aspiration to an artistic reworking of traditional material. In practice, it means an orientation toward a superb reproduction of choreographies and music arrangements sourced from a rural folklore heritage derived from different regions of Croatia (and, during the Yugoslavia period, other republics). Stylization is prevalent among KUDs from urban environments, whereas village KUDs adhere primarily to the concept of authenticity. Although in reality there is a lot of back-and-forth flow between these two categories, they still remain categorical principles of the public practice of folklore.10

336   Naila Ceribašić The postwar period has been characterized by a significant increase in the number of village KUDs, especially in war-stricken areas. This period has also been characterized by a more inclusive concept of tradition in expert and governmental circles (especially as regards the acknowledged bearers of tradition and their agency in defining it), combined with the yearning of many KUDs to articulate music that would represent the very specificity and distinctiveness of their communities and traditions. This distinctiveness is enhanced by relying on the past, mostly through revived forms, genres, instruments (e.g., the gajde and lijerica mentioned above), and performing styles, and less often on revived ways of treating templates (as in the example of Istrian music) or reviving performing contexts. The reasons for the postwar upsurge of KUDs are complex and mutually connected. First, the upsurge occurred in the social atmosphere of postwar material reconstruction. The implementation of that task was, from 1994 to 1999, the duty of the Ministry of Development and Reconstruction (or “Revival”; in Croatian, it is the same word— obnova; starting in 2003, the Ministry underwent several transformations, but all retained the word obnova in the title). The Ministry would occasionally support cultural projects such as, in 1998, the “Obnavljamo baštinu” project (literally, “We Revive Heritage,” or, as officially translated into English, “Reconstructing Heritage”), started by a group of experts who produced the Zagreb MSF festival, with the goal of restoring folklore heritage in “heavily damaged places in which life is coming back after the destruction of war” (Vitez 1998: 5). (See Figure 15.2.) The project included eleven such villages in different regions of Croatia. According to the project leader, some of the folklore groups needed only a stimulus and encouragement, while others needed greater assistance in searching for traditions which have died out, or have been partially or completely forgotten. The experts provided help in finding documentation, in the restoration of national costumes, as well as of the dancing and musical aspects of their native culture, and also helped with the adaptation of these elements for stage performances. (Vitez 1998: 5)

Second, the upsurge of KUDs was helped by Tuđmanist rhetoric about folk tradition being the protector of national self-consciousness, endurance, and distinctiveness from the “other” (read, primarily, rebellious Serbs). People who suffered in the war could easily associate their traumatic experiences with that idea and find comfort and defiance in reviving their heritage. In 1998, the president of a KUD from “Village A” near Knin illustrated that rationale well, explaining the motives that guided his group in their work. He stressed that they would not give up, despite their village being completely destroyed and their being forced out. They engaged women to reconstruct folk costumes (having barely escaped with their lives, let alone possessions and costumes) and founded in Zagreb, already at the beginning of their exile in 1992, their homeland cultural society. This society started presenting their village’s heritage at performances throughout Croatia, helping in this way to benefit spiritually, morally, and even materially their

FIGURE  15.2  Visual representation of the “Reconstructing Heritage” project (1998, reproduced with permission of Međunarodna smotra folklora). This edited photo was used in the festival booklet, posters, and exhibition that accompanied the festival, as well as in the CD produced the following  year.

338   Naila Ceribašić soldiers at the first frontlines of the battlefield (conversation, Zagreb, July 22, 1998).11 This cultural society also started to document their heritage, which resulted in an exceptionally comprehensive folk song collection (published in 1995). Soon after returning to their village following Operation Storm in 1995, they established their KUD. The president of the KUD clearly saw his group’s actions as acts of defiance against their enemies (whom he did not name, but clearly implied as the rebellious Serbs in the Knin area who expelled these people from their village). These enemies, in his understanding, never had any culture; through envy, they were attracted to the values and beauties of Village A culture and the spiritual riches that the Croatian Catholic people of that area always possessed, and this led to their desire to destroy Village A and its people (conversation, Zagreb, July 22, 1998). But the people of Village A “wouldn’t give up.” One of the first actions of their KUD was the revival of the custom of vučarenje (“wolf assembly”) as a scenic performance, last practiced in the 1960s. The wolf is an embodiment of evil because it kills the villagers’ sheep; therefore one who kills a wolf goes with his friends from house to house through the village, carrying the dead wolf and singing the wolfer’s song while the villagers give him gifts because he saved them from evil. The link between vučarenje and the aftermath of war is, I believe, obvious. What is important to add, however, is that, contrary to the claims of the Village A representative, the cultural assets of local Croats and Serbs—who in war became enemies—were, before then, shared, similar if not the same. In other examples, the reasons for establishing KUDs and their activities were not so much nationalistically grounded or directed against the proximate other, but were more grounded in the aspiration of a community to (re)constitute itself through its tradition. Both cases can be determined as culturalization (i.e., “a stress on cultures in difference, with the implication that cultural activities are caught up in processes of differing” [Bennett 2005: 68, emphasis in original]). This is a process that produces difference and downplays exchanges among collectivities through cultural means, a situation in which culture is posited as prime ground for explaining social and political dynamics (I discuss this more broadly in Ceribašić [2007]). But while during the war and the flourishing of the nationalistic narrative, culturalization overwhelmingly referred to internally uniform Croats in relation to other ethnic collectivities (in particular, Serbs), after the war, in different political circumstances, culturalization was transposed to embrace differences in intraethnic, regional, and local traditions and communities. Although the aim of saving (safeguarding and/or reviving) a very local, indigenous tradition (which in fact meant its rearticulation into representative heritage with clear-cut borders, i.e., a shift toward cultures in difference) also characterized the concepts of culturalization from the 1930s and 1960s—and it can therefore be said that, in the postwar era, culture was simply once again renewed—a clearly pronounced stress on cultures in difference presents a new moment. This new concept doubtlessly owes its existence to politicized wartime culturalization, but equally to intimate human encounter with the local world, endangered, ravaged, or destroyed in the war. For instance, KUD Grančica (Twig) from Đeletovci in eastern Slavonia acted for its inhabitants, during the years of exile from November 1991 to October 1997, as their

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virtual birthplace, testifying to the vitality of their community and tradition. It did so by making the KUD’s performances a reason for assembling the people of the village who were strewn across the whole of Croatia and by presenting programs based on their narrow local repertoire and on local topics in song lyrics. Their first visit to the village, made possible by the process of peaceful reintegration in the Danube region, occurred on the day of the local patron saint in 1997. On that occasion, a Mass was said in front of a demolished church, after which the people who gathered danced their kolo (round-dance). As they said, they had dreamed for years of doing exactly this after their return to the village—attend Mass and dance in their kolo. Several events from my visit to the village of Đeletovci in February 1998 are etched into my memory. One member of the KUD took us to her half-demolished house, seated us on improvised benches in the yard, warned us to be careful where we walked because the property had not yet been cleared of landmines, and then began talking about the beauties of her village’s tradition, utterly ignoring the rough reality of the place. Using the metaphor of a twig in their KUD’s name, which grows into a strong tree, and intertwines with other twigs to form a circle of communality, other members of the KUD talked enthusiastically about the revival of Đeletovci and explained in detail the peculiarities of their music, dance, and costumes in comparison to even the closest neighboring villages (e.g., the specifics of the steps in their kolo dances). (See video ­example 15.7  .) Browsing through the ethnomusicological literature, Baily’s view on music that “provides a range of therapeutic possibilities for those who have suffered the traumas of warfare, the direct exposure to military force, the loss of family members, the dislocation, the uncertainty, the depression, the stress which occurs with prolonged experience of brutality” (2001: 45) could be applied to Đeletovci (and to Village A as well). We can see in the musical horizons of Đeletovci the elements of teleological judgment about which Joshua Pilzer writes when referring to Korean singing style in the demilitarized zone, stressing how “myriad musical forms enact teleological systems that pass through suffering to its relief, suggesting that the varieties of human suffering are purposeful events on a structured path towards an improved or even ideal state” (2003: 70). We can draw a parallel with the musics of other (although less) stressful conditions, such as Liverpool country music, which, according to Sara Cohen, “with its emphasis on kinship, community, and continuity” helps “to provide, perhaps, a resource to cope with, or a defense against, the disruptions of the local world” (2005: 31). For the villagers of Đeletovci, their music and dance are an effective resource for coping with the disruption of their local world. Their music and dance are even more effective because they are happening within a KUD, an organizational framework that helps people to nurture social connections in the community. Regular rehearsals, in addition to being devoted to practicing the repertoire, customarily include communal informal eating, drinking, chatting, and other forms of social exchange. In the same way, various local events organized by members of the KUD and their travels to festivals and visits to other places, where they are then hosted by other KUDs, additionally strengthen the feelings of a harmonious community epitomized by their KUD.

340   Naila Ceribašić The KUD of Đeletovci was one of eleven KUDs included in the “Reconstructing Heritage” project. Other projects, mostly those initiated from outside by experts or cultural organizations (including international nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]), did not, as a rule, aspire to strengthen or revive a very local heritage. The intention of these projects was, nevertheless, to help recovery, to be therapeutic. In that way, the project to help survivors of Srebrenica relied on sevdalinka because it was both a marker of identity and had an emotional capacity for expressing (and thus overcoming) sadness (Softić 2011: 173–175), and the project to help Bosnian refugees in Norway focused on a general, popular repertoire of Bosnian and Norwegian tunes (Pettan 1996). In contrast to these projects, the recovery of Bosnian society as charted by Western cultural development initiatives completely circumvented traditional music due to its ethno-national abuses and offered in its place “non-political local popular music and popular music from abroad” (Haskell, in Helbig 2008: 53), in which Haskell recognizes neocolonial implications. In still other cases, the reasons for establishing KUDs and their activities were mostly pragmatic. For instance, according to some prominent members of the KUD from Cetingrad in the Kordun region of Karlovac County, before the war, the village’s inhabitants would meet during their free time in old, abandoned houses, to sing and dance there accompanied by local musicians. This completely satisfied their cultural needs, so they did not need to organize a KUD or participate in festivals. Such prewar gatherings were completely destroyed during the war, and thus emerged an incentive to organize a KUDs so that local authorities could acquire some space appropriate for gatherings and also pay for its maintenance. Aside from that, future KUD members were guided by the fact that only formally organized groups (not individuals or informal groups) could apply for funds from the Ministry of Culture and the local municipal bodies intended to support amateur cultural activities—and they needed new musical instruments because they had lost their old instruments in the war. In addition, the ruinous force of the war instilled in them a longing for ages past and a desire to pass their traditional values on to the younger generation. In their case, however, unlike in Đeletovci, the latter motive was secondary; the decisive factor was to ensure the space for gathering and the instruments with which they would renew the prewar joy of informal musicking. The war and the postwar period both have been characterized by a significant upsurge in homeland12 and minority KUDs. The basis for the development of homeland groups—town groups that, usually following the concept of authenticity, cultivate the heritage of their more or less distant birthplaces—was migration, temporary or permanent, caused by the war, and a new discourse on the Croatian dispersal (which, as mentioned earlier, was marked by Tuđman’s call to the Croatian people—“here in the Croatian homeland and those strewn all over the far-away world”). The upsurge in minority groups occurred thanks to a new constitutional order that brought great changes in the treatment of national minorities and, consequently, their cultures. In the age of socialist Yugoslavia, in conformity with the politics of brotherhood and unity, there were no KUDs with the ethnic marker of any of the constitutive nations of the former Yugoslavia (Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Muslims/Bosniaks, Serbs,

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Slovenes). In independent Croatia, however, all former constitutive nations, except Croats, became minorities. These minorities founded their KUDs in the early 1990s, forming a new, minority folklore scene together with other minority KUDs that also established themselves at that time (Albanian, Austrian, and German in the early 1990s; Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian in the 2000s) and with minority KUDs that were already active during the time of the Yugoslavian state (Czech-Slovak, Italian, and Hungarian from the 1940s; Ruthenian and Ukrainian from 1968; Romani from 1980; Jewish from 1989). I have written about the minority scene elsewhere (Ceribašić 2007), including examples of revival. (See Figure 15.3.) Classifying people on the basis of ethnicity or residence status and consequently organizing them on their status as refugees, immigrants, or minorities, brought, in itself, new articulations of tradition in terms of the agency and authority of communities and of KUDs as their symbolic or informal representatives. Communities (and their KUDs) gained greater freedom to define their traditions in their own terms, without reference to the canons of authenticity and stylization. In the case of the Roma community, for instance, the professionalism of the musicians was, for the most part, not a discriminating factor in itself when Roma KUDs sought funding, as was the case with majority KUDs. On the whole, the minority scene brought the challenge of a multiple construction of authenticity—in question is not necessarily the “authenticity” of a certain local heritage (the mimesis of a certain local script), but rather the idea of authenticity as defined by the particular performing ensemble, whose different backgrounds (e.g., different regional traditions that the ensemble’s members inherit from their countries of origin, as is often the case in town ensembles) require a blending or middle ground of “stylization.” Such stylization is actually authentic, corresponding to a direct expression of the ensemble’s profile. This more inclusive concept of tradition manifests in the postwar era, although in smaller measure, in the whole public practice of folklore. For instance, some city KUDs active within the concept of stylization, which canonically has presumed a stylization based on examples from a rural heritage, reached instead for examples of urban heritage, taking a novel view of the legitimacy of every heritage, especially “one’s own.” (See video ­examples 15.8 and 15.9  .) The multiplicity of postwar articulations of traditional music, the aspirations of local communities to express their distinctiveness and the distinctiveness of their traditions, and the revivalist reaching for the past are best seen in the landscape of folklore festivals, shaped in cooperation with KUDs as grassroots practitioners, experts as producers, and governmental bodies as the main sources of funds. From the mid-1990s, new specialized festivals and thematic programs within the existing large festivals appeared, as well as festivals and concert programs that promote hybrid crossings between traditional and ethnomusic. These festivals present diverse aspects of folklore traditions, including those unknown to wider audiences, formerly marginalized to expert circles, or those that are newly revived. In so doing, to some degree, they manage to avoid the previous stereotypical model and affirm cultural diversity. Examining even a cursory list of such festivals is beyond the scope of this chapter; but for our purposes here, it is important to recognize that these festivals—in

342   Naila Ceribašić

FIGURE  15.3 Eleventh Manifestation of the “Cultural Activities of National Minority in the Republic of Croatia.” Photographed by the author in Zagreb, 9 November 2008. This was the central multiminority festival from 1998 to 2008, held in the main concert hall in Zagreb. At the end of the program, all participants returned to the stage for the final bow, accompanied by the anthem of the European Union. The photograph depicts this moment. In 2009, the Manifestation was temporarily canceled because of budget cuts.

addition to representing the revival of folklore by supporting its greater visibility and mainstreaming it—initiated numerous revivals of (almost) forgotten examples of repertoires, subgenres, performing styles, and varieties of instruments. As well, the technology of reviving from the past or unknown present relies on the narratives of the oldest members of local communities and frequently on historical records (auditory records, which are frequently the case because of their increased availability, or sheet music, especially when auditory records are missing). Such enterprises are often jointly led by KUDs and professional ethnomusicologists or folklorists who are, at the same time, festival producers, and who act most often on the basis of the aspirations (or at least approval) of local communities hoping to constitute the very distinctive item(s) of their heritage. At the same time, some festivals or festival programs try to revive the participatory and interactive qualities of folklore, instead of staging standard concert presentations. The first in that respect was the MSF, with its workshops (which began in the 1980s), followed in the postwar period by some festivals that intentionally tried to promote the exchange of experiences and mutual informal playing and singing by participants

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instead of being simply presentational events. Such an approach is most pronounced at certain Istrian festivals (which, tellingly, are almost always called “meetings” instead of “festivals”) and is visible as a series of informal musicking events held off stage, with various combinations of musicians and in direct interaction with the audience. (See video ­example 15.10 .) Clearly, it is no coincidence that Istra, more than any other part of the country, organizes such kinds of festivals, since this region is characterized by an understanding of tradition that appreciates freedom in approaching templates (instead of using an already defined set of templates) and by its tourist orientation. Making it possible for the audience, or, more appropriately, the participants, to directly experience certain festival events carries a strong economic potential because tourism is increasingly moving from passive consumption to active experience. However, this very element of planned “spontaneous” or “folkloric” (implying authentic?) participation instead of presentation is, at the same time, very “unfolklore-like” because it is strongly influenced by external forces and motives. In other words, is there a space for dualistic theorizing that posits folklore versus folklorism (or authentic folklore vs. “fakelore”), participation versus presentation, repetitive custom versus invented tradition, and tradition versus heritage? When we present theoretical concepts without dichotomous or oppositional terms, as in the case of hybridity or revival, is there another half of the binary that is missing, seemingly missing, or hidden? Clifford proposes a theory of articulation (2001), which implies permanence of articulations alongside de- and rearticulations; historical connections and disconnections; and the political hooking and unhooking of particular elements or streams of revivals. Perhaps Clifford’s theory is the most capable of capturing the duality of revival and revival’s oppositional shadow, an “untouched, ingenuous nature,” and thus is the most apt description of the coexistence and interrelation of seemingly oppositional revival streams in the Croatian war and postwar periods.

Continuity of Articulations Instead of Revivalist Disjuncture As can be seen in this chapter, the term “revival” (obnova) is, in Croatia, primarily reserved for the articulation of one’s own local, indigenous tradition. Conversely, the understanding of “revival” in English-speaking countries implies the volitional transformative articulation of a tradition by outsiders, often combined with making it accessible to modern mass communications systems and commercially viable (cf., e.g., Rosenberg 1993). In Croatia, such articulations are described using other terms, such as stylization, tradition-based popular music, or ethnomusic. Here, traditional music remains a sacred zone of ideologized purity (which is commercially nonviable and externally funded).13 Indeed, numerous elements of wartime and postwar Croatia support this view. One should also bear in mind the important, sometimes even key role of experts in revivalist projects. As a rule, these experts are outsiders to the revived traditions and communities

344   Naila Ceribašić to no less a degree than Western revivalists; however, an important difference is that, in Croatia, experts do not take an active part in making music but function rather as counselors, either as helpers (e.g., in providing historical material) and promoters (e.g., by producing festival programs) or by serving as (ethically questionable) interveners in stylistic features of performances (e.g., by “de-choreographing” performances in the domain of authentic folklore that have been choreographed under the influence of stylization). However, this is just part of the story. If revival is needed as an explanatory, analytical tool in scholarly writing, then obviously there should be a zone of (perhaps pure, authentic, spontaneous, ingenuous, unselfconscious, folklore, customary, habitual, premodern, primordial?) tradition and community in which both intentional, volitional action and transformation are absent. Is there such a zone? Hardly so, if one examines the phenomena discussed in this chapter. This notion of tradition presumes characteristics that would seem by definition to differentiate it from revival. Yet the customary Croatian syntagma of “safeguarding and/or reviving,” illustrated throughout this chapter, indicates that these two spheres are not understood as separate or even contrasting concepts. This I find as close to the intention of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Music Revival to view revival not only in terms of a temporary excursion from a smooth evolution of tradition but also as an ongoing cyclical process with an awareness of the aftermath of revivals—new infrastructures, styles, practices, communities, and value systems that have grown out of revival movements. I  agree even more closely with Clifford’s notion of articulation, as already noted, because it does not imply that revival is a disjuncture, an entirely “new” phenomenon, followed by a discreet postrevival stage. Rather, it implies a “living tradition’s combined and uneven processes of continuity, rupture, transformation, and revival” (Clifford 2001: 480), under the assumption that “cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade” and that “communities can and must reconfigure themselves, drawing selectively on remembered pasts” (Clifford 2003:  89). In this chapter, I  have tried to illuminate the question that Clifford also emphasizes as relevant: namely, whether and how communities “convince and coerce insiders and outsiders, often in power-charged, unequal situations, to accept the autonomy of a ‘we’ ” (2001: 479)—the autonomy (or at least the authority for self-definition, as formulated earlier) of an ethnic, national, and local, individual and collective, more official or more grassroots “we” as articulated in diverse musical fields and genres in war-charged, war-baggaged situations. This task of convincing and coercing is achieved through the argument of preserving tradition and maintaining continuity with the past. The key element around which self-identified revival movements (whether under the title of the Croatian obnova or the English revival) are structured in wartime and postwar Croatia is the articulation of the present out of the past. Thus, as is evident in the title of one of the topics of a conference held in 2000 in Croatia (Ivancich Dunin and Zebec 2001), the reconstructive component of revivals has precedence over the revitalizing one. The past is appropriated in different ways. It can be appropriated to serve as historical rootedness, a stronghold and justification for the present regime. The wartime uses of old-time patriotic songs,

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tamburitza, klapa, and church music are examples of such articulations of the past, articulations that are close to Williams’ hegemonic sense of tradition: “a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order” (1977: 116). Next, the past can be appropriated in terms of support, safety, and comfort, as a golden age or a resource to be used to cope with the disruptions of one’s own, known world, as exemplified in the sections on musicking in the war and postwar articulations of traditional music. In this view, the articulation of the past does not aspire to establish history; rather, it moves on heritage terrain, between Nora’s lieu de mémoire and milieu de mémoire (1989). Finally, the past can be articulated through resources that prompt or even require creative reworking, the very autonomy of a “we,” as a number of musicians at the crossroads of the traditional and ethnomusic scenes indicate (especially Istrian musicians, musicians in the ethnic minority scene, and others). In this view, not at all paradoxically, the past is not “a world apart” (Nora 1989: 17) or “a foreign country” (Lowenthal 1985), but an essential part of the self. In that domain also we can speak in greatest measure about alternative approaches to the mainstream, which is one of the key elements in some definitions of revival (e.g., Livingston 1999). However, in spite of its various articulations, the past is not only a question of choice and imagination; we are all beings of the past, of memory and history, inseparable from the historically imposed constraints that make both a “we” and an “I,” our identities and experiences. In times of peril, be it war, conflict, or disaster, we are even more so.

Notes 1. The Croatian term obnova is etymologically closer to renewal (nov meaning new), whereas the closest etymological equivalent to revival (i.e., more precisely, to “reviving” as a noun) is oživljavanje (živ meaning living, live, alive). However, due to language usage (since oživljavanje is a more general and less directed term, whereas obnova connotes a kind of action or project), it is more appropriate to translate obnova as revival. It is obnova that is the key term used in this chapter. 2. Tambura, a type of long-necked, plucked lute, was brought to the Balkans by Ottoman incursions and adopted in eastern Croatia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tamburitza ensembles were first formed in the mid-nineteenth century, consisting of the same type of instruments, but differing in size, shape, tuning, and function in the ensemble. They served as the leading musical symbol of the national or state community during the twentieth century, a position acquired by a combination of political uses of music, professionalization, and mediaization, as well as their firmly established roots in traditional musical practices, particularly in northern regions of Croatia. In contrast, klapa singing, a style of multipart homophonic singing by a group of four to eight (traditionally male) singers, is typical of the southern region of Dalmatia. Its modern development started with the establishment of the Festival of Dalmatian Klapas in Omiš (in 1967), gradually expanding its range over previous gender, regional, and also aesthetic boundaries. The boom in popularity and promotion happened during the war and, especially, the postwar period, so that, from the 2000s on, klapa singing has been an integral part of the nationwide popular music scene.

346   Naila Ceribašić 3. Narodnjaci is a general term, with pejorative overtones, for the genre of newly composed folk music, a major genre of Yugoslav popular music up to the end of the 1980s, as well as for the successive genre of turbo folk, promoted in the war years by Serbian media. So, with the outset of the war, narodnjaci (aka, newly composed folk music alias turbo folk) completely disappeared from the media and public space in Croatia. It has been officially understood as Balkan, Eastern, Serbian music incompatible with Croatia’s alleged Westernness and Europeanness (cf. Baker 2010; for more on this complex and variously termed music see Rasmussen 2007). 4. Video recording stored in the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, IEF video 208/11c. 5. In a narrower sense, kumpanija (kumpanjija) is a chain dance with swords, performed by male societies (which are also called kumpanija) in Blato, Čara, Pupnat, Smokvica, and Žrnovo on the island of Korčula. In the past, the dance was a part of a larger and more complex custom connected with carnival time and/or local patron saints’ days. 6. According to Carolyn Nordstrom, author of the Shadows of War, “there is an image of war that has stuck in my mind for nearly two decades. It seems to point toward some deep understanding, something that stands just outside of conscious grasp or maybe beyond intellectual thought to a more profound conception of . . . what? Not just war, but something that tugs at the heart of what it means to be human” (2004: 5). 7. The author of “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” is Miroslav Škoro, since the late 1980s and early 1990s one of the leading and the most prolific artists on the scene of tamburitza music. His websites are http://skoro.hr and http://www.miroslav-skoro.nl.eu.org. A search for Miroslav Škoro on YouTube brings about 4,000 results (accessed July 15, 2012). 8. His website is http://www.thompson.hr. A  search for Marko Perković Thompson on YouTube brings about 3,700 results (accessed July 15, 2012). 9. As for tamburitza music, a lot of material can be found on the Croatian-based website http://www.tambura.com.hr, the Serbian-based http://tamburica.org, and the U.S.based http://www.tamburitza.org. For klapa singing, the leading website is http://www. naklapskinacin.hr. Both domains are represented on YouTube by tens of thousands of recordings. 10. There is no space here to depict in more detail the Croatian variant of these internationally widespread concepts and processes. For the literature in English, see Ceribašić (1998) and Ceribašić and Ćaleta (2010). The professional ensemble Lado impersonates the main model of know-how in folklore stylization (http://www.lado.hr; its channel on YouTube is http://www.youtube.com/user/ladoansambl). For performing practice within the concept of authenticity, see the MSF website, one of its main promoters (http://www.msf.hr; its channel on YouTube is http://www.youtube.com/user/dantos10). 11. Audio recording stored in the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, IEF CD 363/8. 12. The Croatian noun is zavičaj, German Heimat; the English “homeland” is an approximation. It is not quite appropriate, even more so because Croatian domovina (which is close but not equivalent to German Vaterland) is here also translated as “homeland” (e.g., it is domovina in the cited Tuđman’s speech). 13. Differences between these revival genres also manifest in copyright issues. In particular, traditional music belongs to the public domain and cannot be protected under the ownership of a certain local community. In its elaborated (expropriated) form, however, it can

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indeed be protected as the authored work of individuals, as is the case with authors in the field of stylized folklore, ethnomusic, etc.

References Allen, Ray. 2010. “In Pursuit of Authenticity: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Postwar Folk Music Revival.” Journal of the Society for American Music 4 (3): 277–305. Atkinson, David. 2004. “Revival: Genuine or Spurious?” In Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation, edited by Ian Russell and David Atkinson. Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, 144–162. Baily, John. 2001. “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan. Copenhagen: Freemuse. Baker, Catherine. 2008. “When Seve Met Bregović: Folklore, Turbofolk and the Boundaries of Croatian Musical Identity.” Nationalities Papers 36 (4): 741–764. ——. 2010. Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991. Farnham-Burlington: Ashgate. Baumann, Max Peter. 1996. “Folk Music Revival:  Concepts Between Regression and Emancipation.” The World of Music 38 (3): 71–86. Bennett, Tony. 2005. “Culture.” In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 63–69. Bithell, Caroline. 2006. “Musical Archaeologists: The Revival and Reconstruction of Polyphonic Settings of the Latin Mass in Corsica.” Ethnomusicology Forum 15 (1): 113–145. Blacking, John. 1976. How Musical Is Man. London: Faber & Faber. Bohlman, Philip V. 2004. The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Čapo Žmegač, Jasna. 2000. “Odjeci dekapitacije vola u Pupnatu na otoku Korčuli:  Hrvati između tradicionalizma i modernizma.” Narodna umjetnost 37 (2): 9–25. Ceribašić, Naila. 1998. “Folklore Festivals in Croatia: Contemporary Controversies.” The World of Music 40 (3): 25–49. ——. 2007. “Musical Faces of Croatian Multiculturality.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39: 1–26. Ceribašić, Naila, and Joško Ćaleta. 2010. “Croatian Traditional Music Recordings: The 1990s and 2000s.” Journal of American Folklore 123 (489): 331–345. Clifford, James. 2001. “Indigenous Articulations.” The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2): 468–490. ——. 2003. On the Edges of Anthropology (Interviews). Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Cohen, Sara. 2005. “Country at the Heart of the City: Music, Heritage, and Regeneration in Liverpool.” Ethnomusicology 49 (1): 25–48. Čolović, Ivan. 2006. Etno: Priče o muzici sveta na Internetu. Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek. Čorkalo Biruški, Dinka, and Dean Ajduković. 2009. “Od dekonstrukcije do rekonstrukcije traumatizirane zajednice: Primjer Vukovara.” Revija za socijalnu politiku 16 (1): 1–24. Guffey, Elizabeth E. 2006. Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Books. Hadžihusejnović-Valašek, Miroslava. 1998. “The Osijek War-Time Music Scene 1991–1992.” In Music, Politics, and War: Views from Croatia, edited by Svanibor Pettan. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 163–184.

348   Naila Ceribašić Helbig, Adriana (with contributions from Nino Tsitsishvili and Erica Haskell). 2008. “Managing Musical Diversity within Frameworks of Western Development Aid: Views from Ukraine, Georgia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 40: 46–59. Hill, Juniper. 2009. “Rebellious Pedagogy, Ideological Transformation, and Creative Freedom in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music.” Ethnomusicology 53 (1): 86–114. Ivancich Dunin, Elsie, and Tvrtko Zebec, eds. 2001. Proceedings 21st Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology, Korčula 2000:  Sword Dances and Related Calendrical Dance Events; Revival:  Reconstruction, Revitalization. Zagreb:  ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology—Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research. Johnson, Bruce, and Martin Cloonan. 2009. Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Farnham-Burlington: Ashgate. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2002. “Sounds of Sensibility.” In American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots, edited by Mark Slobin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 129–173. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals:  Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Lomax, Alan. 2003 [1959]. “Folk Song Style.” In A. Lomax: Selected Writings 1934–1997, Ronald D, ed. Cohen. New York: Routledge, 140–172. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melucci, Alberto. 1996. The Playing Self:  Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pettan, Svanibor. 1996. “Making the Refugee Experience Different: ‘Azra’ and the Bosnians in Norway.” In War, Exile, Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives, Maja Povrzanović and Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, ed. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 245–255. ——, ed. 1998. Music, Politics, and War: Views from Croatia. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research. Phillips, Mark Salber, and Gordon Schochet, eds. 2004. Questions of Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pilzer, Joshua D. 2003. “Sŏdosori (Northwestern Korean Lyric Song) on the Demilitarized Zone: A Study in Music and Teleological Judgment.” Ethnomusicology 47 (1): 68–92. Prica, Ines. 1993. “Notes on Ordinary Life in War.” In Fear, Death and Resistance: An Ethnography of War, Croatia 1991–1992, edited by Lada Čale-Feldman, Ines Prica, and Reana Senjković. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Matrix Croatica, X-Press, 44–71. Rajković, Zorica, et  al., eds. 1992. 26. Međunarodna smotra folklora, Zagreb 1992. Zagreb: Koncertna direkcija Zagreb. Rasmussen, Ljerka Vidić. 2007. “Bosnian and Serbian Popular Music in the 1990s: Divergent Paths, Contested Meanings, and Shared Sentiments.” In Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene:  Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, edited by Donna A. Buchanan. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 57–93. Ronström, Owe. 1996. “Revival Reconsidered.” The World of Music 38 (3): 5–20. Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Slobin, Mark, ed. 1996. Retuning Culture:  Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Softić, Badema. 2011. “The Music of Srebrenica after the War: Attitudes and Practice among Surviving Bosniacs, Music Therapy, and Music Works in the Name of Srebrenica.” Narodna umjetnost 48 (1): 161–181. Tuđman, Franjo. 1990. “Govor Franje Tuđmana u Saboru 30. svibnja 1990.” http://hr.wikisource. org/wiki/Govor_Franje_Tuđmana_u_Saboru_30._svibnja_1990, accessed April 3, 2011. Vitez, Zorica. 1998. “[Reconstructing Heritage].” In 32. međunarodna smotra folklora, edited by Zorica Vitez. Zagreb: Koncertna direkcija Zagreb, 5–7. Wallace, Anthony F.  C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist (New Series) 58 (2): 264–281. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Discs Cited Zlatni dukati. 1989. Hrvatska pjesmarica. Audio cassette. Published by Interstrada, UCAY 717. ——. 1990. Hrvatska domovina. Audio cassette. Published by Jugoton, MC-6 3025625.

Films Cited Bulajić, Veljko (director). 2005. Bitka na Neretvi. DVD video. Published by Novi list et al.

C HA P T E R  16

C U LT U R A L R E S C U E A N D M U S I C A L R E V I VA L A M O N G T H E N I C A R AG UA N G A R I F U NA A N N E M A R I E G A L L AU G H E R

In his introduction to Reassessing Revitalization Movements, Michael Harkin (2004: xxvii) observes that “the sine qua non of revitalization movements” seems to be that “they are defined in the dialogic space between cultures.” Taking this observation as a point of departure, this essay looks at revitalization among the Garifuna people of Nicaragua and the dialogic spaces that have emerged in this movement through Garifuna interlocutions with Nicaraguan African-descended Creoles.1 The Garifuna (sometimes glossed as “people of the cassava”) are one of six officially recognized population groups inhabiting Nicaragua’s Autonomous Atlantic Caribbean Coast region. Like their diasporic ethnic peers in other parts of Central America and the United States, the Nicaraguan Garifuna today claim a combined African and Amerindian ancestry, a heritage reflected in their former colonial designation as Black Caribs.2 Their history with Creoles on the coast has been long, complicated, and deeply intertwined. As revealed in their revitalization narratives, and as corroborated by Creole voices also at times, Creoles are seen as at least partly responsible for what the Nicaraguan Garifuna now assess as devastating cultural loss.3 As a result of complex and often contradictory processes of discrimination and assimilation, unfolding initially in the context of the coast’s experience of British colonialism and later under the continued anglo-machinations of a U.S. enclave economy, the Nicaraguan Garifuna were largely subsumed into the Creole population. Incorporation into this English Creole-speaking group, one which as a result of its Protestant anglo-affinities enjoyed a relatively elevated position on the coast’s ethnolinguistic hierarchy (Gordon 1998), was seen originally as a means to increase Garifuna chances for material survival and social betterment. Toward the end of the 1970s, however, as more and more Garifuna Afrocreolized, it seemed to some scholars (Davidson 1980), as it did to a number of Garifuna themselves, that Garifuna identity in Nicaragua would soon disappear.

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One of the goals of revitalization has been to halt the Afrocreolization process. Garifunas involved in the movement want their own separate identity back, an identity they sometimes label, in accord with their diasporic counterparts, “black autochthony,” “black indigeneity,” or “Garifuna indigeneity” (Anderson 2009; Brondo 2006). They also want the freedom to express this identity openly as well as the capacity to assert themselves as a living, not a dying culture. While their population remains small,4 and while they consider themselves still vulnerable and at risk, more individuals have been stepping forward to reclaim a Garifuna identification, thus supporting the view that Garifuna culture is very much alive. As movement leader, Frank Lopez, sized it up enthusiastically in one of my fieldwork interviews, “Now everybody wants to be Garifuna!” (interview, Orinoco, June 23, 2002).5 At the same time that they want to strengthen their distinct self-image, however, Nicaraguan Garifuna revitalizers also want to sort out their historical entanglements with Creoles. Rather than carry the burden of blaming Creoles for their identity loss, but without wanting to forget the part played by the group in the process, they have also included reconciliation and cooperation with Creoles among their revitalization objectives. The hope is that both groups might work together—and it is a hope shared by all coastal or costeño populations engaged in the ongoing struggle for regional autonomy— to challenge mestizo hegemony in the country,6 dismantle the lingering verticalism of the coast’s hierarchical social structure, and replace it with a set of intraregional relationships that are more equitable, horizontal, and intercultural. Interculturality is a term common to the discourse of many contemporary indigenous and African-descended movements throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. As defined by social movement scholar Arturo Escobar (2008: 14), and in language at least partially resonant with that of Harkin above, it is “a project, that of bringing about effective dialogue of cultures in contexts of power.” But how is effective dialogue achieved? In the Nicaraguan Garifuna-Creole case, some of it is, of course, accomplished through language. This is particularly so in mutually attended community development meetings, classrooms, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workshops where revitalization and related issues of autonomy and mestizo national dominance are debated and discussed. But as I aim to illustrate, another channel through which dialogue occurs effectively between Garifunas and Creoles is music. Garifuna musical performance—especially that centered around the revival of expressions understood as traditional—is both a productively contentious as well as collaborative arena in which Garifunas can explore not only their own past and present identities but also their past and present relationships with Creoles. Talk about and reflection upon music are also useful means for both groups to find ways to address these matters. The essay has four sections. In the first, I  outline some general characteristics of contemporary Garifuna revitalization, attending especially to features it shares with other early twenty-first century Latin American and Caribbean indigenous and African-descended movements. In the second, I  provide an account of the factors, including Afrocreolization, Garifuna revitalizers attribute to their cultural loss.

352   Annemarie Gallaugher The third section I devote to an analysis of the revitalization trajectory, following its course from its beginnings in the early 1980s through to the early 2000s, a time of significant change for the movement. I note how, in response to different shaping influences (events, personages, institutions, and other movements), relationships between Garifunas and Creoles altered in these decades, shifting back and forth between poles of conflict and accord. The early 2000s were significant for Garifuna revitalization in a number of ways. Of special importance, however, was the formal drawing up of a set of movement objectives by an officially organized body of revitalists. Included among these objectives were three dedicated specifically to the issue of Garifuna-Creole relationships and the steps Garifunas might follow to make these relationships more intercultural. Drawing on interview excerpts and other ethnographic data, I use the fourth section of the essay to consider the impact of Garifuna music-making and debates about music on the achievement of these goals.

Cultural Rescue, Difference, Life, Resurgence The Nicaraguan Garifuna credit the Sandinista revolutionary government (1979–1990) as having been the initial catalyst behind their revitalization efforts. Drawing on discourse inherited from Sandinista ideology, they refer to their revitalization process as cultural rescue or, in Spanish, rescate cultural. Some observers have objected to the term, perceiving that it carries passive and paternalistic connotations of the Garifuna as helpless victims waiting to be saved. However, when we consider that the etymology of the word rescue includes a linguistic strand meaning “to shake”—as in to “shake free” or “liberate”—a much more active image appears. Garifuna rescuers have indeed been active in this sense. In the process of rescuing their Garifunaness, they have been shaking off the mantle of Afrocreolization. They have also been shaking off a history of colonial, neocolonial, and since the 1990s, neoliberal oppression. In the context of the dügü, the centerpiece ritual of their Catholic-inflected Amerindian/African vernacular religious practice, Garifunas partake in activities meant to shake off troublesome ancestral or other recalcitrant spirits. In music and dance-making contexts, particularly those in which the fast-paced traditional punta and the equally fast-paced but modern tradition, punta rock, are featured, they emphasize rapid shaking of the hips as an important focal point of the choreography. I will look at other meanings of the term cultural rescue, particularly those cultivated within the Sandinsta revolutionary vision, in section three. Now, however, I will highlight the work of two authors, Arturo Escobar (2008) and Maximilian Forte (2006), whose landmark insights into indigenous and African-descended movements in Colombia and

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the wider Caribbean, respectively, are particularly helpful for deepening our understanding of what Nicaraguan Garifuna are striving toward in their rescue struggles. In its current configuration, the Nicaraguan Garifuna cultural rescue movement can be situated within the broad framework of attempts by many Latin American indigenous and African-descended groups to construct at a grassroots level what Escobar (2008) refers to as “territories of difference.” These undertakings (the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Kichwa in Ecuador are perhaps the most well-known examples) have been directed frequently toward the achievement of various types of autonomy and self-governance arrangements with the mestizo-led state. They have also been aimed at the creation and implementation of comprehensive and alternative ethnodevelopment or development-with-identity agendas in which—in contrast to older top-down, Western, and capitalist-centric approaches—cultural identity concerns are respected and understood as being just as crucial for the participants involved as those of an economic and material nature. Within these mobilizations “from below,” a massively complex range of issues has been tackled. Much energy has been devoted to land claims, collective rights, control and protection of natural resources, poverty reduction, technology access, bilingual and intercultural education, gender relations, and child protection, as well as to the restoration of traditional knowledges, customs, sacred beliefs, and expressive-communicative forms such as music and dance. Ultimately, what is at stake here is, to borrow Escobar’s assessment, “the definition of life itself, in particular the defense of . . . the cosmovisiones (worldviews) of the black and indigenous groups” (2008: 2). Echoing this view, Victor Obando Sancho (1999:  53)  describes cultural rescue for the Nicaraguan Garifuna as their “Life Plan.” As if life itself were not enough, complicating the picture even further is the fact that these movements have not taken place in isolation. Instead, numerous cross-boundary ties and alliances have been involved. Some of these have been formed at local, regional, and/or national levels. Nicaraguan Garifuna rescuers, for example, have allied with neighboring Creoles for black solidarity purposes and with Creoles and other costeños for purposes of advancing Atlantic Coast regional autonomy. Often, transnational and diasporic associations are additionally at play. Such is the case, for instance, when the Nicaraguan Garifuna declare themselves members of a transnational diasporic Garifuna nation. NGOs, international aid and advocacy groups, and global bodies such as the United Nations may also be part of a given movement’s connective tissue. For the Garifuna, a significant (although not necessarily untroubled) global connection has been that established with the 2001 UNESCO Proclamation of Garifuna culture as one of the “oral and intangible masterpieces of humanity.” Finally, taking into account the importance of the cosmovision concept, we should also consider here the linkages indigenous and African-descended movements often affirm with the supernatural world. As a result of these many complex webs of interaction, akin certainly to Harkin’s dialogic spaces, studies of these movements (authored or coauthored increasingly by movement participants themselves) have come to be inscribed with a politics of complexity and multiplicity. Their analyses, propelled in large part by the search for alternative (e.g.,

354   Annemarie Gallaugher postcapitalist/anticapitalist/noncapitalist) modernities, proceed from an acknowledgment of multiple issues, multiple actors, multiple scales of action, multiple relations of power, and often, multiple actants (spiritual deities, animals, objects, sounds). One effective statement for imaging the immensity of the task involved comes from the Escobar volume, introduced by its publishers as part of a series of works that (along with the movements themselves, I would stress) “envision more lasting and just ways of being-in-place and being-in-networks with a diversity of humans and other living and non-living beings” (2008: n. p.). Also helping us gain perspective on these movements is Forte’s (2006) edited collection on indigenous resurgence. For Forte, indigenous resurgence is in many respects a critique against a long-term tendency by dominant groups, including Western ethnographers, to construct indigenous peoples as if they “have been ever vanishing, almost as if disappearance was their predetermined historical role” (p. 1). Focusing on indigenous peoples in the Caribbean in particular, but in ways entirely relevant to the Nicaraguan Garifuna, Forte argues that rather than being headed toward extinction (a story, he notes, the West has told itself to prop up its own superior self-image), what indigenous peoples have really been doing is struggling for survival and the production and reproduction of their identities. As he states with indigenous co-author Bharath Hernandez in reference to the Carib community in Trinidad: . . . a resurgent Carib identification process renders the ongoing quest for a Carib identity the same as the identity itself . . . . Being a Carib . . . is struggling to be a Carib. (Bharath Hernandez and Forte 2006: 127)

Recognition of such agency and such effort has been continually denied indigenous peoples, however, with the entrenchment of certain Western representational and rhetorical patterns. One such pattern, Forte (2006: 9) notes, has been “salvage ethnography,” i.e., ethnography motivated by paternalistic urges to document cultures and traditions before their supposedly inevitable demise. Another pattern has been what Forte sees as “fruitless debates” about what is essential versus what is constructed, what is invented as opposed to what is authentic or non-invented, what is primordial versus what is instrumental, and what counts as cultural change versus what is cultural loss (pp. 4–5). Still another pattern has been orthodox and colonizing practices of “putting lines through whole peoples,” using the myth of indigenous extinction to bolster beliefs that capitalism “rules” (p. 2). Forte points out that there is a different model to follow, one involving “a shift from writing about indigenous peoples in a state of decline, facing a future of assimilation, to perspectives on indigenous peoples engaged in resistance, facing a future of resurgence” (p. 2). Cautioning lest any overly celebratory attitude set in, Forte then identifies five developments that, in the two or so decades preceding his publication, have served to invigorate indigenous resurgence such that it cannot be viewed as a “mere repetition of the past” (p. 13). These five developments are (and I quote much of Forte’s description of them verbatim here):  (1)  the development of ideologies of renewal

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and autonomy; (2) the emergence of strong activist leaders; (3) the formation of new or revamped organizations plus their transnationalization via international media, regional gatherings, and the Internet; (4) nationalism and nation-building projects resulting in new indigenous entanglements with the wider society and provoking various reinterpretations of the folk roots of the nation; and (5) demographic resurgence through the phenomenon that finds more individuals self-identifying as indigenous (pp. 13–14). All of the above features and developments can be found operating in the present-day Nicaraguan Garifuna case. What Escobar and Forte leave out, however, is any discussion, beyond a few passing references, of musical activity. This is an omission typical of most studies of Latin American indigenous and African-descended movements and it is an unfortunate one, given that music-making is cited so often by movement protagonists as crucial to the health, sustainability, and effectiveness of their enterprise, as well as crucial to their very sense of who they are, where they have come from, and where they are going. The following statement reflects this strong sense of connection between music and resurgent identity for the Garifuna: A Garifuna who does not dance, who does not sing, or who does not like the drum is not a Garifuna. The Garifunas carry song and dance in their blood. This is our custom. And likewise the custom of our forefathers. (Idiáquez 1994: 104, quoting the words of an interviewee)

During my fieldwork, I  often heard this statement reiterated in various forms. Part of my motivation for this essay, then, has been to think about how scholars of Latin American and Caribbean indigenous and African-descended social movements might be convinced to include music and musical revitalization among the central themes (in Escobar’s case:  place, capital, nature, development, identity, networks) they address. On the other hand, my developing acquaintance with the vast literature on indigenous and African-descended revitalization in this part of the world also prompts me to consider how scholars of musical revival and revitalization—most of whom have focused on Euro-American settings—might benefit from the understandings of revitalization processes the authors of this literature make available. What follows is a modest attempt to push in both directions.

Cultural Loss and Afrocreolization The story of the Nicaraguan Garifuna begins in the middle 1800s with their temporary migration as part-time laborers from Honduras and Belize into the then British-protected but mestizo-contested Atlantic Caribbean Coast, a Protestant (primarily Moravian) region populated in the north by indigenous Miskitu peoples and in the south by indigenous groups as well as African-descended Creoles. By century’s

356   Annemarie Gallaugher end, a number of Garifuna-speaking Catholic families had settled permanently into small subsistence farming and fishing villages in the south’s Pearl Lagoon Basin area (Davidson 1980). Somewhat later, finding their subsistence livelihoods challenged by the influx of U.S. extraction industries and pressures to adapt to a cash economy (a sign of “progress” endorsed by the 1894 Reincorporation of the coast by Nicaraguan mestizo nationalists), they also took up residence in Bluefields, the port city that is now the capital of the southern autonomous region. As Garifunas tell it, almost as soon as they put down roots, they were subject to severe marginalization and discrimination, not least because of their professed Catholicism in a largely Protestant jurisdiction. Hostility was directed toward them from several sources. However, in what is perhaps its most immediate and complicated form, it came in particular from Afro-Creoles. In some cases, tension between the two groups emerged because they were each other’s labor competition. In other cases, however, animosity was unleashed toward the Garifuna by Creoles who, under the expeditious manipulations of British colonial administrators, had come to renounce their own blackness and think of themselves as English and superior. Although in many cases Creoles shared phenotypical features with the Garifuna and knew that certain of their historical and lived experiences were similar, many of them tended to reject the group outright. They referred to them derogatorily as indios (Indians) or Caribs and denigrated them publicly for their seemingly strange behaviors and habits. As one community member recalled, “[We] suffered a lot of scorn and were distrusted. Some laughed at our language and our customs. Others looked upon us as if we were bad spirits that had come to do evil” (quoted in Idiáquez 1994: 174). Echoing similar sentiments, Rosita Davis, a schoolteacher in the largest Garifuna village of Orinoco, explained to me how Creoles used to mock members of her grandmother’s generation, calling them names if they acted differently or spoke the Garifuna language. The result, Davis said, was that, “All those things started to carry down the prestige of the people, and they started to be ashamed” (interview, Orinoco, June 21, 2002). The Garifuna had many difficulties adjusting to such maltreatment. Because of their small numbers and the fact they had become almost completely cut off from Garifuna outside of Nicaragua, and also because of the daily survival needs that forced them to interact regularly with neighboring costeño groups, including Creoles, they found themselves facing a serious identity crisis. At risk of almost complete exclusion, they could no longer easily maintain, at least not openly, the distinctive language, spirit-based religious practices, and other cultural markers that made up a large part of their separate and customary Garifuna identity. As an adaptive response, Nicaraguan Garifuna began deliberately to sublimate their Garifunaness. They inserted themselves and were inserted, in turn, into the coast’s Afro-Creole culture. The subsumption process carried on to such an extent that, although there were exceptions, by the 1970s, most were passing themselves off or being passed off by others as Creoles. They had stopped speaking Garifuna, even among themselves, and had acquired English Creole speech patterns instead. Some had renounced

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Catholicism and converted to Protestant forms of worship. They also began to replace, or in some cases hide, many of their vernacular ritual practices. They were especially concerned with covering up post-mortem rites and the iconic dügü curing ritual, referred to locally in Nicaragua as the walagallo (Suco Campos 1987). With the force of Afrocreolization, Garifuna cultural loss was also felt in such domains as vernacular health and ethnomedicinal practices, foodways, ways of dress, social values, and community, family, and political arrangements. Musically, the Nicaraguan Garifuna also experienced a decline. The process had certainly already begun before they arrived in the country, but as Afrocreolization took hold, it escalated. Whether out of shame or for sheer strategic survival purposes, Garifunas put away the instruments—garawoun (drums), sisira (gourd rattle), and wadabágei (conch shell trumpet)—that, along with the newer hicatee-back (turtle shell percussion), so strongly identify them today. Instead of their own sacred huguléndi ritual music and semi-sacred abeimahani, arumuhani, and hüngühüngü forms, they sang Christian hymns. Instead of their secular punta, paranda, gunjei, and wanaragua expressions, they participated in the mento, calypso, dance orchestra, marching band, country and western, and later, soca and reggae styles that typified Creole musical tastes. During the annual carnival-type May Festival held each spring in Bluefields, Garifunas danced in street comparsas to maypole music, the mento-related Creole form often considered the sonic emblem of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Caribbean Coast. (See the Glossary on the companion website for further detail about the instruments and genres mentioned in this essay. The website also includes a Discography, Webography, and Filmography along with Suggestions for Further Reading on the Garifuna in Nicaragua, as well as in the wider diaspora. ) Thus, whatever remnants there might have been of Garifunaness in the country in the early decades of the twentieth century, by the middle decades, these remnants had been effectively denied, suppressed or, as some Garifuna rescuers describe it, “put to sleep” (Isabel Estrada, interview, Bluefields, June 4, 2002).

The Cultural Rescue Trajectory and the Shaping of Garifuna-Creole Relations A major turning point came in 1979 when, under the leadership of a young Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the Sandinista Revolution triumphed in Nicaragua, ending over four decades of U.S.-backed Somoza family dictatorship (1933–1979). Through the cultural and economic recovery programs set up by the FSLN as part of its national reconstruction project, the Garifuna found an opportunity to turn their perceived cultural losses around. As they engaged in the recovery process promoted by Sandinistas under the rubric cultural rescue, they began to step out from under the cloak of Afrocreolization, reassert their distinct identity, and reclassify

358   Annemarie Gallaugher themselves ethnically as Garifuna. Capturing the impact of that historical moment and its continued legacy for the group, rescue leader Isabel Estrada reflects: We consider that this Garifuna ethnic group was abandoned. For more than fifty years we were abandoned. We were just lost. We didn’t know what we were until after the Frente Sandinista came over. They visited the communities and helped us recognize that we are Garifunas. And now, actually, you can enjoy, you can see the expression, the different dancing, the drumming, the conch shell, and different things around us. And all of those were lost for more than fifty years. So we have a great reason to strengthen ourselves and who we are. The ones who helped open our eyes and recognize who we are were the Frente Sandinista. (Interview, Bluefields, June 4, 2002)

Although the term cultural rescue was undoubtedly in use in Latin America before the Sandinistas appropriated it, they nevertheless shaped its meaning in unique ways. Understood as both concept and practice, rescue found resonance with broad sectors of the Nicaraguan populace. On a nation-wide scale, it connoted freedom from Somoza repression and U.S. cultural imperialism. At local levels, it signified a diverse range of activities, including, for example, the reintroduction of indigenous medicinal practices, the return to folk artesanal production, the rediscovery of past artistic and musical forms, emancipation of women, and sexual liberation for youth (Craven 2002; 1989). Rescue was also used in a specialized way with reference to the Sandinista revolutionaries themselves who were encouraged to rescue their best virtues (e.g., sacrifice, fraternity, humility, simplicity) and spread them among “the people” (Hodges 1986: 257). Additionally, through associations with progressive liberation theology, one of the most significant influences on Sandinista thought, rescue was also linked to Catholic ideas of redemption and resurrection. Craven (2002) underscores the point that, contrary to some understandings, in no way was rescue to be interpreted in a passive sense. Nicaraguans were not to sit idly by as helpless victims waiting for the heroic actions of their leaders. As Brazilian literacy educator and revolutionary supporter Paulo Freire had advised, they were not to be treated as “objects which must be saved from a burning building” (quoted in Craven 2002: 54). Rather, the emphasis was on a dynamic and dialogic rescue-making—and thus revolutionary-making—process. The process was to be one in which all citizens participated critically and consciously and one which unfolded through struggle and action. Everyone was to learn from each other in a spirit of reciprocity and “unity-in-diversity.” Contention and uncertainty would undoubtedly ensue from the range of viewpoints that would emerge, but the struggle for identity, place, and belonging among competing voices and identities would be taken as normal and thus would be welcomed as something that would strengthen, not weaken, the movement. Defending this position, Uruguayan intellectual Eduardo Galeano wrote that the goal of the revolution should be to “rescue the multiplicity of life with all its conflicts” (quoted in Craven 1989: 44).

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Sandinista ideology, with its promises of participatory democracy, freedom, and rescue appealed to the Garifuna, the majority of whom became committed FSLN members or supporters (Perry 1991). As Rosita Davis recalled to me, “That was the time when everybody was free to express themselves, the way they wanted” (interview, Orinoco, June 21, 2002). Garifunas welcomed the many opportunities (including scholarships and cultural exchanges with Garifunas in Belize and Honduras) afforded them by the FSLN government and were receptive, as were Creoles and other costeños initially, toward Sandinista teachings that preserving, reviving, and revitalizing their distinctive cultural identities could be the road to their liberation and future advancement. Garifunas were also drawn to Sandinista conceptions of music. For Sandinistas, music was “a weapon” and “a defense” against oppression, cultural invasion, and injustice. It was a way of negotiating conflict and of expressing la mística, i.e., revolutionary morality and the combination of love, mystery, and magic connecting all of humanity in struggle. Music was also understood by the FSLN as a means to expand a Nicaraguan national revolutionary consciousness (Scruggs 1999). A second important impetus for Garifuna rescue efforts in the initial stages was the appearance on the coast of several Garifuna individuals from Belize and Honduras. Among them was the late Andy Palacio (winner of the 2007 WOMEX world music award for his 2007 album Wátina), who came to the region in the early 1980s to work as a youth volunteer in the Sandinista literacy campaign. Once in the village of Orinoco, he recognized, apparently to his astonishment, people who shared his own Garifuna background. Several of my interviewees recalled how Palacio was an inspiring presence as he spoke to the Nicaraguan community about the strong ethnic revival getting underway among Garifunas in Belize. Where the Sandinistas had “helped open people’s eyes,” to reiterate Isabel Estrada’s words above, Palacio was able to provide a concrete living example of how cultural liberation and renovation might actually be achieved. He rekindled interest in many aspects of Garifuna culture and ethnicity, especially the language, the dügü, and above all, the music. According to Freeland (1995: 193), Palacio had made plans to bring a trained team from Belize to assist the Nicaraguan Garifuna in rescuing their culture, but the eruption of the counterrevolutionary or contra war in 1983 did not allow him to realize his plans. The contra war was a bleak moment in Garifuna-Creole relations. Throughout its duration (1983–1987), Garifunas remained largely loyal to the Sandinsta cause. Some Creoles, particularly those who through Rastafarianism and other black pride movements had come to embrace a progressive black consciousness, also declared Sandinista loyalties. Most Creoles, however, who like the majority of costeños and particularly the Miskitu took pride in their anglo-affinities, began to develop anti-Sandinsta sentiments. Perceiving that the FSLN was not going to respond to their demands for territory and ethnic recognition as readily or as comprehensively as they had anticipated, they began to see the Sandinistas as cut from the same hispanic cloth as the western or Pacific mestizos before them who historically had threatened their anglo-sensibilities. As a result of this increasing mestizo mistrust, fueled by the anti-revolutionary rhetoric of the U.S.

360   Annemarie Gallaugher Reagan administration as well as the local Moravian Church, many joined the Miskitu and took up arms (Hale 1994). As the FSLN and, by extension, Garifuna conflict with militant Miskitu and Creole groups deepened, the Sandinista government was forced to reroute much of its culturally designated budget into defense spending. Garifuna and other rescue programs were thus pared down considerably. The Sandinistas began to worry about a possible breakup of the country, one that, conceivably, could result in the coast’s secession. Eventually, in an effort to restore peace, a series of consultations were launched in which the FSLN tried to better understand and accommodate the demands of their adversaries. As a follow up to the consultation process, in 1987, the Sandinista government passed the Autonomy Law, a legislative gesture that served as a third important stimulus for Garifuna cultural rescue. Under the autonomy legislation, the coast’s six main population groups (mestizo, Miskitu, Sumu-Mayangna, Rama, Creole, and Garifuna) were now recognized officially as distinct. They were awarded a set of autonomy rights, including rights to ancestral lands, natural resources, customary laws, languages, spiritual beliefs, and cultural traditions. Costeños began to look forward once again to the chance they would now have to live out their lives, not under the control of dictatorial mestizo authorities or in keeping with what they saw as the FSLN’s originally misguided left-political popular class designations but according to their unique ethnic and indigenous identities. Such a reconfiguration of national and regional relationships seemed to have ushered in an era of costeño pride and empowerment. In this positive climate, the Garifuna community proceeded in their rescue plans with renewed vigor and confidence. Cultural exchange programs were resumed, tensions with Creoles were placated, and an atmosphere of cultural and musical vibrancy prevailed. Unfortunately, in the years that followed, the Autonomy Law remained more of a paper-thin promise than an effective policy instrument (Dennis 2000). In the 1990 national elections, although the Garifuna community voted strongly in favor of the Sandinistas—by now perceived as the guardians of Garifuna culture—the FSLN was defeated. The loss of Sandinista power meant a serious decline in funding and support for cultural rescue endeavors. Incoming and subsequent neoliberal administrations with their structural adjustment programs dismantled or simply let fall to ruin the social services provisions and cultural funding initiatives that the Sandinistas had established. By the middle 1990s, most of the political, social, and cultural gains made under the Sandinistas, if they had not been entirely undone, had lost most of their momentum. Cultural rescue was all but aborted, regional autonomy plans collapsed, and NGO projects failed. The Garifuna community became destabilized and disenchanted. According to a contemporary assessment offered by Freeland (1995), Garifunas were once more being shunned by other costeños and, as a result, could not find work. Moreover, there were few NGOs left in the region that were able to offer them aid or assistance. Freeland was pessimistic as she reported on the cultural uncertainty, ambivalence, and doubt as well as the deteriorating economic and material conditions that were putting the Garifuna at risk once again.

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Notably, Freeland also recognized the way the Creole sector was implicated in the Garifuna situation. She warned that Creoles needed to be careful of becoming so caught up in their own internal (black versus English) factionalizing that they lost consciousness of “the whole multi-ethnic complex” on the coast and, particularly, of the Garifuna who had had to endure so much Creole discrimination. Finally, Freeland ended her piece with a fervent appeal to autonomy, identifying it as “the best guarantee of Creole and Garifuna minority rights” (1995: 198). Freeland was not alone in her views. Convinced of the deleterious effects of the neoliberal turn on the coast, a group of costeño intellectuals and academics from various ethnic backgrounds had been convening together with the aim of founding a regional university that would help reinvigorate the autonomy process and reactivate cultural rescue. In 1994, the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN) was inaugurated. URACCAN made a commitment to coastal autonomy one of its main focal points. To build the autonomy regime, it would provide the coast’s ethnic and indigenous communities with educational outreach and would assist them with development projects designed to integrate cultural and economic dimensions. Drawing largely on Sandinista revolutionary philosophy, URACCAN saw cultural development and economic development as inseparable. The Garifuna were one of the first beneficiaries of the URACCAN mandate. In 1995, a team of researcher activists met with the community and began to plan a formal five-year project with them. The project included modules geared toward local community management as well as to the restoration of small-scale fishing and agricultural production. It also included a strong ideological component such that regional autonomy concerns were to be paramount. Thus, participants were called upon to “promote a multiethnic and pluricultural culture in the region that contributes to the consolidation of national unity in the framework of diversity” (Obando Sancho 1999: 49). While there were a number of stumbling blocks, significant outcomes were nevertheless achieved. One was the formation of a URACCAN-based Garifuna drum-and-dance ensemble that quickly gained popularity in Bluefields and beyond. Second was the emergence of a strong cultural rescue leadership with a renewed commitment to keeping the rescue vision alive. The initiative of some of these leaders resulted in the establishment of the main Garifuna rescuing body, the Nicaraguan Afro-Garifuna Organization (OAGANIC). When the five-year URACCAN project ended, the Garifuna were again in a potentially uncertain position. However, by this time, a second generation of rescue leaders and activists was emerging. Born during the revolutionary and war years, well-socialized in the cultural rescue culture, and aware increasingly of the growing upsurge of indigenous and African-descended movements throughout Latin America, these young individuals were ready and willing to take up the rescue torch. A number of them were university students; some had been key participants in the URACCAN project. One of them, Kensy Sambola, had recently become OAGANIC’s president. This young woman—a daughter of rescue leader Franz Sambola, himself a son of Orinoco’s

362   Annemarie Gallaugher founder and a grandson of one of the first Garifuna settlers in Nicaragua—saw the end of the URACCAN project not as a loss but as an opportunity for OAGANIC to leave the URACCAN fold. In her view, OAGANIC had been started “among the Garifuna people, for the Garifuna people.” Although she greatly appreciated many of the developments of the five-year joint undertaking, she said, it was time for URACCAN and others to recognize that, “the people want to do things for themselves” (interview, Bluefields, June 3, 2002). Doing things for themselves meant, in part, ensuring organizational autonomy for OAGANIC. It also meant allowing Garifuna people, rather than non-Garifunas, to take on responsibility for the leading organizational roles. Despite its intentions to adopt a backseat accompaniment position, the URACCAN project had nevertheless continued to place Creoles, mestizos, and foreigners at the helm. OAGANIC saw a need to break this power barrier. Having thus asserted their independence, what things did the Garifuna want to do? OAGANIC’s new mission and vision statement identified a set of twelve wide-ranging objectives, reflecting many of the types of ethnodevelopment issues spelled out in the first section of this essay. One objective, for example, spoke to the need for development plans supported by national and foreign organizations and directed toward the Garifuna community’s “social, economic, and political wellbeing.” Another was dedicated to “the rescue and conservation of the ecological balance.” A third targeted “human rights for men and women,” while a fourth focused on “the protection and defense of children.” The three OAGANIC objectives with which I am most concerned, however, are those that addressed Garifuna-Creole relations. These objectives were stated as follows: (1) Promote the integral development of the black communities: the Garifunas and Creoles of Nicaragua (2) Carry out actions intended to rescue, conserve, and strengthen the cultural values of the Garifunas and other members of black ethnicity in Nicaragua (3) Move toward the training and organization of the Garifuna and Creole communities to be incorporated into the national effort. As these objectives indicate, Garifuna rescuers had realized at this stage in their rescue process that sorting out and improving their historically uneasy relationships with Creoles should be among their priorities. They had ascertained that an approach toward Creoles that was more explicitly collaborative, inclusive, and intercultural would be helpful as they proceeded with the next leg of their rescue journey. Music-making and discussion about music were placed clearly as key elements in cultivating this approach. They were understood as part of the promotional tasks referred to in Objective 1. They were also seen as among the actions and values referred to in Objective 2. And, they were recognized as part of the training and organization cited in Objective 3. At the same time, however, music-making and discussion about music

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had reflexive roles to play. By this, I mean that they served as mechanisms for keeping a check on the extent to which OAGANIC’s objectives for Garifuna-Creole interculturality were or were not being realized.

Dialogic Spaces: Garifunas, Creoles, Music . . . so nowadays, Creole people want to be Garifuna. Creole people say, “I am Garifuna,” because that drumming, that African beat, went through all of our blood. And not just Creole people—mestizo, too. I feel good [about that]. I feel proud. My self-esteem starts lifting higher. People have started looking on us nicely. (Vernon Ramos, interview, Bluefields, July 30, 2002) I’m a Garifuna and that I have in my blood! Wherever I am, I am Garifuna. I mean, the comparsa is a black people’s dance. I’m a black, but I never present myself as a Creole. I present myself as a Garifuna. So, well, I’m not saying I’m not interested in the comparsa. But I  have more feelings for my culture, my Garifuna, than the comparsa. (Cheryl Watson, interview, Bluefields, July 12, 2002)

These words, spoken by two young adult members of Ruguma—a drum-and-dance ensemble sponsored by the Nicaraguan Afro-Garifuna Organization—draw us immediately into the dialogic space between Garifunas and Creoles, particularly as that space is both constituted and shaped by music-making and talk about music. There are some interesting differences, however, in the ways the two speakers, both of whom self-identify as Garifuna, position their ethnocultural, racial, and musical identities with respect to Creole culture. For Vernon Ramos, Garifuna music, particularly the “African beat” of its drums, is a point of connection for the two groups. Ramos suggests that Creoles, and even the Nicaraguan mestizo majority, identify with Garifunas through their music and look on them favorably because of it. Such recognition instills in him a sense of pride and increased self-esteem. Cheryl Watson, on the other hand, while acknowledging the identity she, as a black person, shares with Creoles, seems to emphasize more the distance between the two cultures. Although she explains that she is not disinterested in Creole musical forms—represented here by the comparsa—her greatest affection is reserved clearly for her Garifuna “blood.” As seen throughout this essay, this theme of relative Garifuna-Creole attachment versus detachment, at times interwoven with references to mestizos or other populations, is a central one in Garifuna cultural rescue discourse generally. One place this theme operates in a music-related sense is in the way the sonic and instrumental features of particular Garifuna genres are interpreted. Traditional punta, for example, is understood by most rescuers as the genre through which Garifunas can best claim their exclusivity. Its acoustic timbres and “natural” instruments (wood-and-skin drums, gourd rattles, etc.)

364   Annemarie Gallaugher are often cited as evidence of the special ecological value Garifunas place on nature and the land, a value often perceived as lacking among Creoles and mestizos. Additionally, because of its heavy drum-and-percussion emphasis, rapid-fire articulations, and fast tempos, some rescuers and listeners interpret traditional punta as “aggressive” and “warrior-like,” meant to keep Garifunas together while keeping others at bay. Punta rock, on the other hand, with its electric and electronic instruments, incorporation of North and Latin American popular music influences, and use of lyrics in English and Spanish as well as Garifuna, is seen as decidedly more inclusive. Reaching across ethnic boundaries, punta rock creates sonic alliances while inviting social ones to take shape. Another manifestation of the Creole-Garifuna attachment versus detachment theme is in the way membership is constituted inside performing groups and in the respective ideologies to which the groups subscribe. In the four formally organized groups I spent time with in Bluefields, separation from or integration with Creoles (and others) was a recurrent talking point. As I got to know the groups better, it seemed to me that they represented points of wider community divergence about this issue along what might be called an ethnicity continuum. At one end was Ruguma. Ruguma, named for a traditional tool used to strain cassava and a symbol of Garifuna unity, took the approach that until cultural rescue was more secure, Garifunas should concentrate on cultivating a deep knowledge of Garifuna music and dance traditions by themselves, without interference from outsiders. Thus they adopted a “Garifunas only” policy and a strict notion of tradition, i.e., no punta rock allowed. Next was Black Arisin,’ a group sponsored by the Center for the Development of Human, Civil, and Autonomy Rights (CEDEHCA). While this group also focused on a strictly traditional repertoire, it had a mandate from CEDEHCA to ensure, as its name suggests, that both Garifunas and Creoles could be counted among its members. According to its leader, Clarence Gonzalez, Black Arisin’ was started in order to give Garifuna and Creole youth an opportunity to interact and learn from each other. It was a way “to get Creole people involved, so they wouldn’t feel left out” (interview, Bluefields, June 3, 2002). The third group on the continuum was Garifuna Power. This was the group which had formed under the auspices of the above-described URACCAN project. Garifuna Power had from its inception been even more inclusive, welcoming people of any ethnicity to join. This group had also been more musically and performatively adventurous from the start, incorporating punta rock rhythms enthusiastically and emphasizing the sexuality of the dances. Fourth was a very recently organized group founded by a former member of a professional folkloric ballet company from western Nicaragua. The Regional Dance Group, as it was being tentatively called, included Garifuna members and worked with conventionally traditional Garifuna music. However, as its name indicates, it was more regionally oriented, seeking to represent all costeño identities in its membership and repertoire. Certainly, there were a number of tensions between and among these groups and they often argued about the image of Garifuna culture as well as the level of authenticity that each one was or was not projecting. But at the same time and for a variety

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of personal and economic reasons, various members from each of the groups floated among the others. However, when they did so, I  noticed, they easily revised their performance practices, ethnicity definitions, and authenticity concerns to suit their new environment. It seemed to me they were thus acting out the advice that Vernon Ramos told me he tried to impart to young dancers and to all young Garifunas: “Be multiple!” During my fieldwork, I  was struck in particular by what, in my interpretation, appeared to be a recurrent pattern of identity shift in a number of performance events I attended. While these events seemed to start out on an integrated Creole-Garifuna note, by the end they had been transformed into assertions of Garifuna difference. For example, in an outdoor, pre-Garifuna Day party I went to at the home of rescue leader Isabel Estrada,7 I observed how Garifuna identity became more pronounced over the course of the party’s duration. In the late afternoon and early evening as guests began to arrive and gather in the yard, there was a decidedly Creole atmosphere as old and new soca and reggae hits were churned out non-stop from the home sound system. This Creole ambience continued on into sunset when the hostess then rounded up children and adult party-goers alike to play a few rounds of the West Indian song-and-ring game, “Brown Girl in the Ring.” Eventually, however, as night set in and a huge bonfire was lit (a custom enjoyed especially by Garifunas, I was told), several drummers and percussionists appeared with their garawoun, sisira, hicatee-back, and wadabágei. As lively punta music and dancing ensued, the party space metamorphosed dramatically into a place of Garifuna excitement and belonging. A similar metamorphosis occurred at a May Festival I attended in Bluefields. For most of the day, the performances on the festival’s main stage featured Creole maypole or reggae music, while in the streets neighborhood groups held their comparsa competitions. The atmosphere was pleasant enough, but perhaps a little low key. Toward the end of the evening, however, a different set of sounds filled the air as Garifuna Power took to the stage. As the drummers and percussionists began to pound out the distinctive rhythms, three young female dancers began to punta their way energetically across the platform. The tempo of the music and dancing increased to an almost frenetic pace and the audience cheered exuberantly. In this case, a characteristically Creole event had been turned, at least temporarily, into a celebration of Garifunaness. I witnessed what I understood as similar identity shifts in other settings: an Anglican church service; the rehearsals of performing groups; nightclub gatherings; and at-home sing-a-longs. Each situation seemed to involve, through a perceptible change in music, a process of de-Creolizing and becoming Garifuna. What was also noticeable, however, was that the Creoles in attendance at these events tended to move to the sidelines when the change occurred. Except for some intermittent participation, people who identified themselves as Creoles never “became Garifuna” musically. These scenarios seem to offer a number of insights relevant to the OAGANIC objectives stated above. First, the fact that Creoles did not remove themselves from the performance settings when Garifuna music ensued, but stayed on to observe the activities with a show of respect and approval, seems to be a good indication that a more

366   Annemarie Gallaugher positive attitude on the part of Creoles toward Garifunas has emerged. The fact that the Garifunas in question felt comfortable in expressing their traditions openly and without shame in front of Creole onlookers is also a positive sign. However, I do not think it can be said that there was any real “integral development” (Objective 1) occurring. Neither was there much demonstration of “shared cultural values” (Objective 2), beyond, perhaps, the value placed on music itself. There was a clear Garifuna performer/Creole spectator division of the performance space, and the musical/performance shifts were always one-way:  Only Garifunas moved musically from being Creole to being Garifuna. Except for those few individuals who participated intermittently, Creoles never made this change. Such a transformation, I think, would have indicated a greater level of integration and value sharing. Different Creole interviewees suggested different reasons for this musical distancing. Dorothy Wilson, known for her research on maypole music and her view that maypole’s origins are English as opposed to African, commented that while it was good to see Garifunas feeling confident and reviving their culture, it is possible that Creoles did not join in because they objected to Garifunas promoting punta as a Garifuna tradition. Contrary to popular Garifuna assertions, Wilson maintains that punta was originally a Creole form. In her opinion, punta had been appropriated by Garifunas and the way they danced it was “not the real punta.” This fact, she said, plus the emphasis some Garifuna performers placed on sexuality, might explain why Creoles did not dance with Garifunas. Dance teacher and choreographer Amanda Jiminez interpreted the gap as having originated more from the Garifuna side: What I  really think is that the Garifuna identify themselves differently from the Creole. The Creole mixed themselves. The Garifuna are very proud of being more pure, keeping their own bloodline. They have around twenty years that they have tried to rescue their traditions, and they have focused on the punta . . . . I suppose somewhere or other, they have danced the maypole. But punta is so much more aggressive. It has very provocative movements. So I suppose the Garifuna decided to identify themselves with that to difference themselves from the Creoles, to have something more unique. (Interview, Bluefields, July 27, 2002)

Jiminez also mentioned the perception among some Creoles that Garifunas would not approve if they tried to dance their traditions. As a case in point, she spoke of a staged performance of a walagallo ceremony presented in the late 1980s in Managua’s Ruben Darío Theatre by the national folkloric ballet company Macehuatl. Jiminez explained that even though from their perspective the non-Garifuna professionals responsible for this production had meant it as a tribute to Garifuna culture and had found it an exhilarating and beautiful experience, reaction from the Garifuna community was negative. The community thought that those who had been involved in “folklorizing” and “artifying” their ritual were trying to prove their own superiority. Thus, Jiminez said, even though Creoles might have wanted to show solidarity with and friendship

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toward Garifunas by dancing their dances and participating in their music, they sometimes felt that they could not do so lest Garifunas accuse them of elitism, a criticism that would thus lump them with the mestizo majority. As my Garifuna interviewees made clear, having their traditions appropriated and folklorized by Creoles and mestizos was not how they envisaged Garifuna and Creole communities being (as per OAGANIC Objective 3) “incorporated into the national effort.” Appropriations by western mestizos of costeño cultural forms were also a troubling issue for some Creoles. For example, Father Terence Charles, a Catholic priest of Creole background and a strong supporter of Garifuna cultural rescue, spoke of how “the people from Managua” (i.e., mestizos) had some years ago started dancing maypole—in his view, “the real Nicaraguan Creole music” and a music not of English but of black influence. They had then gone on to commercialize it and so, he said, the tradition had lost its value. He expressed concern that the same thing would happen to Garifuna music: Just like people who wear dreadlocks and are not Rastafarian, people [from Managua] will dance punta because it is in style, not because they are conscious of, “This is part of my identity. This is part of my culture.” If a next dance comes up, attractive like the punta, they will dance it and forget about the punta. (Interview, Bluefields, May 18, 2000)

Compounding these concerns about mestizo attitudes was the sense that there could be no truly progressive dialogue about any of them. My interviewees felt that, if questioned, mestizos would always have a justification for their behaviors. Even though autonomy had been granted to the coast years ago and even though pronouncements of a more inclusive mestizo multiculturalism had become part of the neoliberal national order, as far as most Creoles and Garifunas could see, Nicaragua was still being imagined in the western side of the country as a homogenous mestizo nation. Thus positive views toward mestizos like that expressed in the quotation at the beginning of this section were rare. There were other hesitancies and ambivalences voiced by Creoles about participating in Garifuna music. Father Charles noted that while many Creoles expressed approval and even admiration for the Garifunas’ cultural rescue efforts, they also admitted to feelings of jealousy and sadness at times. According to Father Charles, Creoles felt that Nicaraguan Garifunas had developed an identity much stronger than their own and lamented the fact that they had let their own identity weaken. Father Charles spoke of how Creoles had let maypole fall into decline and had opted instead for “imported” musics such as reggae, soca, and country and western. This situation was, he pointed out, obviously advantageous for Garifuna musical rescue. But, he noted too, that at the same time as Garifunas might benefit from a cultural recession among Creoles, as a strongly resistant black people, who, purportedly, had never been enslaved, they could also be a source of inspiration and a model: . . . well, the Garifunas are part of the black people. But there are differences culturally. They have their language. They have a stronger identity than we do. Our own is not

368   Annemarie Gallaugher clear. It has been disappearing . . . . The Garifuna community, from what I know, they never experienced slavery. They had the opportunity to develop their identity and their culture because they are a people of strong resistance. Even though when they came here in the past and lost their language, they kept certain things of their culture holding strong. They lost their language because they had to survive. Everybody spoke English and, if they wanted to get a job, they had to know English. But many other things are still strong there yet. (Interview, Bluefields, July 25, 2002)

For their part, Garifunas were not oblivious to the kinds of mixed feelings that Creoles often held toward them. They realized that underneath overt expressions of positive support, there could also be hidden and not-so-hidden layers of discomfort. Some Garifuna cultural rescuers were uneasy with this situation and its negative implications for the hoped-for integral development of Garifunas and Creoles. They wanted to find ways to deal with the problem sensitively and proactively. I have already noted how the performing group Black Arisin’ expressly followed a mandate to include Creoles in its membership. But there were other instances involving music that I thought could be taken, at least in part, as gestures of Garifuna generosity toward Creoles and of a desire to create a spirit of interethnic cooperation and interculturality. In a documentary about the walagallo ritual aired on national television, the well-known costeño reggae song “Black History, Black Culture” (Soul Vibrations 1991) was chosen as the opening theme music. The use of this song rather than one from the Garifuna repertoire suggested to me a display of Garifuna black solidarity, particularly with the progressive black Creole cause on the coast. This cause has been mobilized in large part through politically oriented reggae, and, to some degree, associations with Rastafarianism. Of course, a more skeptical interpretation might see the choice of “Black History, Black Culture” as a form of Garifuna opportunism, i.e., as Garifunas seeking to elevate their status by appropriating a music with a wider popular appeal than their own. Another example of Garifuna goodwill toward Creoles seems present in at least two of their performance genres choreographed for presentation on the formal stage. For example, both the conga (a dance drama) and the Negra (a dance set to a poem) involve reenactments of the experience of African slaves. Although a proud claim of many Garifunas is that they were never enslaved, these genres and their messages of liberation and empowerment are intended as an expression of empathy and solidarity with blacks who were. According to Amanda Jiminez, the conga is intended as “a way that the Garifunas have, as a black people, of protesting against the ill-treatment that the slaves received from the masters” (interview, Bluefields, July 27, 2002). The Negra, on the other hand is:  . . . . a call to value yourself as a black person and [to understand] that despite whatever mistreatment you have received in the past, you must put it aside, it will just serve as an experience . . . . The last statement [of the poem] is a confirmation that you

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must never be ashamed of your race and says, “If I was to be born again, black I would like to be again.” It’s very beautiful . . . . It is a call that you must never be ashamed of who you are, and even though you have limitations, you can always prosper. (Interview, Bluefields, July 25, 2002)

Finally, as they pursue OAGANIC’s objectives of Garifuna-Creole integral development, shared cultural values, and incorporation into the Nicaraguan nation, Garifunas have a particular advantage: They can always draw on an expanded notion of Garifuna music and their capacity for flexible musicality, or “being multiple,” to enhance their relationships with Creoles. Should their assertions of Garifuna difference become problematic or alienating for Creoles at any time, they can readily reintegrate by switching musical codes and enjoying soca, reggae, maypole, and all the other well-loved Creole forms. After all, I was told, these are Garifuna traditions too.

Conclusion On the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, Garifunas were at one time slated to disappear. This has not happened. What has happened instead is a long-term revitalization movement aimed at survival and resurgence. Like other similar contemporary indigenous and African-descended movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, characterized as they often are with highly ambitious ethnodevelopment agendas as well as strong hopes for achieving new and alternative ways of being in and making sense of the world, the struggle for Nicaraguan Garifuna cultural rescue has been complex and multifaceted. Its particular trajectory has unfolded through a history marked by discrimination, assimilation, national revolution, armed conflict, neoliberal pressures, and postrevolutionary battles for costeño regional autonomy. One defining feature of the project and a main concern of this essay has been the dialogic spaces between Garifunas and costeño Afro-Creoles that have arisen in its wake. Relationships between the two groups have variously strained and softened over the years as both have tried to find ways to come to terms with their own separate cultural identities as well as their complicated historical intertwinements. Garifuna rescuers continue to recognize Creoles as significant perpetrators in their experience of cultural loss. However, they have sought to work with Creoles in order to establish a more effective intercultural dialogue. The objectives dedicated specifically to Garifuna-Creole relations by OAGANIC, the main organizing body for Garifuna cultural rescue on the coast, articulate several propositions for what that work might look like. As I  have tried to convey, musical work forms an important part of the picture. Examination of this musical work, be it music-making itself or dialogue about music, reveals a number of points of tension and disagreement and suggests that OAGANIC’s objectives may need some rethinking or revision. But what is important is that the two groups do at least confront each other musically and they do maintain an open and

370   Annemarie Gallaugher frank debate about their ethnomusical differences. They are, to paraphrase the words of Eduardo Galeano quoted earlier, rescuing the multiplicity of life, and, I would add, the musicality of life, in all its conflicts.

Notes 1. This essay is based on research conducted for the author’s Ph.D. dissertation (Gallaugher 2008). Fieldwork consisting of extensive interviews, informal conversations, participant and non-participant observation, and media analysis took place during six periodic visits to Nicaragua between 1999 and 2002. 2. The Black Caribs are believed to have originated through the mixture of Carib/Arawak peoples and shipwrecked or escaped African slaves. Their ethnogenesis as a distinct, slavery resistant ethnic group on the island of St. Vincent in the seventeenth century, their military alliances with French Catholic colonial powers against the British, their eventual deportation by the British to Central America in 1797, and subsequent dispersal along the eastern seaboards of what are today Honduras and Belize is a story well-circulated in anthropological texts. See, for example, the seminal work by Gonzalez (1988). 3. It should be pointed out here that while Creoles are recognized officially as African descendants, they may also self-identify as having a mixture of heritages, including British, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and indigenous. Thus the category Creole, like all other categories named in this essay, including Garifuna, may be interpreted variously. Such complexities, involving intersecting but also shifting constructions of race, ethnicity, class, nation, and more recently, diaspora are part of the social fabric throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. See, for example, Wade (2010). 4. As of the 2005 census, the total population was 3, 271 (López and Koskinen 2009: 8). 5. I use real names in the case of well-known public figures or lesser-known public figures previously identified in news media or scholarly publications (e.g., Obando Sancho 1999). In all other cases, I use pseudonyms. 6. Here, mestizo refers to people of primarily mixed indigenous and Spanish descent. Often racialized as white, mestizos are generally the most powerful group in most Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America. 7. Garifuna Day is an annual ethnicity celebration day and is held throughout the diaspora.

References Anderson, Mark. 2009. Black and Indigenous:  Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bharath Hernandez, Ricardo and Maximilian C.  Forte. 2006. “History and Ritual in the Maintenance and Retrieval of Traditions in the Carib Community of Arima, Trinidad.” In Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival, edited by Maximilian C. Forte, 107–131. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Brondo, Keri. 2006. Roots, Rights, and Belonging: Garifuna Indigeneity and Land Rights on Honduras’ North Coast. Ph.D. dissertation. Michigan State University. Craven, David. 2002. Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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——. 1989. The New Concept of Art and Popular Culture in Nicaragua Since the Revolution in 1979:  An Analytical Essay and Compendium of Illustrations. Lewiston:  The Edwin Mellen Press. Davidson, William V. 1980. “The Garifuna of Pearl Lagoon: Ethnohistory of an Afro-American Enclave in Nicaragua.” Ethnohistory 27 (1): 31–47. Dennis, Philip A. 2000. “Autonomy on the Miskitu Coast of Nicaragua.” Reviews in Anthropology 29: 199–210. Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham: Duke University Press. Forte, Maximilian C., ed. 2006. Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival. New York: Peter Lang. Freeland, Jane. 1995. “Nicaragua.” In No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today Minority Rights Group, 181–201. London: Minority Rights Publications. Gallaugher, Annemarie. 2008. “The Sounds of Resurgence:  Music, Cultural Rescue, and Development among the Garifuna People of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Caribbean Coast.” Ph.D. dissertation. York University (Canada). Gonzalez, Nancie L. 1988. Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garifuna. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gordon, Edmund. 1998. Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hale, Charles R. 1994. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harkin, Michael E. 2004. “Introduction: Revitalization as History and Theory.” In Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, edited by Michael E. Harkin, xv–xxxvi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hodges, Donald C. 1986. Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press. Idiáquez, José. 1994. El Culto a Los Ancestros: En La Cosmovisión Religiosa de Los Garifunas de Nicaragua. Managua: Instituto Histórica Centroamericano. López, Vernadine and Arja Koskinen. 2009. “La revitalización de la lengua y cultura Garifuna a través de la educación.” Ciencia E Interculturalidad 5 (2): 8–16. Obando Sancho, Victor, et al. 1999. Orinoco: Revitalización Cultural del Pueblo Garifuna de la Costa Caribe Nicaragüense. Bluefields, Nicaragua: URACCAN. Perry, Pamela. 1991. “The Politics of Identity: Community and Ethnicity in a Pro-Sandinista Enclave in Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 36: 115–135. Scruggs, T. M. 1999. “‘Let’s Enjoy as Nicaraguans’: The Use of Music in the Construction of a Nicaraguan National Consciousness.” Ethnomusicology 43 (2): 297–321. Suco Campos, Idalberto. 1987. La Musica en El Complejo Cultural del Walagallo en Nicaragua. Habana: Casa de las Américas. Wade, Peter. 2010. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. 2nd edition. London: Pluto Press.

Discs Cited Palacio, Andy. 2007. Wátina. Cumbancha CMB-CD-3. Soul Vibrations. 1991. Black History, Black Culture. Aural Tradition Records ATRCD 118.

C HA P T E R  17

T O WA R D A M E T H O D O L O G Y FOR RESEARCH INTO THE R E V I VA L O F M U S I C A L L I F E A F T E R WA R , NAT U R A L DI S AST E R , BA N S ON A L L MUSIC, OR NEGLECT M A RG A R ET KA RTOM I

This chapter discusses revivals of the musical arts in societies suffering or recovering from musical decline or deprivation as a result of war, natural disaster, enforced bans on all music, or neglect, focusing on case studies from the early 2000s. The genres in question include traditional, folk, and classical music, bardic singing, dance, musical theater, and the commercially distributed popular and media arts. After briefly reviewing the ethnomusicological literature on such revivals in a few areas of the world, the chapter will focus on two main case studies, with additional reference to one subsidiary case. The first case study will be the post-tsunami, postconflict revivals in Aceh, based on my fieldtrips to the province in 1982, 2003, and annually from 2005 to 2010 (Kartomi 2014). This will be followed by a short discussion of the parallel situation in post-­tsunami, postwar Sri Lanka. The other main case study will be Afghanistan, where efforts have been made in the cities of Kabul and Herat to restore and revive musical life as the country copes with its continuing war and the effects of the Tālibān’s bans on all music making and listening; here I draw mainly on studies by John Baily, Veronica Doubleday, Lorraine Sakata, and Ahmed Sarmast. The chapter concludes with an outline of a preliminary methodology for research into musical revivals after major catastrophes, bans, or neglect. The term “revival” is used here in the sense of the restoration or revitalization of a musical tradition that has severely declined or even virtually died out due to the fact that

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its people have had to devote most of their energy to coping with disasters and emergencies. The serious decline of a society’s music culture that results can easily be recognized when it becomes apparent that few or no master performers or teachers of the traditional music culture have survived to pass on the tradition to the next generation. The decline also becomes apparent when a considerable proportion of the population is traumatized by a disaster and is in need of therapy, including therapy through the revival of the music culture.

A Review of the Literature Ever since the birth of the discipline of ethnomusicology in the 1950s, scholars have emphasized the need to research the uses and functions of music in society as well as the history and styles of the musical genres themselves. However, the uses and functions of music in societies in the process of recovering from war, natural disaster, punitive bans on all musical life, or neglect have largely been overlooked. Much of the existing revival literature emphasizes the part played by, and meanings ascribed to, revived genres, styles, or practices in connection with sociopolitical movements. Ethnographic research into revivals of the performing arts in periods of reconstruction and peace maintenance constitutes relatively new research territory, in need of a new methodology. Why have music revivals of this kind been neglected? One reason is that it is usually difficult for scholars to obtain permission to do fieldwork in postdisaster situations, for the authorities naturally do not want to be distracted by visitors as they try to ameliorate mass suffering and rebuild societies in extremely difficult conditions. Moreover, the authorities may be loath to allow visiting researchers to observe their inadequate relief efforts, especially in poverty-stricken areas where resources are limited. Natural disasters seem frequently to occur among communities who suffer not only from grinding poverty but also from conflict between insurgents and established forces, as in Haiti, which has been judged the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Musical and material revivals in impoverished communities can be slow indeed compared to richer communities, where revival is normally speedy, as in the case of solace offered by musicians in the aftermath of the Australian bush fires in 2008. In the early 2000s, a group of applied ethnomusicologists published papers on the effects of war on music in several areas of the world, including the cultural and physical survival of the Croats and Serbs in Croatia (e.g. Pettan 1998) and musical revivals among socially marginalized and disadvantaged groups, such as Romani musicians in Kosovo (Pettan 2011) and Canada’s First Nation peoples (Harrison 2008). In 2007, some members of the group presented papers at the first conference of the newly formed Study Group for Applied Ethnomusicology of the International Council for Traditional Music. The group defines “applied ethnomusicology” as “research guided by principles of social responsibility, which extends beyond the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding toward solving concrete problems,” and this includes

374   Margaret Kartomi studies of postdisaster revivals (Pettan, personal communication, July 10, 2008). Some members aim to make objective studies while others see themselves as activist scholars who work for the implementation of strategies to assist recovery after a war or natural disaster, including among marginalized and neglected groups (Pettan 2010). In 2002, an ethnographic study of the experiences of male and female soldier-musicians in an Australian military band appeared, containing an account of how contemporary Australians constructed meaning from the commemorative military music played on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the World War I landing in Gallipoli (Bannister 2002). In 2005, a number of scholars presented their war- and revival-related research at the annual Society of Ethnomusicology conference, addressing its keynote theme, “war, peace and reconciliation.” Another scholar wrote one of the first articles on the preservation and revival of music in a refugee population (McDonald 2010). While music research into postconflict situations is still relatively rare, there is even less published literature on natural disaster situations, such as the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, leveled its capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed well over two hundred thousand people. Conference papers were presented at the Society of Ethnomusicology conference on the Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans on August 28, 2005, killing more than eighteen hundred. Studies of the use of music therapy for trauma relief in war and peace, including for former combatants, is in its early stages. Only one author has studied musical revivals in Aceh after the 2005 peace accord (Kartomi 2010). A recent study was devoted to the role of women artists and ex-combatants during postwar psychological therapy treatments and periods of reconstruction (Uning 2009). An earlier study focused on small children as victims of trauma in other areas of the world (Gilbert 1996). Another study dealt with music-psychological therapy provided to treat ex-combatants and widows in Aceh or children who were victims of trauma (Vignato 2009). Brief reference was also made to the effects of Hurricane Katrina on a family jazz funeral and parade scheduling in New Orleans (Sakakeeny 2010: 1, 25). Publications by ethnomusicologists John Baily (2009) and Ahmed Sarmast (2006) have focused on the revival and rebuilding of music culture in Afghanistan, and NGO leaders have discussed concrete measures to rebuild music education and performance, including the establishment of a new primary and secondary music school in Kabul and various other projects carried out by the Aga Khan projects and the establishment of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Several features distinguished the Acehnese situation from other revival scenarios. Most significant among these were the massive efforts needed to reconstruct housing, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure in order to allow daily life—including artistic and ceremonial activity—to continue as before; the need for emotional therapy in the face of mass trauma; the help of government, aid agencies, and NGOs to reestablish an education system and facilitate transmission of the arts for children and adults under extreme conditions of destruction of environment; and the freedom from curfews and other restrictions so that the people could hold family ceremonies, celebrations, rehearsals, and performances again. The case studies that follow focus on ways in which

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postdisaster societies attempt to revive their artistic activity after neglecting it due to war or natural disaster, including improving the quality of performances by re-establishing regular classes and rehearsals.

Case Study 1:  Revival of Musical Life in Aceh This case study is in two parts: aspects of the revival of musical life in Aceh after the 2004 tsunami and aspects of the revival after the armed conflict ended with the 2005 peace accord.

Post-tsunami Aceh For almost three decades before the great Indian Ocean tsunami struck Aceh’s west and north coasts on December 26, 2004, the province was in a state of armed conflict between the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) and the Indonesian state military. The tsunami, which caused whole populations of many villages to disappear, compounded the victims’ severe war weariness, trauma, and social and artistic deprivation. After an earthquake that measured 9.3 on the Richter scale, the tsunami unleashed a wall of water three stories high that traveled a fifth of the way around the earth at speeds of six hundred kilometers per hour (Hume 2009: 17). The worst affected area was Aceh, where an estimated 167,736 Indonesians—mostly Acehnese—died, including almost a third of the population of the capital, Banda Aceh, two-thirds of whom were female and 21.1 percent of whom were under ten years of age (Rofi 2006: 340–350). When the tsunami struck, the men were mainly fishing at sea or working in the fields, and the women were at home looking after children and the elderly (ibid.). Almost a thousand registered artists died, and the personnel and equipment of scores of art troupes and schools were wiped out.1 Thousands of men and women were widowed and thousands of children orphaned (Vignato 2009: 3). Following the tsunami, international governments, NGOs, and individuals pledged more than $7 billion (US) in aid for the relief and revival effort. For the first time in decades, Aceh opened its borders to foreign expertise, and sixteen thousand foreign personnel entered the formerly closed province. Barracks and tent cities were established to house the four hundred thousand homeless, who were suffering from a state of shock, bewilderment, and grief and were barely able to function. Apart from the mammoth task of rebuilding immense areas that the tsunami had razed to the ground, survivors had to grapple with the economic collapse, social breakdown, and psychological traumatization resulting from both the tsunami and the separatist conflict with the Indonesian government.

376   Margaret Kartomi When the international and national aid eventually began to be made available, it was distributed unevenly and often failed to reach the very poor and needy, including most of the one thousand or so registered artists. Very few of the performing art groups and schools received any aid, so they had to start again from scratch, replenishing their membership with novice artists and replacing their lost musical instruments, costumes, and rehearsal spaces with anything they could find. Some children and teen survivors in the camps could join classes in music, dance, and art offered as therapy by local Acehnese artists employed by NGOs. In the beachside village of Lampnuk, the whole community was wiped out, but in Lokna one ratôh duek (sitting dance) performer survived, and by assuming the responsibilities of the former troupe leader, he showed how the arts and adat (traditional customs) could be saved. He and others discovered modes of self-help through which individuals and communities could alleviate their trauma through music, dance, the bardic arts, filmmaking, and government-organized arts festivals and competitions.2 Immediately after the tsunami struck, the national and provincial government and private television and radio stations began to broadcast news about the disaster interspersed with heartrending Acehnese laments and other recorded music. This was part of a nationwide effort to secure private donations to help the survivors and revive their spirits. Some of the broadcasts were aired virtually nonstop, continuing for weeks, or in the case of the Acehnese-owned channel Metro TV, for months. For example, the west-coast Acehnese singers Marzuki Hassan of the Jakarta Arts Institute (Institut Kesenian Jakarta) sang the tragic, high-pitched west-coast laments (ratôk; B.I., ratap) on television. Aceh’s most famous pop singer, Rafly, created and performed new songs that expressed sympathy for the tsunami survivors, especially the many orphaned children. Given the emergency, which demanded an immediate musical response, he also recycled existing songs; the “Tsunami Orphan Song,” for example, was an adaptation of his song about orphans from the war (see Atjeh Loen Sayang, 2007). A song sung on the media by the pop singer Sherina Munaf, titled “Indonesia Menangis” (Indonesia weeps), expressed the widely felt view propagated by some religious leaders that the tsunami was God’s punishment for the Acehnese people’s sins, including the killings in the war. Others consoled themselves by remembering an Acehnese proverb: “It is heartbreaking to lose our children, but it would be disastrous to lose our adat [custom, set of cultural practices] which is our anchor in all things.” They were determined not to let the tsunami destroy their culture. Troupes of dancer-musicians in Indonesia and overseas were mobilized to perform Acehnese and highlander Gayo sitting dances, ratôh duek, meuseukat, and saman, to raise money for the hundreds of thousands of victims. Both professional and amateur artists took part in the continuing efforts made in the years that followed to alleviate the trauma of the tsunami survivors through music. Some stories of the resilience of the people of several coastal villages devastated by the tsunami are told in films such as Nyanyian Tsunami (Tsunami song), which was made by CV Layarkaca Intervision in 2006 (Komoditi Production House with Studio Kampung Mulia). Composers of the songs, including the evocative “Tsunami Song,” which was

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accompanied by a simulated Western orchestra, were Jamal Abdullah and Maulana Akbar, and the editors and filmmakers were Maulana and Afeed Afifuddin, assisted by a group of musicians named De Atjehers (The Acehnese, in Dutch). The film project was supported by the daily newspaper Serambi Indonesia, the Caritas Czecho agency in Lamno, and the traditional art troupe Talo, and included interviews by journalists from Regional Asia and USAid. The film portrays the self-doubt of the inhabitants of the seaside village of Pudong (in Kecamatan Lhong, Aceh Besar) as they attempted to restore the practices of their local artistic heritage following the death of eight hundred of their nine hundred households. Before the tsunami, the village had specialized in performances of an Acehnese version of the Sufi musical genre dabôh; however, the tsunami claimed all but one of the troupe members. The survivor was a shy young man who courageously decided to teach himself the most difficult role in the genre—a religiously inspired awl-dancer. Eventually, he taught some young men to perform the various roles with him, and he re-formed the troupe, serving as its leader. The film also shows a bard (tukang hikayat) in the same village singing an excerpt from a legendary hikayat (epic poem) and inserting stirring episodes in his performance to revive the will to live (semangat) of the villagers after the terror of the tsunami and to encourage one of them to take on the role of troupe leader. The bard drew attention to a legend told on Aceh’s offshore island Simeulu about the Krakatoa eruption and tsunami in 1883. As he knew, the islanders’ knowledge of the story had saved many Simeulu inhabitants from death during the 2004 tsunami because they knew that they should flee from the coast up to higher land. This story underlines the importance of the people maintaining and nurturing their knowledge of their folk stories and wisdom to teach successive generations. Another film that illustrates post-tsunami, arts-led resilience, Meusare-sare (Working together), was made by National Geographic in 2005. In the Malay-speaking seaside village of Cokna in Aceh Jaya, a man named Teungku Sofyan, who had lost his wife and children to the waves, overcame his trauma by reviving his wife’s dance troupe and teaching a new generation of young singer-dancers to perform Cokna’s main heritage genre, ratôh taloe (literally, “net-weaving song-dance”). In this performance, a row of boys or girls sit close together and sing secular texts interspersed with Islamic phrases such as “Assalamulaikum” (peace be with you) while dancing and performing body percussion techniques, including clapping and beating their thighs and shoulders in repeated rhythmic motifs, after which they weave a piece of rope into a fishing net. They then kneel up on their lower legs and sing about the Prophet’s birth, to the accompaniment of an oboe (seuruné kalée), cylindrical drums (geundrang), and frame drums (rapa’i). One of the aims of this film was to show how the traditional musical arts can help a team of newly arrived foreign aid workers communicate with a traumatized local community. Members of the NGO Aloe gained the trust of the people in its chosen village by first learning from them about their artistic and cultural activities. This raised the people’s determination to find ways to restore their livelihoods, enabled them to work together with NGO members to improve their farming and fishing pond techniques,

378   Margaret Kartomi and helped maintain their hope for full recovery. The film shows them performing their sitting (duek) song-dances with stirring body percussion (ratôh duek); a bamboo flute (serdam) player accompanying tragic footage about the fate of the many orphaned children; and an Acehnese oboe, double-headed drum, and frame-drum ensemble accompanying some traditional standing and stepping dances. Some scenes are accompanied by newly composed music “with a Muslim flavor” (yang bernafaskan Islam), which is obtained by using Arab-sounding tonal materials. Other scenes are accompanied by Acehnese pop music played by an electronically simulated Western symphony orchestra. Some of the NGOs that employed traditional artists to perform for, and teach the arts to, tsunami victims commissioned instrument makers, especially frame-drum builders, to make replacement instruments. These NGOs also employed seamstresses to make and embroider new dance costumes for depleted troupes in some villages. Some foreign governments offered aid that assisted an arts-led recovery. Aid from the Turkish government reconstructed a village that was wiped out by the tsunami, providing a mosque and new music and dance rehearsal and classroom space among the new houses for homeless families. However, in most rebuilt villages provision was not made for buildings that could be used for rehearsals and classes, which severely limited the return to normal music making and dance classes for young artists. Professional assessors of the temporary housing camps constructed with assistance from the community development agency Plan Australia had noted that many of the 150,000 children in the camps were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, blocking their memories of the tsunami, changing their behavior dramatically so as not to have to deal with others, and preferring to be alone.3 As local Acehnese and foreign teachers in UNICEF’s twenty-one child centers testified, the more than eighteen hundred children who were separated from one parent or lost both parents in the raging tsunami waters wrestled with unimaginable trauma in the following months and years. The centers, which were mostly set up in refugee camp tents by local and foreign volunteer staff, looked after three thousand children, including tsunami and war orphans. Arts therapy exercises worked in many cases. The children were given opportunities to improvise and perform music and dance, including Acehnese ratôh duek, meuseukat, and rodat sitting song-dances with frame-drum playing, and to tell stories and draw freely, often choosing to write about or draw the tsunami or their deceased parents (Leila Bukhari Daud, personal communication, July 25, 2008). According to the province’s child protection officer for UNICEF, Frederic Sizaret, the children’s resilience was high—but, he said, “You wonder what they are repressing. . . and they are going to need help later on. Their long-term future is uncertain, given the rudimentary child welfare system and the lack of a formal foster care program and trained social workers” (Jerome and Rubin 2005: 1).4 As time passed, however, “the children’s dark days became fewer,” as a number of anecdotes have shown (Jerome and Rubin 2005: 1). One of these, related personally to the author, tells of a group of boys in Lampnuk benefiting from song-dance therapy.

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Each group was taught to perform a partly improvised ratèb duek song-dance with Muslim texts. Kneeling close together in a row, the boys swayed back and forth while the song leader improvised texts such as “Allah Akbar” (Allah is great) and “Laillaailalo” (There is no God but God), to which the group responded by singing the same texts in chorus to a well-known Acehnese melody, sometimes with Acehnese body percussion (clapping, thigh-slapping, etc.) (Leila Bukhari Daud, personal communication, July 25, 2008). Thousands of artists who lost their livelihoods due to the tsunami tried to re­establish troupes and schools, and they participated in the tsunami commemorations and the proliferating government-run artistic events and festivals. New politically acceptable texts were set to former well-known underground song melodies, both traditional and commercial/popular, and these were popularized through recording sales and media outlets; international pop songs also increased their market share. In most cases, groups that were able to continue to operate were those attached to the offices of the governor or bupati (district heads). Some of them had the resources to create or redevelop new art works in response to the conflict and the tsunami—one example being the Perang Sabi (Holy War) dance that was redeveloped by the governor’s sanggar Meuligo (Meuligo performance group) in Banda Aceh—and to perform at such functions as official tsunami memorial services. Another way of dealing with tsunami trauma has been for the government to hold annual commemorative ceremonies (Peringatan Tsunami Resmi) on December 26 at the mass graveyards (Kuburan Massal) in the seaside village of Ulele and the inland cemetery just outside Banda Aceh in Kecamatan Lamburu, usually in the presence of the governor and other government officials, as well as at Meulaboh and elsewhere. At the first annual commemoration, an orphan choir sang regional Acehnese songs and Rafly’s “Lagu Tsunami Aneuk Yatim” (Tsunami orphan song). Rafly also sang a traditional west-coast lament between the prayers, Qu’ran reading, and speeches. Born in Tapaktuan, he has a powerful, high-pitched singing voice that is typical of the loudly carrying jantan (masculine) voices of fishermen at sea as they call the wind on Aceh’s southwest coast. At the second commemoration, the Acehnese musicians Mahrisal Rubi and Edy Erwinsyah released the song “Bersama Kita Bisa” (Together we can do it!), which, through a synthesis of Acehnese and jazz styles, highlighted the key role of volunteers in the recovery of affected areas. Many health professionals and aid workers reported widespread psychological trauma associated with the tsunami, the war, or both combined. This was compounded by the traditional belief in many affected regions that a body must be buried by a family relative combined with the fact that in many cases after the tsunami no body remained to be buried. Some Indonesian and foreign NGOs used conventional music, dance, and art therapy in the enormous task of aiding the recovery of the survivors of conflict and/ or tsunami trauma, especially in the displaced persons’ camps, and increasingly became involved in providing services to survivors of the conflict and for peace advocacy work. However, national economic and political conditions have directly influenced “the availability of the requisite support for music therapy services, thereby determining who

380   Margaret Kartomi will receive music therapy” (Wang Feng Ng 2005: 1), and the great majority of direct and indirect victims of Aceh’s war and tsunami failed to receive any arts therapy at all.

Postwar Aceh after the 2005 Peace Agreement As has been mentioned, at the time the tsunami struck the people of Aceh were still engaged in a seemingly endless conflict that had begun in 1976. The amount of time and energy spent on music, dance, and the bardic arts had been greatly reduced, especially throughout the rural areas, because of the fighting and frequent curfews, though official government performance troupes kept the traditional and newly created musical arts alive. However, international pressure after the tsunami and a measure of war weariness brought the two sides together, and they signed the Helsinki Peace Agreement in August 2005. The peace accord abolished the curfews and brought enormous relief and joy to the common people, who could at last hold their life event and other celebrations, including many that had had to be postponed. Thousands of artists gained employment by establishing or reopening their dance and music schools, and troupes of artists began to perform again. Texts of separatist songs that had been banned were recycled with new texts that conformed to the new state of peace, and these were performed on the media. In 2008, the government held its fifth All-Aceh Arts Festival, and hundreds of artists from across the province took part. In early 2009, the government’s Planning Body for National Development launched its Program for the Socialization of Peace and Reintegration of Aceh. This “aimed to revive the people’s energy for the growth and development of Acehnese culture, which had almost died out during the harsh conditions of the decades-long conflict and the following disaster” (Anon. 2008). The Program included a new peace song competition for poets and composers. The winning songs, which had texts on themes that would help maintain the peace, combined traditional Acehnese and Acehnese pop attributes and were performed by leading Acehnese musicians in Banda Aceh and the Acehnese diaspora in Jakarta. Recordings of the performances were assembled in the album AMAN Album Dame Aceh (Album of peace songs; 2008) and distributed on CD, cassette, video, and ringtone. One song, “Tajaga Damée” (Watch Over the Peace), begins, bardic-style, in free meter and then launches into a characteristically modern-Acehnese, hexatonic melody in a minor key, with alternating normal and lowered tone 2 in the harmonic scale to give it an Acehnese-Arab feel, accompanied on frame drums (rapa’i) and oboe (seuruné kalée). Its text, set in classical Acehnese pantun rhyming quatrains, draws attention to the new peace after a “crazy period.” Presenting an impossible image of “a midday robbery in the sky,” it expresses the people’s joyful amazement that peace has come at last. Another new peace song was “Aman Duniaku Aman” (Secure, my world is secure), which was sung on the CD by Aceh’s best known female singer in the Jakarta diaspora, Nyak Ina Raseuki Ubiet, accompanied by a seuruné kalée, and with a choral refrain in thirds, as is typical of some Acehnese folk songs.

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In summary, the musical revival after the tsunami was only made possible by the negotiations to end the armed conflict, which had sapped the energies and will of the people to practice their traditional arts and develop new artistic ideas and directions.

Case Study 2:  Revival of Musical Life in Sri Lanka Like Aceh, Sri Lanka not only was ravaged by decades of military conflict between government forces and a separatist movement, represented by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, but was also devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, which killed thirty-five thousand Sri Lankans and displaced around six hundred thousand, bringing in $3 billion in aid. The experience of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, unlike Aceh, was not soon followed up by a peace accord, though the government of Norway tried to broker a peace deal in 2002–2008. The fighting continued until the government won military victory in 2009. The conflict—estimated by the United Nations to have killed up to one hundred thousand people between 1983 and 2009 and to have displaced hundreds of thousands more to camps for displaced people—was marked by a cultural movement, both at home and in the diaspora. This included a repertoire of songs on the Tamil Eelam liberation theme, including rap songs in English and Tamil that were accessible on the internet. Most were heroic, stirring songs in Carnatic-Eelam vocal style, set in a minor mode with drum accompaniment, including “Viduthalai Eelam Song” and “Tigers Song Forever in Tamileelam,” which were presented in films and on video, mp3, and YouTube. Sri Lanka’s postwar situation is more complex than Aceh’s, in that the Sinhala-Tamil ethnic conflict remains, despite the end of physical hostilities. After peace was declared in 2009, the Sinhala majority were happy that they could safely resume their family celebrations with performances and their children could more safely go to school and receive training in music and dance (Anupama Ranawana 2010). However, the Tamils, who still needed to spend much of their energy on the immediate relief of physical suffering and the supply of food and housing, with some languishing in camps and detention centers, took the view that the revival of their music culture was a secondary priority. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government had to face the massive task of winning the peace and the trust of the minority Tamils in their attempted postconflict reconstruction and reconciliation and finding a political solution to the long-standing grievances that had made them take up arms in the first place. Human rights groups claim that freedom of expression has been under heavy attack by the current Sri Lankan government, while others argue that despite this, the prospects for a durable peace are better than in other war-torn states such as Afghanistan. Until the political and constitutional reforms are carried out, a spontaneous revival of artistic activity among the Tamils is unlikely to occur.

382   Margaret Kartomi

Case Study 3:  Revival of Musical Life in Afghanistan We now turn to a country that is still in a state of war—Afghanistan, where prospects for a lasting peace are, at the time of writing, deemed slim indeed. As we know, the practice of the musical arts usually declines in societies when they are at war. However, there are a few exceptions in warring areas where a whole city may feel relatively secure due to the presence of an occupying military force, as in the case of Afghanistan’s two largest cities, Kabul and Herat. Despite the continuing war in Afghanistan, substantial efforts have been made to revive the rich traditions of Afghan vocal and instrumental music in those cities. Beginning in 1996, the Tālibān—a Hanafi Islamist political-military movement— took control of most parts of the country. The previous two decades of civil war had already devastated Afghanistan’s infrastructure and economy, and the pro-Soviet Afghan government of 1980–1995 had begun to implement restrictive cultural policies as the mullahs tried to forge a new national identity. In the Tālibān’s five years of power (1996–2001), they enforced one of the most extreme interpretations of Sharia law in the Muslim world. Among their edicts, ostensibly based on quotations from the hadiths (writings and traditions of the Prophet’s followers), there was a ban not only on commercial popular music but also on traditional genres such as the revered sung Persian poems (ghazal) with instrumental accompaniment performed at weddings and births (Lorraine Sakata, personal communication, June 20, 2006).5 Exceptions were, however, made for the Tālibān’s own tarana chants, and the daireh frame drum was exempted in some instances. The Tālibān also closed the archives of traditional Afghan folk songs at Kabul Radio. Not surprisingly, many musicians feared that the neglect and the prohibitions would cause some forms of the music culture to disappear, indeed that a whole generation of children would be deprived of musical education and the opportunity to carry on Afghanistan’s musical heritage. Broken cassettes were nailed to the posts at the entrances to refugee camps to remind everyone that music was not allowed, even listening to it on the radio, while professional musicians found it expedient to keep their identities secret (John Baily, personal communication, October 30, 2004). There was also a decree forbidding women to work or to be educated from the age of eight, and female singers were banned from performing on radio and television. The effects of decades of war and the lack of local security in many areas had seriously deleterious effects on music making. After the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, most members of the Tālibān fled to neighboring Pakistan, where they regrouped as an insurgency movement against the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The number of foreign troops in Afghanistan increased steadily after 2001, reaching more than one hundred thousand in 2009.

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Steps toward instituting a revival of music began in the first few hours of the Tālibān’s withdrawal from Kabul in 2001, when the radio started broadcasting songs by male Afghan singers whose performances had been recorded and stored in the Kabul Radio archive. The interim Afghan government removed the complete ban on music, yet until 2004 the restriction on female singing on radio and television remained in place as some members of parliament again tried to outlaw female singing. In areas that are militarily secure, women still sing and dance at weddings, though due to war weariness and lack of opportunity the number of women who still know how to perform is decreasing significantly (Veronica Doubleday, personal communication, October 30, 2004).6 To date the musical revival has been patchy and intermittent, severely hampered by circumstances reflecting the history of the destruction of musical life in the area (Baily 2009). Afghanistan has never included the arts in its general education curriculum. During a visit to his home city of Kabul in 2004, the Afghan ethnomusicologist Ahmad Sarmast observed that war and the antimusic policy of the Tālibān had virtually eliminated Afghan music and music education. He noted that the rich archive of traditional Afghan music recordings at Kabul Radio was in a state of neglect and disrepair after it was closed, that the male—and especially the female—vocal culture was in disarray, and that no one was left who could play Afghanistan’s important traditional instruments. He feared that a whole generation of children would be deprived of a musical education and the opportunity to continue the practice of Afghanistan’s musical heritage. Although conditions had improved radically since the collapse of the Tālibān in 2001, musicians had no rights, and qualified music teachers were very hard to find. Realizing that the rich musical tradition was in danger of being lost altogether, Sarmast approached the government with a report on his field work (Sarmast 2010) carried out under the auspices of the Revival of Afghan Music and a proposed National Strategy for Music Education.7 This would eventually operate from primary through secondary and to tertiary levels, and would include traditional, modern, tribal, and orchestral music. Sarmast proposed that a nationwide system of music schools be established and lobbied the government to create an environment that would encourage more musicians to return to Kabul and practice their profession in safety. He also worked to open a school in Kabul that would provide Afghan and Western music education for war orphans as a form of musical therapy. With concrete assistance from many countries (including governmental and private support from Germany and Australia), the Afghanistan Institute of Music (ANIM) opened in Kabul in 2008, with Sarmast at its head. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, ANIM is providing both a general education and musical training in Afghan and Western classical traditions for boys and girls starting at age ten. They may continue their studies for a decade and graduate with a diploma based on standards developed in association with the National College of Music in London. Sarmast has found support for ANIM from around the globe, beginning with the World Bank. However, given the continuing war and the urgent needs for clean water, housing, electricity, and medical care, he has continually encountered difficulties in trying to convince potential donors that ANIM is important. On his fund-raising

384   Margaret Kartomi expeditions, he therefore cites reports by the World Bank and UNESCO that credit music education with the reduction of poverty, arguing for the need to provide training and a sustainable future for the large number of orphans—an estimated seventy thousand in Kabul alone and six hundred thousand across Afghanistan (Lambers 2010)—who are vulnerable to being kidnapped for forced labor, prostitution, or drug smuggling. Indeed, half of ANIM’s three hundred students are disadvantaged children, many of whom have become sole providers for their families by selling small items in the streets; ANIM pays a monthly stipend to the guardians of each student to compensate for their loss of income. Another of Sarmast’s major problems was attracting qualified teachers to work at ANIM. Those he found included musicians who had taken refuge in mountain caves in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, and some Hindustani musicians from northern India whose forebears had introduced classical music to the Afghan court in the 1860s. He accumulated musical instruments and scores by soliciting donations from European and Australian tertiary institutions and music companies. He argues that while ANIM may be a small contribution, it represents an enormous shift in attitudes since the time the Tālibān were in charge, and that it could continue to have the power to change society and revive the vibrant musical culture that Afghanistan once had. In his Strategy, Sarmast stressed the urgency of rebuilding Afghanistan’s music infrastructure. He recommended that maximal advantage be taken of the Music Initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Afghanistan, which aims to preserve the intangible and tangible cultural heritage of Afghanistan, focusing on Kabul, Herat, and Almaty, and on the launching of the Ustâd-Shâgird Music Training Program in Kabul and Herat in 2003. The Aga Khan Trust and other NGOs had been working to restore musical performance and the craft of instrument making in certain communities, as political efforts were being made to establish Afghan self-rule. They not only focused on restoring opportunities to train professional performers of classical music and bardic singing but also provided musical education for children. The aim was to build up educated audiences for the next generation of musicians, on the assumption that the music would not survive unless it was performed within supportive communities. In 2006, another group of ustads (master musicians) in the old city of Herat aimed to raise performance standards by teaching groups of students selected on the basis of merit who could only stay on the course by passing regular tests. In the beginning they taught male students only, but eventually they sought out and enrolled a few females who could continue the rich tradition of female solo and group singing (Doubleday 2005). The initial effort made to teach the basics of the traditional music to children was located at the Kokil Music College in Almaty, led by the College’s director, Abdulhamid Raimbergenov. The Aga Khan Music Initiative supplied hundreds of musical instruments, some electronic textbooks, and video training guides for nationwide use by the children, who when grown up would constitute informed audiences and communities in which music could thrive. The next stage of ANIM’s development included training for musically talented students who could become professional performers of Khazak traditional music through the Murager (Heritage) program. The Ministries

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of Education and Culture in Kazakhstan officially recognized Murager’s activities in 2004. The Aga Khan Music Initiative also participated in the Historic Cities Program, whose mission is to conserve and rehabilitate the historic quarters of the old city of Kabul, including a sixteenth-century royal Mughal garden. This Program included the Koch-e-Kharabat school, where many classical Afghan ghazal and other songs are believed to have originated, and which had long been associated with the teaching and performance of Kabuli-style art music. Due to the unstable situation, the school virtually ceased to operate after 1989, with most musicians fleeing into exile and the remainder losing their homes and neighborhoods in 1992–1993. In the early 2000s, however, some returned to Kabul, and the Music Initiative engaged six ustads to teach at the premises of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture as part of the Music Initiative’s Ustâd-Shâgird Music Training Program, launched in 2003.

Conclusions and Research Methodology What can be learned from the foregoing case studies about the nature of revivals of musical life and the methods of researching them? Each situation that induces a musical revival to occur possesses some distinctive attributes, based on its unique local culture and its musicians’ and dancers’ responses to the particular reasons necessitating the revival, such as a natural disaster or a war. For the people in a culture to be able to revive their performing arts after a major disaster, they need help to overcome their emotional problems and trauma, as well as receiving government and corporate assistance to rebuild their homes and the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure on which they depend. Researchers who try to conduct fieldwork in a society after a disaster need either to find ways to help in the reconstruction or to stay away lest they contribute further to the chaos. Thus, each research project into a particular case of postdisaster revival requires a partly different research methodology. For example, the revivals after the tsunami in Aceh differed from the revivals after the peace agreement. The Acehnese experience of the tsunami resulted in a revival of the traditional laments and associated music and dance and in the organization of annual commemoration ceremonies that therapeutically enabled survivors to cope with their shock, grief, and bewilderment. It also led the Acehnese to introspectively re-examine their existing military stalemate, a process that helped them end the war. The revival of musical life after the peace accord less than a year later expressed their feelings of relief and joy as they resumed family life, their children’s general and musical education, their life event ceremonies, and the government-run festivals and competitions. Unlike the Acehnese, the Sri Lankans did not find a way to end the war soon after their experience of the tsunami tragedy, but they responded in part by reviving some old melodies and composing new ones set to new texts about the horror and grief brought by the tsunami that helped overcome their trauma. After the war ended, the Sinhala

386   Margaret Kartomi gladly resumed their family celebrations with the traditional performances of music and dance, unlike many of the Tamils, who in 2011 were still living in camps and detention centers and showed few signs that they were psychologically ready to revive their musical culture. In warring Afghanistan, revivals of traditional music and dance have occurred in some safe havens that assist orphans and other children, as well as adults, to gain therapeutic solace through music and that encourage the revival of musical life through family celebrations in both rural and urban areas. Due to the efforts of individuals, NGOs, and multilateral governments, music schools at the primary, secondary, and tertiary level are being established, and the holdings of the Radio Kabul archive are being conserved. In the neighboring peaceful Central Asian republics, by contrast, revivals of some long-neglected genres of traditional music and dance are being led by private and government agencies, with burgeoning social consequences in these countries themselves and with increasing exposure and appreciation among foreign audiences. The case studies presented in this chapter have the following implications for research methodology (where relevant): First, the type of disaster or neglect that is being recovered from needs to be analyzed, together with its causes. Second, data needs to be gathered about the uses made of old repertoire and the development of new creations in the process of the revival. Third, research needs to be conducted into any efforts made to build up the morale of the survivors via the arts, especially the most vulnerable and traumatized of all—children, former child soldiers, women, ex-combatants, political prisoners, refugees, and internally displaced people. Fourth, investigations are needed into any efforts made to develop an arts education system for all social classes (especially the underprivileged), and to establish long-term educational institutions for arts training of children and teenagers. Fifth, the foregoing case studies suggest that the revival of musical life as a strong cultural voice in a society that has been weakened by war, natural disaster, religious bans on all music, or neglect is likely to be successful if well-planned strategies, such as peace maintenance campaigns, are implemented by governments, NGOs, local private or commercial bodies, artistic leaders, and individual artists. Research into these bodies, indeed into all the stakeholders, needs to be made to see whether and how they can collaborate with each other to rebuild the artistic infrastructure. Sixth, researchers need to examine efforts made to detraumatize and reintegrate victims of war fatigue into society and the workplace, including ex-combatant men and women, widowed spouses and orphans, and members of any government-run, arts-led campaign that is launched to maintain the peace and provide therapeutic arts-based programs to ameliorate the physical and psychological sufferings of the victims. Indeed, a peace accord that ends a lengthy war, especially a guerrilla

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war, may have a limited chance of success unless the respective government organizes such a campaign—able to help prevent ex-combatants from slipping back into their old habits and resuming fighting, as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka did following the 2004 tsunami and the several subsequent efforts to stop the war. As has been noted, a relatively successful government campaign for reconciliation and reconstruction was carried out in Aceh in 2008, involving hundreds of artists who created and presented appropriate songs, dances, films, and other forms of artistic expression for use in schools and places of worship, at public events, in commercial arts outlets, and by the media. Seventh, in order to understand how a society in revival mode is coping with the trauma and social disruption caused by war, natural disaster, enforced bans on all music, or neglect, scholars also need to compare the cultures of performance with any relevant past revivals, whether at home or abroad. In other words, researchers need to observe and analyze the amount of energy that the whole society in the postdisaster or postneglect period now devotes to the performing arts compared to the predisaster periods or periods of neglect. They need to observe any increase or decrease in the rate of family celebrations in villages and suburbs, festivals, and government art functions. In addition, they need to assess whether and how aspects of musical life that have been damaged by the disasters are being ameliorated or corrected, how artists may be adapting existing items of music, dance, theater, and film to the new situation, how they may have learned to externalize and express their traumatic experiences in new artistic creations or by developing old works, and how they may even have changed direction entirely in the process of revival and revitalization.

Notes 1. Personal communications from Ibu Cut Asiah, head of an arts school and troupe in Meulaboh; Ibu Bupati Aceh Besar Leila Daud in Jantho; and Dr. Syam, head of the Department of Education and Culture in Meulaboh (2008). 2. This account is based largely on personal testimonies, 2005–2009. 3. Children suffering from posttraumatic disorder learnt to heal through a unique play and art therapy approach to treatment developed by the child-centered community development agency Plan Australia, in partnership with the Indonesian Psychological Association (Himpunan Psikologi Indonesia; HIMPSI). Using songs, games, drawing, and role-playing, the therapy helped children relax so that they could start to understand and accept what had happened and move forward, socially and emotionally. Volunteer trainees, many of whom were camp residents themselves and therefore had a special understanding of the children, were specially trained with HIMPSI to decide what needed to be done to rebuild the children’s lives and helped train the next team of volunteers in psychosocial trauma counselling. Plan Australia provided ongoing support for the children after moving to their newly constructed villages.

388   Margaret Kartomi 4. The policy was to try to connect the children with family members, but there were some unscrupulous child operators. International adoption is banned. Only one Indonesian university trains social workers (Jerome and Rubin 2005). 5. Sakata was head of a project to preserve Radio Afghanistan’s Archives. 6. Doubleday acted as coperformer and producer of the CD Afghanistan—Women Musicians of Herat (2002). 7. Revival of Afghan Music is a project of the Monash Asia Institute and the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University, Melbourne. 8. SSPDA stands for Sustainable Peace and Development in Aceh; BAPPENAS stands for Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Nasional (National Planning and Development Body).

References Anon. 2008. “Terms of Reference Album Lagu-lagu Perdamaian Aceh.” Typescript with AMAN Album Dame Aceh [Album of Songs for Peace in Aceh]. SSPDA-BAPPENAS 2. Anupama Ranawana. 2010. “Re-imagining Sri Lanka Post-War.” http://groundviews. org/2010/05/23/re-imagining-sri-lanka-post-war. Baily, John. 2001. “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan. Copenhagen: Freemuse. http://www.freemuse.org. ——. 2004. “Music Censorship in Afghanistan before and after the Taliban.” In Shoot the Singer! Music Censorship Today, edited by Marie Korpe, 19–28. London: Zed Books. ——. 2009. “Rebuilding Kabul’s Art Music Culture in the Post-Taliban Era.” In Musik in Fremdwahrnehmung, edited by Michael Schramm, 125–136. Bonn: Militärmusikdienst der Bundeswehr. Bannister, Roland. 2002. “How Are We to Write Our Music History? Perspectives on the Historiography of Military Music.” Musicology Australia 25 (1): 1–20. Doubleday, Veronica. 2005. Liner notes to Abdul Wahab Madadi, Veronica Doubleday, and John Baily, Sweet Nomad Girl: Folk Music from Afghanistan. MetierWorld MW 360–01. Gilbert, Martin. 1996. The Boys Triumph over Adversity: The Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors. London: Orion. Harrison, Klisala. 2008. “Heart of the City: Music of Community Change in Vancouver, British Columbia’s Downtown Eastside.” Ph.D. diss., York University, Toronto. Hume, Tim. 2009. “Back from the Brink: The Remarkable Recovery of Aceh.” Age (Melbourne), December 26: 17–18. Jerome, Richard, and Courtney Rubin. 2005. “The Children of the Tsunami.” Archive 63 (23) (June 13). http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20147894,00.html. Kartomi, Margaret. 2010. “Toward a Methodology of War and Peace Studies in Ethnomusicology: The Case of Aceh, 1976–2009.” Ethnomusicology 54 (3): 452–483. ——. 2014. “Responses to War and Tsunami Trauma through the Musical Arts in Aceh, 2005– 2012.” Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse 13. Lambers, William. 2010. “Food with Education Is the Key to Afghanistan’s Future.” http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/food-with-education-is-the-key/. McDonald, D. 2010. “Music, Folklore, and Nationalism among Palestinian Refugees in Amman, Jordan (2003–2005).” Bloomington, IN: EVIA Digital Archive.

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Pettan, Svanibor, ed. 1998. Music, Politics, and War: Views from Croatia. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research. ——, 2010. “Applied Ethnomusicology:  Bridging Research and Action.” Music and Arts in Action 2 (2): 90–93. ——, 2011. “Encounter with ‘The Others from Within’: The Case of Gypsy Musicians in Former Yugoslavia.” In Roots Music, edited by Mark DeWitt, 459–478. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Rofi, Abdur. 2006.  “Tsunami Mortality and Displacement in Aceh, Indonesia.” Disaster 30 (3): 340–350. Sakakeeny, Matt. 2010. “‘Under the Bridge’: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans.” Ethnomusicology 54 (1): 1–27. Sarmast, Ahmed. 2006. “Music in Afghanistan Today: A Report on Fieldwork Conducted in Late 2005.” http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/mai/files/2012/07/Afghan-Music-Report.pdf. Uning, Dara Meutia. 2009. “Female Ex-combatants’ Reintegration into Post-conflict Aceh: Women at the Periphery.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies II, Banda Aceh, February 23–24. Vignato, Silvia. 2009. “Different Orphans: An Ethnography of Children in Aceh.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies II, Banda Aceh, February 23–24. Ng, Wang Feng. 2005. “Music Therapy, War Trauma, and Peace: A Singaporean Perspective.” Voices:  A  World Forum for Music Therapy 5 (3). https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/ article/view/231/175.

Discs Cited Afghanistan—Women Musicians of Herat. 2002. Produced by Veronica Doubleday. UNESCO Traditional Music of the World Collection. Naïve. AMAN Album Dame Aceh [Album of Songs for Peace in Aceh]. 2008. SSPDA-BAPPENAS 2. Rafly. 2007. Atjeh Loen Sayang: Rafly Special Edition. VCD, Menara Millennium Record.

Films Cited CV Layarkaca Intervision. 2006. Nyanyian Tsunami—Tsunami Song. Komoditi Production House, with assistance from Studio Kampung Mulia. National Geographic. 2005. Meusare-sare—Working Together.

PA R T V I

I N N OVAT ION S A N D T R A N SF OR M AT ION S

C HA P T E R  18

I N N O VAT I O N A N D C U LT U R A L AC T I V I S M T H R O U G H T H E R E I M AG I N E D PA S T S O F F I N N I S H M U S I C R E V I VA L S J U N I PE R H I L L

Music-cultures inevitably undergo many cycles of change. Some of these transformations may be indirect results of larger social processes—for example, in Finland, imperialism, religious proselytization, migration, urbanization, industrialization, and mass media led to declines in many folk music practices and to popularization of new musical styles. Other transformations are the direct result of intentional strategies to control change, such as Finland’s nationalist movement and numerous revival endeavors. Revival efforts, as a conscious response to change, may, in some cases, “forc[e]‌a conservative, regressive pattern on a cultural form that had always changed and developed” (Baumann 1996: 3). In other words, in some instances, a revival movement may be one of humankind’s strategies through which “stasis and purity are asserted . . . against historical forces of movement and contamination” (Clifford 1997: 7). However, despite the rhetoric and pretense of preserving or restoring the old, revivals almost always end up transforming that which is revived and creating something new (see Rosenberg 1993; Slobin 1983: 37). Indeed, Livingston asserts that one of the primary purposes of a revival movement is “to serve as cultural opposition and as an alternative to mainstream culture” (1999: 68), and Wallace maintains that revitalization movements are a deliberate, organized, conscious effort to construct a more satisfying culture and to establish a new cultural system (1956: 265). I view revival movements as a form of cultural activism that uses elements from the past to legitimate change—change comprising not only reversion to past practices, but innovation. In this essay, I examine cycles of revival activities in Finnish folk music to illustrate how the past is reimagined in new ways to innovate and create sociocultural and artistic alternatives in the present.

394  Juniper Hill Borrowing from the past can be useful in a number of ways. It provides inspiration and source materials. It allows activists to wield historical continuity as a means of generating legitimacy, authority, and support as they depart from contemporary norms. It allows change to be disguised as conservativism and preservation—which is why the term revival, though not an accurate or literal description of the process, may be useful for maintaining the perception of re-creating the past. When elements from the past are borrowed, they are chosen selectively. This is partly of necessity—particularly in the case of orally transmitted musical traditions before recording technology, documentation is extremely incomplete, necessitating extensive invention and imagination. The selective lens through which the past is viewed and represented may also be strategically focused in order to support the agenda of the activists, as well as shaped by contemporary aesthetics and value systems—thus we see the past reimagined and rerepresented in many different ways by different groups in different, or even the same, time periods. As elements of past musical traditions are invoked and put to use in the present, they are decontextualized from their original music-cultures and recontextualized into new sociocultural settings. Decontextualization can provide many freedoms— freedom from original communal and cultural constraints, freedom to ignore certain aspects of the tradition that do not suit contemporary tastes or needs, as well as freedom to re­invent and imagine (or borrow from abroad) what has been lost to history. At the same time, the process of recontextualization brings new demands. If revivalist-activists want to obtain the legitimacy and authority necessary for achieving public acceptance and governmental or institutional support for the cultural and musical changes they introduce, they may need to establish authenticity. Furthermore, when revived traditions are introduced into new cultural contexts, they are often taken up by performers who are relative outsiders to the tradition; even if they are from the same ethnicity or nationality, they are often from a different geographical region, social class, or time period. This outsider status creates the need—particularly for “outsiders” wishing to become bearers and innovators of the tradition—for legitimacy, which may be asserted by establishing authenticity. Authenticity, though often naturalized and essentialized, is a means of judging a performance or performer based on a set of selective criteria determined by revivalists, scholars, or members of the community in which the revival occurs. These criteria are ideals and may be product oriented (as in text, melody, style, instrumentation, dress, etc.) or process oriented (as in lifestyle, transmission methods, and improvisation practices). In any case, these ideals and authenticity criteria are strategically transformed with each revival cycle, each time the past is reimagined. If successful, the activist activities that draw on the past for inspiration and legitimacy may result in the establishment of a new subculture, cultural movement, or cultural alternative. In Finland, there have been numerous large-scale and smaller-scale revival activities, each invoking and reimagining the past in a slightly different way and each resulting in new cultural streams. The most influential revival endeavors from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the Romantic Nationalist and Public

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Enlightenment movements. The Romantic Nationalist revival of Finnish mythology from epic songs was used to bolster a burgeoning national identity and spur a new nationalist art and literature movement, while the Public Enlightenment movement’s revival of “beautified” folk dancing was part of a strategy to “civilize” the Finnish people. Examples from the second half of the twentieth century abound. The Folk Music Movement beginning in 1968 was a primarily rural amateur revival of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiddle and accordion dance music (pelimanni music), which helped to rejuvenate depressed rural economies and led to so much grassroots music-making that Laitinen (2003b) dubbed it the “great therapeutic process.” Also beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, a burgeoning interest in so-called ancient folk music traditions led to experimentation with sung oral poetry and ancient instruments, such as small kanteles (zithers), jouhikko (bowed lute), and various shepherd flutes and horns, resulting in much new research, the development and refinement of modernized versions of these instruments, and a strain of experimental folk musicians interested in “the ancient as avant-garde.” Developing out of (and at times reacting against) these multiple layers of revival activities, the 1980s saw the successful entrance of contemporary folk music bands on the international world music market and the establishment of the Folk Music Department at the prestigious Sibelius Academy, offering the first tertiary-level professional training in folk music. This department instigated many processes, including: the revival of several traditions that had been lost and not yet revived; the re-revival of traditions according to ideals and values that differed from previous revivals; and the development of nykykansanmusiikki, or “contemporary folk music,” which includes newly composed, improvised, and arranged music as well as a folk music avant-garde. Most of these revival activities are now, in the early twenty-first century, in a postrevival state (though newer small counter-revivals are still afoot). The Romantic Nationalist movement achieved its nation-building goals, and its artistic products have firmly established places in public school curricula, national museums, and the public imagination. Amateur folk musicians across the country continue to participate in a plethora of folk festivals and civic folk musician organizations. Professional contemporary folk musicians develop their individual artistry with state and institutional support. Since Finland’s folk music revival activities are too rich and numerous for me to discuss them all in detail in this short essay, I will focus on three case studies: (1) the Romantic Nationalist use of narrative folk song; (2) the amateur folk music revival of pelimanni music; and (3) the use of ancient music by academy musicians to create personally expressive, experimental, or avant-garde folk music. These three revivals represent different historical eras and different activist agendas, yet each illustrates the manipulation of the past for creating change in the present, and each has left a legacy that can be seen and heard in Finland today. For each of these cases, I will illustrate the revivalists’ activist goals, the ways they selectively appropriated and reimagined the past according to specific ideals (and new designations of authenticity), and the cultural and musical changes and innovations they effected.

396  Juniper Hill

The Romantic Nationalist Transformation of Epic Songs One of the most profound and powerful re-presentations of the past to shape the future occurred during the Romantic Nationalist movement. Finland was under Swedish rule from the twelfth century until 1809, and then under Russian rule until finally achieving independence in 1917. During the period of Russian rule, the czar wanted Finns to develop an identity independent of Swedes so that the Finns would not side with Sweden in border disputes and thereby serve as a more effective buffer between Russia and the Swedish empire. Thus encouraged by the czar, and further inspired by the ideology of Herder and the Romantic Nationalist movements sweeping through Europe, Romantic Nationalism flourished in Finland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finnish intellectuals embraced the ideas of the German philosopher Gottfried von Herder about the embodiment of the national soul in rural folk traditions and the need for a nation’s political state and artistic expressions to be rooted in and developed out of its own national (ethnic/racial) heritage (Wilson 1976). Thus, Finnish nationalistic folklorists were delighted when they discovered a surviving tradition of narrative poetic singing, or runo-singing, among peasants in the eastern borderland regions of Karelia and Ingria. They interpreted the poetic texts in this oral tradition as being extremely ancient. The earliest documentation of runo-singing was by disapproving clergy in the sixteenth century, but some folklorists have theorized that some of the songs are as old as two thousand or even four thousand years (see Anttonen and Kuusi 1999:  19–20; Hautala 1969: 11–12; Kuusi, Bosley, and Branch 1997: 44–46). Nationalistic folklorists also interpreted the songs as being of distinctly Finnish heritage (as opposed to being appropriated from neighboring peoples) and as representations of ancient Finnish history and cosmology (Wilson 1975). Runo-songs narrate—in trochaic tetrameter with much alliteration and parallelism—creation stories and legends about heroes, shamans, and demigods. The same system of runo-singing was also used for spells, wedding and funeral laments, agricultural and hunting songs, and lyrical songs. Some of these songs were sacred; some were for entertainment. Many songs express a pre-Christian Finnish cosmology, while others reflect later Christian beliefs. The tradition died out in the seventeenth century in western Finland due to Protestant suppression and the influx of new song types from the west, but in the nineteenth century runo-singing was still practiced in villages in the east that were both more isolated and under the jurisdiction of the more lenient Orthodox Church. (Listen to audio ­example 18.1 for a wax cylinder field recording of a runo-song made in a Karelian village in 1915 .) Dozens of educated folklorists undertook expeditions to rural Karelian and Ingrian villages to collect the texts of runo-songs. Thousands of collected runo-song texts were eventually archived and published in various compilations by the Finnish Literary Society, which was founded in 1831 to support national(ist) folklore research. (See

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Web Figure 18.1 for folklorist A. O. Väisänen’s handwritten transcription of a Karelian runo-song, and see Web Figure 18.2 for the version of this song that was published by the Finnish Literary Society .) Scholarly documentation was not the only, or even the primary, goal of many of these folklorists. In 1817, a lecturer in Finnish at the University of Helsinki proposed: If . . . the young authors in Finland . . . would take an active interest in the production of their native country, and try to cultivate and develop their native literature—what a field would be open to their endeavours! . . . If one should collect the old national songs and make a systematic whole out of them, be it an epos, drama, or whatever it may be, then there might come about a new Homer, Ossian, or Nibelungen Lied; and the Finnish nation would be glorified with the splendour and renown of its originality, in the consciousness of its own development, and would arouse the admiration of the present generation and of generations to come. (Carl Axel Gottlund quoted in Alphonso-Karkala 1986: 21)

A group of scholar-activists embraced the idea that peasant runo-songs could be reshaped into a national epic, which would be equal in greatness to the Greek and European epics and thus demonstrate to the Finns and to the world the great ancient heritage of the Finnish people. Scholars such as Reinhold von Becker and Zacharis Topelius Sr. laid some of the groundwork in their collection and arrangement of runo-songs (ibid.), but the gauntlet was taken up by Elias Lönnrot, a young circuit physician who traveled the countryside visiting patients and often learning songs from them. (See Figure 18.1 for a drawing of Lönnrot.) Extensively collecting song texts in the field, Lönnrot began compiling them into a gigantic epic that became known as the Kalevala (referring to the land of the pre-Christian Finnic god Kaleva). He completed the so-called proto-Kalevala in 1833, the first edition proper of the Kalevala in 1835, the final edition in 1859, and the school edition in 1862. Lönnrot’s Kalevala took episodic narrative songs, collected from numerous different traditional singers, telling individual stories about the various exploits of legendary shamans and heroes and combined them into a single long saga with a cohesive plot structure. Some folklorists of the time believed that this effort was reconstructing a previously existing historical epic that had since fragmented into smaller stories—an example of how they reimagined the Finnish past according to their contemporary hopes and aspirations. In addition to structuring and compiling the song text, Lönnrot made several changes. He explained: “I was convinced . . . that I had the same right that I was convinced the singers took, namely, to arrange the poems in the order they thought best . . . . I considered myself a singer, as good as they themselves were” (quoted in Gay 1997: 64). Indeed, Lönnrot was extremely knowledgeable about and skilled in working with the runo-song poetic language; his variations and additions were faithful to the tradition at the level of poetic line and prosody, and individual variations were common among traditional runo-singers. However, he also innovated and broke from the tradition in many ways.1 Some of his changes made the material more accessible to the Finnish urban audience who had been previously unfamiliar with the runo-song tradition: he

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FIGURE  18.1 A  drawing of Elias Lönnrot traveling through the countryside, by A.  W. Linsén,  1847. (Provided courtesy of the Finnish Literary Society.)

standardized and homogenized the dialect and added descriptions of characters and places that were unnecessary to Karelian and Ingrian peasant audiences who had grown up with this mythology. Other changes reflect Lönnrot’s educated European Romantic aesthetics: He added emotive moods and settings and incorporated some influences from other European epics. Some changes—such as the elimination of “later” Christian elements—supported his desire to present an ancient Finnish cosmology.2 Most noticeably, Lönnrot transformed an oral song tradition into a written poetic tradition and disseminated it to a new audience.3 This transformation of runo-song from an oral tradition to written literature, and its widespread dissemination, had multiple and far-ranging impacts. Many folklorists

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in Finland were patriots and activists, and they disseminated their interpretations of Lönnrot’s interpretation of the runo-song tradition very widely through educational materials, public speeches, and articles in the popular press (Wilson 1975). In addition to Lönnrot’s classroom version of the Kalevala (1862), Zachris Topelius’s general textbook and reader (1876), a staple in Finnish education from the 1880s onward, taught students about the Kalevala, instilling national pride for their ancient heritage in generations of Finns: Everywhere the opinion prevails that the Kalevala is one of the most significant products of folklore ever created, and Finland is considered fortunate to be in its possession. For such a collection of folklore as the Kalevala is unequaled in all the world. It depicts the characteristics of the Finnish people and although it contains much that seems pagan and strange to us today, it expresses nonetheless a deep wisdom, a simple beauty, and a stirring love of native land. (Topelius quoted in DuBois 1996: 277–278)

Before independence, interpretations of the Kalevala and its thematic and mythological content played a large role in the nation-building project, bolstering national identity and national pride, which were legitimized by this presentation of a grand ancient Finnish history. From Independence up until World War II, both right-wing and left-wing patriots continued to draw on the Kalevala in their public political rhetoric (see Wilson 1975, 1976). Linked to this flourishing nationalism, the Kalevala also provided thematic source material for a revival of pre-Christian Finnish mythology in Finnish Romantic Nationalist literature, painting, and art music. Traditional runo-singers in Karelia were also impacted by the activities of enthusiastic folklorists and their dissemination of the printed Kalevala and related educational materials and song collections. Though more research needs to be done on this area, DuBois (1996) demonstrates how some versions of Lönnrot’s verses re-entered the oral tradition in Karelia, and Asplund (1994) notes how collectors’ work and invitations from elites for traditional singers to perform for them brought a higher status and some monetary remuneration to traditional singers. Generations later, the profound influence of these revival activities is still readily observable. In addition to fueling the struggle for national sovereignty, the nineteenth-century reimagination of Finnish mythology filled the national literary, artistic, and musical canons. The Kalevala is still taught in public schools and continues to shape the public understanding of Finnish heritage and folklore among the general Finnish populace. The Kalevala still serves as inspiration for art and popular music, including even heavy metal (see Jaakkola and Toivonen 2005). Finnish scholars and artists (after a break during the Soviet period) still go on field expeditions to villages in Russian Karelia to collect songs and be inspired (see Hill 2007: 58–64 and many of the publications by the Juminkeko Institute for Karelian Culture). These transformed notions of Finnishness, new works of art, and political gains were shaped in no small way by the activist efforts of folklorists who transformed tr­aditional materials and reimagined the past according to their own ideals, aesthetics, and

400  Juniper Hill aspirations. The revivalist-folklorists succeeded in helping to shape an alternative culture that became part of future mainstream culture.

Pelimanni Music and the Rejuvenation of Rural Culture This next case study of old traditions reshaped in strategic cultural change concerns the revival of amateur dance music. Pelimannit is the Finnish term for musicians, primarily fiddlers or accordionists, who play instrumental dance music with western/ central European influences. Their repertoire may include polskas, minuets, waltzes, polonaises, polkas, mazurkas, marches, quadrilles, schottisches, and foxtrots. Dating from the seventeenth century through the 1940s, pelimanni music is considered a “new tradition” (in comparison to the older runo-singing tradition). While similar dance music in neighboring Scandinavian countries (such as the polska in Sweden) received Nationalist attention and was accorded national symbolic value, Finnish Romantic Nationalist scholars largely ignored pelimanni music in favor of the more “ancient” kalevalaic runo-singing (Laitinen 2003c). Thus, before its revival, pelimanni music was largely unregulated, unstandardized, and relatively under-researched. It made its way into commercial recordings and radio broadcasts in the early twentieth century and, up through the 1940s, was generally perceived as local dance music. A shift in terminology in the 1950s relabeling the old popular dance music “folk music” (Kolehmainen 1994) preceded the massive pelimanni music revival that took off in the late 1960s. The rejuvenation of rural culture and economy was one of the primary motivations and functions of the pelimanni revival. Finland experienced relatively late and rapid urbanization and industrialization, which left many rural areas depopulated, depressed, and in some cases depleted of civic services. In some areas, even post offices and schools were closed, and many cultural activities moved to larger urban centers such as Helsinki (Heikki Laitinen, interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki). The Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, which kickstarted the revival boom in 1968, was started in part as a strategy for boosting the local economy. As Ramnarine explains, it “was interlinked with attempts to promote the region of Ostrobothnia [in western Finland] in a climate in which local groups perceived the capital as exerting too much power over local interests” (2003: 52). The director of the Association of the Central Ostrobothnia Region, Viljo Määtälä, and the chair of the Association of Finnishness, Erkki Salonen, organized a conference titled “Region in a Changing Society,” which resulted in a competition launched by a regional newspaper for readers to suggest ideas on how to promote the region economically and culturally (52). Inspired by a local resident’s visit to the Llangollen International Eisteddfod in Wales, as well as the village of Kaustinen’s uniquely thriving fiddling tradition and history of successful agricultural markets, it was decided that an international folk festival should be held in Kaustinen.

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Unlike parallel folk revivals in the United States and Sweden from which Finnish revivalists drew inspiration, this folk music revival was not motivated by left-wing political aspirations or associated with any youth movement. The average participants tended to be more nationalistic and middle-aged (Kurkela 1994 argues that several Romantic Nationalist beliefs continued through the Finnish folk music revival). There have also been some indirect affiliations with center-right political parties. As one informant (who wished to remain anonymous) explained to me, several of the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival’s organizers and overseers have been from the Farmers’ Party (now called the Central Party), and despite the official apolitical stance of the festival, organizers sometimes have felt pressure to appease or cater to certain public officials in order to receive funding. The organizers of the first folk music festival held in Kaustinen in 1968 were well connected with the national media, and instead of the estimated two thousand, twenty thousand people registered to attend (Saha and Westerholm 1987). (See Figure 18.2 and Web Figures 18.3 and 18.4 for photographs taken during the festival’s early years .) Over the following five years, folk music activities around Finland mushroomed: Over eight hundred folk music festivals sprang up around the country; many organizations were founded, including the Folk Music Institute and Folk Music League; research and educational projects were initiated; and an unprecedented number of amateur musicians across the country picked up instruments and started to play and compose. These revival activities seem to have succeeded for many years as a strategy for rural economic and cultural rejuvenation in the region of Ostrobothnia. Four decades after its founding, the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival continued as one of the largest festivals in Finland; attendance was estimated at 121,000 in 2007 and 117,000 in 2008 (Finland Festivals 2011). In addition to bringing increased business to local accommodation, food, transportation, and other service industries, the festival and its related organizations have provided jobs and led to increased local and regional sales and income tax revenues.4 The pelimanni revival also led to a cultural rejuvenation of another sort: mass amateur performing and composing—a remarkable phenomenon in a modern Western society in which stage performances and the creative act of composing are usually the reserve of conservatory-trained art musicians or professional commercial pop musicians. Old dance musicians who had put away their instruments received new acclaim as folk musicians. Moreover, large numbers of untrained and low-skilled musicians had the opportunity to perform on important stages and began composing. This wide-scale composing was strongly encouraged by two figures, Konsta Jylhä and Erkki Ala-Könni. Jylhä was the great media star and principal role model of the pelimanni revival. He and his band, the Kaustisen Purppuripelimannit, had risen to national acclaim in the decade and a half before the pelimanni revival boom, appearing on national radio and television and receiving acknowledgment from the president of Finland. A local fiddler from Kaustinen, Jylhä was a prolific composer of pelimanni tunes (Saha and Westerholm 1987; Kolehmainen 1994). (See the photo in Web Figure 18.5 and listen to audio examples 18.2 and 18.3 of Jylhä playing the fiddle .) Professor Erkki Ala-Könni was the

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FIGURE  18.2 A  large group of pelimanni musicians play together at the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival. Photograph by Erkki Ala-Könni, Kaustinen,  1971. (Provided courtesy of the University of Tampere Folklife Archives.)

foremost expert on—and indeed one of the few researchers of—pelimanni music. The definition of folk music that he extolled to revivalists allowed for the composition of new folk tunes. Coming from his position of authority, his permission and encouragement to compose, together with the resources he made available to revivalists and the examples of his own compositions, were highly influential in encouraging and enabling amateur newcomers to the pelimanni tradition to begin composing. (See web Figure 18.6 for a photo of Ala-Könni working with a farmer pelimanni musician ). The resultant creativity has been described by the former director of the Folk Music Institute in Kaustinen as “one of the most significant chapters in the music history of Finland” (Laitinen 2003a: 169). Laitinen emphasizes the significance of this phenomenon of mass amateur creativity: In the beginning of the 1970s occurred something unspeakable, that in a culture in which composing had been transferred into its own specialized institutions as the distinct right of fortified specialists, suddenly everyman and everywoman rose to the stages one after the other and declared themselves composers. It was in a way a message from the countryside: “I have the right myself to define my culture.” (221)5

The Folk Music Institute collected more than two thousand new folk music compositions between 1974 and 1987 (Kolehmainen 1994: 40). Thirty years on, the director of the Folk Music League reported that “young and old pelimannit are very much still composing their own tunes” (Päivi Utriainen, interview, July 13, 2004, Kaustinen).

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Laitinen’s labeling of this mass creative phenomenon as a “therapeutic” process instead of an artistic process perhaps relates to the relatively low skill level of many of the participants. Indeed, pelimannit have had a reputation as being poor musicians. Utriainen confessed that this stereotype continues to trouble the Folk Music League (interview, July 13, 2004, Kaustinen). The artistic director of the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival jokingly related: “There were a couple of fiddlers in the village where [my dad] lived and they were really bad. When [the villagers] started to dance, those guys played a tune or two tunes and then usually the dancers asked, ‘stop playing, just keep a beat in your feet, it’s easier’ [laughter]” (Jyrki Heiskanen, interview, July 14, 2004, Kaustinen). In actuality, the pelimannit involved in the folk music revival were a very diverse group. They included a small but important number of highly skilled musicians who had grown up in the oral tradition and were honored as “master pelimannit.” They included numerous amateur musicians, some who had studied in the Western art music style at school, some who were completely self-taught, and some who would eventually drift from folk music into rock. They also included a few professional classical musicians who played folk music as a hobby. Performance practices ranged from reading music from notation to oral transmission, and from composition and variation to faithfully following the melodies as published in sheet music. Repertoire ranged from eighteenth-century polska wedding music to 1940s U.S.-influenced jenkka tunes (after "Yankee," otherwise known as foxtrots). However, one common practice that developed during the revival was ensemble playing. Although some instances of pelimanni ensemble playing occurred historically in certain locales, the pelimanni tradition was primarily a solo tradition (first a solo fiddler, and in more recent history a solo accordionist). When Konsta Jylhä and his four-piece band of two fiddles, harmonium, and double bass gained prominence, they became the primary role model for newcomers to the tradition. New pelimanni bands with similar instrumentation sprang up across the country, even though such ensembles had not been a part of the local tradition in many areas. Large groups known as pelimanni yhdistykset (folk musician organizations) with anywhere from a dozen to over a hundred fiddlers also became popular, with many civic organizations, workers leagues, and municipalities sponsoring their own pelimanni organizations. These large ensembles were probably inspired by the Swedish spelmanslaget that had been popular in Sweden for decades.6 Large ensemble playing necessitated certain changes in performance practice. Variation—which several scholars have emphasized as folk music’s single most essential characteristic (Saha 1996; Ala-Könni cited in Laitinen 2003a: 168)—becomes hard to hear, hard to teach, and much less aesthetically pleasing in groups with over one hundred fiddlers. Even the practice of individual members composing, which may be easily incorporated into the repertoire of a three- or four-piece band, becomes less practical when large groups of pelimanni musicians with little rehearsal time are looking for common repertoire to play together. In addition, even though the repertoire consists almost entirely of dance music, such ensembles almost never play for dancers.

404  Juniper Hill Large pelimanni ensembles serve other purposes. Mauno Järvelä explained to me some of the ideology behind the large pelimanni ensembles that he teaches and directs. Järvelä is from a highly respected family of folk musicians in the Kaustinen area; he learned orally from his father and taught his sons. He is well known and respected in the pelimanni music world as a dedicated music educator and ensemble director. (See Web Figure 18.7 for a photo of Järvelä’s Näppäri ensemble ). Järvelä maintains that music, like sporting events, can provide an opportunity for diverse members of the community to come together. Having people of all ages and skill levels playing music together can have positive effects on society, increasing social harmony and allowing people to overcome their differences and bridge social barriers. Playing together is also a good way to get young people and newcomers enthusiastic about music, since it is more fun than practicing by oneself. Järvelä concludes idealistically: “when one gets a group to play and sing together a lot—and this was also Lönnrot’s idea—that where there is a lot of playing then there is no crime. Lönnrot made this observation in his travels around Karelia. In simplified words, through playing even wars end” (interview, July 2007, Kaustinen). Thus, the pelimanni revival introduced important new musical practices to the instrumental folk music of western Finland, including rural festivals, unprecedented amateur composing, and large ensemble playing. These new practices served many aims: enhancing culturally and economically depressed rural areas, strengthening local and regional identity and culture outside the central urban capital, fostering non-elitist public participation in music-making and composing, and facilitating societal unity. Many of these activities still continue more than four decades after the pelimanni revival movement began.

Ancient Music as Departure for Experimental Improvisation and Personal Expression In this final case study, we see ancient music becoming a springboard for both personal expression and avant-garde music. The lack of documentation and knowledge about the earliest layers of traditional music has required more extensive use of the imagination and experimentation to re-create the past. This fact, combined with a growing awareness of the limitations set by previous folk music revivals and a frustration with the lack of creative opportunities in contemporary Western music circles, led to profound innovations and fed into the development of an alternative music subculture known as “contemporary folk music” (nykykansanmusiikki).7 Finnish “ancient” music is a broad category, encompassing the instrumental traditions of the five-string kantele (zither), the jouhikko (bowed lyre), and a variety of woodwinds often associated with shepherding, including flutes, simple trumpets, and reed instruments. Ancient music also includes the vocal traditions of kalevala-metered runo-songs, laments, and herding calls. Considered to predate the Western influences

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that filtered into Finland during Swedish imperialism and Christianization, these music cultures rather have ties to the east. They are shared with or similar to the music of Finnic cultures around the eastern Baltic Sea rim, including Karelian, Ingrian, and Estonian. A few contemporary musicians perceive ancient music as encompassing thousands of years of traditions stretching from time immemorial. (See video 18.1 for an imaginative re-creation of Finnish Stone Age music .) By the second half of the twentieth century, ancient traditions were virtually moribund. Old instruments could be seen in museums but were rarely heard. Large concert kanteles were played, but no one played the older, smaller kanteles. One of the last surviving traditional jouhikko players, Juho Villanen, passed away in 1927. Only one known shepherd flutist from neighboring Ingria, Teppo Repo (1886–1962), survived into the twentieth century. With the exception of the kalevala-style epic songs discussed earlier, a relatively small amount of research and documentation was done on these traditions. Though the scholar Armas Otto Väisänen (1890–1969) made important field collections (e.g., Väisänen 1928), much about these traditions remains undocumented and unknown—and indeed unknowable, except perhaps through experimentation and imagination. In the 1970s and 1980s, an interest in performing the older Finnish traditions began to grow. Following international trends in free jazz and folk rock fusion, bands such as Karelia (founded 1970) and Piirpauke (1974) began experimenting with old Karelian melodies, initially playing them on jazz and rock instruments, then on traditional instruments as they became more available (Rauno Nieminen, interview, July 3, 2004, Haapavesi; Austerlitz 2005). The ensemble Primo, short for Primitive Music Orchestra, was founded in 1979 with the purpose of exploring old kalevala-style music on old instruments through improvisation. These initial projects awoke a greater interest in the ancient traditions and set a precedent for approaching them through exploration and experimentation. Three men active as performers, scholars, and educators, Heikki Laitinen, Hannu Saha, and Rauno Nieminen, were influential in creating and making available important resources for the revival of ancient music. They taught short courses in the older traditions at the Kaustinen Folk Music Institute and summer camps; published books on how to play and build the five-string kantele, the jouhikko, and shepherd flutes; and served as role models as performers in the band Primo and in other projects. Nieminen, a skilled luthier, also made instruments available to musicians, copying and developing the instruments he found in museums, and trained new luthiers. (See Figure 18.3 for a photo of Nieminen and a jouhikko he built.) In the 1980s, these activists carried out an ambitious project to provide a small kantele for every school in the country, as well as teacher training (Laitinen, interviews, June 18, 2004, and October 1, 2008, Helsinki; Saha, interview, October 7, 2008, Helsinki; Nieminen, interview, July 3, 2004, Haapavesi). The establishment in 1983 of the Folk Music Department at the prestigious and influential Sibelius Academy tremendously impacted the revival of ancient music. The department’s first leader, Heikki Laitinen, explained that one of their initial goals “was to restore this historical folk music, since it has been missing from Finland . . . what

406  Juniper Hill is found in the archives. In that manner, each student would become something of a researcher” (interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki). Despite these efforts in instrument building, archival researching, and how-to book publishing, many contemporary musicians felt that insufficient historical materials were available to create artistically satisfying performances. As early music scholar Richard Taruskin has observed, music has to be imaginatively recreated in order to be retrieved . . . . [The] historical reconstruction of Messiah can only invoke the pastness of the past . . . unless it derives its sustenance not only from whatever evidence musicological research may provide, but from imaginative leaps that will fill in the gaps research by its very nature must leave. Otherwise we will have not a performance but a documentation of the state of knowledge. (Taruskin 1982: 343)

An important ideological shift occurred in the 1970s and 1980s that helped legitimize the use of the imagination as a historically authentic way of (re)creating ancient music. The publication of Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales (1960), with its theory of oral composition explaining the creative processes of Yugoslavian and Homeric epic singing, hugely impacted Finnish folklore intellectual circles. Folklorist Anneli Asplund, Heikki Laitinen, and others formed a group called the Nelipolviset (The Tetrametereds) with the goal of learning how to (re)create runo-songs in the moment of performance according to what they now perceived to be the traditional oral creative process (Asplund, interview, May 27, 2004, Helsinki; Laitinen, personal e-mail, 2005; see also Hill 2005: 125–127 and Asplund 2010). The criterion of authenticity shifted from the final musical sound product to the creative process.8 Many contemporary folk musicians set out to explore, experience, and embody the creative processes of historical folk musicians and to create their own music in the process. Arja Kastinen and Leena Joutsenlahti are professional contemporary folk musicians who have undertaken personal journeys and experimental artistic research to go more deeply into the traditions of small kanteles and shepherd flutes, respectively, trying to re-create historically authentic processes of personal expression and improvisation. Kastinen has been particularly inspired by descriptions of historical kantele players who were “playing their own power.” In her concert programs and album liner notes (Iro, 1995), Kastinen has quoted the following journal entry from historian O. A. Hainari’s 1882 field trip: We wanted to hear a kantele player from Lahti Village near Lake Säämäjärvi whose skill had been praised. After playing a few dances, the man fell silent, claiming that he knew no more. We left him in peace and thought that he had been praised for nothing. The kantele player was forgotten. He sat alone in a corner with his kantele on his lap staring out ahead of him. Gradually, he began to play softly, at times faster with a greater display of feeling and warmth, at others so softly that he was barely audible. When we then said that that was exactly what we had been wanting to hear and asked what it was, he said that it was nothing, that he had just been playing his own “power”

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FIGURE  18.3 Luthier and revivalist Rauno Nieminen plays his handmade jouhikko (bowed lyre) at the site where the last known traditional jouhikko player, Juho Villanen, was photographed. (Photograph by Juniper Hill, Savonranta, 2004.)

[mahtia—an old term often used in connection with shamans]. Then we let him be in peace, each going about our own business. But the kantele player, no longer asked any questions and being left to his own devices, played throughout the evening, and what a pleasure it was to listen to him. (Hainari cited in liner notes to Kastinen 1995 from Relander 1917)

There are unfortunately no transcriptions or recordings of the lengthy solo improvisations as described above (most of the archive recordings of kantele players are of

408  Juniper Hill relatively short dance tunes). So Kastinen has done her best to enter into the same state of mind, creative process, and approach toward music as these elusive early kantele shamans who “played their own power.” She explains: The tradition was dead, completely dead . . . . I was trying to understand the ideology of this music: What can this kind of music be that you play with a pretty simple instrument with only a few strings and you can play it for hours without getting fed up with it yourself? . . . And so I started to play music with this instrument. But because I don’t have any recordings of that music and because those people said that they were playing their own power [mahtia] . . . I thought that if I tried to play like someone else has played then I’m not playing my own power anymore, so I have to find my own music. (Kastinen, interview, November 9, 2003, Helsinki)

Kastinen describes how she made her own improvisations, reasoning that if she wanted to “play my own power now” she had to live in the moment and incorporate sounds from her contemporary life, including musical influences that would not have been heard by historical players. She concludes that it is necessary to “listen to the inner part of yourself . . . and let your imagination go” (ibid.). In this manner, Kastinen uses her understanding of the traditional kantele ideology, approach to music-making, and creative process in order to go deep into her own personal expression and play her own music on traditional instruments. The resulting music is considered both historically and personally authentic. (See the photo in Web Figure 18.8 and listen to audio example 18.4 of Kastinen improvising on kantele .) Similarly, Leena Joutsenlahti has been working to understand more deeply the creative processes of the last documented shepherd flute player, Teppo Repo, while simultaneously developing her own personal expression through improvisation. Repo was famous for playing “from his own head” (omasta päästä) as he improvised melodies on his shepherd flutes. In a series of concerts for her artistic doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy Folk Music Department, Joutsenlahti explored different approaches to playing omasta päästä on traditional flutes. Her first concert explored structured and preprepared improvisation. Her second concert experimented with completely unprepared and unstructured improvisation—literally playing omasta päästä, from her own head in the moment of performance in the concert. For her third concert, she learned melodies and motifs composed by Repo and created her own improvisations using these traditional melodic materials (Joutsenlahti, personal communication, October 3, 2011, Helsinki). (Watch video example 18.2 to hear Joutsenlahti improvising on shepherd flutes .) In the liner notes to Joutsenlahti’s solo album Makale, Heikki Laitinen writes: Makale is a journey:  a road and another road . . . . Poised on the forest path with her pipe is a shepherdess, listening to the echo . . . a matchless teacher of imaginative variation and improvisation . . . . . The life of anyone interested in ancient shepherd instruments is not an easy one: the archives are silent, the facts are scattered far and wide. There is little left to catch hold of. Thus the only alternative is to use

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one’s imagination and to journey into the past, to drink in the archaic features of the Finnish mind . . . . Archaic mindscapes in the modern world. [The piece] “Valssi” is like a description of this whole journey of the imagination: the coarse, archive sound of the beginning being molded by the power of imagination into a pure echo of eras past . . . . It is strange how only the very latest music technology [e.g. loop delay and studio effects] seems to be able to capture the most archaic sound of all, to accompany the mind on a journey into the past. (Laitinen, liner notes to Joutsenlahti 1999)

Laitinen’s description of Joutsenlahti’s musical journey is romanticized (presumably for marketing purposes) yet reveals a fundamental approach to performing music of the ancient past by trying to enter into a (pre)historic mental/creative state. This underscores the importance of combining and supplementing historical research with imagination, exploration, and personal expression. Joutsenlahti and Kastinen’s work also manifests one of the primary agendas of the late twentieth-century revival of ancient music, which was not nation-building or community-building but individual artistic and creative freedom. A key factor shaping the revival of ancient music and the development of the contemporary folk music scene in general was a growing awareness of and dissatisfaction with the limitations on creativity and artistic development placed on folk musicians by previous revival efforts. Contemporary folk musicians whom I interviewed complained, sometimes bitterly, of the negative stereotypes and public perceptions generated from the legacy of Romantic Nationalist revivals (see Hill 2009b: 92–95). Hannu Saha critiques his revival predecessor of the early twentieth century, the Romantic Nationalist scholar Armas Otto Väisänen, who “did not approve at all of musicians making their own compositions” and insisted that “they should play old, traditional, valuable music.” In contrast, Saha and his colleagues “represented complete freedom” and asserted that “one could do what they wanted in the name of folk music” (Saha, interview, October 7, 2008, Helsinki). Saha elaborates on this difference in ideology: There was really a change of perspective . . . of the essential nature of the tradition. In the [early] 1900s it was understood that tradition is that which is found in the archives . . . and it was old and valued. In contrast, we understood that this did not necessarily represent authentic culture, because it was just copying a particular model . . . . Creativity has always been a part of folk culture. In all folk cultures, a person has the right to create from one’s own point of view . . . The nationalist culture did not understand this side at all. They copied [the tradition], and in a certain way they also warped it. They wanted to present folk culture slightly from the perspective of art music, and they called this cultivated . . . . And then after the 1970s we wanted to return again to the original qualities. (ibid.)

Saha thus discredits earlier revival approaches for at best imitating and at worst warping the tradition, while legitimating contemporary approaches for embracing the essence of the tradition, which he defines as creativity.

410  Juniper Hill Additional activist impulses that further fueled the desire for artistic freedom in folk music came from a perceived lack of creative opportunities in Western art music education and culture. In a paper titled “Why Teach Folk Music?” presented at a seminar of Finnish music school teachers and administrators, Heikki Laitinen declared that “folk music is taught and will be taught for the salvation of musical creativity” (1989: 9). He strongly criticized the Finnish music education system, polemically proclaiming that “art music is based on the eradication of the creativity on the part of some 50,000 children” and that “the music education system is founded on repetition, obedience, subjugation and conformity” (10).9 Saha has confessed that both he and Laitinen “explicitly wanted to offer an alternative music pedagogy to the classical music theory–based studies” (interview, October 7, 2008, Helsinki). Their ambitious project in the 1980s to provide five-string kanteles to every school in Finland was one such effort. At the Sibelius Academy, Laitinen developed several pedagogical techniques for teaching students to improvise within the traditions, to improvise beyond the traditions, and to overcome the limitations that were both self-imposed and culturally imposed on students from being raised in Western music culture.10 The process of developing the curriculum at the Sibelius Academy Folk Music Department led to a critical questioning of the nature of revived folk music and to a commitment to the development of artistically free and avant-garde folk music. The department’s former head reflects: It was terribly exciting, because all the time we got to imagine everything that should be [in the curriculum]. One time we had a long discussion . . . about whether improvisation belongs in folk music and we decided together that improvisation does belong in folk music . . . all types of improvisation. (Laitinen, interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki)

He elaborates: This whole process [of developing a five-and-half-year-long folk music curriculum] was so demanding that it gave rise to an enormous amount of questions, to which I myself had to invent the answers . . . . I suddenly noticed that it’s really significant that in all other musical idioms there is an avant-garde, except in folk music. And I myself had been a classical music avant-gardist when I had studied modern composition, classical composition . . . . I started to understand the limitations and prohibitions from the times of the Public Enlightenment. One prohibition was that if there is old folk music, then it should be kept the same. In other words, it didn’t have any right to change. And when I noticed that, then it was clear that we had to seek an avant-garde for folk music and permit it and find it. (Laitinen, interview, October 1, 2008, Helsinki)

One of the foundational principles of the department became that “there cannot be any boundaries, rather the folk musician has to be just as free as the jazz musician and

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classical musician” (Laitinen, interview, June 18, 2004, Helsinki). In addition to teaching composition and improvisation in folk music, Laitinen and his colleagues began offering experimental improvisation courses to encourage folk music students to challenge all of the boundaries that might be limiting them as folk musicians and as artists (see Hill 2009b, 2009c). He has also encouraged and served as a primary role model in the development of a folk music avant-garde.11 The revival of ancient music, with its lack of documentation and need for imaginative and experimental re-creations, has provided particularly rich opportunities for realizing these aspirations toward increased artistic freedom and personal creativity. Some artists, like Kastinen and Joutsenlahti, take their creative freedom in more traditional-sounding veins, while other artists (described below) have gone in more avant-garde directions. For Laitinen and many of the professional contemporary folk musicians who studied under him, ancient music and experimental music go hand in hand. Experimentalism is used as a journey into the ancient, and ancient music is used as a springboard for the avant-garde. Furthermore, since ancient music may be exotic to present-day musicians and audiences, it can sometimes be perceived as avant-garde in and of itself. Anna-Kaisa Liedes, one of Laitinen’s first students and now a lecturer at the Sibelius Academy Folk Music Department, is a vocalist who has specialized in the older singing traditions as well as avant-garde vocal improvisation. In her first concert for her artistic doctoral studies, entitled “Journeys into the World of Voice-Sound,” she used a variety of vocal improvisation techniques to explore the birth of human sound, the birth of song, and the development of voice-sound into song.12 Her exploration of very ancient concepts of the origin of voice, sound, and song—which, considering the lack of documentation, can only be done through imagination and experimentation—was carried out through very personal, corporeal self-experimentations with the production of sound in her own body (Liedes 2005). The resulting performance sounded avant-garde and experimental, particularly in her use of ei-laulu (non-song, i.e., nonmusical) sounds, but for Liedes it was also a means of connecting with prehistoric song: At first thought, traditional music and voice-sound improvisation seem to be quite distant from each other. But going deeper into improvisation, I found there all of the music that I had experienced or heard as well as many other things that I am not capable of analyzing. In the minimalism of voice-sound improvisation and voice-sound composition is a convergence with the old tradition in kalevalaic meter with few notes. The aesthetics of music-making are the same. I feel that the further I proceed to the birth source of voice-sound through improvisation, the closer I am to the original fountainhead of song and music. (Liedes 2005: 39)

One of the most avant-garde musicians associated with the contemporary folk music scene is Pekka Westerholm, a luthier and free improviser who builds and develops traditional Finnish reed instruments, such as the mänkeri, and uses them to play his own music with his band, the World Mänkeri Orchestra (watch video example 18.3 ).

412  Juniper Hill Westerholm explained to me that he grew up as a reed player trying to play jazz and improvise like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, but no matter how much he practiced he felt that he couldn’t get the right sound, he was just copying and wasn’t playing his music. Two breakthroughs came for him, first when he met Heikki Laitinen, who taught him that one can improvise in any type of music (before he had thought it was only possible to improvise in African-American idioms), and second when he met Rauno Nieminen, who taught him that he could build his own instruments. After his encounter with these folk music revivalists, Westerholm started building his own instruments and playing his own music. The old “primitive” Finnish instruments, he explained, give him the ability to create his own sounds and to express himself in a way that standard Western instruments never did. His creative work with ancient instruments is extremely important to him because it allows him “to get that type of sound that helps me be able to endure each day” (Westerholm, interview, September 22, 2008, Helsinki). Though his music sounds like avant-garde free jazz, some consider it to be folk music because it is created with an omasta päästä process similar to the one that the traditional shepherd flautist Teppo Repo used (Riitta-Liisa Joutsenlahti, personal communication, February 2004, Nakkila). Such valuation of personal expression is extremely strong in the contemporary folk music scene, and has come to be one of the defining characteristics of being a folk musician, even when one is playing avant-garde music. For example, after an avant-garde concert of a collaboration between a contemporary folk musician, a classical musician, and a jazz musician, I asked the folk musician Jouko Kyhälä: “when you are doing free improvisations with musicians from other musical genres . . . how is that related to folk music?” He responded: I feel always when I’m playing that I’m playing folk music. It doesn’t depend on the context . . . . The idea of music, the way I  think of music is coming from folk music . . . that it should be personal, it should reflect something that comes from your inside, and all the techniques are just a method of expressing your inner voice and feeling. So I think that it might sound like we are playing free jazz to someone, but I still think I am a folk musician . . . . I don’t care then what other people say, I feel it. (Interview, October 16, 2004, Helsinki)

This transformation to perceiving and valuing folk music as a vehicle for personal expression, and the concurrent increase in degree of artistic freedom for folk musicians, developed in Finnish contemporary folk music as a direct result of the conscientious efforts of revivalists such as Heikki Laitinen, Hannu Saha, and their cohort. As cultural and musical activists, they had two primary goals: (1) to overcome the rigid attitudes and negative perceptions of folk music as national symbol that were the legacy of the Romantic Nationalist and Public Enlightenment movements, and (2) to create an alternative musical culture and pedagogy that offered more opportunities for individual creativity than the existing mainstream Western music culture and education system. Since contemporary folk musicians selectively chose to judge historical authenticity not on the sound product or repertoire performed but on the creative process, they were freed

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to express themselves and develop their personal artistry while exploring and remaining faithful to what they perceived and asserted to be the essence of the tradition. Listening to the narratives of contemporary folk music revivalists, it might sound as though their revival was the only one to value and allow creativity and innovation. However, the original revivalists from all three case studies discussed here exercised considerable creativity, from the extensive poetic liberties taken by Elias Lönnrot to the explosion of amateur pelimanni composing and to the avant-garde improvisations of Liedes, Westerholm, and Kyhälä. But after the activist agendas of the original revivalists were fulfilled and their changes became established, the resulting post-revival music cultures became standardized, and the degree of innovation decreased—which eventually generated impetus for the next cycles of activism and revival.

Conclusions Reimagining the past has been a successful way to create cultural change, and to inspire and legitimize innovation, throughout the last two centuries of Finnish history. The Romantic Nationalist and Public Enlightenment activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries selected what they valued from the folk tradition (poetic song texts with pre-Christian mythological content and “beautiful” folk melodies), transformed it according to their own aesthetics (into great literature and “refined” folk melodies), and used it to support their agendas of building the Finnish nation and “civilizing” the Finnish people. The instigators of the amateur pelimanni revival of the late 1960s and 1970s were motivated to rejuvenate a rural culture that had been decimated by rapid urbanization. Even though this revival continued to represent many of the nationalist values of the earlier revival, it also created a significant alternative to contemporary mass-mediated culture by encouraging widespread amateur participation in music performance and music composition. Small pelimanni ensembles provided an arena for amateurs to engage in creative activities that were normally within the purview of cultural elites, while large pelimanni ensembles contributed to social cohesion. At the same time, the seeds were being sewn for the next folk music revival, which would transform the perception of and approach to folk music. In the newer “contemporary folk music” scene, completely different aspects of the past were brought forward. The folk creative process, understood as personal expression using traditional material as a point of departure, came to be seen as one of the most important defining elements of folk music, and the new criterion for judging its authenticity. Thus, contrary to those outsiders who might consider the syncretisms and innovations of Finnish contemporary folk music to be less traditional and less authentic than the folk-costume-wearing, archive-transcription-playing pelimannit of the earlier revival, Finnish contemporary folk music (post)revivalists consider their music—no matter how avant-garde—to be even more historically faithful because their primary criterion of authenticity is creative process. All of the aforementioned revivalist efforts led to significant innovations: from the creation of a national literary epic and the Romantic art music pieces based on it to the

414  Juniper Hill proliferation of networks of folk festivals and civic organizations for amateur folk music with their own aesthetic of playing pelimanni music and to the free improvisations and avant-garde experimentations of contemporary folk musicians. And they have all left legacies that can be seen and heard in the diverse Finnish music soundscape of the twenty-first century. Since the efforts of these revivalist-activists have succeeded and resulted in firmly established, if subcultural, scenes, there is less of a need to emphasize the authenticity of the revived music to legitimize their cultural and musical changes. Contemporary folk music has been accepted as a legitimate art form in the larger Finnish musical community, both at the prestigious Sibelius Academy and the government’s arts council, to such an extent that twenty-first-century contemporary folk musicians no longer need to claim historical authenticity to legitimize their musical innovations but instead can be heard to claim their “artistic right” to make their music the way they want to. However, small counter-revivals and rerevivals continue to emerge, and the cycle of reimagining the past to create new futures continues.

Acknowledgments This essay has been informed by ethnographic field research conducted in Finland between 2002 and 2012. I would like to thank the many Finnish musicians and scholars who shared their expertise and artistry with me over the years. I am also grateful for the support provided for this research by Fulbright IIE, Fulbright CIES, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Marie Curie Action of the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program, UCLA, and the Sibelius Academy.

Notes 1. Like many revivalists across different cultures, Lönnrot was accused of being inauthentic and producing “fakelore.” (See Dundes 1985; Rosenberg, this volume.) 2. See Alphonso-Karkala (1986), DuBois (1993), and Gay (1997) for analyses of Lönnrot’s editorial and creative processes in the creation of the Kalevala. 3. The compilation of runo-song texts into a national epic was not a revival of folk music but a revival of the folk poetry and mythology originally conveyed through singing. A revival of runo-singing as a form of music-making would not occur until the 1970s, when a group of performing folklorists would try to enter into the traditional process and re-create runo-songs as a living tradition (see Hill 2005: 126; Asplund 2010). 4. Studies on the economic impact of the Kaustinen Festival have been carried out, for example, by Tohmo (2002) and Haaga Instituutti (2007). 5. All quotations from Finnish sources are my translation. 6. According to Swedish scholar Krister Malm, the phenomenon of several dozen fiddlers playing together in unison got its start when hordes of American tourists started arriving

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

in Sweden and, in the absence of electrical amplification technology, musicians simply added more players together to gain the volume needed to project to the crowds of tourists (personal communication, November 2004, Tucson). The performance of ancient Finnish music and avant-garde folk music are overlapping streams in the broader Finnish contemporary folk music subculture. They represent the most extreme manifestations of an ideology valuing individual artistic freedom and authenticity to creative processes that is generally shared by most contemporary folk musicians. For more on other streams in the contemporary folk scene, such as commercial world music bands, contemporary pelimanni music, jazz-folk and other fusions, see Ramnarine (2003), Hill (2007), and Austerlitz (2005). Ronström (1996) describes a similar shift from object-oriented to process-oriented musicmaking in the Swedish folk revival scene. In 2008, I interviewed various Finnish music education professors and administrators and asked them if Laitinen’s assessment of Finnish music education was accurate. To my surprise, they agreed that it was, at least back in the 1970s and 1980s. The twenty-first century has seen some important curricular changes, including the mandatory introduction of vapaa säestys, or free accompaniment, which requires all music teachers to learn to improvise (and has been challenging to implement, requiring many teacher training courses). Music education professor Heidi Westerholm believes these changes were brought about in no small part by the influence of contemporary folk music (personal communication, November 4, 2011, Helsinki). See Hill (2009a, 2009b, 2009c) for more detailed descriptions of these pedagogical methods and their impacts. In the Finnish contemporary folk music scene, the term “avant-garde” is often used to refer to folk music that incorporates atonality, extended techniques, nonharmonic and/or unmetered improvisation, electronic manipulation, and/or unconventional performance behavior (which is often influenced by contemporary theater, dance, and performance art). The Finnish word ääni means both “voice” and “sound.” I translate it here as “voice-sound” in order to maintain this double meaning.

References Alphonso-Karkala, John B. 1986. “Transformation of Folk Narratives into Epic Composition in Elias Lönnrot’s ‘Kalevala.’” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 31: 13–28. Anttonen, Pertti, and Matti Kuusi. 1999. Kalevala-Lipas. Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society. Asplund, Anneli. 1994. “Mother and Daughter—in the Footsteps of the Itinerant Singers.” In Songs beyond the Kalevala: Transformations of Oral Poetry, edited by Anna-Leena Siikala and Sinikka Vakimo, 343–364. Studia Fennica Folkloristica, 2.  Helsinki:  Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. ——. 2010. “Ruvetkasme, rohjetkasme, älkäs ääntämme hävetkö! Runolaulun uuden tulemisen historiaa.” In Kalevalamittaisen runon tulkintoja, edited by Seppo Knuuttila, Ulla Piela, and Lotte Tarkka, 247–275. Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society. Austerlitz, Paul. 2005. Jazz Consciousness:  Music, Race, and Humanity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Baumann, Max Peter. 1996. “Folk Music Revival: Concepts between Regression and Emancipa­ tion.” World of Music 38 (3): 71–86.

416  Juniper Hill Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Centuryr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. DuBois, Thomas A. 1993. “From Maria to Marjatta: The Transformations of an Oral Poem in Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala.” Oral Tradition 8 (2): 247–288. ——. 1996. “The Kalevala Received: From Printed Text to Oral Performance.” Oral Tradition 11 (2): 270–300. Dundes, Alan.1985. “Nationalistic Inferiority Complexes and the Fabrication of Fakelore: A  Reconsideration of Ossian, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Kalevala, and Paul Bunyan.” Journal of Folklore Research 22 (1): 5–18. Finland Festivals. 2011. Finland Festivals Statistics. www.festivals.fi/en/, accessed May 21, 2013. Gay, David E. 1997. “The Creation of the ‘Kalevala,’ 1833–1849.” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 42: 63–77. Haaga Instituutti-säätiö, Haaga-Perho. 2007. Kaustisen kansanmusiikki-festivaalien taloudelliset vaikutukset vuonna 2007. Helsinki: Haaga yhtymä. Hautala, Jouko. 1969. The History of Learning and Science in Finland 1828–1918, vol. 12, Finnish Folklore Research 1828–1918. Helsinki: Tilgmann. Hill, Juniper. 2005. “From Ancient to Avant-garde to Global:  Creative Processes and Institutionalization in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music.” PhD  diss., University of California, Los Angeles. ——. 2007. “‘Global Folk Music’ Fusions: The Reification of Transnational Relationships and the Ethics of Cross-cultural Appropriations in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39: 50–83. ——. 2009a. “The Influence of Conservatory Folk Music Programs: The Sibelius Academy in Comparative Context.” Ethnomusicology Forum 18 (2): 205–239. ——. 2009b. “Rebellious Pedagogy, Ideological Transformation, and Creative Freedom in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music.” Ethnomusicology 53 (1): 86–114. ——. 2009c. “Transformative Teaching Methods in Finnish Folk Music and Wilderness Education.” In Musik im interkulturellen Dialog: Festschrift für Max Peter Baumann, edited by K. Oehme and N. Çiftçi, 91–102. Bamberg, Germany: Forschungsstelle für fränkische Volksmusik and the University of Bamberg. Jaakkola, Jutta and Aarne Toivonen, eds. 2005. Inspired by Tradition: Kalevala Poetry in Finnish Music. Helsinki: Finnish Music Information Center. Joutsenlahti, Leena. 1999. Makale. CD. Olarin Musiikki OMCD 84. Kastinen, Arja. 1995. Iro. CD. Sibelius Academy Folk Music Department and Mipu Music MIPUCD 401. Kolehmainen, Ilkka. 1994. “The Finnish Folk Music Revival in the Experience of Three Folk music Groups.” In Explorations in Finnish and Hungarian Folk Music and Dance Research, vol. 1, edited by Varpu Luukola and Hannu Saha, 38–69. Kaustinen: Folk Music Institute. Kurkela, Vesa. 1994. “The Myths of Finnish Folk Music—the Basis for its Revival.” In Explorations in Finnish and Hungarian Folk Music and Dance Research, vol. 1, edited by Varpu Luukola and Hannu Saha, 27–31. Kaustinen: Folk Music Institute. Kuusi, Matti, Keith Bosley, and Michael Branch, eds. and trans. 1997. Finnish Folk Poetry Epic: An Anthology in Finnish and English. Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society. Laitinen, Heikki. 1989. “Miksi Kansanmusikkia Opetetaan?” Musiikin Suunta 11 (4): 2–11. ——. 2003a. “Erkki Älä-Könni:  Tallentaja, Tutkija.” In Iski Sieluihin Salama:  Kirjoituksia musiikista, edited by Hannu Tolvanen ja Riitta-Liisa Joutsenlahti, 165–175. Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society. Originally published in Kansanmusiikki 1981 (1): 26–33.

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——. 2003b. Iski Sieluihin Salama:  Kirjoituksia musiikista, edited by Hannu Tolvanen ja Riitta-Liisa Joutsenlahti. Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society. ——. 2003c. “Suomalaisen Kansanmusiikkiliikkeen Taustasta ja Luonteesta.” In Iski Sieluihin Salama:  kirjoituksia musiikista, edited by Hannu Tolvanen ja Riitta-Liisa Joutsenlahti, 217–223. Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society. Originally published in Kansanmusiikki 1989 (2): 14–17. Liedes, Anna-Kaisa. 2005. “Matkoja äänen maailmaan.” Doc.Mus. diss., Sibelius Academy. Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43, (1): 66–85. Lönnrot, Elias. 1835. Kalewala taikka Wanhoja Karjalan runoja Suomen kansan muinosista ajoista. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. ——. 1862. Kalewala:  Tärkeämmillä selityksillä koulujen tarpeeksi warustanut E.  L. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ramnarine, Tina. 2003. Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Relander, O. 1917. O. A. Hainari muistelmia. Helsinki: Kansanvalistusseura. Ronström, Owe. 1996. “Revival Reconsidered.” World of Music 38 (3): 5–20. Rosenberg, Neil, ed. 1993. Transforming Traditions:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Saha, Hannu. 1996. “Kansanmusiikin tyyli ja muuntelu.” PhD diss., University of Tampere. Kaustinen, Finland: Folk Music Institute. Saha, Hannu, and Simo Westerholm. 1987. “Oliko Konsta Jylhä iskelmäsäveltäjä?” In Kansanmusiikista Populaarimusiikiksi:  Aineistoa kansanmusiikin teemavuoden seminaarista 14–15.2.1987, edited by Ilpo Saunio, 39–47. Helsinki: Kansanmusiikin keskusliitto. Slobin, Mark. 1993. Subcultural Sounds:  Micromusics of the West. Hanover, N.H.:  Wesleyan University Press. Taruskin, Richard. 1982. “On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance.” Journal of Musicology 1 (3): 338–349. Tohmo, Timo. 2002. “Kulttuuri ja aluetalous:  Vaikutukset ja käyttäjien kokema hyöty.” Licentiate thesis, University of Jyväskylä. Topelius, Zachris. 1876. Maamme kirja:  Lukukirja alimmaisille oppilaitoksille Suomessa. Helsinki: G. W. Edlund. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–281. Väisänen, Armas Otto. 1928. Suomen kansan sävelmiä, 5. jakso, Kantele- ja jouhikkosävelmiä. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Wilson, William A. 1976. Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wilson, William A. 1975. “The Kalevala and Finnish Politics.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 12 (2/3): 131–155.

C HA P T E R  19

R E V I VA L C U R R E N T S A N D I N N O VAT I O N O N T H E PAT H FROM PROTEST B OSSA TO T R O P I C Á L IA DE N I SE M I L ST E I N

In 1965, Nara Leão, one of the founding members of Brazilian bossa nova, traveled from Rio de Janeiro to the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia in search of traditional sounds. On entering the Vila Velha Theater in the city of Salvador, she encountered a group of young musicians preparing a performance that explored the roots of bossa nova in the music of Bahia. The show was entitled Nova Bossa Velha, Velha Bossa Nova (Old New Trend, New Old Trend). Nara was instantly drawn to the musicians and their songs.1 Her contact with the samba world of Rio’s impoverished neighborhoods had engaged her with politics and motivated her to incorporate marginalized musical traditions into her work with bossa nova. Nara had not set out to build a revival movement. She was, rather, riding along on a revival current that carried her to times and places outside of the Brazilian musical mainstream. The musicians that Nara met in Salvador, especially Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia, Gilberto Gil, and Maria de Graça (soon to adopt the name Gal Costa), were poised to become leading figures in Brazilian popular music. They had boarded the same revivalist current as Nara, but they rode along its edge, both because of their peripheral position in the Brazilian music world and as members of the avant-garde environment of Salvador. The fact that Nara hailed from the cultural, political, and economic center of Brazil shaped how the Bahianos perceived her. In light of this, Caetano retrospectively described Nara as “an adorable creature of the type that only Rio’s Zona Sul can produce. One could sense in her the enjoyment of a freedom that has been won with difficulty and determination. So all her gestures and words seemed to flow out of a direct and serious realism, but they always came out in a delicate and graceful way” (Veloso 2002: 44–45). Nara was drawn to Bahia’s culture, and the Bahian musicians were taken by her cosmopolitan sophistication and openness. This trip to the periphery reflected Nara’s

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desire to reach beyond bossa nova. But her work was also politically motivated. Before traveling, Nara had been performing in an antiauthoritarian musical, Show Opinião, which challenged the regime while celebrating the most traditional music of the urban and rural underclasses. In a response to the accusation at the time that her work was subversive, Nara articulated the link between culture and politics that has supported hers and other revivalist stances: “if singing music about the dramas of the people, their sadness, their anguish and their happiness is to be subversive, then I think I cannot escape that basic category. I prefer, however, to be called passionate for the Brazilian soul, for seeking out the roots of true Brazilian music” (Leão quoted in Cabral 2001: 70). In the historical moment when Nara embarked on her voyage, aesthetic choices consistently interacted with political concerns. As Brazil entered a period of authoritarianism that would last from 1964 to 1985, bossa nova roughly divided into two overlapping groups of musicians:  those who went north to the United States to build the genre alongside jazz musicians and those who stayed in Brazil, most often grounded by their commitment to leftist social movements. The first group identified with the bossa nova movement, while the second group belonged to “protest” or “nationalist bossa” and incorporated political messages and revived sounds and styles into the original bossa nova style. This group, to which Nara belonged, took the music beyond “love, smiles, and flowers” to incorporate marginalized voices and calls for social and political transformation.2 It was the nationalist, Marxist bent of the social movements in which they participated that led these musicians on a search for ostensibly authentic cultural manifestations in the music of marginalized urban and rural populations. The Bahian group of musicians was firmly rooted in local culture and well versed in the traditional musics of northeastern Brazil that had inspired bossa nova veterans seeking musical renewal. The sights and sounds must have been refreshing for Nara, as much for their avant-garde aesthetic as for their grounding in the popular culture of traditionally marginalized populations. In an increasingly commercial music industry, Nara and her peers perceived musicians who were making or incorporating traditional sounds as carriers of the authenticity that was lacking in commercial venues. They also idealized Bahia as the cultural crossroad that had produced the unique diversity of Brazilian culture. Nara saw in the Bahianos a group of young, lively, talented musicians ideally situated to inject new energy to a movement that was suffering under the strain of political repression and stale musical forms. The Bahian musicians held a different self-conception. The four were fully conversant with and critical of the national and international musical soundscape and well on their way to innovating by melding musical influences from a vast array of sources. Their work reflected an evolving vision of where they fit along the historical evolution of Brazilian music. In this effort, the show they created positioned their own songs as the next step in a narrative that moved from traditional to contemporary Brazilian popular music (Veloso 1977 [1965]). Nara hailed from Rio de Janeiro, which combined with São Paulo to form the center of the Brazilian cultural industry. From the Bahians’ perspective, her appearance on the scene opened the opportunity

420   Denise Milstein to launch their careers as popular musicians in the national mainstream and possibly beyond. The two groups of musicians this essay examines, Bahians and protest bossa musicians, had drifted along on what may be termed a revival current. The two groups approached revival from such different perspectives that their intersection on common musical ground produced more misunderstandings than musical consensus. Although the Bahianos were familiar with the exotifying lens that Rio and São Paulo musicians applied to the northeast, they were not prepared for being magnified in its focus. In contrast to the perception from the center that was bound to label them as exotic northeasterners, the members of the group had their eyes trained both on the Brazilian cultural mainstream and on popular culture in Europe and the United States, especially as expressed through film and music. They had come of age in the vibrant, avant-garde cultural environment of the University of Bahia. Their training with the local and European artists and intellectuals who formed that community had equipped them practically and theoretically to push Brazilian music in innovative directions. The imminent conflict between center and periphery would produce dissonance but ultimately prove productive for the evolution of Brazilian music. One of Nara’s goals on her journey to the Northeast was to find a singer to take over her role in Show Opinião. The show took audiences through the exercise of cobbling together a leftist consensus from diverse perspectives. Three characters, a peasant, a shantytown dweller, and a student, discussed their differences until they came to agreement. When Nara resolved to invite Maria Bethânia to play her role in the Rio de Janeiro production, she effectively opened the doors for the entire Bahiano group. In a year, all four had moved to Rio and São Paulo. They entered the music and television industries through their contacts in the protest bossa and politically engaged theater worlds. The four had witnessed how protest bossa developed gradually and without major ruptures from previous Brazilian musical genres. They also recognized that Nara’s search built on a continuous effort in the movement to find new voices that could infuse protest bossa with an “authentic” Brazilian sound. As repression against labor and student leaders increased, protest bossa harnessed those voices to build its legitimacy as the musical arm of political resistance. However, in a cultural field made increasingly tense by mass-media-driven competition and deepening authoritarianism, Brazilian popular music found itself immersed in crisis. This essay describes how that crisis eventually fueled conflict between musicians identified with protest bossa and the Bahianos. Revivalism, viewed as a cultural current, provided the threads from which the Bahianos wove their own musical movement, Tropicália. This innovative, countercultural movement also drew on contemporary, transnational musical influences and grew to challenge the sound and the evolutionary dynamic of Brazilian popular music.3 Revival and innovation processes interweave in repeating patterns along the history of Brazilian musical movements. Their interaction was especially fruitful in the history that evolved from this encounter. The coincidence of Nara’s turn toward marginalized music with her deepening leftist political consciousness is representative of a wide swath of her generation of artists. Political and cultural currents led to Nara’s encounter with

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the Bahianos and to the historical turning point examined here. The revivalist impetus in bossa nova serves as a hinge that opens a passage to a new movement in Brazilian music. More broadly, analysis of the dynamic between revival and innovation in 1960s Brazil addresses the question of how political crises and transitions shape artistic movements. In this case study, I identify revival as a current along which musical threads weave in the creation and dissolution of musical movements. As a current, revival moves musicians to look to spatially and temporally displaced musics in the process of innovation. The Brazilian revival current initiates in the early twentieth century and runs through the history that leads from protest bossa to Tropicália. Revival provides threads, or sounds, that share a space with innovative practices through the life cycles of musical movements. Encounters and relations in art worlds and transformations in the environment in which those art worlds evolve lead musical movements along contingent paths. In this framework, the analysis of artistic movements must balance between two extremes in understanding the emergence of innovation. On one hand, attributing innovation to autonomous creative processes grounded in individual artists ignores the role of social, political, and economic structures in creating and shaping spaces for specific types of expression. On the other hand, individual trajectories express agency, and group dynamics also shape innovation, which leaves some space for maneuvering at specific historical junctures. The story of revival and innovation evolves in between these two extremes. Art transforms as a result of relations in a space that mediates between agency and structure. Relational approaches in the sociology of art reveal the importance of social networks in the communities that develop around artistic production. Examining art worlds without attention to relations among artists, audiences, and mediators would miss the social aspect of artistic production (Becker 1982). This approach recognizes that systems of production and aesthetic practices shape one another through the relations that develop among actors (Peterson and Anand 2004). Institutional settings, including those that disseminate culture, and their transformations and crises produce opportunities for style overlaps and determine the survival possibilities of innovative aesthetic practices, once again, through relations (White and White 1993; White 2008). This essay discusses how revival currents act as a social catalyst, facilitating the establishment of collaborative (but also competitive) relations across generations, socioeconomic classes, cultural groups, and regions. The inception and consolidation of authoritarianism in Brazil through the 1960s transformed interactions between artistic and social movements. Revival wove in and out of the relations that musicians established with one another in that context. The narrative that follows emphasizes the impact of relations on musical movements in the political, social, and cultural context of 1960s Brazil. This approach demands a broadening of the notion of revival to explore musical movements that engage in revivalist activities without producing formal revivals. Definitions that categorize revival as a social movement shed light on the intersection of political and aesthetic concerns in the search for new and old sounds (Livingston 1999; Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 2005: 131– 132). The work of Nara Leão and her protest bossa cohort only partially qualifies as a

422   Denise Milstein revival of this type. Although they pursued a sense of authenticity and built a musical alternative to the mainstream, the effort was too diffuse to construct a revival movement. The protest bossa musicians may be categorized as “folk stylists” because they did not hail from the musical traditions that they worked to perform and disseminate (Filene 2004: 185–186), but again, their work was too wide-ranging to formally classify as revivalist. And what about the Bahianos? The narrative that follows demonstrates that although their work did not conform to the definition of revival as a social movement, and their individual careers may not be identified with those of folk stylists, they were riding along the same revivalist current as the protest bossa musicians. That current, however, deposited them downstream from the protest bossistas, at a different musical and political juncture. The outline of a revivalist current as a multidimensional conduit to musical innovation begins to emerge here and will be further articulated in the last section of the essay. A revivalist current, as opposed to a revivalist movement, carries musicians to the margins, whether spatially or temporally, in a search for ostensively authentic sounds that exist outside the mainstream. Although these currents may give rise to full-fledged revivals, the closest to this case being the Brazilian choro revival (Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 2005), they may also serve as bridges to new relations between musicians, conduits for new musicians to join existing movements, and even potential exits for musicians wishing to leave a movement. These currents infuse music with old sounds that drive innovation once displaced from their original contexts. This essay highlights the presence of all these processes in the Brazilian case. The focus on revivalist currents in the evolution from bossa nova to Tropicália illuminates the tense but productive relationship between revival and innovation. The narrative that follows emphasizes processes and the flux of relations between artists to examine transformations in ideologies and identities in the shifting political and cultural context of Brazil in the 1960s.

From Bossa Nova to Tropicália along the Path of Revival Nara’s journey to the northeast fit the zigzag pattern between tradition and innovation that characterized Brazilian cultural development during the first half of the twentieth century. The process of intercalating a return to tradition with innovative steps forward in musical style was neither new to Brazil nor original to protest bossa. Brazilian intellectuals had begun to build a modern national identity in the populist surge of the 1920s, when debates within and between artistic disciplines brought issues of authenticity, cultural syncretism, and universality to the fore. Earlier articulations of national identity had reflected Brazil’s continuing allegiance to its colonial past and denied the richness of Brazil’s multiethnic heritage, relegating African and indigenous cultures to a status below that of European culture. The 1920s formulations of national identity

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were heavily influenced by contemporary cultural movements in Europe, particularly post–World War I modernism, with its confidence in the universality of art. The effort to make that Brazilian identity universally accessible accompanied an assiduous search for national expressions in art, music, and literature. For musicians, this involved setting out to record marginal musics and then returning to the dominant center to incorporate those sounds in the broad compositional norms of classical and art music. Prominent musicians and intellectuals involved in this effort included Heitor Villa-Lobos, who incorporated Brazilian folk into his art music, and Mario de Andrade, who collected and documented rural musics and evolved into a leading figure in Brazilian modernism (Stroud 2008: 11–12).4 The modernist debate initially divided cultural producers into two camps, one advocating for a pure, more traditional Brazilian identity and the other building a cosmopolitan but identifiably Brazilian character. The modernists, including Villa-Lobos and Mario de Andrade, effectively bridged the distinction between these two positions. This smooth dynamic of change would recur and prevent fractures along most of the transitions in the history of Brazilian popular music. This modernist movement presents one among multiple examples of how Brazilian unity builds on a syncretic model of national identity (Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 2005: 180). The 1920s also set the pattern of combining a reference from the past or from a marginal location with a forward-looking determination to innovate. Coupled with a capacity to move fluidly back and forth between high and popular culture, this approach would propel the evolution of Brazilian music through the twentieth century (38). Although this dynamic first developed in “high” art and intellectual circles, by the 1950s it had expanded to popular musicians performing for mass audiences on the radio and television. The populist Vargas regime that began in 1930 crystallized Brazilian musical identity by defining samba-song, which had developed from carnival genres, as national music, and using it to build a ubiquitous musical identity through its dissemination on National Radio (McCann 2004: 24; Reily 2000: 5).5 The Brazilian music industry developed on the backbone of samba-song, which was easier to broadcast and record than traditional carnival samba. In that context, music that reflected or built a Brazilian identity gained popularity among Brazilian audiences and encouraged successful competition with the foreign music that had dominated the Brazilian market before the institutionalization of samba (McCann 2004: 14–15). Samba outshone other genres through the 1930s and 1940s as it settled in and successfully embodied the compromise between reflecting national identity and providing a bounded space for innovation. This stability ended when, spurred by the evolution of bossa nova, the 1920s cultural debates over national identity reemerged. The mythology of bossa nova suggests that the style developed in the 1950s among a small group of musicians who, after admiring, following, and collaborating with a previous generation of singers who had combined samba with jazz, met to experiment in living rooms and other intimate spaces in southern Rio de Janeiro. Although popular memory identifies João Gilberto as the mythical founder of the style, published interviews with the musicians involved reveal continuity between the fusion of jazz and samba that was being played in Rio’s nightclubs at the time and the cooler, stylized

424   Denise Milstein synthesis that came to be called bossa nova (Lyra 2006).6 As Tom Jobim stated in 1966, “bossa doesn’t have an owner. We are all part of a movement that comes from way back. It was being defined and rehearsed long before it was baptized” (quoted in Britto 1966: 121–122). Bossa nova, or “new trend,” was not entirely new, and certainly not autonomous from Brazilian cultural history. Musics as disparate as traditional northeastern baião, which builds on a syncopated rhythm and emerged from the meeting of African and Portuguese sounds in the nineteenth century, and classical impressionism also influenced the genre. Like their modernist predecessors, the bossistas traveled along the revivalist current, looking back in time and out to the periphery to fuse tradition with innovation. The style built on the basic structure of samba-song, but bossa musicians contributed their knowledge of other musics. Bossa vocalists took rhythmic freedom, relying on the stability of the accompaniment, which was primarily acoustic guitar. Taking technological changes in amplification in stride, bossistas valued subtle interpretations and intimate tones best captured with microphones.7 Singers almost spoke the lyrics, and avoided the use of vibrato or excessive ornamentation, consciously moving away from the flamboyant and dramatic performances then in vogue. Even as the style incorporated elements of foreign popular and classical musics, it lived up to the nationalist expectations prevalent in the 1950s and remained consciously Brazilian, building on samba and more traditional genres, especially of the northeast (Britto quoted in Campos 1968: 20). The time and place in which the “new trend” emerged facilitated its expansion and dissemination beyond its small founding group. Music was commercialized, produced, and released in Rio and São Paulo. The economic boom of the Kubitschek administration accelerated development in the mass media and communication industries; as radio broadcasting and national television grew, the music industry expanded.8 From the beginning, music fueled much of television and radio broadcasting; Brazilian programs mimicked variety shows in the United States and European music festivals. Television became a space where audiences could build personality cults around popular musicians. Image became as important as sound in fueling the popularity of musicians. Paralleling the state’s developmentalist drive, bossa matured into the first Brazilian cultural product readily exportable to the rest of the world (Campos 1968: 48). By the early 1960s, bossa had reached beyond Brazilian audiences and become popular internationally—particularly in the United States, where it met with jazz in collaborations between Gilberto, Carlos Lyra, Tom Jobim, and Stan Getz. These collaborations with U.S. jazz musicians produced the reaction of protest bossa musicians who feared for the Brazilian identity of the genre.9 The willingness among protest musicians to connect bossa music to social change led to participation in the student movement and encouraged a return to the revival current. Turning to samba de morro, or samba of the hill (Rio’s shantytowns are located mostly on hills overlooking the affluent neighborhoods that line the coast), allowed musicians to blend the political drive to bridge class distinctions with the cultural quest for “authentic” manifestations of Brazilian culture (Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia 2005:  127–128).10 This turn paralleled both earlier

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and contemporary politicized folk revivals in other countries, including the United States. These types of revivals are characterized by folksingers who reject commercialism, straddle the cultural and political spheres, and use folk songs as a tool of protest (Rosenberg 1993: 7, 19). Protest bossa branched off from the original bossa nova through a revivalist reinvention that reproduced Brazil’s pattern of seamless evolution: the introduction of innovation without enforcing exclusive boundaries.11

Breaking the Pattern of Evolution Protest bossa musicians encountered a broad musical palette when they began exploring the sounds of the shantytowns. Migration to urban centers had accelerated with the economic exuberance of the Kubitschek period, which produced a steady stream of northeastern and other musicians to Rio and São Paulo. After a brief struggle to enter the music industry, a minority assimilated to the musical mainstream enough to succeed and transcend the distinction between regional and national artists (Sandroni 2001: 84–99). For protest bossa musicians, the turn away from the promise of success in the Northern Hemisphere corresponded with new collaborative relationships that transcended socioeconomic class. These musicians pursued popular music in contexts that linked musicians living in the affluent, coastal neighborhoods of Rio with shantytown samba musicians, backcountry folksingers, and northeastern traveling musicians. Collaboration with these musicians and exposure to other politicized artists led protest bossa singers back and forth between unearthing the roots of Brazilian music and building the communicative potential of their work for political ends. By 1962, protest bossistas were collaborating with the cultural arm of the student movement, the Popular Center for Culture (Centro Popular de Cultura; CPC), which brought music, theatre, and musical theatre to broad audiences. This influential but short-lived organization brought Communist and radical Catholic students together and looked to a leftist think tank, the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros; ISEB), for ideological guidance. A manifesto drawn up by an ISEB sociologist, Carlos Estevam Martins, articulated the goals of the CPC. In it, Martins posited that only clear and explicit language could raise consciousness and produce social change, rejecting less realist perspectives on art and politics that had grown as critiques of the Lukácsian approach and were prevalent in other politicized cultural movements of the time (Mello 2003: 50). The CPC manifesto thus called on artists to use familiar forms to carry a revolutionary message to broad audiences. The document produced discussion but no significant consensus around the call for socialist realism and the notion of art as a reflection of social relations within a historical materialist framework (Contier 1998; Demaitre 1966; Garcia 2007). The CPC standardized politicized artistic production and created a diverse and revivalist cultural façade for the left. Interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as new relations

426   Denise Milstein across classes, neighborhoods, and regions, also encouraged the effort to revive peripheral or past musical styles. In 1964, the regime banned the CPC and intensified repression against students. However, the authorities were slow to repress leftist cultural expression not formally linked to social movement organizations, and protest musicians continued to collaborate across disciplines (Schwarz 1978: 63). Over the next four years, as the student movement languished underground, artistic production became the most visible nonviolent resistance to the regime. Without the impetus of formal social movement organizations, the search for an authentic national identity overshadowed other tactical concerns and ideological imperatives. Increasing repression and censorship pushed artists away from explicit calls for revolution and toward less risky work exposing life in the poor, marginalized sectors of Brazilian society. Aesthetically, the search for authentic roots to Brazilian music in the shantytowns and rural regions of Brazil undid part of the modernist path that the initial bossa nova had forged and carried into jazz collaborations. The folk canon the musicians sought did not, to borrow Philip Bohlman’s words, “depend on a preexisting community with primordial roots or procrustean cultural boundaries” but “formed during a period of cultural ferment” (1988: 120). Bohlman’s notion of revival illuminates the dynamic of displacement and its political potential by emphasizing “the dialectic between context and text, which by definition resolves through change” (120). Traveling along the path of revival thus produced dialogic songs, with rich communicative potential during a charged political moment. This dynamic between text and context structured engagement in Brazilian popular music and drove Nara Leão to Bahia. The same revival current drove the Bahianos to Rio. By the time they arrived, they found the musicians who had participated in the student movement scattered throughout the cultural realm. In 1964 and 1965, Show Opinião, which was directed by Augusto Boal, a leading figure in the politically committed artistic world, was the centerpiece of musical resistance. The show presented a synthesis of the revivalist paths that protest bossa musicians were pursuing. Three main characters represented the three revolutionary classes of students, workers, and peasants, as envisioned by the extinct CPC. Nara (and later Maria Bethânia) played the role of a university student with an emerging political consciousness. Second was Zé Kéti, playing a character much like himself, a samba singer from Rio (Kéti 2000 [1973]: 257). His songs were grounded in the life of the city’s lower class and became more militant with his connection to protest bossa. The third actor, João do Vale, also played a character much like himself, a musician from the class of rural poor. He had traveled to Rio from a remote northeastern region, singing and working his way across the country. Like Kéti, he had met bossa musicians in one of the city’s traditional samba venues, Zicartola. Kéti and João do Vale maintained protest bossa’s requisite aura of authenticity by conforming musically and stylistically to the prevalent stereotypes. The show attempted to salvage the idealism of cultural progressives regrouping after the 1964 coup d’état. Through the show, Boal proposed a union of the three classes in solidarity against the dictatorship but avoided a deeper discussion of Brazilian inequality and class conflicts.

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In its search for a unified Brazilian identity, Show Opinião celebrated Brazilian culture as a rich and diverse patchwork. This image would come apart with the hardening of the regime in 1968. The effort posed a political challenge to military power while also articulating a progressive, nationalist response to the perceived cultural invasion of Anglo-American music and the internationalization of Brazilian mass culture. Observations from Brazilian critics who attended convey that the show served as a collective rite of mourning and absolution for the failure of social movements to prevent the coup (Hollanda 1981: 35). The show played to middle-class sensibilities in a context that was a far cry from the earlier participative CPC performances in the countryside (Schwarz 1992: 145). Between 1964 and 1968, artists whose work had been shaped by the CPC experience adapted to the hardening regime and diminishing possibilities for expression. Moving their work to safer venues meant losing the link to marginalized audiences. As radical activists took up arms, musicals such as Show Opinião struggled to maintain their link to social movements. Protest bossa could not stand on its own as a form of resistance, and censorship limited possibilities to support the more radical actions taking place in the country. In this context, Maria Bethânia was sent by Nara to act in Show Opinião as an exemplar of northeastern culture. The show both adapted to her presence and required that she reshape her image to fit the stereotype of a northeastern youth. Her hair was straightened and pulled back to fit a northeastern image, and she donned jeans and a button-down shirt (Veloso 2002: 44). As she explained in a recent interview, it’s because I had to be representative of the Brazilian Northeast, a warrior. When they saw me and heard my voice in the rehearsals, Augusto Boal, my beloved director, was the first to demand a strong figure. I even sang in Franciscan sandals to appear more rural . . . and afterward, people only wanted to see me like that. (Bethânia quoted in Weinschelbaum 2006: 192–193)

The Bahian singer’s voice was deeper than Nara’s, and her stage presence had a rougher edge. Bethânia quickly gained prominence in Rio as a new northeastern voice. However, Bethânia’s background had not been formed by the mythological hotbed of traditional culture imagined by Brazilian cosmopolitans. The unique racial and ethnic makeup of Bahia’s capital had originated under the prosperity of the slave trade and sugar industry. Salvador, which had been Brazil’s capital from 1549 to 1763, held a marginal economic and political status in relation to Rio and São Paulo by the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, the city was undergoing a cultural renaissance. The conjunction of different ethnic groups formed a montage of cultures, easily stereotyped from the outside (by turns as the spiritual hub of Brazil, as the center of poverty, or as the source of Brazilian music and dance) and infinitely complex to those living inside it (Albuquerque 1999). In the mid-twentieth century, the University of Bahia was an enclave for foreign intellectuals and artists, who formed an influential community within the city’s already rich cultural circles (Risério 1995). Bahia thus became a center for avant-garde culture, with the

428   Denise Milstein thriving cultural institutions of the city supporting innovative artistic production and interdisciplinary collaboration. The popular music world in Brazil prescribed a path for the Bahianos similar to that of other musicians from the shantytowns and marginalized regions of the country. For decades, musicians had trickled down into Rio and São Paulo and struggled to climb onto the pedestals to authenticity set up in the metropolis. This path explains how Bethânia willingly adapted her avant-garde, Salvador image to fit the northeastern folk aesthetic.12 She offered her raw voice to Rio’s leftist intellectual audiences as a reflection of the cultural capital's notion of authenticity, producing a collective catharsis even as these audience’s political hopes and projects collapsed under the pressure of authoritarianism. She also opened the way for her Bahian peers to access the center of Brazilian cultural production and the music industry. The reflections of her brother, Caetano Veloso, indicate that the Bahianos recognized the strategic potential of the opening in the Rio and São Paulo music worlds and shared a tacit determination to maintain aesthetic independence from protest bossa (2002: 44–47). Show Opinião was the first of a series of politically engaged, revivalist musical shows in which the Bahianos participated. Most of them drew on Bahian culture and history to convey a political message and foment a revolutionary national identity. Even as the entertainment industry built images for the Bahianos around their identities, the artists themselves grew skeptical about the Bahian label and its mix of exoticism, underdevelopment, and traditionalism. Still, the disjunction between the urban, avant-garde identities of the Bahianos and the myth constructed by Rio and São Paulo cultural entrepreneurs would not come to the fore until the Bahians had established themselves. The Bahians entered the mainstream cultural industry just as the regime began to harden. While Nara and other members of protest bossa who openly opposed the dictatorship were threatened with arrest (Mello 2003: 121), the Brazilian music industry and mass media continued to expand. These two processes overshadowed what was left of the antiauthoritarian, grassroots cultural movements that had opposed the dictatorship. In this context, the Bahianos began to take an alternative path to that pursued by earlier migrant musicians. Gilberto Gil’s trajectory exemplifies these differences. Within a year of arriving in São Paulo, Gil received a call from the prominent singer Elis Regina inviting him to present a song on her popular television show O Fino da Bossa. At the performance, he interpreted his own song, “I Came from Bahia” (Eu vim da Bahia), which described the coexisting liveliness and poverty of Bahia in a style reminiscent of the more traditional ballads and sambas from the region (Dunn 2001: 59). The performance was a success, setting Gil at the center of protest bossa. Gil’s career took a turn in early 1967 when he traveled to the city of Recife in the northeastern state of Pernambuco to perform at the Teatro Popular de Nordeste (Gil 1982 [1972]: 63). For a short period before the 1964 coup, Pernambuco’s population had lived under a democratically elected socialist government. Miguel Arraes, the governor of the state, had initiated a process of agrarian reform and showed unmitigated support for unions and community organizations. That experience was a model and focus of hope for Brazilian leftists. In 1964, Arraes had been forced out of office, imprisoned,

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and exiled after refusing to obey the order to renounce his post. For Gil, the encounter with Pernambuco’s impoverished population and their fresh memory of the possibility for transformation underlined the necessity for political engagement. Reflecting back to that moment, Gil commented: I returned from Recife to Rio with the certainty that something had to be done in terms of a movement, in terms of integrating those needs that already existed among Brazilian university students. . . . In truth it was my own attitude, a reflection of a bad political conscience, trying to mix everything with that confusion in my head that was protest music, that whole thing about participant music and so on. . . . But soon I became disillusioned, it became clear very quickly that it wouldn’t work. (Gil 1982 [1972]: 63–64)

Gil had returned to Rio with the intention of organizing musicians to produce a new kind of music, using the dominant commercial venues to disseminate a revolutionary message. His own experience with mass media and a growing sense of political urgency led Gil to look for new forms of expression to incorporate to the protest bossa movement. The move followed the typical dynamic of change in Brazilian culture. He sought to bring traditional genres to the present by producing a combination of folk and pop that could be performed on television. Guilherme Araújo, the Bahianos’ agent, collaborated in organizing a meeting that brought together members of protest bossa and the Bahianos (Veloso 1997: 132). Caetano’s description illuminates the conflictive dynamic between protest bossistas and the northeastern newcomers. Here, their differing understandings of revival and its role in forging political and aesthetic transformations come to light. The protest musicians’ opposition to incorporating rock sounds issued from an anti-imperialist stance that identified rock with cultural domination. The Bahians on the other hand did not perceive rock music as a political or cultural threat to Brazilian popular music. Veloso reflected on the meeting in his autobiographical Tropical Truth: I do remember this much clearly: Chico—bohemian and wary of programs—would get drunk and make ironic remarks about what he had barely listened to, while Sérgio Ricardo would misinterpret Gil’s words. For instance, Gil’s phrase “to be really popular” moved Sérgio to suggest that we do shows at the entrance[s]‌to factories. Gil had an awful time trying to make himself understood. Whenever he mentioned rural music from Pernambuco, one could almost hear someone say that Edu was already working on that satisfactorily; and when he talked about the Beatles, some lowered their eyes, others opened them—all mouths were closed. He didn’t dare speak about Roberto Carlos [a prominent pop singer]. And, after a tense pause, someone would say something just to show that he had understood it all to be a clever if somewhat dishonest strategy—and therefore destined to fail:  to make music that was more commercial so it could better serve as a vehicle for revolutionary ideas. In the end, Gil did not give up trying to make himself understood, even though the others gave up trying to follow him. It was up to us to go it alone. (Veloso 2002: 79–80)

430   Denise Milstein Perceiving the impossibility of coordinating a movement and the incompatibility of aesthetic visions, the Bahianos decided to launch their own movement. They followed Gil’s plan to take popular music beyond the essentialist assumptions of protest musicians and openly embrace new directions, even if they came from abroad. In their strategies, the Bahianos took a step beyond the perspective that only explicit antiauthoritarian and politically engaged expression could serve the interests of Brazilian leftist movements. Their work placed art on a plane that retained autonomy from social movements while maintaining a loose commitment to their goals. By 1967, Veloso and Gil were deepening their relations to avant-garde currents in music, visual arts, and literature, based in São Paulo. The composer Júlio Medaglia had connected Gil and the composer Rogério Duprat, who was among the founders of the new music movement in Brazil. Medaglia and Duprat had both studied with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany. They had returned to Brazil determined to continue producing art music and open to crossing borders into the realm of popular music. The New Music Manifesto, which they had drawn up with other composers, claimed “total commitment to the contemporary world,” “concretism,” acceptance and use of communications media, and willingness to keep up with international developments in art. The manifesto ended with Mayakovsky’s words “there is no revolutionary art without revolutionary form” (Cozzella et al. 1963). As Gil recalled, “Rogério has, with respect to art music, a stance quite similar to ours with respect to popular music. That stance of dissatisfaction with imposed values. He wants to develop art music; he doesn’t want to limit it in an academic sense” (quoted in Campos 1968: 183–184). The same year, through Duprat, Gil met and began to collaborate with the Paulista rock band Os Mutantes (The Mutants). The combined sound of Os Mutantes, Duprat’s arrangements, and Gil’s songs would define the Tropicália musical aesthetic over the next two years. Revived sounds were there, in Gil’s songs, but in fragmented, collage form. The revival current had deposited Gil in a place where he could actively incorporate and interrogate traditional sounds in his songs, surround them with new and pop sounds, and use poetry to infuse them with surreal, contemporary images. These collaborative relationships and the beginnings of Tropicália took place behind closed doors. As a result, Gil lived in anguished conflict during 1967, when he participated in a television program, Frente Única, that launched and promoted a nationalist music organization, the United Front of Brazilian Popular Music. The program upheld Brazilian music, as represented by the protest bossa aesthetic, against pop music. In the course of a few days, Gil had both marched in a demonstration against electric guitars sponsored by Frente Única and become obsessed with the Beatles’ concept album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, two activities that appeared incongruous to him. Participation in the protest bossa movement contradicted his desire to innovate along the lines suggested by contemporary rock and roll. For nationalist protest musicians, these sounds were signs of cultural infiltration from the North. His instability reflected the experiences of students, intellectuals, and leftist activists on a broader level. Disillusionment with the Brazilian Communist Party set Brazilians adrift on a sea of possibilities, including armed insurgence. By 1967, any goodwill attributed to the regime

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had worn off as power was transferred to a hardliner, General Costa e Silva. In the meantime, protest bossa and politically engaged theatre were losing ground as forms of cultural resistance (Schwarz 1992: 145). It should come as no surprise that frustrated artists would radicalize in this tense context. When Gil’s turn came to anchor Frente Única, he opted to read texts praising Roberto Carlos, the pop king of the Jovem Guarda group, a commercial movement reviled by protest musicians. He also invited Bethânia (who by that time had built her own feminine and unmilitant image as diva) to sing with an electric guitar while wearing a miniskirt and knee-high boots (Mello 2003: 183). Nationalist and protest fans were outraged. From that moment onward, a transformed group of Bahianos, led by Caetano and Gil, burst onto televised festivals with a new, polemical style that combined traditional, bossa nova, and rock styles, using allegorical, provocative lyrics. The movement was named Tropicália after an art installation by the neoconcretist artist Hélio Oiticica that presented a similar critique and celebration of the Brazilian myth. As the movement grew to include artists across disciplines, Tropicália musicians avoided explicit identification with any political current and, as the following paragraphs show, only won audiences to their cause after infuriating them. The Tropicália movement built a relationship to traditional musics different from that of their protest bossa predecessors. They deftly incorporated northeastern rhythms, traditional instruments, and revived song styles in a fragmentary, whimsical fashion. In this light, revived musics sounded in juxtaposition with electronic, contemporary sounds. The initial reaction, both from audiences and the cultural workers who had supported the Bahianos’ rise, was negative. Augusto Boal, wielding his influence as gatekeeper to the politically engaged artistic sphere, attacked Tropicália for being “neo-romantic,” “homeopathic,” “inarticulate,” “timid and gentle,” and “imported” (Basualdo 2005: 272– 273). Sérgio Ricardo, a musician identified with protest bossa, called it “an alienating movement” and lamented that with it “values were pretty much inverted, politics were forgotten. . . . And the doors opened. And rock came in, the Beatles, McLuhan came in, all kinds of things” (Barcellos 1994: 399).13 Like other innovative musicians who had entered their respective musical worlds via folk and traditional sounds, the Bahianos faced a negative reaction that, ironically, labeled their work as antiprogressive.14 In response to Boal’s and other attacks from established artists, Veloso presented the song “É proibido proibir” (“It’s forbidden to forbid”), which took its title from a widely disseminated 1968 Parisian graffito. The song did not sound like any previous festival song. The lyrics confronted repression without naming either the regime or nationalist, leftist artists and audiences. By omitting the direct reference, Caetano opened a space for an interpretation that aligned the two as enemies of free expression. At the first festival round, the audience, dominated by militant students, booed and insulted Caetano and Os Mutantes, who were backing his vocals. By the second round, Caetano had prepared a response. As he describes it, “É proibido proibir” was transformed, with a little help from Os Mutantes and Rogério Duprat (who, though not responsible for the orchestral arrangement,

432   Denise Milstein directed the atonal introduction, reminiscent of Os Mutantes’ concrete and electronic music), into a highly scandalous piece. My hair was very long and, left to its own rebellious curliness, seemed like a cross between Hendrix and his British accompanists from the Experience. I wore plastic clothing in green and black, my chest covered with thick necklaces made of electrical wires with the plugs hanging at the ends, and thick chains with animal teeth. . . . After the long introduction—whose atonality and lack of rhythmic definition provoked some booing—I started to sing the silly lines (“The virgin’s mother says no / And the TV ad / Was written on the gate”) and do a kind of dance that consisted entirely of moving my hips to and fro, although not in the mechanical manner of the Elvis grind, but in the easygoing, sexy way one observes in Bahian women, or morro samba dancers, or Cuban men and women. Then, as if that were not enough, the singing and dancing were interrupted by a recitation of [a]‌Fernando Pessoa poem. . . . To accentuate the contrast, I inverted the popular saying “the devil is loose,” screaming “God is loose,” as if announcing his arrival onstage in the guise of an American youth, John Danduran, who was obviously a gringo, tall, very white, wrapped in a hippie poncho, and without a single hair anywhere on his body . . . who howled and grunted unintelligibly. (Veloso 2002: 187–189)

The presentation, which resembled a happening more than the performance of a song, drew a violent, negative reaction from the audience. Veloso writes that “the audience . . . made up predominantly of students who were pro-Left nationalists (meaning anti-imperialists), reacted with violent indignation. Many faces looked at me with evident hostility, and not a few punctuated the conventional booing with swearing and insults” (2002: 189). As members of the audience began to turn their backs on Caetano and Os Mutantes, who were accompanying him, the Mutantes themselves turned their backs to the audience. It was then that Caetano began his tirade against the audience: So is this the youth who say they want to take power? . . . You don’t understand anything, anything, anything—nothing at all! . . . The problem is this! You want to police Brazilian music! . . . But Gil and I already opened the path, so what do you want? I came here to end this. I want to say to the jury: disqualify me! . . . We [Gil and I] had the courage to go inside all the structures and leave them all. And you? You, if you are . . . if you are the same in politics as you are in aesthetics, we’re done for! God is loose! (Caetano quoted in Basualdo 2005: 244–245)

Gil echoed Caetano’s sentiment in an interview soon after that performance, saying: You know the types of people that were there: young people connected with the university student movement, with an ideological conditioning for music, a group committed to social clichés. At the same time, a group that’s reactionary with respect to aesthetics. It’s contradictory. They’re policed in the political realm and they want to police the aesthetic realm? Why? It’s wrong, isn’t it? (Gil 1982 [1968]: 33)

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Revival, Disjunctions, Innovations The history described above begins with a puzzle. How and why did the new recruits to protest bossa overturn the movement in four years, undoing the history of smooth transitions that had characterized Brazilian popular music over the previous decades? Why was music transformed abruptly and not gradually, as had happened in earlier transitions? How and why did the Bahianos establish a different relationship to the state, the media, and revivalism itself from that of other northeastern migrants? Attention to the music alone does not answer these questions. Revived sounds are amenable to incorporation, in continuous or disruptive manners, to popular songs. Folk genres commonly do combine with rock and produce new movements through incremental steps and innovations (Burns 2007). Only an appreciation of the social and political context in which the Bahianos innovated illuminates how their trajectories could lead to unprecedented conflict between and among musicians and their audiences. This examination of the relationship between revival and innovation addresses rupture by recognizing the dynamics of a revival current that wove through musical movements in a specific social and political context and carried musicians to different places in the cultural sphere. The Tropicália movement was set in motion by the disjunction between central and peripheral perceptions and interpretations of identities, ideologies, and aesthetic positions. Veloso aptly articulates the source of the conflict in his description of the Brazilian illusion surrounding Bahia. His retrospective view on the rupture combines the peripheral perspective with an intimate understanding of the cultural center: there’s this whole mystery, a myth and folklore around Bahia, because Bahia ended up being like the root, like a place . . . the deepest expression of Brazil, that whole thing. Because of those elements [ethnic and cultural diversity, colonial history, etc.] and the mystification that those elements underwent, right? So, in a country [Brazil] that is basically rootless, if you were to compare any country in America to European or African countries, you’d notice that America is a tacky place from top to bottom, in other words, it’s a continent without a past, right? The American past may be summarized as the extermination of indigenous nations, no? And then of course in what came after, that is, European colonization, English, Spanish, French, Dutch or Portuguese, and in the importation of slaves which is a detail of major importance in this continent of ours. . . . So you have the permanence of a European language, a continuation, but under different conditions than that of a European culture, you understand? So that creates a damned mess; at the same time you have holes, the American has holes, all Americans, from Canada to Patagonia, holes for lack of roots, imported holes, the necessity to affirm a national character artificially, something that doesn’t happen in Europe, you understand? (Veloso 1972)

434   Denise Milstein Revival efforts and the incorporation of revived sounds in music do not emerge sui generis from inspired artists or independent of historical processes. Rather, persistent interests in reclaiming a sense of authenticity, often spatially and temporally grounded, drive revival. The protest bossa musicians in the early 1960s remained aloof to the rootlessness, fragmentation, and constructed quality of culture that Veloso identified. Moved by the political crisis in their environment, protest bossistas rode along the revival current in pursuit of authenticity and a rich repertoire of sounds. Still, they recognized that revived sounds, once unhitched from their spatial and temporal origins, may be infused with new meaning. In this way, they incorporated revived sounds in a conscious effort to consolidate oppositional identities and politically mobilize their audiences. The impetus to follow along the thread of revival gave rise to new relations. As this case shows, the relations forged through revival efforts restructured movements and carried a symbolic and ideological content that merits analysis. Culture and politics intersected in the identities that mediated between ideology and aesthetics in the production of music. But beyond the structure of relations, media institutions added one more layer to the evolution of musical movements. Not just ideology but also aesthetics builds on materially experienced reality, including the conditions that limit and determine the lives of social agents (Wolff 1993: 50). Thus, the music and television industries, as well as the transforming political regime, created, cut off, and reshaped paths for revival and innovation in the careers of musicians. Further, the history described shows how when structures and institutions impede individual or collective movement, they become the targets of transformative action. This is also true for genres, which, like institutions, set boundaries around cultural production. In addition to articulating ideologies, artists forge aesthetic approaches through collective experience and reflection. Moments of crisis destabilize identities, sometimes breaking down the boundaries between different social groups, at other times building them up. Oppositionality, in the Brazilian case, found grounding in the affinity to “otherness.” This appeal to marginality has been defined (Livingston 1999) and identified in the U.S. folk revival movement (Feintuch 2006: 13). The case of Brazilian popular music shows revival not as a movement but as a current forged through a historical dynamic that repeatedly links revival and innovation and is always available as a conduit between movements and between present and future. In this case, looking back in time or out to the periphery in a search for authentic expressions of identity allowed artists to regain footing in crisis contexts. The transition to authoritarianism facilitated this process by producing a crisis that restructured relations among artists and between activists and artists. Shifts in the music and television industries also transformed relations by emphasizing competition and creating new spaces for dissemination. In this context, those engaged in political resistance used revival to reconstruct identities with traditions, genres, or simply sounds and symbols that had become malleable as a result of decontextualization. But malleability has a limit, and bringing musics forward in time or into the mainstream from a peripheral position also produces conflict. In considering that initial encounter between Nara and the Bahianos in the Vila Velha Theater, this essay opts to frame Nara’s revivalist impulse as the choice to travel along a

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revivalist current as opposed to joining or starting a revival movement. That approach leaves more space for a disjunction of the type described between the protest bossa and Bahiano perceptions. This disjunction between those looking out from the center and those looking at the center from the periphery persisted in spite of the awareness, among all the musicians involved, of the differences in their experiences. Developing a broad understanding of revival not as a specific movement but as a cultural current brings to light its role as a key ingredient in the rise of Tropicália in Brazil. This effort calls for recognizing that the boundaries around the revivalist movements that informed protest bossa and Tropicália were quite permeable, if not entirely fictitious. Revival currents, as distinguished from movements, open avenues for innovation rather than recycling practices or re-creating a fictitious past. However, revival currents in themselves would not exist without the experience and existence of revival movements, including the critical practices and perspectives that they produce. Beyond contributing to understanding rupture in the evolution of musical movements, tracing the thread of revival that interconnected bossa nova and Tropicália opens the way for a dynamic and nonlinear conceptualization of musical movements. The inner workings of these historical dynamics center on relations among musicians, which drive transformations in musical styles through imitation and shared practices. But political, economic, and cultural crises produce the shifts that lead to new relations. Thus, the causes of innovation are of two types, operating simultaneously. First, relations among musicians evolve and produce change in a process endogenous to movements. Second, exogenous causes such as social movements, political change, and media transformations open spaces for innovation. The two types of causes mingle in revivalist currents. Musicians engage in collective reflection and action, building movements from musical practices, as part of a sociohistorical process. The institutions surrounding artists, including the state, different types of venues for performance and dissemination, and in some cases social movements, do not simply provide a structure or context for action. They exist in dialogic relation with the artist, who on the one hand builds an identity as realist or idealist “representer” and on the other hand struggles for autonomy through his or her aesthetic journey. The meaning attached to revival varies according to the position of the artist within this constellation of actors, institutions, and forces. Innovation expresses the transformations that result from clashes between identities and interpretations.15 The Bahianos rose within protest bossa and then countered the musical movement that had brought them into the fold. They did so with a devastating critique to the notion of cultural authenticity in Brazil. Their career paths were shaped by the dynamics of the music world and the political and institutional contexts that surrounded them. Under different conditions, the Bahianos might have gradually transformed bossa in manageable increments and not by the radical turn that produced controversy and divided audiences. The fact that one movement—by way of a search for renovation—unexpectedly opened the way for an entirely new aesthetic that fundamentally challenged its own premises is not atypical among processes by which innovation emerges in art worlds. Revival as a current, rather than as a movement, provided protest bossistas with

436   Denise Milstein an opportunity for building political legitimacy through a constructed sense of authenticity. For the Bahianos, engagement with the revival current provided the ingredients for radical innovation. The Brazilian revival current fomented the complex relations that developed in this environment, including links to marginalized musicians, collaboration with an avant-garde musical movement, and conflicts between the Bahianos and their bossa nova mentors. The effervescent network of artists that resulted produced transformations in the identities of artists and in their work. In this context, the Tropicália musicians articulated an answer to the typical challenges of revival movements. By combining the drive to create a universal sound with the willingness to incorporate traditional sounds, but doing so irreverently, creatively, and in a fragmented way, they were able to transcend static notions of authenticity to create a musical environment open to innovation. They successfully turned the tables on the assumption that politically engaged art should only reflect social reality or that art, in order to communicate a political message, must use a fully recognizable language. The Bahianos forged their own path by embracing revival with whimsy and irreverence, consciously wielding it as a tool for musical innovation.

Acknowledgments This essay has benefited from ongoing dialogue with Caroline Bithell, Juniper Hill, and Sun-Chul Kim. Earlier versions were critiqued by participants in the 2010 Conference on Politics, Criticism, and the Arts at Vanderbilt University and the 2009 Sociology of Music Conference organized by the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical at the Universidade de Nova Lisboa. I am grateful for these readers’ comments, which have sharpened the ideas expressed here.

Notes 1. Here and throughout, I refer to artists by the names most often used in historical and contemporary sources. In the case of Nara Leão, her first name is consistently used alone in printed sources. In other cases, such as that of Gilberto Gil, the last name has become the primary identification. 2. See the discography and videography for examples. See also the website http://tropicalia. com.br/ (in English at http://tropicalia.com.br/en/) that accompanies Oliveira et al. (2010). The title of João Gilberto’s second album, released in 1960, was Love, Smiles, and Flowers. 3. Oliveira Filho (2001), a compilation of Brazilian music, covers the musical movements described in this essay. The selected songs provide a representative view of the historical evolution of Brazilian music through the twentieth century. 4. The recordings from the Missão de Pesquias Folclóricas released in 2006 (Andrade 2006) offer a sample of the folk material collected under Mário de Andrade’s direction. The project was integral to Brazilian modernists’ interest in folk sounds and revival. See also its

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companion website at www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/hotsites/missao/index.html. For a sample of Villa-Lobos’s compositions, please refer to The Complete Choros and Bachianas Brasileiras (Villa-Lobos et al. 2009). This compilation illustrates the incorporation of Brazilian folk sounds in classical music in the work of the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. 5. For a sample of popular samba songs from the first half of the twentieth century, see Silva et al. (1998), a compilation that represents the sound promoted as inherent to Brazilian national identity during the Getulio Vargas populist era. 6. João Gilberto’s album, O amor, o sorriso e a flor, is emblematic of the bossa nova movement at a time when the sound had settled into the conventions, both musical and lyrical (of love, smiles, and flowers) that Nara sought to transcend in her travels beyond Rio. 7. Performers initially made this adaptation in the 1930s, in the United States. The bossa musicians followed the crooner style that emerged in that context (Lockheart 2003). 8. McCann’s research reveals that radio stations nationwide grew from twenty in 1931 to one hundred in 1941, and three hundred in 1950 (2004: 24). During the period, investment in television advertising doubled in relation to radio, printed, and other media (based on research by Dias 2000: 53 and Mattos 1990: 5). The growth of television audiences was even more impressive and is reflected in the increase of television sets in use from 598,000 in 1960 to 4,584,000 in 1970 (Mattos 1990: 10). 9. The collaborations between Brazilian bossistas and U.S. jazz musicians produced a distinctive sound exemplified in the two albums with Stan Getz cited in the discography (Getz et al. 1997a, 1997b). 10. The film Orfeu (Diegues et al. 2002) marks the meeting of bossa nova musicians with the marginalized world of Rio’s favelas and epitomizes the romantic view of it. The bossa nova songs incorporate and stylize the more traditional samba sounds of the favela. 11. The discography includes three albums that showcase the songs from Show Opinião and the Protest Bossa movement (Show Opinião 1994; Leão 1965; Leão et al. 1965). These songs interweave bossa and more traditional Brazilian genres. The lyrics address historical and contemporary socioeconomic inequalities in Brazil and celebrate freedom, social mobilization, political militancy, and crossclass solidarity. 12. The album Domingo by Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso (1990) reflects the sound the Bahians adopted on their initial entry to the Rio–São Paulo music scene. The album was recorded before the Bahians decided to change musical paths. 13. Listen to the following three albums for a broad sample of the Tropicália sound. Tropicália (Duprat et al. 1993) was Tropicália’s concept album, recorded shortly after the musicians’ controversial live performances of the songs. Tropicália é proibido proibir (Gil et al. 2006) gathers a diverse set of songs, many of them performed in televised festivals and identified with the Tropicália movement. In Grande Liquidação (2011), Tom Zé’s take on tropicalism ventures even further into experimental music than his colleagues’ work does. His songs proved more challenging to listeners and, though they were less amenable to categorization, embodied the spirit of Tropicália. Listen to the podcast and see the accompanying listener’s guide and further references at http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials?id_capsula=537 (Pratginestós 2009). Compiled in conjunction with a Tropicália exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, this website reaches beyond the period described in this essay and offers the listener a window onto the continued evolution of Tropicália musicians. 14. Bob Dylan, for example, faced similar reactions beginning with his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (Denisoff 1983: 127; Filene 2000: 184).

438   Denise Milstein 15. For an overview of the history of Tropicália, see the following recommended films in the videography. Jom Azulay’s Doces Bárbaros (Azulay et al. 2008, presents the work of the Bahians in the mid-1970s, tracing the evolution of Tropicália past the period described in this essay, as the musicians continued innovating on the basis of references to past sounds and critical, often irreverent notions of national rootedness. La Révolution tropicaliste (Billon and Dreyfus 2001) describes the evolution of Tropicália and complements some of the perspectives developed in this essay. Claude Santiago’s film on Tom Zé (Santiago and Zé 2010) develops a contemporary view of Tom Zé the artist, also highlighting the mechanism at play in the evolution of Tropicália as an innovative movement that builds forward on the basis of a revival current.

References Albuquerque, Durval Muniz de, Jr. 1999. A invenção do Nordeste e outras artes. São Paulo: Cortez Editora. Barcellos, Jalusa. 1994. CPC da UNE: Uma história de paixão e consciência. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Basualdo, Carlos, org. 2005. Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture. Trans. Aaron Lorenz, Renata Nascimento, and Christopher Dunn. São Paulo: Cosac Naify. Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bohlman, Philip V. 1988. The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World. Indianapolis: Indiana University. Britto, Jomard Muniz de. 1966. Do Modernismo à Bossa Nova. Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Civilização Brasileira. Burns, Robert G. H. 2007. “Continuity, Variation, and Authenticity in the English Folk-rock Movement.” Folk Music Journal, 9 (2): 192–218, 287. Cabral, Sérgio. 2001. Nara Leão: Uma biografia. Rio de Janeiro: Lumiar Editora. Campos, Augusto de. 1968. Balanço da Bossa: Antologia crítica da moderna música popular brasileira. São Paulo: Editôra Perspectiva. Contier, Arnaldo Daraya. 1998. “Edu Lobo e Carlos Lyra: O Nacional e o Popular na Canção de Protesto (Os Anos 60).” Revista Brasileira de Historia, 18 (35): 13–52. Cozzella, Damiano, et al. 1963. “Música nova: Manifesto 1963. Invenção.” Revista de Arte de Vanguarda 2 (3). Http://www.latinoamerica-musica.net/historia/manifestos/3-po.html, accessed August 30, 2013. Demaitre, Ann. 1966. “The Great Debate on Socialist Realism.” Modern Language Journal, 50 (5): 263–268. Denisoff, R. Serge. 1983. Sing a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Dias, Marcia Tosta. 2000. Os donos da voz: Indústria fonográfica brasileira e mundialização da cultura. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial. Dunn, Christopher. 2001. Brutality Garden:  Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Feintuch, Burt. 2006. “Revivals on the Edge: Northumberland and Cape Breton—A Keynote.” Yearbook for Traditional Music, 38: 1–17.

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Filene, Benjamin. 2004. “O Brother, What Next? Making Sense of the Folk Fad.” Southern Cultures, 10(2): 50–69. ——. 2000. Romancing the Folk:  Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Garcia, Miliandre. 2007. Do teatro militante à música engajada: A experiência do CPC da UNE (1958–1964). São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo. Gil, Gilberto. 1982 [1972]. “O sonho acabou, Gil está sabendo tudo.” Interview with Hamilton Almeida. Bondiho 34 (February). Reprinted in Expresso 2222, edited by Antônio Risério. Rio de Janeiro: Corrupio, 47–84. ——. 1982 [1968]. “Gil está falando de vaias e festivais.” Jornal da Tarde, 28 September. Reprinted in Expresso 2222, organized by Antônio Risério. Rio de Janeiro: Corrupio, 33–35. Hollanda, Heloísa Buarque de. 1981. Impressões de viagem—CPC, vanguarda e desbunde: 1960/70. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Kéti, Zé. 2000 [1973]. “Zé Kéti.” Interview for television show MPB Especial. Reprinted in A Música Brasileira deste Século por sues Autores e Intérpretes 2, edited by J. C. Pelão Botezelli and Arley Pereira. São Paulo: Serviço Social de Comércio, 240–256. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology, 43 (1): 66–85. Livingston-Isenhour, Tamara, and Thomas George Caracas Garcia. 2005. Choro:  A  Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lockheart, Paula. 2003. “A History of Early Microphone Singing, 1925–1939:  American Mainstream Popular Singing at the Advent of Electronic Microphone Amplification.” Popular Music and Society, 26 (3): 367–385. Lyra, Carlos. 2006. “Entrevista:  Carlos Lyra e A  Bossa. Do Fundo do Baú.” Interview originally published in Cult Press. Reprinted in www.overmundo.com.br/overblog/ entrevista-carlos-lyra-e-a-bossa-do-fundo-do-bau, accessed August 30, 2013. Mattos, Sérgio. 1990. Um perfil da TV Brasileira (40 anos de história:  1950–1990). Salvador: Associação Brasileira de Agências de Propaganda & Capítulo Bahia: A Tarde. McCann, Bryan. 2004. Hello, Hello Brazil:  Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Mello, Zuza Homem de. 2003. A Era dos Festivais: Uma Parábola. São Paulo: Editora 34. Oliveira, Ana de, Rico Lins, Amanda Dafoe, and Antonio Risério. 2010. Tropicália, ou, Panis et circencis. São Paulo: Iyá Omin Produćoães. Companion website at http://tropicalia.com.br/ en/, accessed August 30, 2013. Peterson, Richard A., and N. Anand. 2004. “The Production of Culture Perspective.” Annual Review of Sociology, 30 (August): 311–334. Reily, Suzel Ana. 2000. “Introduction: Brazilian Musics, Brazilian Identities.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 9 (1): 1–10. Risério, Antônio. 1995. Avant-garde na Bahia. São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993. Introduction to Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1–25. Sandroni, Carlos. 2001. Feitiço Decente: Transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917–1933). Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editor & Editora UFRJ. Schwarz, Roberto. 1992. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. London: Verso. ——. 1978. “Cultura e política, 1964–1969.” O pai de família e outros estudos. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.

440   Denise Milstein Stroud, Sean. 2008. The Defence of Tradition in Brazilian Popular Music: Politics, Culture and the Creation of Música Popular Brasileira. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Veloso, Caetano. 2002. Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil. Translated by Isabel de Sena, edited by Barbara Einzig. New York: Knopf. ——. 1997. Verdade tropical. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. ——. 1977 [1965]. “Primeira feira de balanço.” Ângulos, Revista dos Alunos da Faculdade de Direito da UFBA, 1965. Reprinted in Alegria, Alegria, organized by Waly Salomão. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Pedra Q Ronca,. ——. 1972. “Visto?” Interview. Bondinho 38. Available at http://gafieiras.com.br/entrevistas/ caetano-veloso/, accessed August 30, 2013. Weinschelbaum, Violeta. 2006. Estação Brasil: Conversas com músicos brasileiros. [Trans. Chico Mattoso]. São Paulo: Editora 34. White, Harrison C. 2008. Identity and Control:  How Social Formations Emerge. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ——, and Cynthia A. White. 1993 [1965]. Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolff, Janet. 1993 [1981]. The Social Production of Art. 2nd ed. New  York:  New  York University Press.

Discs Cited Andrade, Mário de. 2006. Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas. CD. São Paulo: Serviço Social do Comércio, SESC-SP. Companion website:  www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/hotsites/missao/index. html, accessed August 30, 2013. Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Peter Blake, and John Lennon. 1987. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. LP. London: Parlophone. Billon, Yves, and Dominique Dreyfus. 2001. La Révolution tropicaliste. CD. Histoire En Musiques. Paris: ADAV-les Films du village. Costa, Gal, and Caetano Veloso. 1990. Domingo Sunday. CD. New York: Verve. Duprat, Rogério, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Nara Leão, and Gal Costa. 1993. Tropicália. CD. [São Paulo]: Philips. Getz, Stan, João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Astrud Gilberto, Tommy Williams, and Milton Banana. 1997a. Getz/Gilberto Featuring Antonio Carlos Jobim. CD. New York: Verve. Getz, Stan, Charlie Byrd, Keter Betts, Gene Byrd, Buddy Deppenschmidt, and Bill Reichenbach. 1997b. Jazz Samba. CD. New York: Verve. Gil, Gilberto. 1970. “Eu vim da Bahia.” In Maria Bethânia, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Geraldo Vandré, and Caetano Veloso, M.P.B. espectacular Caetano, Bethania, Gil, Gal, Vandre. LP. Montevideo, Uruguay: RCA Victor. Gil, Gilberto, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, and Tom Zé. 2006. Tropicália é proibido proibir. CD. London: Soul Jazz Records. Gilberto, João. 1972. O amor, o sorriso e a flor. LP. São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil: EMI-Odeon. Leão, Nara. 1965. Opinião de Nara. LP. Rio de Janeiro: Philips. Leão, Nara, Edu Lobo, and Tamba Trio. 1965. 5 Na Bossai. LP. Rio de Janeiro: Philips. Show Opinião. 1994. CD. Manaus, Brazil: Philips. Silva, Orlando, Carmen Miranda, Moreira da Silva, Patricio Teixeira, Silvio Caldas, Guarda Velha, Breno Ferreira, et al. 1998. Samba 1917–1947. CD. Vincennes, France: Frémeaux & Associés.

REVIVAL CURRENTS AND INNOVATION FROM PROTEST BOSSA TO TROPICÁLIA  441

Veloso, Caetano. 1999. “É proibido proibir.” In Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Nara Leão, and Rogério Duprat. Tropicália essentials. CD. Universal City, CA: Hip-O Records. Villa-Lobos, Heitor, Catullo da Paixão Cearense, Ruth Valladares Corrêa, Manuel Bandeira, Anders Miolin, Fábio Zanon, Cláudio Cruz, et al. 2009. The Complete Choros and Bachianas Brasileiras. CD. Åkersberga, Sweden: BIS. Zé, Tom. 2011. Grande liquidação. CD. Brighton, East Sussex, England: Mr. Bongo.

Films Cited Azulay, Jom Tob, Isabel Câmara, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethânia, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Kati Almeida Braga, Olivia Hime, Renata Mader, and Sylvia Medeiros. 2008. Os doces bárbaros Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethânia, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa. Rio de Janeiro: Biscoito Fino. Diegues, Carlos, Renata Almeida Magalhães, Paula Lavigne, Toni Garrido, Patrícia França, Murilo Benício, Zezé Motta, and Vinícius de Moraes. 2002. Orfeu. New York: New Yorker Video. Santiago, Claude, and Tom Zé. 2010. Tom Zé. Paris: la Huit production.

Websites Cited Pratginestós, Raül G. 2009. “Objeto semi-identificado no pais do futuro:  Tropicália and post-tropicalismo in Brasil (1967–1976).” Podcast. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials?id_capsula=537, accessed August 30, 2013. A list of further audio, visual, and textual sources and of web links can be found on the companion website .

C HA P T E R  20

BENDING OR BREAKING THE NAT I V E A M E R I C A N F LU T E TRADITION? PAU L A J. C ON LON

The Native flute of the indigenous peoples of North America has undergone many layers of cultural transformations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Questions arise as to how far the Native flute can travel and still remain connected to its traditional roots, and where the Native flute will go from here. The tensions and ironies that hover around these questions are much more complex and nuanced than these questions imply. It is not just about how far or close the Native flute is to its traditional roots but about how different artists strive to be or are interpreted by others as being traditional or nontraditional, and how “purists” may in fact be innovators and innovators may retain elements of the tradition. To examine these issues, I have divided the Native flute’s journey into four blocks: the traditional flute up to 1879, the prerevival period from 1880 to the late 1960s, the revival period from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, and the postrevival period in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Native flute was no longer part of everyday Native life after 1879, when federal laws to suppress Native culture and send Native children to boarding schools came into effect. The subsequent prerevival period lasted from the 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. By the late 1960s, the early stages of the Native flute revival had begun, with the flute having been transformed into a public expression of Native identity. In the mid-1980s, crossfertilization with non-Native music traditions began to appear, followed by a shift to offering opportunities for non-Natives to learn to play the flute by the end of the decade. The 1990s saw the advent of female Native flute players, with increasing non-Native involvement in the inner workings of the Native flute world by 2000. The postrevival period of the first decade of the twenty-first century has non-Native flute players, makers, and recording artists at the helm, with a number of Native flutists still playing an active role. Information is drawn from the available literature, interviews, and correspondence with Native and non-Native flute

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  443

players and makers conducted over the course of thirty years, participation at Native and non-Native workshops between 1996 and 2010, and my own journey from purist researcher to hands-on flute enthusiast and back again.

Traditional Native Flute—Pre-1880 The Lakota flutist Kevin Locke has suggested delineating the traditional Native flute as “American Indian,” the legal term for a member of a federally recognized tribe, and reserving the term “Native American” for its contemporary counterpart (personal communication, Feb. 9, 2011). This designation, however, would still require a common ground for what is meant by the word “tradition.” The Choctaw ethnomusicologist Tara Browner separates her Native music courses at the University of California Los Angeles into two classes, “Traditional North American Indian Music” and “Contemporary North American Indian Music.” When I asked what music she includes in the traditional course, she replied that “traditional” refers to tribal-specific forms, essentially those that existed prior to European contact, and “contemporary” refers to everything else (personal communication, December 19, 2010). The ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond notes that aspects of traditional knowledge in the belief systems of various Native groups emphasize the importance of place, including environmental sound and the properties of natural materials used for sound production (2008: 21). During the course of research for my earlier work on the Native flute (1983), I found information about the construction of the traditional flute and its music in accounts of flute origin stories from Plains and Eastern Woodlands tribes. It is difficult, though, to trace precisely how far back the Native flute goes in history. The earliest date for Native flutes in collections is the 1860s (Hensley 2002: 16), explained in part by the fact that dates generally refer to the accession date and that Native flutes were made of compostable wood and often buried with the maker. Stories of the first love flute contain references to a young man finding a bird, often a woodpecker, pecking holes in a cedar tree, with the wind rustling through the hollow wood to “make the branch sing.” Flutes were traditionally made of a straight-grained wood, preferably cedar because of its ease of carving, its spiritual connotations, and its image of everlasting life. Links to the origin stories are sometimes portrayed by animal or bird effigies on the flutes themselves, either at the base of the flute or on the upper surface of the external block that sits on top of the flute (see Figure 20.1). The ethnomusicologist David McAllester notes that the distinctive external block sound mechanism makes this type of flute unique to the New World (1980: 307), and the Navajo-Ute flutist R. Carlos Nakai refers to this type of flute as “the block flute” (Nakai and DeMars 1996:  7). This ingenious device is the equivalent of the interior whistle sound mechanism of the European recorder. A plug is inserted inside a hollowed-out tube of wood near the mouth hole, with a hole on either side of the plug; the external block guides the air stream across the plug and into the longer vibrating tube with the

444   Paula J. Conlon

FIGURE  20.1  Bird effigy on external block. Flute maker:  Timothy Nevaquaya. Private collection of author. Photograph by author.

Slow air chamber (SAC) Sound Chamber Airflow Breath hole

Plug

FIGURE  20.2 External block sound mechanism. Diagram by Clint Goss. Used with permission.

finger holes. The block is also referred to as a “bird,” “rider,” “jigger,” or “saddle,” due to its shape. Because of the predominance of the flute and its origin stories in the Plains area, the Native flute authority Richard Payne calls this type of flute “the Plains flute” (1999) (see Figure 20.2). In the southern Plains area, flute players traditionally made their own flutes, fashioned after the bodily dimensions of the maker—the flute was the length of the man’s arm, the flute’s diameter was the size of his thumb, finger holes were a thumb width

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  445

apart, the external block was a hand’s span from the mouth hole end of the flute, and the first finger hole was a fist width down from the block. Origin stories describe the Plains flute as having five finger holes, and flutes with five finger holes continue to be considered as more traditional than flutes with six, the norm for contemporary flutes. The lowest tone on traditional flutes is frequently highlighted by an intense vibrato that is built into the flute and considered particularly desirable. The Sac and Fox-Comanche ethnomusicologist Edward Wapp refers to this warble as “the secret of good flute makers” (personal communication, August 19, 1982). Grace notes, usually of an octave or other large interval, often occur between repetitions of the “warbling” base tone in traditional flute songs. Ornamental devices also include glissandi (upward and downward slides), note bending, turns (upper and lower notes), trills, and a quick release at the ends of phrases. This quick release of the fingers results in a fast, rising pattern, sometimes referred to as “dog barks.” In the northern Plains, many Lakota (Sioux) flutes have the carving of a crane with open beak at the base end, harking back to the story of the first flute. Once a young Lakota man had proven his skill as a hunter, he could obtain permission to go to a flute maker, called an elk dreamer, to obtain a courtship flute. Along with the flute, the elk dreamer provided a flute song and a corresponding vocal love song, based on words spoken by the young woman he wished to court. Melodic fragments are frequently found at the end of northern Plains courtship songs, varying from one note to a short phrase. These coda-like motifs are generally high in pitch in imitation of a bird (produced by overblowing from the lower octave fingering), leading Locke to refer to these fragments as “bird calls” (personal communication, February 5, 1983). The ethnologist Willard Rhodes recorded the Lakota flutist John Coloff in the 1950s, including the flute and vocal renditions of a Lakota love song said to be “the original flute song.” The English translation of the vocal version is “I am coming in a round-about way. An important family I seek for myself. I have arrived, I have arrived” (Locke, personal communication, February 5, 1983). The performance style of traditional Lakota flute songs reflects the lack of ornamentation in the corresponding vocal love songs, and flute players made it a practice to learn the vocal counterpart before undertaking the flute rendition. Origin stories from the southern Plains underline the supernatural power of the love flute, such as the Kiowa flutist Belo Cozad’s story of a poor Kiowa boy who was given a flute and a flute song from a spirit and then became “well off, and got [a]‌good woman and raised children” (Payne 1999: 13). Cozad gave the right to make flutes to Woody Crumbo of the Potawatomie tribe, who believed the flute was essentially an instrument of love, advising that the bird carving on the external block should face away from the mouthpiece to send the flute music outward. To further enhance the flute’s power, four holes were sometimes carved at the base of it to send the sound to the four directions. To protect the flute’s power, women and children of the Potawatomie tribe were not permitted to handle or play it, for fear of breaking the love charm. The Comanche tribe also restricted the flute to male use, “to be put away after marriage for fear of breaking up the family” (Payne 1999: 22).

446   Paula J. Conlon

Native Flute Prerevival, 1880 to Late 1960s The ethnomusicologist Tamara Livingston points out that “if a tradition is perceived to be alive and well, there is no need to revive it” (1999: 67). By the mid-twentieth century, however, the Native flute had all the earmarks of a dying tradition. The original use of the flute by young adult Native males to court their prospective brides went underground in the 1880s when federal governments of the United States and Canada instigated laws to suppress Native ceremonies and cultural expression. These laws included edicts to send Native children to federal boarding schools, with the goal of assimilation into mainstream society by placing children in institutions where they were separated from their relatives and forced to reject Native culture, often from the time they were five or six years old until they were eighteen or even older. The Native experience in Oklahoma has a particularly complicated history. Tribes were removed from other parts of the United States to Indian Territory (present Oklahoma) from the 1830s through the 1870s. Allotment, the federal policy of dividing communally held tribal land into privately owned property (160 acres per Native adult) took effect in 1887. The 1889 Land Run, with the provision of “surplus acreage” to eager settlers, followed by the Curtis Act of 1898 that abolished tribal courts in Indian Territory, culminated in Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907. The ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin believes that the word “revival” in its literal sense—to bring back to life—is largely inapplicable to most musical situations because expressive culture does not really die; he thinks of it “more as a spiral, changing, but dipping back along the way” (1983: 37). For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native music and dance experienced instances of both non-Native appropriation and renewed Native interest in performative cultural expression. When the first generation of boarding school Native children forcibly admitted in the early 1880s graduated as young adults in the latter part of the 1890s, many chose to return to their reservations over being “assimilated,” sometimes, even often, integrating their Western music training with Native American practices they had not been privy to for many years. These “returned students” were accomplished musicians from years of disciplined training in military-style marching bands and music lessons at Indian boarding schools. The generation of Native children who had been forcibly sent to federal boarding schools for their entire formative years made good use of the intertribal powwow to reintegrate themselves into their home communities, and in effect spurred the Native music and dance renaissance of the early twentieth century (Troutman 2009: 39). The concentration of Native people onto small, confined areas of reservation land offered ethnologists rare access to Native cultures. The Smithsonian Institution employee Frances Densmore (1867–1957) was the most prolific, collecting thirty-five hundred songs, including vocal love songs and their Native flute counterparts, and transcribing twenty-five hundred of these songs for her many publications. Her ability to find singers reveals that many performative traditions banned by the federal Office of

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  447

Indian Affairs had persisted in the memories of Native people. The irony of the situation was not lost on the Native communities she visited, where singers asked why she, a government worker, was requesting them to perform songs associated with dances the federal government had forbidden since the 1880s (Troutman 2009: 159–160). Densmore’s reply that she was preserving their heritage for their children was complicated and conflicted by the fact that she was simultaneously involved in a plan to introduce her own version of their songs, in Western notation, to Native students at federal boarding schools and to the non-Native public. The non-Native public’s fascination with the “vanishing Indian” around the turn of the twentieth century was fueled in large measure by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows and World Fairs. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the Americas’ many nations and peoples were represented, was attended by twenty-eight million people, nearly half the population of the United States at that time. The Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) published an article in a New York newspaper after touring the Exhibition, encouraging American composers to look to their folk traditions to find their nation’s voice. Native people represented the closest relationship to the American landscape (Troutman 2009: 155), and by 1913 these classical composers, known as “Indianists,” had written hundreds of Western art music pieces based on Native themes (Pisani 2005:  184–185). Browner points out the paradoxical discourse inherent in Indianist music: “making songs accessible to the general public required changing them to fit into the Western musical system. Thus accessibility contributed to the degradation of authenticity, the very reason composers sought out Native songs in the first place” (1997: 279–280). President Theodore Roosevelt’s public endorsement of The Indians’ Book: Songs and Legends of the American Indians (1907), by the ethnologist Natalie Curtis, made a strong impression on Francis Leupp, commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1905 through 1909. In 1907, Leupp ushered in a new music curriculum for the federal Native boarding schools, based on Native music collected by ethnologists and works by Indianist composers, far removed from their context in indigenous systems of knowledge. As noted by Slobin, “in culture, context counts for more than half of meaning” (1983: 37), and Native families were outraged at the sanitized tribal music being taught to their children in boarding schools without their consent. Thurlow Lieurance (1878–1963), an Indianist composer who worked closely with the Office of Indian Affairs from the 1910s to the 1940s, based his compositions on Native music he had personally recorded from thirty-three tribes, along with collecting over forty Native flutes (Hensley 2002: 7). Many of Lieurance’s pieces based on Native music were derived from flute calls and flute songs he had collected, which affirms that there were Native flute players who still knew the old songs in the early twentieth century. At Bacone College in Muscogee, Oklahoma, a Native music component was added to the curriculum in 1932 when the Creek flutist A. C. Blue Eagle and the Potawatomie flutist Woody Crumbo, both of whom had been influenced by Kiowa flutist Belo Cozad, joined the faculty (Payne 2002a: 3). This gave Native students access to Native flute, taught by Native instructors, in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The

448   Paula J. Conlon

FIGURE  20.3 Doc Payne and his flute collection, 2000. Private home, Oklahoma  City. Photograph by author.

Comanche flutist and artist “Doc Tate” Nevaquaya (1932–1996) heard Native flute for the first time as a young child at the 1939 American Indian Exposition in Anadarko, Oklahoma, the year that Kiowa artist and flute player Stephen Mopope was a featured performer. Nevaquaya recalled that “the sound fascinated me. . . . I heard a lot of stories about flute music, but even long ago, very few Indian people played it” (1975: n.p.). A repository for Native flutes in Oklahoma in the mid-twentieth century came from Dr. Richard W. “Doc” Payne (1918–2004), a non-Native medical doctor born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Payne became interested in collecting Native flutes while still in high school, and he picked up his hobby again when he returned to Oklahoma on graduation from medical school in Boston; he had also studied classical Western flute at the Boston Conservatory. Payne taught at the University of Oklahoma’s medical school and practiced medicine in Oklahoma City, which enabled him to travel around Oklahoma collecting Native flutes and visiting with Native flute players and makers. He amassed a collection of over a thousand flutes over the course of his life. (Most of the Payne Native flute collection was sold individually at auction by his family after his death in 2004.) (See Figure 20.3.) The American student movement that began in direct connection with the civil rights movement in the early 1960s became a new kind of audience for folk music. Their interest was generated by the broader political and social movement, in which the criticism of a mass, technological culture was of central importance (Eyerman and Jamison 1998:  119). The 1960s also saw the founding of two Native-run civil rights organizations—the National Indian Youth Council (founded in 1961), and the American Indian

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  449

Movement (founded in 1968). Both groups used powwow singing and dancing around the drum to exhibit Native identity and pride. Thus, the period of decline and oppression of Native culture that began in the latter part of the nineteenth century was followed by non-Native collection and appropriation of Native music and, later, Native civil rights and pride movements, which spurred a renewed interest in Native music and set the stage for a Native flute revival.

The Native Flute Revival, Late 1960s to Late 1990s The ethnomusicologist Max Peter Baumann proposes two models to use as heuristic devices to help interpret revival music in the context of cultural-political movements, dividing performing musicians into two categories: “those who define folk music traditions within the concepts of purism (with a tendency towards stabilizing or even regressive preservation) and of syncretism (with a tendency towards reinventing the past by emancipatory creation to the point of breaking the local and regional frontiers)” (1996: 80). For example, the Native American flute revival began with the activities of artists perceived as being purists or preservationists and later developed in more syncretic, frontier-breaking directions. A critical juncture in the early stages of the Native flute revival was the chance meeting of Payne and Nevaquaya at the 1968 Anadarko Exposition. Payne noticed a flute player in one of Nevaquaya’s paintings, handed him a flute, and asked if he knew how to play. Payne was amazed at Nevaquaya’s playing, noting it was “just like it should be played, strong and masculine” (2002b), and the two men became lifelong friends. They were both firmly rooted in the purist revival model, which accounts for their mutual agreement about how the Native flute revival should progress. Nevaquaya also possessed the “charismatic leadership” element of the leader-follower relationship characteristic of revitalization movements (Wallace 1956: 273), later becoming the first Native musician to give a solo concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1990, and cofounding the American Indian Cultural Society in 1991 (Conlon 2007: n.p.). Livingston notes that performers and consumers alike were obsessed with a search for “authenticity” in the 1970s, in part stimulated by the increased availability of long-playing record albums (1999: 76). When Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya was released in 1979 by the Smithsonian Institution, Nevaquaya received an official stamp of “authenticity,” and he was named the 1986 National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA 1986: n.p.). The ethnomusicologist Jeff Titon muses that when he joined the Folk Arts Panel in 1981 (an appointed group that advises the NEA on which projects to fund), he was struck by an “overwhelming irony” (1993: 222). The panel had decided to consider only proposals from traditional folk artists, eliminating proposals from revivalists because they had

450   Paula J. Conlon not grown up inside a traditional family or community. But as he glanced around the panel, Titon saw mostly “lapsed revivalists” like himself (from the 1960s folk revival), voting to give money only to nonrevivalists. In the case of Native proposals, there is a further irony in that the proof of being a traditional folk artist is having your name on a tribal roll created by the federal government that outlawed your performative traditions a century before. Slobin has observed that in most cases of both preservation and change, a small number of key individuals set the pace and/or serve as source for an entire community, and this kernel group is often comprised of an activist, a researcher, and a pragmatic practitioner (1983: 39). The release of Nevaquaya’s 1979 album was due to the foresight of the ethnologist Verna Gillis, who recorded Nevaquaya in 1978 in Oklahoma and presented the tape to Moses Asch, founder and director of Folkways Records. An added bonus is the inclusion of Nevaquaya’s verbal introductions to each song, a discussion about the intricacies of Native flute playing, a demonstration of the characteristic warble on the flute’s lowest pitch, and four pages of liner notes that contain a diagram of the external block sound mechanism (Gillis 1979: n.p.). Earlier in the 1970s, the Comanche singer K. D. Edwards had recorded Nevaquaya and privately released the tape Indian Flute Songs from Comanche Land (1976), and the Kiowa-Comanche flutist Tom Mauchahty Ware’s Flute Songs of the Kiowa and Comanche (1978) was released by Indian House Records. Although these earlier recordings were not widely distributed, they provide confirmation of the presence of the traditional style of Native flute playing in Oklahoma advocated by Nevaquaya in his 1979 album. (For an analysis of these albums, along with ethnologists’ field recordings, see Conlon 1983.) Along with recordings in the 1970s, the Native flute was increasingly used as live entertainment in the form of workshops and concerts at both impromptu and more formal venues. Nevaquaya played his flute at his art booth at events such as the annual Anadarko Exposition, and soon he was being asked to perform Native flute concerts and lecture/demonstrations. In 1970, the Smithsonian Institution commissioned him to perform flute on a Goodwill Tour of England and at the 1973 National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C., and he gave flute workshops at local and national venues, including Brigham Young University (1972) and Georgetown University (1974). He also played Native flute on numerous television appearances in both the United States and England. Oklahoma was not the only state with a budding Native flute revival in the 1970s. Lakota flutist Kevin Locke, born in 1954 and raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, learned the Lakota flute and vocal love song tradition from the Lakota elder John Coloff. In the late 1970s, Locke decided to devote himself to reviving and diffusing appreciation of the Lakota/Dakota flute tradition, stating that he saw himself “strictly as a preservationist” and basing his repertoire on the old songs (NEA 1990: n.p.). Locke released his first solo flute album, Lakota Wiikijo Olowan—Lakota Love Songs and Stories, in 1982 and followed in Nevaquaya’s footsteps as the 1990 National Heritage Fellow. Baumann outlines the typical process for the syncretism model of music revivals, starting with simple arrangements and then crossing one borderline after another

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  451

(1996: 82). The “closeness” to the original source is dominant at the beginning, but the creative and individual aspects become increasingly dominant later on. Navajo-Ute flutist R. Carlos Nakai’s career is a perfect example—he has released over thirty-five Native flute albums, most as collaborative efforts with an array of outside influences, with over four million copies distributed worldwide. Born in 1946 on the Navajo reservation near Flagstaff, Arizona, Nakai began playing classical Western trumpet at school in the seventh grade, going on to study trumpet and jazz at Northern Arizona University. When he was gifted a traditional Plains cedar flute in 1972, at the height of the American Indian Movement’s political activism era, Nakai decided the best way for him to support the Movement’s fight for Native rights and recognition was through his music. He sees his role as a performer of the traditional flute “not to reiterate the traditional sounds but to find new avenues of expression for the cultures of native peoples” (Nakai and DeMars 1996: 120). Nakai’s early albums stay relatively close to the traditional solo Native flute style advocated by Nevaquaya, whose 1979 album Nakai had in his possession. The tracks on his 1983 solo flute album, Changes, have titles such as “Whippoorwill,” with imitation of birdcalls, pitch bending, trills, tremolos, and quick releases at the ends of phrases. Nakai’s 1989 album, Canyon Trilogy, also for solo flute, became the first Gold Record issued for a recording of Native music, with five hundred thousand units sold in the United States alone. Livingston notes that the popular culture component of revivals frequently creates tension in a revival movement, which may result in breaking it up into conservative and “progressive” wings (1999: 80). This split occurred in the Native flute world of the mid-1980s, when Nakai decided to pick up on his jazz roots from his college days with a group he called Jackalope, whose first album, also called Jackalope, was released in 1986. The conservative wing of the Native flute revival, including Wapp and myself, lined up behind Locke and Nevaquaya; Nakai simultaneously developed a following among the progressive wing, many of whom were Native and non-Native jazz aficionados. In a discussion of old instruments in new contexts, the ethnomusicologist Karl Neuenfeldt notes that part of the instruments’ appeal is their “cultural baggage in the form of notions of authenticity and simplicity of manufacture” (1998: 6), and the distinctiveness of the traditional Native flute’s external block sound mechanism has been left largely intact in contemporary Native flutes. Neuenfeldt goes on to note that another part of the old instruments’ appeal is how their authenticity and simplicity of manufacture is electronically integrated or synthesized (1998: 6). Nakai explains his use of a digital processing unit onstage as a means to simulate the echo effect of the Arizona canyons on the Navajo reservation where he grew up, saying, “my music speaks my life in Dinetah [Navajo for ‘the people’s home’]” (1997: n.p.). Nakai collaborated with jazz flutist Paul Horn on two albums, Inside Canyon de Chelly (1997) and Inside Monument Valley (1999). There is an incongruity, though, with what is left unsaid—there are no echoing canyons in the Plains area where the traditional Native flute originated, and Nakai did not grow up with the Native flute tradition.

452   Paula J. Conlon Given Nakai’s receptiveness to influences from non-Native cultures in his own music, it is not surprising to find him at the forefront of opening up the Native flute world to non-Native participants. In 1987, Nakai cofounded the International Native American and World Flute Association, whose goal is the advancement, appreciation, preservation, and understanding of the Native flute, as well as other world flute traditions. The formation of the Association stimulated the formation of regional Native flute circles in various pockets of the United States, made up primarily but not entirely of non-Native flute players. In 1992, Nakai cofounded the “Renaissance of the Native American Flute,” an annual weeklong summer retreat near Helena, Montana. Relatively inexpensive plastic flutes, built by non-Native flute maker and cofounder Ken Light, made the Native flute accessible to anyone who wanted to learn. In 1996, Nakai coauthored The Art of the Native American Flute with classical composer James DeMars. McAllester contributed a chapter as well: “The Question of Authenticity,” in which he bemoans the stereotype of the “authentic” (prereservation) Native American, asserting that Nakai’s willingness to mingle his creative output with elements of other music is itself very “Indian” (1996: 112). As the 1990s progressed, revival ideology and discourse focused more and more on improvisation techniques adapted for the Native flute. The ethnologist Owe Ronström describes a similar stress on improvisation in European folk revivals in the 1970s: whereas before, “authentic” had referred to the material itself, it could now also refer to how the material was treated, not to reproduce but to produce anew (1998: 5–6). Nakai’s workshops encouraged improvisation as a means to develop personal artistic expression, and participants shared their own improvisation ideas when they gathered at the growing number of Native flute workshops, circles, and annual meetings taking place in the 1990s across the country. By the close of the decade, players and makers of the Native flute were from all walks of life—male and female, Native and non-Native, young and old, rock musicians and university professors. Attitudes toward gender, from restriction to male players to permission and recognition of female flutists, are another aspect of revival ideology and practice that shifted during this period. Neuenfeldt discusses the Australian myth of blanket restrictions on women playing or sometimes even touching or hearing the didjeridu (2006: 37). I have heard similar statements about the Native flute, but not from Native consultants, who are careful to speak only on behalf of their own tribe’s traditions. I think Nevaquaya’s statements about the Comanche tribe’s restriction of the Native flute for male use, combined with his pervasive influence during the early days of the Native flute revival, is largely responsible for blanket statements about Native women being prohibited to play, touch, or even look at a Native flute. Conversely, around 1968, a Lakota woman played the Native flute as her talent for the Miss Indian America contest (Wapp, personal communication, August 19, 1982). The Chugach Aleut-Seminole flutist Mary Youngblood, born in Seattle in 1958, was adopted into a white, middle-class family at seven months of age, an unwitting participant in the Indian Adoption Project, the federal assimilationist program enacted in the late 1950s. (Canada had a comparable program.) Raised as Mary Edwards, Youngblood was immersed in Western classical music growing up, taking piano, violin, flute, and

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  453

guitar lessons. She decided to switch to her biological father’s surname after meeting her birth mother in 1980, and she began playing Native flute in the early 1990s after finding a Native Plains flute at a local pawnshop. Youngblood went on to become the first woman honored at the Native American Music Awards, as 1999 Flutist of the Year for The Offering (1998), her debut solo Native flute album, which was comprised of her own compositions.

Native Flute Postrevival, 2000 to the Present (2014) Livingston suggests that when there is no longer an overriding concern for authenticity, and “tradition” is felt to be too constricting a reference point, revivals may stimulate new styles and cease to exist as a revivalist genre, although revivalist strains, differentiated by use of the term “traditional,” may nonetheless exist alongside the new styles that have been generated by, or merged with, the revivalist genre (1999: 80–81). This was indeed the case in the arena of the Native flute world at the millennium. As the twentieth century drew to a close, one indicator that change was imminent was the launching of the Native American Music Awards in 1998, followed in 2000 by the formation of a Native music category for the Grammy Awards. These awards favored innovation and individuality/originality, reflecting the artistic climate of the time, which included significant departures from traditional playing by both Native and non-Native artists and an expectation of a high degree of professionalization and commercialization. A look at the activity of three of the major Native flute players active in the early 2000s—Nakai, Youngblood, and Locke—confirms the Native flute’s arrival at the “postrevival” stage in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nakai’s propensity to collaborate with musicians from a wide variety of cultures earned him high praise and phenomenal record sales. Youngblood’s acceptance as a female performing artist on an instrument formerly forbidden to women was a public disregard for traditional restrictions. Locke, initially focused solely on the preservation of the Lakota flute tradition, had broadened his scope to collaborate with traditional instruments from other cultures. It is interesting to compare the award track records of these artists. Nakai received eight Grammy nominations for his collaborative albums. Youngblood received three Native American Music Awards: Flutist of the Year in both 1999 and 2000 and Best Female Artist in 2000. She was the first Native woman to receive a Grammy Award for Best Native American Music Album and the first Native person to win two Grammy Awards, in 2002 and 2006. Locke received accolades in the first decade of the twenty-first century from both ends of the Native awards spectrum. In 2000, the album The First Flute garnered Locke the Native American Music Award for Best Traditional Album, and his 2008 release, Earth Gift, was awarded 2009 Record of the Year. Earth

454   Paula J. Conlon Gift is a new departure for Locke, combining Native flute with “old” instruments from a variety of cultures. As indicated by the Native flute’s journeys in the Native awards labyrinth, by 2010 the postrevival stage of the Native flute had been up and running for an entire decade. The ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman suggests using a musical creativity continuum to study the performance practices of folk musicians in the modern world (1988: 78–80), which provides a useful framework to assess performing artists’ contributions to the Native flute revival. At one end of the continuum is regulated creativity (faithful reproduction); beside this category is discriminatory creativity (limits repertory or performance aspects); followed by rationalized creativity (adapts to external values and contexts); then integrative creativity (repertories and styles are altered in ways consistent with the expectations of diverse audiences); and at the opposite polarity is ubiquitous creativity (willful departure from traditional constraints, with tradition serving as a reference for variation and change). The folk musician’s challenge is to maintain the balance between individual creativity and a society’s expectation of adherence to tradition. A look back at the original liner notes from Nevaquaya’s seminal album of solo Native flute music in 1979 provides a window of reflection regarding changing attitudes on allowable parameters around the “authenticity” label. Gillis’s four pages of liner notes contain a diagram of the Native flute’s sound mechanism, some information about Nevaquaya’s name and where he grew up, and details about the recording session (1979: n.p.). When Nevaquaya was designated 1986 National Heritage Fellow, he was presented as a purist and traditionalist who was a leader in the revival of the Native flute tradition, and his 1979 album was credited with bringing the flute tradition to wider public attention (NEA 1986: n.p.). When Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya was rereleased as a CD in 2004, the expanded liner notes (eighteen pages) had a very different tone. The notes begin with introductory notes by Nakai, describing the impact Nevaquaya’s 1979 album made on him, and Gillis’s original notes are included at the end of the booklet (2004: 14–15). Wapp’s portion of the liner notes describe how Nevaquaya introduced new playing techniques for the Native flute when the album was first released in 1979, including experimenting with crossfingerings to extend the flute’s range, developing ornamentation to embellish the melodic line, and extending the warbling sound on the lowest tone to all the available pitches (2004: 4–13). Wapp notes that these innovations resulted in the expansion of the Native flute’s repertoire to include renditions of such varied singing styles as powwow songs, traditional vocal songs, and Christian hymns, as well as original instrumental compositions. Nevaquaya’s explorations as a creative artist in the 1970s are freely acknowledged in the postrevival era of the 2000s, lending credence to the temporal dimension of the traditional-syncretic spectrum of the Native flute’s journey. In fact, the 2004 liner notes themselves reflect a move away from the Native flute’s revival stage, when the authenticity police are no longer out in force. Nevaquaya’s innovations meet Bohlman’s criteria for rationalized creativity, adapting the traditional Native flute’s private courtship repertoire to its new context as a public

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  455

expression of Native identity, where the musician functions as a mediator. Nevaquaya developed two new compositional styles in the 1970s, one he called his “modern courting song style” and the other a creative mode through which an individual musician could improvise while still remaining within the aesthetic parameters of Plains Indian musical forms (NEA 1986: n.p.). The view of Nevaquaya as a bridge to the “old school” is well supported and documented. Browner designates Contemporary Native music as “post-European contact, including post-Nevaquaya flute” (personal communication, December 19, 2010); Nakai describes Nevaquaya as “a link from the Old Culture to the new generations” (2004: 2); and Wapp refers to Nevaquaya as “a traditionalist, [who] gave concerts of solo flute music only” (2004: 11). Nakai’s multicultural contributions mostly land in the integrative creativity category, with his inclination to alter repertories and styles multiple times in multiple ways to satisfy his far-flung audiences watching to see what he would come up with next. So while Nevaquaya and Nakai are often contrasted as coming from different ends of the spectrum, their approaches can be viewed as not so very far apart after all. Right next door to each other on the musical creativity continuum, this would explain why Nakai referred to Nevaquaya as “a bridge to the Old Culture” (2004: 2). On the other hand, albums such as Nakai’s willfully different Kokopelli’s Café (1996), for jazz combo, could arguably belong in ubiquitous creativity at the far end of the “progressive” wing. Deliberately unpredictable throughout his career, Nakai rarely released more than a couple of recordings with the same combination of instruments before moving on. It is interesting that his recent solo Native flute album Sanctuary (2003) hearkens back to his very early solo albums, Changes (1982) and Canyon Trilogy (1989). All three of these recordings could keep Nevaquaya’s 1979 solo Native flute album company in the rationalized creativity area of the continuum. Most of Locke’s albums, certainly his earlier ones, fit with either discriminatory creativity, close to the conservative, purist end of the spectrum, or rationalized creativity, one step over in the continuum. His most recent album, Earth Gift (2008), is somewhat of an enigma—a collaborative effort with “old” instruments from non-Native cultures, this recording offers an unusual variant of “progressive” syncretic music. Meanwhile, Youngblood’s albums could all be viewed as belonging in the ubiquitous creativity region at the furthest edge of the “progressive” wing, willfully departing from perceived traditional constraints on Native women and introducing dual-chambered flutes that are distinctly nontraditional (though retaining the external block). Then again, one could argue that the majority of her compositions belong in the integrative creativity area. After all, “Youngblood is regarded as the female [R.] Carlos Nakai” (Wright-McLeod 2005: 278). Finally, there are researchers like myself, who live tucked up in the regulated creativity box at the furthest tip of the conservative wing, faithfully playing transcriptions of traditional Native flute songs. Or so I thought, until I participated in Nakai’s retreat in 2000, ostensibly as research for my upcoming article about his work (2002). There, I discovered the illicit pleasures of improvisation, using the ever-friendly five-note scales on

456   Paula J. Conlon contemporary Native flutes, and leapt over to the ubiquitous creativity box to celebrate with my new-found “flute family.” When I arrived to Oklahoma in the mid-1990s, I had the good fortune to meet “Doc” Payne, and we became close friends until his passing in 2004. Along with sharing information about the Native flute’s history and his time with Nevaquaya, Payne would invite me to come up to his “flute house” whenever anyone dropped by he thought I should meet. We also traveled around Oklahoma visiting Native flutists and their families, including Charlotte Nevaquaya, Doc Tate’s widow, and sons Edmond, Timothy, and Calvert, all Native flutists and artists in their own right. In 2001, the anthropologist Laurent Aubert stated that the coexistence of traditional world music and modern world music remains problematic; the first affirms the spiritual identity of established collectives, while the second extols the fusion of genres and integration at all costs. He goes on to say that “these two positions are antinomic in essence and any attempt to reconcile them highlights their fundamental antipathy” (2007: 56). I would like to offer a more hopeful view of this scenario, at least from where I am situated in “Indian Territory” in 2014. In 1999, Payne published his book The Native American Plains Flute, which provides a wealth of information about Native flutists in the mid-twentieth century, and he served as principal adviser for the video Songkeepers the same year (reissued as a DVD in 2010). Songkeepers looks at the careers of Nakai, Locke, Nevaquaya (Doc Tate and his eldest son Sonny), Ware, and the Cherokee flutist Hawk Littlejohn (1941–2000). When Payne and I went to Littlejohn’s funeral in North Carolina in 2000, the “flute family” I had met at Nakai’s workshop earlier that year discovered a treasure. Payne’s flute house soon received a new wave of out-of-state visitors, and he was adopted as mentor by an entire contingent of new followers. Flute makers came along as well, and Payne’s workshop was a going concern again, with eager helpers making flutes with the famous “warble” on the lowest tone. In 2003, I  presented a talk on Doc Tate Nevaquaya at the annual meeting of the International Native American Flute Association in Taos, New Mexico. Payne went with me, and Wapp drove up from Santa Fe with K. D. Edwards, both of whom knew Nevaquaya growing up in Apache, Oklahoma. What started as an academic talk soon turned into an informal panel discussion about the life and times of Nevaquaya and the Native flute. As a result, yet another contingent of new followers was making the trek to Oklahoma City to Payne’s flute house, and I was now driving up to help host his visitors. By the time of his passing in 2004, Payne’s one-thousand-plus flutes had been photographed and recorded, a CD of Payne playing Native flute had been made, and a video of Payne and his flute collection produced (called Toubat, the Kiowa word for “flute” that had been given to Payne), recently reissued in an expanded format on DVD. A wealth of information on the traditional Native flute is now readily available. (See the companion website for webography on the Native American flute: 20.Conlon.webography  .) Jacobson House Native Art Center (Norman, Oklahoma) hosted a minicourse in Native flute in 2002, cotaught by Payne, Edmond Nevaquaya, the Kiowa flutist Terry Tsotigh, and myself. When the four classes were over, the participants wanted to

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  457

continue meeting, and Oklahoma’s first Native flute circle was formed. For a couple of hours once a month, chairs are placed facing inward in a large circle, and each person in turn shares a story, a flute song, or a personal anecdote or says “pass” for that month. There is no prescribed formula for how a flute circle should function; sometimes there is a “special guest,” perhaps a Native maker or flute player, but this does not replace going around the circle for all persons to share their music as they wish. The Oklahoma Native American Flute Circle has continued to meet on the first Fridays of each month for the past twelve years, with an open door policy for anyone who wants to drop by (see Figure 20.4). In the fall of 2009, the circle cofounded a two-day Native flute festival at Medicine Park in southwestern Oklahoma with the Medicine Park town council, which has since become an annual event. The setting is idyllic, with vendors along the roadway and “open mic” sessions on the island stage during the day combined with evening concerts by invited artists. Sonny, Timothy, and Calvert Nevaquaya shared the headliner spotlight at the inaugural festival in 2009, and Tom Mauchahty-Ware was the featured artist at the 2011 festival. At first glance, it seems that the contemporary Native flute is now so far removed from its roots that it has become a new entity, but a closer look reveals that many of the innovations have not fallen nearly so far from the tree as they first appear. The six-holed flute, considered by absolute purists inferior to the “more traditional” five-holed version, is used for the most part to play songs based on a five-tone scale. One five-tone scale keeps the third finger hole covered at all times; the other five-tone scale keeps the fourth hole covered at all times. So the six-holed flute can be explained as a means to house two five-tone scales in one instrument. When woodworking tools became readily available, Native flutes could be made in almost any size, with whatever wood the maker wished to use. Pear and other fruit trees, maple, mahogany, even ebony flutes appeared on the scene, depending on the timbre and volume desired by the player. A variety of woods and different sizes of Native flutes are available on the current market, making finding a flute that fits one’s hands and temperament a relatively easy task. Nevertheless, the “F-sharp” flute is still the standard, closest to the size of the traditional Native flute, determined by the length of the man’s arm. (“F-sharp” flute indicates that F-sharp is the lowest available pitch, with all the finger holes covered; it has no relationship to a Western key signature.) Cedar, with the soft, sweet sound referenced in the origin stories of the love flute, remains the most popular choice of wood, especially for flutes used for personal enjoyment and informal small gatherings. Many a romance has sprung out of this extended contact with people who share a common interest, such as the courtship of a couple who met at a Nakai workshop and returned year after year. Wanting to be married surrounded by the flutes that had brought them together, they arranged for a private ceremony at Payne’s flute house in Oklahoma City. Just as the construction of the contemporary Native flute is only superficially different from that of its predecessor, so the topic of flute songs remains tied to courtship and images of love. Youngblood’s flute songs “Children’s Dance” and “Grandmother’s Last Sunset” (from her 1998 album The Offering), Nakai’s 2003 album Sanctuary, and

458   Paula J. Conlon

FIGURE  20.4 Oklahoma Native American Flute Circle, 2002. Jacobson House Native Art Center, Norman, Oklahoma; left to right:  Rodger Brown, Bill Dengler, Leon Murdock (Kickapoo tribe), Jim Klumpp, Deborah  Kay. Photograph by author.

Nevaquaya’s “Edmond Wayne Song” (for his son) and flute rendition of the hymn “Jesus, I Always Want to be Near to You” (from his 1979 album Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya, reissued in 2004) exemplify contemporary flute renditions of various forms of love. As for the wide distribution of contemporary Native flutes across cultures, even across continents, the traditional Native flute also traveled extensively, moving across North America from coast to coast and from north to south. Alongside its portability was the flute’s ease of playing. The traditional five-tone scale, where everything sounds good, meant a young Native male did not need to be an accomplished musician to create a flute love song for his intended that would be pleasing to listen to. Similarly, a big selling point for contemporary Native flutes, which have maintained the five-tone scale, is that one need not be a trained artist to create enchanting melodies on them. Furthermore, Western-trained musicians are delighted with the ease with which one can improvise on the Native flute—how satisfying it is to create endless melodies without ever having to concern oneself with being “in tune” or “on the beat.” Diamond notes that “there are few people on earth who have been mythologized as much as Native Americans” (2008: 1). It is no coincidence that the emergence of the Native flute revival was simultaneous with the formation of the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s, with Native activists and their allies fighting against the “vanishing Indian” status assigned to them at the turn of the twentieth century.

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  459

There is a conundrum, though, in determining what the essential elements of Native America’s heritage actually are. Where is the borderline between “old” traditional music and contemporary syncretic music, which arguably dates back to the “discovery” of the Americas in 1492? In April 2011, the Grammy Awards announced they were eliminating thirty-one categories, combining a number of genres in folk and world music, in part due to challenges in distinguishing between traditional and contemporary entries. Native American, Hawaiian, Cajun/Zydeco, and Polka music were incorporated into a Regional Roots Music category, somewhat analogous to the “flavors” of a Zumba class. The Native community has expressed its dismay and disappointment over the demise of the Grammy’s Best Native American Music Album category, but initially to no avail. At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Native flute finds itself again at a crossroads—one way maintains or restores a link with tradition, the other lays it aside and moves on. A decision to link with tradition is not without potential conflict. Concerns over claims of cultural appropriation, brought into the limelight by the 2003 report of the World International Property Organization regarding who has the right to record traditional music, generates a multitude of queries as offshoots. Does this imply that non-Native flute players have been inappropriately or unethically appropriating the Native flute tradition? Are issues of authenticity or purism regarding non-Native performers the same as or different from those regarding Native players? How are non-Native players received by the Native community? How are the motivations to play or the symbolic meaning of the Native flute different for Native versus non-Native players? There are no easy answers to these potential hot spots and no one-size-fits-all solution to alleviate concerns about cultural appropriation. There have been non-Native flute players who have postured as being Indian, adopted Indian-sounding names, and promoted their own music as “Native American flute” on the internet. This is one reason I am always grateful to have a Native or non-Native person who is known and respected by the community speak for me when I am first introduced to Native artists and/or their family members. Approaching issues of authenticity or purism is an individual decision for non-Native performers that may well change over time, similar to Native artists who choose to broaden their performance practice to include influences which might well have been labeled inauthentic a decade before. The same option is available to researchers. When I first came to Oklahoma, I not only preferred what I considered to be traditional music (i.e. Doc Tate Nevaquaya), I steadfastly avoided teaching anything else, justifying my decision with the reasoning that there wasn’t enough time to do otherwise in a one-semester survey course on Native American music. By 2006, a decade after my arrival, I had updated my reading pack to include “postcontact” music. The impetus to change grew out of discussions with many artists, including Nakai, Locke, Youngblood, Wapp, Tsotigh, and Nevaquaya’s sons—Sonny, Edmond, Timothy, and Calvert. I realized I was guilty not only of living in the “ethnographic present,” I was not giving my students the opportunity to decide for themselves what Native American music is all about. Subsequently, in the fall of 2011, I taught a class on Native flute based

460   Paula J. Conlon primarily on experiential learning and was rewarded with heartfelt thanks from a cadre of Western-trained graduate music students who, just as I had done, discovered the joy and empowerment of creating their own music on the Native flute. This brings us to the question of how non-Native performers are received by the Native community. My personal experience is that over time my abilities as a flute player and researcher have been acknowledged, but this acceptance is not a given and has to be earned. I have been invited to give talks at a variety of Native gatherings, including the American Indian Cultural Society that Nevaquaya cofounded in 1991, and the Seminole Nation Senior Citizens’ group at the tribal complex in Wewoka, Oklahoma (to help start up a local flute circle). Sonny Nevaquaya invited me to join him as a presenter at his annual Native flute retreat in Florida in 2013. The motivation to play Native flute and the symbolic meaning of the Native flute appears to differ between Native artists who have the Native flute in their own tribal heritage and those who do not. This does not mean these performing artists are restricted to their tribal songs, but I have observed that their personal heritage serves as a point of reference for their public persona. For instance, Locke self-identifies as Lakota, and his focus on sharing the Lakota version of the origin story of the Native flute reflects his heritage. The Kiowa flutist Tsotigh tells the Kiowa story of the first flute, and Comanche flutists Nevaquaya and his sons focus on the Comanche version. Accounts of the symbolic meaning of the Native flute vary from tribe to tribe, player to player, and maker to maker. Attributing the sources of the material you share is important, and you can expect questions if you don’t include this information, especially if what you relate is different from what your listeners (both Native and non-Native) have learned from other sources about the symbolic meaning of the flute. Perhaps the only question one can realistically address at this juncture is that of how non-Native involvement has affected the revival and/or postrevival stages of the Native flute tradition. When I  arrived in “Indian Territory,” I  found myself teaching Native students who made comments such as “That’s not how my tribe does it [dance format, etc.].” When I gave a lecture/demonstration for the neighboring community, a gentleman said, “You know, a Native woman would never touch a flute.” There are different ways to react to perceived criticism—close down and/or run away, or realize what a gold mine of information is before you. I invited the Native students taking my class to share information about their tribal ways with their classmates as we progressed through the course, and I was invited as their guest to their tribes’ gatherings that included music and dance. The end result of the “taboo on female flute players” comment was that the gentleman carved me half a flute (split down the middle) to show my classes how the external block sound mechanism of the Native flute worked, he invited me to play Native flute with him at his daughter’s wedding, and he gifted me a Native flute and painting to thank me for playing. I would like to think that my and others’ respectful non-Native involvement in the revival and postrevival stages of the Native flute have assisted the flute’s rejuvenation and will continue to ensure the maintenance of the tradition, in all its guises, for years to come. With mentors such as Payne providing a model of “suitable behavior” for

FIGURE  20.5 Five Native flutists from Oklahoma, 2012. Ruggles Native American Music Series, School of Music, University of Oklahoma, Norman, February 22,  2012. Flyer codesigned by author.

462   Paula J. Conlon non-Natives in the Native flute world, issues of cultural appropriation are largely inapplicable. Although there is no one sure plan to preserve and develop cultural heritage, especially when starting off as an outsider, I suggest that the following format has a better-than-average chance to succeed. When I participated in the International Council for Traditional Music colloquium “Indigenous Music and Dance as Cultural Property:  Global Perspectives” (Toronto, 2008), I found that the most convincing proposals involved active interaction between Native consultants and outside researchers. The anthropology professor Michael Brown has recommended that we stop waiting around for lawmakers to come up with a comprehensive vision for “Total Heritage Protection” (2003:  252). Instead, he advocates consulting with indigenous elders, museum curators, archivists, and cultural-resource managers, who have many years of experience negotiating their way to more balanced relationships, with the understanding that progress will be built on small victories, innovative local solutions, and frequent compromise. As trust is built by following these guidelines, I believe it is possible for traditional American Indian flute and contemporary Native American flute to negotiate a means to effectively cohabitate. For example, the International Native American and World Flute Association has the Native flutists Nakai, Locke, and Sonny Nevaquaya on its advisory board and in 2011 released the CD Preserving the Heritage . . . Insights and Songs from Kevin Locke. Both traditional and contemporary Native flute repertoire was showcased in the spring of 2012 at a historic concert in the newly formed Ruggles Native American Music Series at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Music in Norman. The previous fall, Tsotigh had approached me about cohosting an event, saying he wanted to let people know about some talented Native American flute players in Oklahoma who are still practicing their cultural ways, including the flute (personal communication, October 5, 2011). I leapt at the chance to work with him on this project, which culminated in a concert featuring the Oklahoma flutists Terry Tsotigh (Kiowa), Tom Mauchahty Ware (Kiowa-Comanche), Timothy Nevaquaya (Comanche), Calvert Nevaquaya (Comanche), and Tommy Wildcat (Cherokee). Sonny Nevaquaya (home for a family funeral) made an impromptu appearance as well, playing a Native flute rendition of a memorial song titled “Vietnam, Why Did You Take My Only Son?” (see Figure 20.5 and web Figure 20.1  ). The 2012 Native flute concert at the University of Oklahoma is an example of how Slobin’s kernel group of activist, researcher, and pragmatic practitioner (1983: 39) is a viable model to help ensure the Native flute’s preservation and development. With Native and non-Native advocates, collectors, makers, and players sitting side by side, pooling their ideas and resources, sharing a love for and dedication to the Native flute, the tradition will neither bend nor break. Cognizant and mindful of intellectual property rights for intangible cultural heritage, the Native flute tradition can and will continue to prosper and flourish in the twenty-first century, providing a welcome respite from the busyness and stress of the modern world.

Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?  463

References Aubert, Laurent. 2007. The Music of the Other: New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global Age. Trans. Carla Ribeiro. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. Original publication in French, 2001. Baumann, Max Peter. 1996. “Folk Music Revival:  Concepts between Regression and Emancipation.” World of Music 38 (3): 71–86. Bohlman, Philip V. 1988. The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brown, Michael F. 2003. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Browner, Tara. 1997. “‘Breathing the Indian Spirit’: Thoughts on Musical Borrowing and the ‘Indianist’ Movement in American Music.” American Music 15 (3): 265–284. Conlon, Paula. 1983. “The Flute of the Canadian Amerindian: A Study of the Vertical Whistle Flute with External Block and Its Music.” Master’s thesis, Carleton University, Ottawa. ——. 2002. “The Native American Flute: Convergence and Collaboration as Exemplified by R. Carlos Nakai.” World of Music 44 (1): 61–74. Reissued in The World of Music—Readings in Ethnomusicology, Max Peter Baumann, ed., 118–133. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2012. ——. 2007. “Nevaquaya, Joyce Lee ‘Doc’ Tate (1932–1996).” In Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia, accessed February 19, 2014. Reprinted in Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, vol. 2, Dianna Everett, ed., 1014. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 2009. Curtis, Natalie. 1907. The Indians’ Book:  Songs and Legends of the American Indians. New York: Dover. Diamond, Beverley. 2008. Native American Music in Eastern North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. 1998. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Gillis, Verna. 1979. “Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya.” In Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya.FE 4328. Washington, D.C.: Folkways. Reprint: “Original Notes by Verna Gillis.” In Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya, 14–15. SFW CD 50403. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2004. Hensley, Betty Austin. 2002. Thurlow Lieurance Indian Flutes. 2nd ed. Vida, Ore.: Oregon Flute Store. Original study 1979. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. McAllester, David P. 1980. “North American Native Music.” In Musics of Many Cultures: An Introduction, Elizabeth May, ed., 307–331. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 1996. “The Question of Authenticity.” In R. Carlos Nakai and James DeMars, with David P. McAllester and Ken Light, The Art of the Native American Flute, 109–116. Phoenix: Canyon Records. Nakai, R. Carlos. 1997. “Tsegi  – Within the Rocks.” In Inside Canyon de Chelly. CR-7019. Phoenix: Canyon Records. ——. 2004. “Introduction [to] Doc Tate Nevaquaya.” In Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya, 1–3. SFW CD 50403. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. ——, and James DeMars, with David P. McAllester and Ken Light. 1996. The Art of the Native American Flute. Phoenix: Canyon Records.

464   Paula J. Conlon NEA Heritage Fellows. 1982–2010 [1986]. “1986 NEA National Heritage Fellow Joyce Doc Tate Nevaquaya, Apache, OK, Comanche Flutist.” http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/ joyce-doc-tate-nevaquaya, accessed February 19, 2014. ——. 1982–2010 [1990]. “1990 NEA National Heritage Fellow Kevin Locke, Mobridge, SD, Lakota Flute Player/Singer/Dancer.”http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/kevinlocke, accessed February 19, 2014. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 1998. “Notes on Old Instruments in New Contexts.” World of Music 40 (2): 5–8. ——. 2006. “The Ongoing Debate about Women Playing Didjeridu: How a Musical Icon Can Become an Instrument of Remembering and Forgetting.” Australian Aboriginal Studies 1: 36–43. Nevaquaya, Doc Tate. 1975. Doc Tate Nevaquaya: Interview No. 1. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society. Payne, Richard W. 1999. The Native American Plains Flute. Vida, Ore.: Oregon Flute Store. —— 2002a. Introduction to Betty Austin Hensley, Thurlow Lieurance Indian Flutes. 2nd ed. Vida, Ore.: Oregon Flute Store. Original study 1979. —— 2002b. Qtd. In Doc Tate Nevaquaya:  Portrait of an Oklahoma Treasure. University of Oklahoma Center for Music Television. Pisani, Michael V. 2005. Imagining Native America in Music. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ronström, Owe. 1998. “Revival in Retrospect. The folk music and dance revival.” European Centre for Traditional Culture 4: 1–9. Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New  York Folklore 9: 37–44. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1993. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” In Transforming Traditions: Folk Music Revivals Examined, Neil V. Rosenberg, ed., 220–240. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Troutman, John W. 2009. Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–281. Wapp, Edward. 2004. “Doc Tate Nevaquaya and the Native American Flute.” In Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya, 4–13. SFW CD 50403. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Wright-McLeod, Brian. 2005. “Youngblood, Mary.” In The Encyclopedia of Native Music: More Than a Century of Recordings from Wax Cylinder to the Internet, 278–279. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Discs Cited Locke, Kevin. 1982. Lakota Love Songs and Stories. Featherstone Records FS 4001-C. ——. 1999. The First Flute. Makoché Music/BMI. ——. 2008. Earth Gift. CDBY. ——. 2011. Preserving the Heritage . . . Insights and Songs from Kevin Locke. INAFA Productions. Nakai, R. Carlos. 1982. Changes. Canyon Records CR-615. ——. 1986. Jackalope. Canyon Records CR-7001. ——. 1989. Canyon Trilogy. Canyon Records CR-610. ——. 1996. Kokopelli’s Café. Canyon Records CR-7013. ——. 1997. Inside Canyon de Chelly. Canyon Records CR-7019.

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——. 1999. Inside Monument Valley. Canyon Records CR-7020. ——. 2003. Sanctuary. Canyon Records CR-7060. Nevaquaya, Doc Tate. 1976. Indian Flute Songs from Comanche Land. Rereleased in 2004. Santa Fe: Native American Music. ——. 1979. Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya. Folkways FE 4328. Rereleased in 2004. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings SFW CD 50403. Ware, Tom Mauchahty. 1978. Flute Songs of the Kiowa and Comanche. Indian House IH 2512. Youngblood, Mary. 1998. The Offering. Silver Wave Records SD 917.

Films Cited Doc Tate Nevaquaya: Portrait of an Oklahoma Treasure. 2002. University of Oklahoma Center for Music Television. Songkeepers 2010: A Saga of Five Native Americans Told through the Sound of the Flute. 2010. America’s Flutes. Original video in 1999. Toubat: A Journey of the Native American Flute. 2001. Sundance Media Group. Expanded ed. on DVD. 2006.

Chapter 21

Toward an Appl i c at i on of Gl obaliz ation Pa ra di g ms to Modern Fol k M u sic Rev i va l s Britta Sweers

Modern globalization processes have significantly influenced the development of musical revivals and the situation of postrevival structures. In this chapter I focus predominantly on one interdisciplinary analysis that combines insights gained from studies in politics, economics, culture and communication, migration, and environment. In Global Transformations (Held et al. 2003), David Held (politics), Anthony McGrew (international relations), David Goldblatt (social sciences), and Jonathan Perraton (economics) have developed an analytical framework based on a comprehensive database including original long-term studies in the areas of global politics, military globalization, global trade and markets, finance activities, corporate power and production networks, migration, cultural markets, communication, and environment. In this study, globalization is conceived as [a]‌process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions . . . generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power. (Held et al. 2003: 16)

This definition of globalization is highly useful because it not only leads away from a simple pro-and-contra scheme but can also be transferred to cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and issues of revival in a global(ized) context. As proposed further by Held et  al., the contemporary situation might also be described as “thick globalization.” To approach the actual nature of modern globalization processes more precisely and from an unbiased perspective, Held et al. analyzed the historical development of

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  467 globalization according to the factors of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact (Held et  al. 2003:  21–27). For example, rather than setting a distinct beginning for globalization, they described the premodern situation before 1500 as “thin globalization.” Although this period was already shaped by extensive global migration (as apparent in the distribution of musical instruments in the Pacific region or the exchange of goods along the Silk Road), it was nevertheless characterized by comparatively low intensity, velocity, and impact. The subsequent different phases of “expansive globalization” (until the mid-twentieth century) can be characterized by high extensity and impact (as apparent in the Americas), but they are still shaped by low intensity and velocity.1 Contrary to these earlier processes, the contemporary situation of “thick globalization” is characterized by a high level of quantity and extensity (toward a globe-spanning outreach), a high speed of communication toward simultaneousness, and the increasing emergence of homogenizing forces. This is likewise paralleled by a high density of innovative or transforming events. With regard to Europe, from which the case studies in this chapter are taken (see also Sweers 2010), thick globalization has clearly been apparent since the end of World War II. The second half of the twentieth century was shaped by the emergence of large numbers of acoustic—and later electric—folk music revivals that shifted orally transmitted material, as well as collected and notated versions, into a modern, urban, and increasingly mediatized and digitalized context. Many European countries had already experienced their first systematic folk song collecting activities in the wake of nationalist movements that were embedded into the broader context of emerging global empires and nation-states (Held et al. 2003: 77–86). As the material was transferred from its original oral and rural2 contexts to notated and recorded versions, as well as into academic or otherwise institutionalized frameworks within the early urban environment, one might also speak of a revival into a new context. In England, for example, this development was strongly intertwined with the activities of the London-based Folk Song Society (founded in 1898) and Folk Dance Society (founded in 1911).3 It was also centered on educated collectors, such as English music teacher Cecil J. Sharp (1859–1929) and composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1951). This mixture of partly organized/institutionalized and partly individual activities was subsequently referred to as the “first folk song revival” as a way of distinguishing it from the (acoustic) post-World War II English folk revival movement. The latter was retrospectively named the “second folk (song or music) revival” (Sweers 2005: 21–65). As in Scotland and Ireland, this second revival of the 1950s–1960s was significantly influenced by the American folk revival of the 1950s, which had been preceded by the activities of leftist workers’ organizations like People’s Songs (founded in 1945) and musicians like Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) and Pete Seeger (1919–2014). One can observe related developments in other Western European movements that occurred either simultaneously in the 1960s, as in France, Finland, and Sweden, or in the wake of the Anglo-American movements in the 1970s, as was the case in Germany. In Eastern Europe, the emergence of similar revivals has occurred at slightly divergent times, depending on the political situation. For example, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had each experienced folk collecting activities in the late

468   Britta Sweers nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in Latvia, e.g., this was strongly intertwined with the Atmoda or “national awakening” movement that led to independence in 1918). Each country then also witnessed a postwar acoustic folk revival (in the wake of the Russian revival that started in the 1960s) in the 1970s–1980s, as did many other East European countries and regions that were noticeably affected by developments in the Soviet Union. Similarly, in associated states like Hungary, one could observe the urban tanchaz (“dance house”) movement in the 1970s—again a counterdevelopment against regulated folk music and state ensembles. Many of these (East and West) postwar European movements were political, yet they were also shaped by the search for musical alternatives outside state-controlled or institutionalized, mass-media–based networks—issues that already hint at the impact of modern thick globalization. An early indication of this was the emergence of electric folk movements in the British Isles (and also in other places, such as France and Scandinavia) from the late 1960s. Employing modern electronic means, the groups representing these movements—like Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span in England, for example—seemed to associate themselves strongly with the mass media. In some senses, this direction could be described as a “revival” in England because many electric folk musicians came out of the acoustic movement and used similar material. Yet these groups also reached different, more rock-oriented audiences due to the different styles of arrangement and interpretation they embraced and the degree to which they were promoted by the media. The broader impact of modern thick globalization became especially evident after the end of the Cold War, with the emergence of an increasing number of electric folk revival forms in Eastern Europe. Sometimes called folk rock or electric folk, and sometimes postfolklore (Latvia) or fusion music, these musical approaches touched on issues of the global impact of Western—predominantly popular—music artists, genres, and economic structures on various levels. This became especially apparent in relation to the (mainly) Western cultural network called “world music” with which many groups have been clearly intertwined. This has been reflected in the coverage of leading magazines, the presence of CD labels, and festival appearances. The global impact of transnational business structures is also visible in the strong affiliation with global modern mass media, which underwent a profound transformation toward digitalization and forms of widely accessible hypermedia in the 1990s. It is likewise apparent in issues of musical hybridity, which have often been inter-related with the impact of globally present Western popular music (see, e.g., Lundberg, Malm, and Ronström 2003; Ramnarine 2003; Sweers 2005). Yet, as the situation in England has already highlighted (see Sweers 2005), adequate assessment of the actual global impact of the Western mainstream and business structures has often been difficult. This becomes even more apparent when comparing this situation with post-Cold War discourses in Latvia. Through a comparison of these two different contexts, this chapter sets up a framework to identify and analyze paradoxes and ambiguities of revival concepts, particularly within a modern context. As is argued here, the ambivalence of these concepts becomes especially apparent with electric or

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  469 folk rock developments, which have often challenged established acoustic revival structures. The ideas presented by Held et al. (as introduced earlier) provide the central theoretical basis for a more in-depth exposition of this discursive variety and ambivalence.

Skandinieki and Iļģi: Two Revival Groups from Latvia Nature-related images feature prominently in media advertisements produced by the Baltic state of Latvia (located between Estonia in the north and Lithuania in the south). The concept of an unspoiled environment is also reflected in the large choirs that were significantly involved in the Singing Revolution (1987–1992) that led to the independence of all three states.4 Since the eighteenth century, Latvia, like its neighbors, has been markedly associated with images of unspoiled nature and rural traditions. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who taught at Riga’s Dome School between 1764 and 1769, discussed various Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian songs in his Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1778/79). As he remarked there, these songs were dominated by “the peasant’s tender nature and by something specific to a people.”5 The experience of this region apparently influenced his equating nature with the “uneducated peoples” (Herder [1778/78] 1975: 237)—a perception that shaped various folk music definitions up until the official definition of the International Folk Music Council from 1954/55.6 Against this background, the output of the so-called “authentic” acoustic revival group Skandinieki and the electric revival or “postfolklore” group Iļģi, recorded in the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, seems to confirm the impression of a traditionally based musical approach versus a threatening Westernization. Skandinieki, a collective of singers and instrumentalists that was termed “authentic” in the local musical discourse, presents itself—as on Rotelas un Danči (1996) and Dzied un spēlē (2003)— in a family-like atmosphere, its members wearing traditional gowns and inhabiting rural environments. The music, as can be heard on these recordings, sets an emphasis on a rough, mostly monophonic choral singing style with sparse accompaniment. In contrast, as albums like Sēju Vēju (2000) and Ne Uz Vienu Dienu (2006) indicate, the folk rock fusion band Iļģi—which describes its approach as “postfolklore”7—prefers not only modern clothing but also modern CD designs (with an electrified kokles [a plucked, zither-like instrument]). The Westernizing element is clearly apparent in the use of electric instruments, a rock drum set, and the incorporation of sound effects along with fiddle styles that sometimes come close to Irish fiddling.8 Iļģi has been present on the international festival scene and has occasionally been covered by world music media like The Rough Guide: World Music Vol. 1 (ed. Broughton, Ellingham, and Trillo 1999); the group was also exposed to an audience of millions during the interim break of the Eurovision Song Contest (2003). At first sight, these sketched impressions seem to indicate the strong impact of a Western homogenization process

470   Britta Sweers that also occurred in the British Isles and Germany in the 1950s. One could easily assume that the local population might progressively give up the remnants of its traditions in order to catch up with the modern world of the Western or American mainstream, which gained greater presence in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. A few decades later, and the region might thus experience a growing loss of its individual identity within an increasingly dominant Western mainstream (Sweers 2005). Similar concerns were clearly voiced by Latvia’s Lithuanian neighbors during a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference on Folk Culture at the Beginning of the 3rd Millennium in Vilnius, in 2001 (Astrauskas 2002). However, a more detailed analysis of the sociocultural and historical background to these recordings reveals a much more complex situation (cf. Boiko 2001; Schorno 2007; Sweers 2010). For example, the modern image of Latvian folk music still falls strongly back on the composed choral and instrumental music of the Soviet era. The latter also profoundly shaped and transformed the choral singing tradition that had formed a separate “traditional” layer since the nineteenth century. Noticeably influenced by the German male choir tradition, choral singing had become an icon during the national revival of the First National Awakening (1850s–1880s), especially following the first singing festival in Riga in 1873. Having become independent in 1918, Latvia would later be occupied first by the Soviet Union in 1940, by Nazi Germany in 1941, and then again by the Soviet Union in 1944. Subsequently, the choir tradition was partly integrated into the category of official Soviet amateur art (samodejatel’nost), with its professional singing and dance ensembles. The material bases were often musical pieces in positive major tonalities with partly newly written or neutralized texts or, on a more popular level, kitschy Schlager variants. This was one reason why Iļģi singer and spokesperson Ilga Reizniece long rejected “folk music,” until she rediscovered the rural-traditional material (interview, May 17, 2004, Riga). In contrast, the actual traditional music—which differs from art and popular music by annual-ritual contexts, specific performance styles, or (oral) transmission forms— suffered significant neglect and was also viewed as politically suspect during the Soviet era. This especially applied to the so-called dainas, songs based on four-line verses. With texts ranging from the daily lifecycle to seasonal rituals and mythic-cosmological topics, and musical features like modal tonalities, a narrow melodic range, and mixed or asymmetrical meters, the dainas contrasted with the positive Soviet ideal image. Only after the political liberalization of the 1970s–1980s could this material—which was also seen as a threat because it could be taken as a means of emphasizing a local Latvian identity—be sung in public again. During this period, the group Skandinieki emerged. With the Livonian family Stalti at its core (a Finno-Ugric minority from the Baltic Sea coast), Skandinieki managed to establish a new musical ethnic-Latvian identity. In this context, distinctive elements were overemphasized: the revival of the material (often with a conscious emphasis on pre-Christian elements) was combined with a likewise consciously developed performance practice. This contrasted with the (partly academically) trained Soviet ensembles by focusing on collective group singing using untrained, rough voices, combined with sparse accompaniment.

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  471 Within this discourse, the expression “authentic” thus needs to be understood as a deliberate contrast to the Soviet ensembles, not as a synonym for traditional Latvian music. Moreover, one can observe here that a homogenizing impact is answered by a similarly extreme countermovement—in this case, directed not against the Western mainstream but against the cultural politics of the Soviet Union (see Caute 2003 for a deeper discussion). The core musicians of Iļģi, including singer Ilga Reizniece and instrumentalist Māris Muktupāvels, came initially from this authentic movement and had also been part of Skandinieki. Like the British acoustic folk club–based Second Revival of the 1960s, this acoustic revival also became highly dogmatic about its musical approach. As Ilga Reizniece emphasized in a personal interview (May 17, 2004, Riga), she and Muktupāvels had been looking for more creative ways of working with the material. Against the background of a homogenizing Soviet state culture, this meant fusing the traditional material with pop and rock elements—or with elements of other folk traditions, such as Irish fiddling—because the original instrumental traditions were often nearly gone. Simultaneously, as interviews and sound analyses indicate, Iļģi has been deeply involved with the actual reconstruction of traditional performance elements (Sweers 2010). This included the reconstruction not only of traditional Latvian kokles playing (as undertaken by Māris Muktupāvels and his brother, ethnomusicologist Valdis Muktupāvels), but also of fiddling and singing styles (based on the teceijas singing style that was characterized by a loud sound projection based on tightly closed vocal cords, a style that had been present in the region until World War II).

Toward a Wider Framework As is apparent here, performers working with electric folk fusions have contributed significantly to the highly complex picture of revival developments within contemporary thick globalization. Because this also hints at likewise complex identity constructions that combine traditional components with shifting contemporary alliances (Diamond 2007), electric folk fusions could be viewed as deep expressions of contemporary globalization processes as defined above by Held et al. (2003). Furthermore, as is apparent in the case of England (Sweers 2005), fusions of Western rock (and other musical genres) with local folk/traditional elements are not necessarily an indication of the popularization—and commercialization—of traditional material or previously acoustic performances. Despite the modern pop/rock musical basis, the fusion processes behind the performed or mediatized sound of electric revival bands can be a result of processes completely different from those that lie behind other fusion groups that have begun to dominate the world music sphere.9 However, the electric side of musical fusion processes has often been met with a biased perspective within ethnomusicology, often being equated with popular music or features of (global) homogenization. For example, this is apparent in Laura J. Olson’s

472   Britta Sweers description of world music as a “commercial venture” (2004: 222). Discussing the acoustic Russian folk revivals in careful detail, Olson, by especially referring to groups like Farlanders (who combine Russian traditional music with elements of Western popular and jazz music), describes these electric approaches as an illusory musical sound picture that is exclusively oriented to Western tastes (ibid.). A similar perception was already evident within the internal discourse of musicians of the English folk revival movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Sweers 2005). Here, the evaluation of the combination of traditional musical elements with electric pop and rock components (e.g., instruments and arrangement techniques) was viewed from two opposing camps. Although electric folk groups like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span regarded this approach as a creative enrichment of their musical possibilities, critics (particularly traditionalists of the folk club scene, who—like Scottish singer/actor Ewan MacColl—focused on unaccompanied singing) saw it as a threat and a move toward the musical/ commercial mainstream. As indicated here, acculturation processes have often been accompanied by multilayered discourses. Likewise, as a comparison between Latvia and Britain indicates, for instance, global flows—such as those described by Appadurai (1990; see also 1991 and 1998) as ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, finanscape, and ideoscape—can have differing deep impacts on local situations. Moreover, such flows might not always represent a central homogenizing force; in particular, global hypermedia, such as the social networks on the World Wide Web, can also become a means of survival for musicians from relatively small countries with limited audiences. Given these contrasting views, it seems useful to fall back on a descriptive tool that allows us to differentiate between the different perspectives and possible interpretations.

Understanding Globalization: Three Different Perspectives The issue of globalization has been investigated from a variety of perspectives within ethnomusicology. Examples comprise studies of the world music scene, which also includes revival performers like Marta Sebestyén, Värttinä, or the various so-called Celtic groups (see e.g., Taylor 1997). Another aspect has been the impact and use of modern mass media, which not only led to new forms of musical entertainment (e.g., Miller 2007; Rommen 2007) but also provided new alternative communication and advertising spaces like Facebook and MySpace. Likewise, analysis of the context transformation of local music traditions in which revival processes and postrevival structures played a central role (e.g., Chen 2005; Harnish 2005; Ramnarine 2003) and of the global impact on the local (see Post 2006, part IV) has been a growing concern in ethnomusicology. One significant feature has been the emergence of a large and highly varied body of globalization literature (also apparent in the ethnomusicological discourse; see, e.g., the

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  473 different interpretations of Erlmann [1999] and Taylor [1997]). However, although the term “globalization” is widely used, one only occasionally encounters precise definitions, such as that offered by sociologist and globalization theorist Ulrich Beck (1997: 26–28). In Beck’s usage, “globalization” indicates the process itself. In contrast, “globality” (Globalität) describes the situation of the “globally interconnected world,” whereas “globalism” refers to the ideology and practice of modern neo-liberalism. Furthermore, as Thomas Turino pointed out with regard to the study of the local-global dissemination of Zimbabwean popular music, the term “globalization” is often used synonymously with “Westernization,” “Americanization,” “homogenization,” or “hybridization” (Turino 2003: 52). This indicates that the public debate, particularly since the late 1980s, has been noticeably shaped by critical perspectives. Two main counterarguments against globalism dominated popular discussion and journalism in the first decade of the new millennium: (a) the increasing power of corporations and (b) the gradual retreat of diversity in the face of a single, global culture. As Turino explained further (Turino 2003: 52), it seems that this globalism/globalization discourse was strongly fueled, after the defeat of communism, by key terms such as “colonialism,” “anticolonial nationalist movements,” and “global.” Turino, in tune with Robert Burnett (1996), thus pointed out that “global culture” has, since that time, been used to describe capitalist expressions (such as the image of McDonald’s in Beijing). This perspective is also inherent in the argument that the omnipresence of Western popular musics in nearly all East European countries has led to an increasing dominance of Western music styles in revival musics as well. However, resistance to this Western cultural domination is apparent in the often critical perception of modern mass media and, particularly within the performance sphere, in an increasing emphasis on national elements, as has been evident in the Baltic countries. To develop a broader perspective that might help to relativize each of these perspectives I will again fall back on the model that was developed by Held et al. (2003) in their study Global Transformations. By analyzing the globalization flows and models within several different (political, economic, cultural, and ecological) areas, the authors also distil three different perspectives, which they term sceptic, hyperglobal, and transforma­ tionalist. These perspectives lend themselves well to an interpretation of the situation in the Baltics and elsewhere.

The Sceptic Perspective The sceptic perspective equates globalization with homogenization, which is interpreted negatively. From this perspective, local traditions disappear due to the global homogenization process, so that revival is regarded as an important means of preservation. Consequently, the musical emphasis is on acoustic performance practices, which are often combined with a discourse centered on “authenticity.” Particularly within those ethnomusicologies (or folklore studies) of Eastern Europe (i.e., the countries of the former Soviet bloc) that are characterized by a focus on regional traditions, one can

474   Britta Sweers detect a strong dominance of the sceptic’s perspective (Astrauskas 2002). However, a central criticism of this approach (as is apparent in Britain and the Baltics) has been the danger of creating a museum-like atmosphere. Although folk music has been perceived as a national-iconic symbol within many regions of the former Soviet Union, the revived music has also played a central role in the supercultural sphere, especially within education and also as part of an attempt to maintain visibility within a broader global context. However, the modern equation of (revived) folk music as a symbol of national identity contains a tendency toward nationalism when it is restricted to a static local perception. It is especially from such a static view, created to set identifiable boundaries, that globalization is perceived as a threat.10 Although this issue was already apparent with the romanticized collection and revival movements that were part of the national movements of the nineteenth century, this legacy has also shaped, consciously or unconsciously, the postwar revivals. In the Baltics, this lingering nationalist trace is particularly apparent in the authentic and pagan revival music groups that have based their recreation on mystic, yet fixed pre-Christian images, ignoring any transregional flows that might have occurred. This identity construction includes not only a bundled body of mythology and the choice of an ethnonym (e.g., Celts or Old Prussians in the case of various Latvian groups) but also an agreed prehistory. Generally speaking, many of these groups fall back on pre-Medieval epochs—with uncertain source material—to create a nevertheless modern, multilayered Latvian/Baltic identity similar to those of the Celtic movements (see James 1999). This identity is often combined with a strong iconic emphasis, for example, through references to pre-Christian deities such as Laima, the goddess of good fortune, and the sun deity Saule. As archaeologist Simon James warned, “Agreed national histories are inevitably nationalist histories, and are always partisan. Many notions of deep history underpin ancient claims to territory and precedence over other groups, justify modern antagonisms and constitute the fault lines of future conflicts” (1999: 11). Even if “Celtic” is understood simply as a cultural categorization, it can easily slide back into a dangerously ethnic label if it is allowed to become too static. In the case of the Latvian pagan-metal band Skyforger, which used the Swastika as a pan-Baltic symbol in their iconic design, this led to a conflict in German performance spaces.

The Hyperglobal Perspective The hyperglobal perspective understands globalization predominantly from an economic perspective. Related homogenization processes are viewed from a positive perspective because they will lead to an interconnected global civilization with global economic, governmental, and social structures—from which revival and postrevival structures could also benefit. The hyperglobal view has been most noticeably present within the music industry and modern media corporations. Hyperglobalizers would interpret the impact of

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  475 globalization on revival processes and the situation of postrevival music cultures not as a threat but as a means of access to Western market structure—and also to world music networks, which represent the central market for revival and fusion musics. This perspective has been strongly criticized in ethnomusicological writing, as is indirectly evident in structural-functional approaches (e.g., John Blacking’s depiction of Venda music, which leaves out traces of Western impact; cf. Blacking 1973). More directly, it is especially apparent in Marxist-influenced popular and folk music studies (see Harker 1985, where folk collecting activities are interpreted as highly profit-oriented) but also in analyses of popular music and the music industry (e.g., Middleton 1990/1995). A similar perspective is apparent in recent analyses of hypermedia (see Bennett and Peterson 2004), in which global hypermedia are interpreted as a central means of existence and survival for smaller independent labels in smaller countries with relatively small audiences. This was clearly the case with the label UPE, under which Iļģi recorded until 2010. Although existing outside established business networks, UPE has been noticeably falling back on independent hyperglobal structures, not only by presenting itself at WOMEX but also by making a large portion of its sales via the internet—a strategy that has been taken up by Iļģi, who also make use of social networks like MySpace. Likewise, many acoustic authentic bands have been falling back on the internet as a means of advertising and benefiting from hyperglobal structures, as in the case of internationally distributed CD compilations. However, along with the focus on general economic perspectives (e.g., the issue of global networks), a hyperglobal approach is also apparent in the activities of transnational cultural organizations, as is the case with UNESCO and its function as global cultural regulator. This likewise applies to academic organizations, such as the International Council for Traditional Music, which, as a global academic network, may also serve to voice concerns or provide background knowledge for revival developments.

The Transformationalist Perspective Finally, a transformationalist perspective argues that the contemporary patterns of globalization are unprecedented, as are modern development directions, the musical results, and postrevival structures. Transformationalists thus perceive the increasingly dense global networks as the basis for developing new musical structures, in this case through revival, which needs to be approached with an open perspective. This particularly applies to the analysis of the actual relationship between traditional performance practices and increasingly prevalent revival forms, and also addresses the actual space and deep impact of Western popular music in this process. A revivalist might participate in a complex network of musical cultures, of which the seemingly dominant Western popular music might be simply one element among many and not necessarily a destructive one. Revival forms could, thus, also include or lead to fusion and electric forms. From this perspective, modern technology—often a central part of this revival process—could lead to a rediscovery and reconstruction of traditional elements. However,

476   Britta Sweers these might be embedded into new contexts—a situation that is apparent with Iļģi’s music. Contrary to Skandinieki, for instance, Iļģi became strongly visible within an international (global) context. Yet the group never managed a financial breakthrough and was never able to establish a broader postrevival scene, in contrast with “authentic” acoustic groups like Skandinieki that have become significant reference points for many younger acoustic performers in the new millennium (Sweers 2010). Neither could Iļģi establish a niche in Latvia’s pop/rock mainstream that also includes radio play. Instead, the musicians of Iļģi needed to finance their folk rock fusion projects with other jobs (in music or education, for example). Some broader ethnomusicological approaches that proposed models based on a more comprehensive global perspective combined with a descriptive approach for these complex developments and that could be described as transformationalist were presented by Slobin (1993), Lundberg et al. (2003), Baumann (2004), and others. Falling back on globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai, Mark Slobin (1993) developed an open concept of three interacting cultural systems. This spatial framework consists of an umbrella-like supercultural system; microcultures, which can be found in various forms underneath the superculture; and intercultures (e.g., existing between diaspora and mother culture). This approach is useful not only for describing the location and spatial organization of music revivals but also for avoiding the use of the biased term “subcultures,” which has been strongly associated with youth cultures (Slobin’s usage of the term notwithstanding).11 Another more differentiated perspective that allowed for a clearer assessment of mediatized forms of music was taken up by Lundberg et  al.’s study Music, Media, Multiculture (2003). Indicating that an acoustic performance could also be situated at the end of a long “mediaized” (sic) transformation, the authors indicated the following stages a music form might undergo: (a) primary mediaization (CD-radio), (b) mediaization reworking (transculturation, scratch), (c) demediaization (initially mediaized music is taken up in performance), and (d) remediaization (music is again conveyed to a medium). Similarly, Max Peter Baumann’s (2004) classification of transculturation (i.e., fusion) processes allows for the more precise assessment of those fusion processes that have inevitably accompanied electric revival forms. Going beyond the earlier developed model of purism versus syncretism in revival (Baumann 1996), Baumann further noted that fusion processes can take on different forms, for example, as compartimentalization (different qualities are still recognizable; the musicians move [bimusically] between the different spheres), as syncretism (a lighter form of fusion in which individual elements take on a new meaning), and as transformation into new qualities and forms. Developed to describe the acculturation process of the charango in South America, Baumann’s model can be transferred to folk rock fusions. These processes can likewise be described as the interactions of different music cultures as they move toward syncretism or transformation into completely new forms (which has been the case with jazz folk fusions in the Baltics). However, as is apparent in the discussion that follows, this rather egalitarian perspective also invites criticism. This can be seen especially in analyses of Western world music

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  477 networks and fusion groups which see these forms as becoming muzak-like or “disembodied sonic markers” (Hill 2007: 69) and in the exploitative side of musical appropriations from other countries (see Hill 2007 for a broader discussion).

Applications of the Meta-Descriptions Here, I discuss some recurring sceptic discourses that have frequently surfaced with regard to revivals in Western Europe (the British Isles, especially England) and northeast Europe (the Baltic Countries, especially Latvia). The timing and political conditions out of which Latvian groups like Skandinieki and Iļģi emerged (see Sweers 2010) were clearly different from the background against which revival performers like acoustic guitarist Martin Carthy or electric folk fusionists Fairport Convention developed in England and the British Isles (see Sweers 2005). Yet, different historical contexts notwithstanding, one can discover some striking similarities.

Electric Revival Discourses: Sceptics Versus Transformationalists In both the English and Latvian cases, internal discourses were markedly shaped by a predominantly sceptic perspective. The main initiators of the English Second Revival, A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, partly set the English Revival against then-dominant American (popular) music to reestablish an English-British musical identity. Similarly, the Latvian revival was (like neighboring movements) also set against a superculture—the official Soviet “amateur art” model (samodejatel’nost) with its folk and dance ensembles and arranged folk material set in major modes, with newly written, neutralized texts. The sceptic-turned-static view became especially apparent in the musical crises that appeared in both regions. At the core of the English folk club-based movement was the dogma that folk songs should only be sung unaccompanied, and the Latvian authenticity movement also (initially) strongly emphasized rough, untrained singing styles and sparse accompaniment. This “authentic” movement, which emerged in the 1980s, also subsequently became extremely dogmatic, as is apparent in the group Skandinieki, which resembles groups from the English hardcore folk scene of the mid-1960s. English electric folk groups, such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, became a creative musical alternative that opened the way for new developments (and, in the case of Morris dancing, led to a continuation of certain traditions). These groups embraced a varied selection of instruments as well as various styles of arrangement and the introduction of improvisation—and they also attracted new audiences (e.g., from the progressive rock scene). Electric groups thus overcame the musical dead-end of historicizing acoustic revival movements. The case of Iļģi also highlights the impact of broader musical

478   Britta Sweers folk microcultures from outside the Latvian sphere, such as the Swedish-Finnish group Hedningarna (as an example of Scandinavian folk fusion music) and the use of Celtic fiddling styles as a replacement for the near-lost art of Latvian fiddling. As did many English groups, Iļģi’s band members perceived the move toward a fusion style as an act of creative liberation—as freedom from having to play “authentically.” Referring to Beverly Diamond’s (2007) “alliance concept” here, one can discover a high degree of openness in the modern identity construction process of these bands, one that combines a flexible core with a constantly changing surface. The English groups have adapted elements of the Anglo-American superculture and folk music into a new syncretic music form. Iļģi’s music can be understood as a counter-reaction to both the supercultural layers of the Soviet Era and the subsequent restrictions of the authenticity movement, which represented not only a sceptic view but also reflected a static concept and identity perception (within the folk music microculture).

Sceptic Concerns and a Transformational Answer: The Musical Side In relation to music, sceptic concerns have significantly shaped discourses about the global impact of Western culture and economy and the processes of globalization. For example, criticism in Anglo-American regions has often been aimed at electric instruments, which are seen as “destroying” the old traditions. Moreover, the electric guitar has been viewed as an icon of global (in this case American mainstream) structures: Bob Dylan was attacked by sceptic journalists for playing an electric guitar, which they regarded as taking his music a step toward popular music (see Sweers 2005: 21–23). With regard to contemporary developments, it seems that electric fusion approaches are thus often still regarded as a step toward the Western-based world music sphere (cf. Olson 2004). However, it is difficult to determine the degree of the actual tendency toward homogenization through a global Western cultural mainstream that has musically often been embodied by electric instruments. In the case of electric folk in England, the true impact of playing electrically is difficult to assess. Sceptic concerns about a too overtly egalitarian approach should not be completely ignored, however, because the use of electric instruments and rock drums could indeed lead to an alteration of the material’s essence. For example, due to their narrative parlando-rubato style, it seems reasonable to suppose that ballads were sung more or less unaccompanied within the British-Irish ballad singing tradition. A good example of this is the Child ballad “Tam Lin.” The almost speech-like renditions of A. L. Lloyd or Anne Briggs seem to indicate that this highly dramatic ballad does indeed need a flexible rhythmic-metric framework. This could also lead to the assumption that a simple backbeat setting might destroy the music. And yet the rhythmically straight rock arrangement of Fairport Convention (on Liege & Lief, 1969) is likewise reasonable because it carries the complex drama forward. I would rather argue that backbeat

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  479 arrangements could become destructive only if applied exclusively (see Sweers 2005: 160–167). A definite answer on the degree of homogenization is also difficult due to the broad variety of traditional songs and ballads. In the case of British-Irish traditions, this includes, on the one hand, narrative ballads and lyrical songs (e.g., “She Moves Through the Fair”) that are metrically free and thus provide room for ornamentation. But, on the other hand, it also includes songs that have always been sung to dance tunes or have never been strongly ornamented. Similarly, ballads that were danced to on the Faeroe Islands would not have allowed for much rhetorical freedom because dance movements need a steady, rhythmical beat. A similar variety of electric fusion forms can also be observed in Latvia. Again, despite different political conditions, repertoire, and arrangement styles, these Latvian groups have been confronted with similar criticisms. Iļģi has been attacked by the authentic movement because the group’s adaptation of popular/modern elements seemed to indicate a step back to former ideologies from which the authentic movement had initially departed. Moreover, from the performers’ perspective, electric instruments per se are not the main problem: Many pointed out that electric instruments (aside from being louder) could be played much more delicately. As guitarist Martin Carthy emphasized, playing electrically “taught him economy” (see Sweers 2005: 160–167). This same perspective could also be transferred to working with a microphone, which often actually requires a more intimate singing style and thus can also lead to highly nuanced fusion revival approaches. Here, especially, the three perspectives become helpful in detecting the nature of these various conflicting discourses—in the case of electric instruments, a sceptic (acoustic/preservationalist) position versus a transformationalist (electric) view, which is only in part shaped by hyperglobal thinking (as might have been assumed by critics). As demonstrated next, an application of these three aspects often also reveals the highly uneven circumstances of revival performers in a global- or mass-media– dominated context.

Hybrid Performance Contexts and the Mainstream: Sceptic Criticism Revisited A recurring issue of the sceptic criticism of electric fusion revival groups has been the financial/commercial aspect of such music. As is often argued, acoustic/revival— or even traditional—performers might be tempted to follow the example of electric groups and give up their delicate alternative playing and singing styles (also understood as alternatives to popular and art performance styles) to grasp at success within the mainstream. Although the electric component (e.g., technical equipment, specific performance requirements, etc.) indeed ties groups more strongly to the global media and business

480   Britta Sweers sphere, its deep impact cannot be automatically deduced here. For example, although often not having grown up in the initial traditional reference contexts, many modern revivalists have become involved in a very profound rediscovery process. In several cases, this is likewise accompanied by a clear self-reflection with regard to the musician’s relation to the traditional material. This was apparent in Latvia and also in Lithuania, with Russian artists like Farlanders and Sámi artists like Mari Boine. The members of Iļģi even began to undertake fieldwork expeditions to discover traditional performances, and they became central driving forces for the revival of traditional instruments and singing styles. However—and here we are back to the criticism of the transformationalist perspective (in this case, the danger of ignoring the profundity of the alteration)—any revival, no matter how carefully concerned with reconstruction, transfers traditional musics into a different sociocultural context. This usually means that the music is performed on a stage, which was rarely part of the original performance situation. Although this transformation of the performance sphere also clearly occurred with all acoustic revival groups (including in the hardcore English folk club scene and with Skandinieki), it has become much more apparent with electric groups. Because amplification techniques often demand larger spaces, this automatically results in a greater distance being placed between performer and audience. As the subtitle “untraditional Latvian folk music” of the Latvian sampler Electric Amber (2005) demonstrates, and as is also evident in the problem of finding a proper category for Iļģi’s music in Latvia (Sweers 2010), the various electric revival approaches have often become distinct genres lying somewhere between folk and popular music—and driven by the technical demands of both sides. Yet because such groups could often only fall back on existing (acoustic) performance spaces, the music’s greatest strength (musical originality due to hybridity) also became one of its greatest weaknesses. In England, these electrified groups were too loud for the folk clubs, the traditional performance spheres of the Second Revival, although the emerging Progressive Rock movement provided new performance sites here, such as smaller halls or university auditoriums. Nevertheless, in other cultural spheres, such as the American East Coast of the 1990s, the hybrid nature of specific ethnic electric folk groups like the English-focused New St. George could constitute a problem (see Sweers 2005: 248–249). Although New St. George appealed to an extremely varied audience, it could not fall back on an existing network of musical venues because the American electric folk scene was very small and could provide few suitable spaces for hybrid electric acoustic folk bands, apart from outdoor festival venues. Moreover, as Lundberg et al. elucidated in the case of the Swedish drone rock group Garmarna (2003: 156), a further modern performance problem is caused by the constant shift between different mediatized forms and the increasing incorporation of preprogrammed music. Through its work with samples and loops, the group can perform some parts of its repertoire only if the performance space is equipped with computers, multichannel equipment, and large monitor systems. Yet again, the characteristic performance sites for these Scandinavian folk fusion groups are usually not large, technically well-equipped concert arenas but smaller venues specializing in acoustic artists and thus without their own costly sound engineers.

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  481 Musical hybridity has a financial impact. Even if not working with preprogrammed music, groups like Iļģi nevertheless need the expensive, larger rooms of the rock scene for an ideal performance situation. However, these spaces are often too big for the comparatively small audience. As New St. George founder Jennifer Cutting has pointed out (see Sweers 2005: 248–249), external sound engineers specializing in the hybrid combination of electric and acoustic/traditional instruments were nearly unaffordable for small bands like New St. George, which could not even pay roadies to handle their large, technical equipment. This was one of the reasons why the group finally disbanded in 1996. Moreover, as became especially visible in smaller countries like Latvia, if musicians want to become affiliated with the modern mainstream, they usually play pure pop or rock—but rarely ever hybrid fusion genres such as electric folk because this form is often regarded as a highly eccentric niche music. In the case of Latvia, the youth generation remains affiliated within—now likewise “traditional”—organized dance groups and choirs because these have been providing primary communal rural leisure activity for several decades now. Iļģi is neither part of the established authenticity movement (and partly related acoustic directions), nor is it a group of interest for the masses of younger audiences focused on Western popular music. Although Iļģi has become a household name within the whole region (the group is often mentioned in introductions to the music and culture of the Baltics), it only occupies a small niche position within Latvia’s actual music sphere. These musicians are thus semi-professional, unable to earn a living wage from their music within a country of 2.2 million inhabitants. This automatically raises the question of to what extent these revival groups still represent an outer or popular layer of their country’s folk music—and this represents another sceptic argument. As indicated earlier, not only do (grassroots) traditions, acoustic, and electric folk (revival) musics exist in very different performance spheres and sociocultural contexts, but the multilayered hybrid structure also has resulted in a contradictory situation (cf. Sweers 2010). To use Slobin’s terminology, despite the electric instruments, folk rock or electric folk often does not reach into all parts of the supercultural sphere. For example, Iļģi is well-known within the international festival scene (performing in the United States, Canada, and Germany, for example). Yet the group’s CDs are only rarely featured in world music journalism, as their highly specialized label (UPE) does not have an international distribution. Conversely, the group also maintains a newly created space within the internet, which is regularly visited by a large group of exiled Latvians in the United States and Canada who currently form a distinct interculture (Slobin 1993) with their mother country through the internet. Contrasting this representative role within the global (musical mainstream) sphere, Iļģi is only part of a small electric folk microculture within a local context. This difference became especially apparent when the group became Latvia’s musical ambassador during the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Riga in 2003. As Iļģi’s atmospheric video was watched by several million Europeans during the interlude, one might have expected a subsequent positive impact on the group’s economic/professional situation within the local and international contexts. Yet, as Ilga Reizniece told me in 2004 (interview, May

482   Britta Sweers 17, 2004, Riga), this continental media presence led to only one or two extra concert/festival bookings on an international level, and the group received no additional requests within Latvia. This clearly reflects the isolated position electric folk can take on within its own cultural sphere. This might also relativize some sceptic views on the actual impact of global structures such as hypermedia or the world music network. Returning to Olson (2004), Russia and the Ukraine have also been dominated by already established revival structures that have become distinct traditions but are, in fact, clearly detached from their initial rural contexts. Therefore, not only did the world music scene offer some bands a chance to survive the difficult economic situation of the post-Soviet era (Olson 2004: 222), it also—alongside the new mediatized contexts—opened up new spaces for alternative musical approaches. Examples of the latter are the Russian experimental revival group Farlanders or the Ukrainian Carpathian Ska-punk band Haydamaky. Both groups exemplify how a connection to the Western music industry and the world music network can create new spaces for the rediscovery and revival of grassroots elements, particularly in an atmosphere in which institutionalization has led to a static new tradition of its own.

Outlook Although I have emphasized the transformationalist perspective with regard to the discourses centered on electric folk revival forms, I nevertheless think a more profound understanding of revival within globalized contexts is only possible by combining all three approaches—transformationalist, sceptic, and hyperglobal. Turning to the sceptic perspective, which I view as highly important in shaping problematic and identity-related aspects of modern globalization, it is obvious that today’s increasingly dense transformation processes have also been leading to an increasingly rapid disappearance of traditional musics. Yet these same musics often become central anchor points for modern identity constructions. As was apparent in Lithuania and Latvia, but also in the British Isles and Scandinavia, the younger generation of musicians has often displayed a strong need to readapt their particular rural traditional singing and instrumental techniques. In Latvia, one may even observe the adaptation of performance techniques of marginalized Russian “minorities” (who constitute 40% of the population) by Latvian musicians integrating these approaches as Latvian tradition. One example is the Riga-based Russian group Ilinskaja Pjatnica, which—led by Sergey Olenkin—has revived the repertoire of the Old Believers who have been living in Latvia/Latgalen since the eighteenth century. This seems remarkable, as Latvia, while establishing its new post-Soviet identity, has actually been developing a noticeably ethnically shaped nationalism. And because of the traumatic experience of the Soviet era, this new nationalism often excludes the Latvian Russian minority as a whole from the supercultural sphere (e.g., government and cultural life).

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  483 This situation is also an indication of the political side of sceptic thinking within the region. As is apparent here, revival folk music took on a specific role in relation to national identity construction in these regions. In the context of the “Singing Revolution,” folk music became a means of establishing an individual identity set against the universal Soviet mainstream. Yet although this realization of “Latvian” musical characteristics (particularly within the authenticity movement) did indeed lead to an assurance of national independence, the resulting situation after independence can be instead described as exclusivist with racial elements (e.g., excluding not only the Soviet culture, but also anything Russian that had also previously existed in the region). Although current thick globalization seems to confirm the central role of a sceptic ethnomusicological approach that focuses on the preservation and documentation of material resources and performance practices, it nevertheless also calls for the integration of hyperglobal and transformationalist elements. Switching to the modified hyperglobal perspective, this does not simply emphasize the need for alternative media networks: Increasingly thick global structures have also opened up new possibilities for collaboration and musical/scholarly interaction. It seems, for instance, that the vocal teceijas technique, which was revived by Latvian postfolklore musicians, is also evident in Lithuania, where it was revived by modern sutartinė singers, as well as in neighboring Belorussia and (with some variants) in the Ukraine. This effort, however, calls for a broader transregional collaboration of researchers and musicians, one that goes beyond political conflict zones before the last direct, living contacts disappear within the next twenty years. The open—transformationalist—perspective, which also includes modern practices combined with precise knowledge of current transformation processes, might then perhaps contribute to new revivals of various kinds within global contexts. For, as Christopher Small’s significant concept of “musicking”—as developed in Music of the Common Tongue (1994)—has demonstrated, it is the human factor that has the power to alter those cultural flows, also seen within music genres, that are perceived as global mainstreaming. As Small describes it, “musicking” is a creative process strongly connected to improvisation and particularly central to African-influenced music in which musicians organize their experiences and explore and confirm who they are (1994: 50, 464). The improvisational process is especially apparent in Afro-American music—the initial basis of Western popular music—and thus represents a constant process intertwined with the search for human meanings, in which one’s own identity is sought out, confirmed, and transformed. It may also be that this openness, combined with a deep adaptiveness (i.e., fusion in the sense of transformation), is the reason that Anglo-American music has not only been so successful on a global scale, but has taken on highly varied meanings outside the mass media sphere. This perception also helps us to perceive folk rock fusions as creative processes that are moving toward new musical forms, rather than as homogenizing processes, and as embracing deeply human issues that go beyond national, static perceptions. This is apparent in Ilga Reizniece’s description of Iļģi’s modern revival of Latvian (pagan) traditions as a “national sentiment that is positive” (interview, May 17, 2004, Riga).

484   Britta Sweers

Notes 1. This sketched situation between 1500 and 1950 is likewise highly heterogeneous and can be further differentiated, for example, with regard to the significant alterations that occurred in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (development of increasingly globe-spanning mass media, global migration flows, etc.). 2. Although the initial context was mainly rural, the whole body of revived material also contains, among others, early industrial songs (e.g., with texts referring to spinning factories) and popular music (e.g., sheet music). 3. Both merged into the English Dance and Song Society in 1932. 4. Latvia became independent on May 4, 1990. 5. “In diesen Liederchen herrscht bäurisch zärtliche Natur und Etwas dem Volk eigenes” Johann Gottfried Herder ([1778/1779] 1975: 240). 6. “Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives. The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music. . . . The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and re-creating of the music by the community that gives it its folk character” (International Folk Music Council 1955). 7. It should be noted that, although the term “postfolklore” is usually attributed to Sergey Nekljudov (1995), Iļģi’s application of the terminology clearly differs from Nekljudov in that it refers mainly to musical features. 8. This was also confirmed by Reizniece in a personal communication (May 17, 2004, Riga). 9. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish clearly between revival-related structures—such as electric folk in England, which indeed falls back on preexistent structures—and general fusions. The latter have come close to muzak-like mixtures with neither recognizable original components nor clearly identifiable new structures (often also apparent in lounge music compilations such as the Buddha Bar collection, e.g. Ravin 2004), particularly in the new millennium. Not part of a broader transculturation process, the latter forms rather seem to go far beyond Baumann’s deculturation processes. See, for instance, NRW KULTURsekretariat (2007) with regard to the equation of “world music” with “fusion,” especially within journalism. 10. This also applies to the role of modern mass media. In tune with Adorno (1962), for example, media theorists have argued that humans are manipulated by modern mass media. 11. This is clearly apparent in Simon Frith’s analyses of Anglo-American youth cultures (see Frith 1978).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1962. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2 (2): 1–34. Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. “Global Ethnoscapes:  Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox, 191–210. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

GLOBALIZATION PARADIGMS AND MODERN FOLK MUSIC REVIVALS  485 Appadurai, Arjun. 1998. Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press. Astrauskas, Rimantas, ed. 2002. Folk Culture at the Beginning of the Third Millennium. Vilnius: Lithuanian National Commission for UNESCO. Baumann, Max Peter. 1996. “Folk Music Revival:  Concepts Between Regression and Emancipation.” The World of Music 38 (3): 71–86. ——. 2004. “The Charango as Transcultural Icon of Andean Music.” Revista Transcultural de Musica/ Transcultural Music Review 8. http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans8/baumann. htm Beck, Ulrich. 1997. Was ist Globalisierung? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson, eds. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press. Boiko, Martin. 2001. “The Latvian Folk Music Movement in the 1980s and 1990s:  From ‘Authenticity’ to ‘Postfolklore’ and Onwards.” In Folk Music in Public Performance, edited by Max Peter Baumann, The World of Music 43 (2–3): 113–118. Broughton, Simon, Mark Ellingham, and Richard Trillo, eds. 1999. World Music: The Rough Guide Vol. 1: Africa, Europe and the Middle East. London: The Rough Guides. Burnett, Robert. 1996. The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry. London: Routledge. Caute, David. 2003. The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Chen, Pi-Yen. 2005. “Buddhist Song, and Commercial Popular Music: From Ritual to Rock Mantra.” Ethnomusicology 49 (2): 266–286. Diamond, Beverly. 2007. “The Music of Modern Indigeneity: From Identity to Alliance Studies.” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 12: 169–190. Erlmann, Veit. 1999. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frith, Simon. 1978. Sociology of Rock. London: Constable and Company. Harnish, David. 2005. “Teletubbies in Paradise: Tourism, Indonesianisation and Modernisation in Balinese Music.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 37: 103–123. Harker, Dave. 1985. Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton. 2003. Global Transformations: Politics, Economy and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Herder, Johann Gottfried. [1778/1779] 1975. “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern”; Volkslieder. Zwei Teile 1778/79, edited by Heinz Rölleke. Stuttgart: Reclam. Hill, Juniper. 2007. “‘Global Folk Music’ Fusions: The Reification of Transnational Relationships and the Ethics of Cross-Cultural Appropriations in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39: 50–83. International Folk Music Council. 1955. “Definition of Folk Music.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 7: 6–7. James, Simon. 1999. The Atlantic Celts. Ancient People or Modern Invention? London: British Museum Press. Lundberg, Dan, Krister Malm, and Owe Ronström. 2003. Music, Media, Multiculture: Changing Musicscapes. Stockholm: Svenskt Visarkiv. Middleton, Richard. 1990/1995. Studying Popular Music. Buckingham (UK) and Bristol (USA): Open University Press. Miller, Kiri. 2007. “Jacking the Dial:  Radio, Race, and Place in Grand Theft Auto.” Ethno­ musicology 51 (3): 402–438.

486   Britta Sweers Nekljudov, Sergey. 1995. “Posle fol’klora.” Živaja starina 1: 2–4. Olson, Laura J. 2004. Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity. New York: Routledge. Post, Jennifer C., ed. 2006. Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader. New York: Routledge. NRW KULTURsekretariat, ed. 2007. “Weltmusik”—ein Missverständnis? Eine Tagungs­ dokumentation. Essen: Klartext. Ramnarine, Tina K. 2003. Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rommen, Timothy. 2007. “‘Localize It’: Rock, Cosmopolitanism, and the Nation in Trinidad.” Ethnomusicology 51 (3): 371–403. Schorno, Ruedi. 2007. “Die ‚Singende Revolution’ der Volksmusiker: Lifestyle-Folklorismus und Post-Folklore im politischen und gesellschaftlichen Wandel Lettlands.” http://www. ruedischorno.ch/texte/essay_singend_rev_kurz.pdf Slobin, Mark. 1993. Micromusics of the West. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Small, Christopher. 1994. Music of the Common Tongue:  Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. London and New York: Calder and Riverrun Press. Sweers, Britta. 2005. Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 2010. “The Revival of Traditional Musics in New Contexts: Electric Folk from a Compara­ tive Perspective.” In Concepts, Experiments, and Fieldwork: Studies in Systematic Musicology and Ethnomusicology, edited by Rolf Baader, Ulrich Morgenstern, and Christiane Neuhaus, 351–368. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. Global Pop. World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge. Turino, Thomas. 2003. “Are We Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural Formations and the Study of Zimbabwean Popular Music.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12 (2): 51–80.

Discs Cited DJ Ravin. Buddha Bar VI. George V Records, 2004. Fairport Convention. Liege & Lief. Island, 1969. Skandinieki. Rotelas un Danči. SIA “Auss,” 1996. Skandinieki. Dzied un spēlē. UPE, 2003. Iļģi. Sēju Vēju. UPE, 2000. Iļģi. Ne Uz Vienu Dienu. UPE, 2006. Various. Electric Amber. UPE, 2005.

PA R T V I I

F E ST I VA L S , MARKETING, A N D  M E DIA

C HA P T E R  22

C O N T E M P O R A RY E N G L I S H FOLK MUSIC AND THE F O L K I N D U S T RY SI MON K E E G A N - PH I PP S A N D T R I SH W I N T E R

In 2007, the folk development organization FolkArts England ran two “Folk Industry Focus Days” as part of a four-day conference describing itself as “what may well be the biggest gathering of folk activists, promoters and media folk since, well, who knows?!” (FolkArts England 2007). The size and professional nature of this conference, which took place at a state-of-the-art business conference centre, as well as the use of the term “folk industry” in its description, was indicative of a growing sense of the folk arts in England as existing in relation to an “industry”; a growing engagement with professionalization and commercial markets. A further consolidation of the “folk industry” concept was achieved the following year with a shift in the title of the long-standing Association of Festival Organisers (AFO) Conference to become the “Folk Industry and AFO Conference.” The conference brochure promised that attendance would be a “fantastic opportunity to be part of Folk’s cultural renaissance and to share and connect with the people who are shaping its future” (FolkArts England 2008). There is an assumption here, then, that a burgeoning folk industry is an integral part of a “renaissance”—or, to use our preferred terminology, a resurgence—in the folk arts in England.1 There is evidence that the period starting around 2002 (and still continuing in 2013) may indeed be identified as a period of markedly increasing interest in the folk arts in England. While this interest extends beyond English folk music to include other musics designated as “folk” (and other folk arts such as dance), music that explicitly, often emphatically, identifies itself as English folk is a key element of the resurgence and the main focus of our attention here. It is possible to point to several indicators of resurgence: Folk festivals have become increasingly popular; the demography of folk audiences is getting younger—folk is enjoying considerable and growing popularity with people in their teens, twenties, and thirties; and folk has moved beyond the boundaries of the folk scene and toward popular cultural contexts like Mercury Music Awards

490   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter nominations and mainstream music festivals. The media profile of folk has shifted, with greater media visibility for folk music in both arts and popular entertainment television programming, for example, and in all of this an increasing number of professional folk acts are foregrounding their Englishness.2 It is the purpose of this chapter to examine the multidimensional folk industry that is associated with the resurgence in English folk music and to consider the ways an increasingly commercialized and professionalized infrastructure coexists and interacts with philanthropic, anticommercial, and determinedly amateur motivations. The window through which we will examine this burgeoning folk industry is the festival, a key location for the resurgence in English folk music, before going on to consider the significance of the media, competitions, and folk development organizations.

Historical Context Although we are suggesting that the language and concept of a “folk industry” is recently emergent, we are not claiming that folk music has previously always existed outside economic or commercial structures. Rather, it existed in relation—sometimes uneasy relation—to them throughout the twentieth century. For this reason, we begin with a general overview of the historical context for the current resurgence. This is designed as a broad outline relevant to the development of a folk industry rather than a comprehensive digest of the two multifaceted periods of revival through which folk music in England has been shaped.3 The first discernable movement of revival in English folk dance, song, and music was that most popularly associated with—and, for the most part, directed by—Cecil Sharp between around 1890 and 1920 (although Sharp’s involvement in the revival didn’t begin until around 1899). Among the most significant of Sharp’s legacies has been his crystallization and explicit statement of a particular construct of folk—a construct with which practicing folk music culture has found itself in conflict or negotiation ever since. His definition was explicated in his groundbreaking definition of the term “folk song” in the work English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, and revolved around the construction of an inherently rural and uneducated social group (“the folk”) as the unconscious—and increasingly inadequate—guardians of a national music and dance repertory: The song which has been created by the common people, in contradistinction to the song, popular or otherwise, which has been composed by the educated . . . “the common people” are the unlettered, whose faculties have undergone no formal training, and who have never been brought into close enough contact with educated persons to be influenced by them. (Sharp 1907: 3)

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Sharp’s unwavering insistence on these criteria for the denoting of the authentic source came under some criticism at the time (see Francmanis 2002), but his political influence and published rhetoric ensured strong support from the majority of active musicians, academics, and antiquarians. It can be argued that the quest for the cultural expressions of an idealized rural, agricultural underclass was motivated by the desires of the educated elite to oppose two apparent trends in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century: (1) the fetishization and perceivedly disproportionate influence of other European orchestral traditions (specifically German Romanticism) in nineteenth-century British art music, and (2) the ubiquity of the popular music characterized by the repertory of the burgeoning music hall context, a repertory that (it was feared) was now pervading all areas of vernacular cultural engagement. The “unlettered classes” were thus constructed in contradistinction to what Storey has referred to as the “supposedly degraded culture of the urban working class” (Storey 2003: 11). Significantly for the purposes of this essay, the culture of that urban working class (by the end of the nineteenth century certainly the largest social group in the country) consisted of products designed for mass consumption. Desires to highlight and oppose the capitalist aspects of these new popularist cultural products were central motivations for many involved in collecting and recontextualizing English folk song and music. In his inaugural address of 1899 in the Journal of the Folk Song Society, C. Hubert H. Parry offered a damning indictment of “modern popular music,” with specific reference to its being “made with commercial intention out of snippets of musical slang” (quoted in Storey 2003). It must be acknowledged that an explicit anticapitalist rhetoric was not the main emphasis of the revival movement’s rationale. Rather, an opposition to the commercialism of late Victorian urban culture was implicit in the discourse of social philanthropy foregrounded by the revival’s vocal advocates: The revival of our national folk music is . . . part of a great national revival, a going back from the town to the country, a reaction against all that is demoralising in city life. It is a re-awakening of that part of our national consciousness which makes for wholeness, saneness and healthy merriment. (Mary Neal, quoted in Gammon 1980: 81)

Discussion of the subject centered on the reuniting of the English population with a lost musical legacy for the purposes of widespread cultural enrichment (and, ultimately, patriotic sentiment): Please allow us to teach the children to know and to love what we believe to be the natural and spontaneous music of our ancestors. Then we may hope (with Mr. Cecil Sharp) to have in the future Griegs and Glinkas of our own to do for English music what these patriotic musicians did for the music of their own countries. (J. Heywood, quoted in Francmanis 2002: 13)

492   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter The above quotation speaks explicitly of the two objectives to which focus was directed in this first revival movement: (1) the increase in the role of folk song, music, and dance in school-based education (a brief prioritized by Sharp himself), and (2) the interpolation of collected folk music material in a specifically English body of chamber and orchestral art music (tackled most conspicuously by composers such as Ralph VaughanWilliams, C.  Hubert H.  Parry, and George Butterworth). Both preoccupations were expressed in terms of a greater good (the instillation of national identity and pride), an ethos consciously distanced from any potential economic motivations. Despite this ethos, however, the practices of the movement were not without economic considerations: For instance, every body of collected and arranged material represented a publication to be sold as fuel for the growing interest in an English national culture. Works were commissioned from professional composers, and concerts were given by professional (and, from 1893, trade-union-represented) classical musicians. While the majority of activists in this field funded their projects through their own personal wealth or private income (often a wage in the private education sector, as in the case of Sharp’s early collecting career), the ultimate state sanction of Sharp’s work took the form of public finance: a civil list pension of £100 a year, granted in July 1911 for his services to the collection and preservation of English folk songs (Karpeles 1967: 82). Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, folk music across Britain was the subject of what is widely referred to as the second folk revival. This new period in the development of folk music scholarship and performance differed greatly from Sharp’s movement, primarily due to its political and ideological alliances: Here, emphasis on folk music as the cultural expression of the “people” was predominantly shaped by an internationally growing socialist political agenda (Brocken 2003; Sweers 2005). This new folk revival asserted alignment with the antiapartheid, civil rights, and CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) activisms that were central to the preexisting—and ongoing— American folk movement, while engaging more openly with Marxist discourse and Communist political allegiances.4 Brocken (2003: 49–55) points, for example, toward the significance of the Workers’ Music Association in providing support for the revival, and to the involvement of key movers in the second revival—such as Albert Lancaster Lloyd and Ewan MacColl—in Marxist politics. Just as the folk music of the first revival had been imagined as a more wholesomely English alternative to the popular music of the industrializing period, so some central figures in the second revival saw British and English folk music as an alternative to the commercialized popular music of that time. Alternative circuits of distribution and performance for folk music began to emerge, circuits that placed themselves apart from, or in opposition to, the popular music marketplace, and of central importance in this were the folk clubs that spread from the 1950s onward as a forum for participatory folk music performance, with an amateur ethos (MacKinnon 1993: 33–41). While English folk music continued to be constructed in opposition to commercialized popular music, and the political ideology of leading figures in this revival period may have been “bent on resisting the over-arching economic reality of Western capitalism” (Brocken 2003: 43), this period was also one in which folk music engaged in

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different ways with the marketplace. The folk clubs, for example, while understanding themselves as an alternative to the commercial music marketplace, also developed as a circuit for professional folk performance, as some clubs also began to book guest artists, who performed alongside the clubs’ amateur floor singers.5 Similarly, the independent record label Topic Records developed from the 1950s on to become an important producer of recorded folk music and, in doing so, inevitably had to acknowledge its position in a recorded music marketplace. Brocken captures the ambiguity of this in his description of Topic as “realistic, albeit reluctant capitalists” (43). A more explicit entry of English folk music into a popular music marketplace came through its hybridization with popular music in the folk rock and electric folk of this period, genres that are considered in detail by Sweers (2005) and Burns (2012). Not only did music that featured elements of English folk have commercial success (this reached a peak, Sweers argues, between 1972 and 1975 with the chart successes of Steeleye Span), but this music’s professional stars achieved an attendant visibility in the mainstream media. Sweers, for example, notes that while early coverage of folk music by the popular music magazine Melody Maker had focused on American performers like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, the English revival subsequently started to receive space in the magazine from the 1960s onward, with articles on performers like A. L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Anne Briggs, and Shirley Collins. Through these two revival periods, then, English folk music has largely been imagined and practiced as an alternative to commercialized popular musics—an alternative that has variously been viewed as more properly “English” or else a more authentic expression of “the people.” There are, however, also ways English folk engaged with commercial markets and became, in various ways and to various extents, professionalized through these periods. This took different forms, from the public support afforded to Cecil Sharp through the alternative circuits of the folk clubs where amateur and professional share the stage, and to the intersections of electric folk and folk rock with mainstream commercial markets and musical styles. These engagements can all be traced into the further-developed, multidimensional industry of contemporary English folk culture. For instance, the presence of numerous booking agents and artist managers at the Folk Industry/AFO conference in 2009, including showcase concerts where their acts were profiled for festival organizers, illustrated the extent to which the resurgence had by this time become increasingly reliant on an infrastructure of backstage professionals. Our choice of the term “resurgence” to describe the movement under investigation reflects a need to distinguish the new developments from those of the preceding first and second “revival” periods. There are a number of reasons for this differentiation. First, there is no clear discourse of a tradition in need of “rescue” (to borrow the term from Livingston 1999: 70). None of the protagonists interviewed for the present research showed any concern that the material performed by folk musicians was in danger of falling into disuse. Rather, this resurgence is most clearly understood as a growth of popularity and profile of a preexisting genre. It is also unlike previous revivals (and those in certain other cultures) in that it is not accompanied by a strong discursive opposition to any “mainstream” cultural developments. Through outputs such as singer Jim Moray’s

494   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter album Low Culture, musicians go to great lengths to emphasize folk music status as one kind of “popular music” or to engage in a postmodernist deconstruction of the folk/art/ pop boundaries. In addition, the collection of traditional material—cited by Livingston as a “basic ingredient” of any revival (69)—plays no discernable role in the resurgence, although consultation (and celebration) of existing collections made during the previous revivals is common. Furthermore, there is no unified (or even predominating) methodology for a reinvention of traditional material or performance. In fact, the resurgence has foregrounded and celebrated a considerable diversification of stylistic approaches. For instance, the singer and multiinstrumentalist Jim Moray has employed experimental live-sampling techniques in his arrangements, while the English Acoustic Collective has concentrated on the development of a strictly acoustic polyphony and heterophony, and the eleven-piece folk “big band” Bellowhead has explored arrangements ranging from vaudeville to 1970s disco. Although some acts have developed new and unusual ways of presenting traditional material, many are performing in much the same way as would have been expected before the resurgence began, and all are enjoying increased popularity and media profile. Musicians tend to consider the resurgence as a newly positive, receptive attitude toward folk music by those coming to the genre from outside, assisted by a “new generation” of performers who have made the music more appealing to younger audiences. While other labels are occasionally employed by various commentators for the contemporary movement, use of the term “revival” is very rare, with participants seeking to distance themselves from what are perceived to have been the more heavily politicized objectives of the first and second revivals. Thus, interviewees in our research have generally responded positively to the term “resurgence,” even taking it up in future public discussion. Related to the foregoing points, the current resurgence also differs from the preceding folk revivals in that it is not underpinned by any explicit political or ideological movement. As we demonstrate elsewhere (Winter and Keegan-Phipps 2013), the wider political climate in England can be understood as a contributing factor in the growth in popularity of the English folk arts but cannot be demonstrated to be an explicit motivation for any of the activities manifest in the resurgence. Instead, any political statements locatable in the resurgence are generally subtle, ambiguous, multifaceted, and often downplayed. Some of the organizations and events mentioned in this essay are in receipt of public funding. However, it is important to acknowledge that the British government has no clear or explicit policy on the funding of the English—or wider British—folk arts as opposed to the funding of any other form of arts activities. During the course of the research presented here, new Arts Council England awards have been made for certain activities, while preexisting, regular financial support for others has been withheld. There is certainly a feeling among folk musicians and audiences that although the situation is improving, folk music receives far less support from the state than it deserves because of its established status as an object of ridicule. It is a widely held view among those involved that the resurgence has occurred in spite of the state’s arts funding policies

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rather than because of them, although it is also recognized that the state’s response to the resurgence has been a positive one.

The Festival As a category of cultural and social event, the festival constitutes arguably the most significant performative arena for the early twenty-first century resurgence in English folk music and dance. Earlier studies of folk music in England have focused their attentions on the folk club, but this legacy of the second revival period weakened steadily in significance through the 1980s and 1990s (a decline documented quantitatively by MacKinnon 1993). Barring one or two notable exceptions, club audiences are far from representative of the younger generation (under forty years old) that apparently resides at the heart of the contemporary movement. Younger participants often associate folk clubs with unappealing residual features of the second revival period from which the establishments were born, such as an older personnel, anachronistic cultural capital, unacknowledged formalities, and a heavily (if not always explicitly) politicized ethos. Festivals, however, have seen a considerable increase in attendance by younger audiences. Festivals are also sites of concentrated activity across the full range of the folk arts—music and dance, from the fully presentational (e.g. formal concerts) to the fully participatory (such as open workshops and ceilidh dancing). In recent years, many key innovations in the contemporary English folk arts have been premiered at or instigated by festivals rather than other performance venues (as with the first performance of the ground-breaking morris dance group Morris Offspring at Sidmouth International Festival in 2003, which went on to tour arts venues nationally in 2007). Festivals are therefore considered to represent the most central performance context of the current resurgence by the majority of its participants. Estimates for the number of annual folk festivals throughout the United Kingdom were set in 2004 at around 350 (Association of Festival Organisers 2003). Such estimates can only be approximate, for a number of reasons. First, festivals can range from weeklong, high-profile events attracting upward of ten thousand attendees to something more akin to a series of workshops over one or two days, perhaps attracting fewer than a hundred. Most significantly, the identification of folk festivals is complicated by the fact that generic boundaries and labels are ambiguous. Even among those festivals that include the term “folk” in their title, the nature of the content programmed varies immensely. Different festivals choose to include to greater or lesser extents music that is—or can be—described as world music, early music, singer-songwriter, American old-timey, blues, acoustic pop, and jazz alongside that which is unambiguously traditional music of the British Isles. Meanwhile, symptomatic of the current resurgence is a new-found willingness by music festivals widely regarded as “mainstream festivals” to program folk music. As festivals vary in size and content, so too do they vary in their location and immediate physical setting: For the vast majority of folk festivals, most attendees stay on a

496   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter campsite, and this is often a focal space for festival activities. In the cases of larger festivals, a sizable field plays host to almost all of the programmed activities, with space portioned out for camping, vendors’ stalls, catering vans, and temporary performance venues (commonly marquees of varying sizes). At many festivals, at least some of the performances are housed in a nearby building, such as a school or leisure center, while others make greater use of local public buildings for performances (town halls, churches, theaters, large pubs). A number of “folk festivals” basically amount to a concert series, hosted by an arts center, with attendees expected to organize their own accommodation. A defining feature of “folk festivals,” as opposed to other genres of music festival, is the relative centrality of active artistic participation by attendees. For these attendees, membership of concert audiences may play a significant role, as it would at any other form of music festival, but a great deal of expectation and value is placed on opportunities to take part in music and dance, through either programmed, organized workshops or less formalized (and potentially relatively spontaneous) occurrences such as instrumental music sessions or singarounds (the nearest vocal equivalent to the session). Nonetheless, it is true to say that relatively nonparticipatory performances are the highest profile element of programming at folk festivals—the concert bill remains a central element of festival advertising. Again, emphases differ considerably from one festival to the next, but music concerts and dance displays are likely to account for the majority of the festival program. The festival plays host to the full gamut of commercial activity that now exists in England’s folk music culture. Beyond the initial financial investment on the part of the attendee at the point of purchasing a ticket, the event itself is constructed as a multifaceted economic space.6 Whether situated in a self-contained festival site or positioned in another easily accessed area of the hosting town, the provision of a variety of commercial outlets specific to the event is a central element. Perhaps the most significant category of such vendors (at least from the point of view of turnover) is catering: at a large festival, several trailers and mobile kitchens provide attendees with diverse sustenance, ranging from burger-vans and purveyors of full English fried breakfasts through to vegetarian specialists and exponents of various “ethnic” cuisines. Large numbers of stalls offer a huge array of clothes and gifts, many of which can be said to play a role in the construction of cohesive subcultural identities among the attendees (items such as non-Western—“ethnic”—clothing and ethically traded products). In the vast majority of cases, all of the above vendors have negotiated contracts with the festival organizers in order to secure their pitch at the festival. Much space (and attendees’ money) is given over to the stalls that are culturally specific to the folk festival: sellers of musical instruments and sheet music and sellers of recorded music (“the CD tent”). The former reap considerable economic benefits from their presence at folk festivals: since only a handful of permanent shops exist in the UK that specialize in the trade of folk and traditional musical instruments,7 the festivals provide these vendors with the opportunity to tour their wares—to bring them to their potential clients. Individual sales from these stalls can range from £1 (e.g. a toy harmonica key-ring) to £2,000–3,000 (e.g. a high-quality melodeon). Just a handful of sales at

Contemporary English Folk Music and the Folk Industry  497

the top end of this spectrum may leave an instrument stall’s total turnover equalling that of another kind of stall (e.g. a food vendor) that does continuous, brisk business over the course of a busy weeklong festival. Where sales are not forthcoming during the festival itself, potential clients are provided with the opportunity to try out instruments for comparison with a view to a future purchase (a particularly important prelude to future online purchases). The economics of the CD seller at a large festival can also be comparatively involved. In most cases, there will be only one outlet for recorded music, which will have negotiated (with the event organizers) sole rights to sell music and other merchandise specific to the bands featured at the festival. The organizers will agree to this in exchange for either a flat fee or a percentage of takings, and where such rights have been secured by the vendor, acts performing at the festival will be contracted not to sell their merchandise by any means other than through the vendor, who will apply a standard commission rate (e.g., 20 percent) (Simon Bannister, interview, December 2, 2009, Telford). Meanwhile, the vendor will also arrive at the festival with his or her own prepurchased stock, largely made up of CDs by the more commercially successful and established acts, and often procured from record distributors such as Proper Distribution, a company that specializes in the distribution of “specialist” music (mainly folk and jazz). Folk festivals are connected to a wider events industry in their contracting of services such as sound engineers, public address system hire, marquee hire, stage and lighting hire, portable toilet hire, and outdoor generator hire. For the most part, these roles are fulfilled in much the same way as they would be at any large outdoor event, although professional and social networking in England’s folk culture results in a situation where a relatively small number of contractors for sound, public address systems, marquees, stages, and lighting are hired by folk festivals throughout the country. Sound engineering, however, deserves a special mention, since this area has resulted in a specialization process since the early 1980s: The individuals who are well known in this area are particularly respected for their knowledge in the field of successfully amplifying the sounds of a range of acoustic instruments, including some—such as melodeons, concertinas, whistles, and bagpipes—that might be unfamiliar and challenging to sound engineers working in other genres. Alongside this developing and professionalized folk industry, however, there remains a strong noncommercial (even anticommercial), amateur ethos at the center of the English folk culture’s identity. We have already noted the centrality of artistic participation in the idea of the folk festival, with the attendant blurring of distinctions between performers and audience: Professional performers booked to perform at festivals might be found at times playing in informal music sessions on the campsite, for example. Performers remain strongly associated with, and surrounded by, a discourse of authenticity through nonmonetary motivation. Most professional folk musicians are seen as being motivated by “the love of the music”—not even the love of performing but a love of the music. They are referred to, and regarded as, “tradition-bearers,” while their activities are regularly described in terms of “cultural heritage” (see e.g. Association of Festival Organisers 2003). Amateur protagonists continue to play a central part in promoting

498   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter folk music and dance events, from festivals to clubs; their use of the politically loaded term “folk activists” (rather than simply “volunteers”) to describe themselves is a quiet statement of motivations that are not merely cultural but socially responsive and even philanthropic. English folk culture, then, demonstrates an apparently contradictory coexistence of a folk ethos privileging amateurism and culturally philanthropic motivations with a growing commercialization and professionalization. But this cohabitation—particularly in the festival context—is far from uneasy. For example, many festivals program participatory activities that engage directly with issues pertaining to the newly emerging folk industry, in such a way that the apparently inscrutable aspects of that industry are demystified and explained for festival attendees. The 2008 workshops program at Shrewsbury Folk Festival (one of the largest of England’s single-site folk festivals) included talks by a representative of the Musicians’ Union titled “Releasing Your Own Product” and “Spreading the Word: How to Approach Opinion Makers and Potential Employers with Your Music Product,” while representatives of Birmingham City University provided an advanced workshop on sound engineering. Similar programming was beginning to appear at all the major festivals at this time. Other events show how folk ethos and folk industry are increasingly combined, by constructing an image of the arts industry as an inherently “grassroots” arena, where aspiring festival attendees are encouraged to actively participate in the folk industry in much the same way as they would expect to participate in a music session. Shrewsbury Folk Festival offered access to two on-site mobile recording studios (a feature that is also becoming an increasingly common instalment at larger festivals), one provided by the BBC’s county radio station (BBC Radio Shropshire) and the other by Birmingham City University. These enabled attendees to create a “music product,” with the promise of radio airplay by BBC Radio Shropshire for the best recording made in their studio. A similar reward was on offer to those who took part in the BBC’s workshop entitled “Learn Interviewing Techniques and the Basics of Digital Editing.” Here, participants were taught the necessary skills before being sent forth to create a radio “package” over the course of the festival week, with the promise that “the best/funniest/most revealing gets played on [BBC Radio Shropshire’s folk program] Sunday Folk” (Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2008). The economic relationships being practiced here are multifaceted. In the case of the Musicians’ Union’s educative discussion fora, the attendees remain consumers of the industry about which they wish to learn (the Musicians’ Union representative, for instance, is offering his own advisory “product” and will be paid out of money made from festival ticket sales). In the case of the recording studios, attendee investment in the commercial system extends to the free provision of “products” for that system, either directly (in the case of the BBC’s airplay incentives) or through the indirect feeding of an emphasis on product-led commerce. A developing media involvement even suggests an apparent increase in the potential for talented attendees to be “discovered” in a manner that simultaneously references current popular cultural trends (such as television talent shows like The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent) and an inclusive democratizing of opportunity consistent with longer standing cultural values of the English folk scene.

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These developments are relatively recent (the appearance of mobile recording studios at festivals, for instance, has only occurred since approximately 2004), but the merging of consumption and participation has played an important if tacit role in English folk music culture for some time. The most obvious and long-standing example of this ambiguity is the role of festivals as arenas for the sale of musical instruments and tune/ songbooks, predominantly to amateur attendees, by the vendors mentioned. Even the most unambiguous form of product sale—the sale of music CDs—has historically taken place from the boot of the performer’s car ever since the medium became available for public manufacture: sole-trader festival contracts notwithstanding, the purchase of CDs direct from the performer is a celebrated part of the folk music culture, emphasizing the “grassroots” identification of folk musicians with their audiences. In the context of the larger festivals, this point of cultural contact has, since around 2005, been reinvented with the now standard appearance of a “signing tent”: After concerts, artists may schedule an autographing session in the signing tent (invariably positioned alongside—and often administered from—that of the CD seller). Thus the opportunity for some brief personal contact with the performer/s remains achievable for audience members, while the former are operating within the contractual requirements of the festival’s sole-trader agreement. The institutionalization of performers autographing their merchandise simultaneously enhances their status as celebrities in their culture—individuals to be considered approachable only via a queue. In these ways, the increasingly common practice of the “signing session” can be regarded as both a manifestation and an active vehicle of the professionalizing folk industry.

The Media Media institutions and platforms are recognized by many as being engaged with—and complicit in—the development of a broader, active, and professionalizing English folk industry. In interviews, regular reference is made to the growth of interest in folk music across the country’s radio and television programming as both reflective of and contributing to the current resurgence of English folk music. Steve Heap (FolkArts England) contextualized his experiences of the conception of the folk-music-based Channel 5 television series My Music thus: Now, for twenty-odd years, I’ve been in and out of radio and television studios, and media, saying “folk music” . . . usually with a small “f ” and, in the earlier days, quietly. And they’ve laughed and giggled and said “morris dancers and silly old men with beards and beer bellies.” At [a]‌meeting . . . less than a year ago, twelve top professional television people sat around a table and discussed folk music at length, very seriously, and nobody laughed and nobody giggled and nobody laughed about morris men—and they were discussed—and nobody said “beer bellies” and . . . . That’s a resurgence. That’s people who previously didn’t quite know what it was, taking it

500   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter seriously. And understanding the potential. Some people only understand the commercial potential, other people can see the artistic potential, some can see the heritage potential, the community potential . . . . It’s got lots of different branches to it, and more and more people are recognizing it . . . . That’s a resurgence. (Steve Heap, interview, January 25, 2008, Matlock)

By 2010, there had been a significant increase in generic references to “folk” in mainstream public print, television, and online media and journalism. When related to music, this has included a broadening of the term “folk” to include some varieties of acoustic popular music and musicians, and the term’s expansion into popular classifications such as Nu Folk (e.g., in relation to the acoustic-rock sounds of acts such as Mumford and Sons or Noah and the Whale) and Folktronica (characterized by the combination of heavily electronic and “natural” acoustic sounds, as heard in the work of Tunng). In parallel to this development, English folk musicians (i.e., those who identify with English folk culture and are accepted as such in it) have been receiving new attention from mainstream media and programming. For example, Jim Moray supported the pop singer Will Young on his 2003 U.K. tour, and Bellowhead has made several appearances on the BBC2 televised music show Later with Jools Holland. Although these growing folk music incursions into popular music programming are significant, perhaps the strongest of English folk music’s relationships with the broadcast media is that with BBC Radio 2. Since the station’s inception in 1967, it has been the sole provider of regular, national radio broadcasts devoted to folk music, albeit often scheduled at times of the day likely to receive low listener ratings. Brocken refers to a process of “marginalisation” via a justificatory discourse of “specialisation” (2003: 137), and his clearly aggrieved belief that “folk music has been condemned to a degree of radio exile” is one commonly held by members of the folk music culture in England. Nonetheless, throughout the resurgence, “Folk and Acoustic” programming (in the form of the Mike Harding Show) has been broadcast for an hour between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. on a Wednesday evening (by no means the “graveyard shift”) on BBC Radio 2, the most listened-to radio station in the UK. BBC Radio 2’s notable relationship with folk music and dance culture has been cemented in recent years by its involvement in and financial support of two of the largest folk festivals in England: Sidmouth International Festival and Cambridge Folk Festival. At Sidmouth, the station sponsored the largest of the covered performance venues— the Radio 2 Concert Stage Ham Marquee—from 1998 to 2004, after which the festival was taken under new management, scaled down, and renamed Sidmouth Folk Week. During this period, performances from the Ham Marquee were routinely (and exclusively) recorded for and broadcast on the Mike Harding Show (Schofield 2004:  191). The station has also acted as title sponsor of the Cambridge Folk Festival, with the BBC enjoying exclusive rights to recording and broadcasting at the festival: regular live broadcasts are made from the substantial media enclosure at the festival ground during the week of the event on Radio 2, with highlights of the festival broadcast retrospectively on the BBC’s “culture” digital television station, BBC 4. In 2009, the BBC retained

Contemporary English Folk Music and the Folk Industry  501

its role as the festival’s principal media partner, but status as title sponsor of the event was passed over to The Co-operative, a food retail and banking organization whose famously ethical procurement and investment policies make its financial involvement here a resonant one for a folk industry whose “industrial” aspects interface with philanthropic discourses. The increasing professionalization of English folk culture has not only occurred in juxtaposition with a continuing discourse of cultural philanthropy. The process has also coincided with the converse increase in the vernacularization of access to the distribution of promotional materials, music files, and information via the Internet. The Internet has, of course, allowed increased ease of communication (and therefore the commercial distribution of products or information) for protagonists in all fields of the folk industry, and this includes the musicians themselves, who are ostensibly able to reach ever wider audiences with their music, without the aid of professional distributors or agencies. The social and music networking site MySpace was particularly instrumental at the turn of the twenty-first century in enabling amateur and semiprofessional musicians to be heard by an active/selective audience. However, this apparently democratic distributive media does not necessarily equate to a democratization of direct access to music sales: MySpace enables musicians to “spread the word” but does not necessarily lead directly to transactions without going through a third party. For instance, only a small proportion of those listeners who listen to and download (where possible) mp3 files from such band-profile sites will follow this up by seeking to purchase an entire album in hard copy (i.e. a mail-order CD) directly from the band. Folk music consumers are well aware that if they can find an album for sale on an online shopping site such as Amazon.com, HMV, or CD Baby, they are likely to pay considerably less than if they were to purchase direct from the musician. The significance of networking sites, profile sites, or independent websites rests predominantly in their potential to act as billboards for cheap advertising to audiences or promoters who are actively seeking information. In other words, the Internet has supported and diversified the communication of music and information throughout an active and largely preexisting market. The musicians interviewed by the authors all pointed to live events as the most significant context for the “discovery” of folk music by new audiences—in particular, individuals encouraged to attend a folk event by friends who are members of an existing audience and individuals witnessing a performance of folk music at a nonspecialist (mainstream) music event. Whether or not these narratives are based on corroborating evidence, the inherently social act of live audience membership remains central to internal discourse around the expansion of a folk industry. The achievement of significant commercial success via the Internet continues to depend on the musicians’ engagement with professional distributors—in the case of folk and traditional music in the UK, Proper Distribution—enabling wider circulation of CDs to counteract the inevitably lower profit margins. Through distributors of this kind, CDs are sold in much larger quantities via the popular online shops. And it is the democratization of access to these retailing channels that represents a significant vernacularization of industrial activity. Proper Distribution, for instance, offers a package—Proper

502   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter Access—that enables the cost-effective distribution of CDs in relatively small quantities and is therefore attractive for small labels and unsigned artists who are “just starting out” (Proper Distribution 2010); it is also relatively simple for artists to deal directly with the American online catalogue and retailer CD Baby. These opportunities for unsigned acts to make their music widely available without heavy investment in the management sector speaks to both an ideological investment that privileges the “little people” (the new acts that are overlooked by the big record labels, particularly at early stages in their careers) and a progressive, explorative, and inherently capitalist discourse surrounding the quest for “hot new talent.” As with all areas and genres of the contemporary Western music industry, however, the increased opportunities for self-distribution and self-promotion might also be read as moving folk music into line with a larger hegemonic economy in which musicians are able—and encouraged—to become professional (or rather, professionalized) by working, on a self-funded basis, to begin the process of profile and popularity building. That is, artists are encouraged to invest their own time and money in order to obtain the first indicators by which the industry may assess their economic potential.

Competitions and Folk Development Organizations As we have already suggested, activities geared toward learning and participation make a significant contribution to the programming of all festivals, and the work of development organizations dedicated to the progression of the “next generation” of folk musicians has been a significant contributor to the resurgence and is integrally tied to the folk industry. Workshops are the most ubiquitous of such activities: They offer paying participants access to the technical expertise and social contact of often fairly high-profile performers, while providing those performers with an important supplement to their performance income as well as the opportunity to develop a fan base (Keegan-Phipps 2008: 148). Workshops specifically aimed at children and young people, however, play an important and increasingly acknowledged role in the mid- to long-term future of festivals, and of folk culture more generally. Dedicated educational provision for children has become an essential criterion for the majority of key cultural event funding bodies (particularly Arts Council England) and thus vital to any event requiring public contribution. At the same time, festival organizers are becoming increasingly aware that the provision of workshops and activities designed specifically for young people (preferably by young people) enables the participants to quickly develop an identification with that particular festival and to express a “festival loyalty” that will manifest itself in regular attendance through to adulthood and beyond (283). Shooting Roots, the most extensive series of this kind to develop in the context of the English folk festival, began during the mid-1990s at Sidmouth International Festival

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(under the commission of Heap’s Mrs. Casey Enterprises). By 2007 Shooting Roots had grown to be what is essentially a subcontracted organization in its own right: run by musician and dancer Laurel Swift, the group employed around twenty tutors on a casual basis and was hired out to various festivals to provide a fully formed package of workshops, activities, and entertainments aimed at children and young people between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. The popularity of Shooting Roots among festival-attending tutees (and therefore festival organizers) is in no small part attributable to the relatively young demographic of the tutors (who are aged between eighteen and thirty) and the enthusiastic and informal presentation of the activities on offer. It is relatively easy for the young tutees to identify with their tutors, and it is therefore unsurprising that many regular attendees at Shooting Roots workshops have gone on to become tutors in recent years (Keegan-Phipps 2008: 278–280). In this way, the Shooting Roots experience is a relatively self-perpetuating cycle, and this progression from participant to tutor can also be seen in other nonfestival workshops. But this sustainability of the festival youth workshop economy has developed in parallel with a broader educational and competitive structure for the training and encouragement of a “younger generation” of professional folk musicians. The Folkworks program at the Sage Gateshead is by far the largest and most high-profile example of the institutionalization of folk and traditional music education in England. Based in the North East region of England, Folkworks is a highly resourced program, facilitating performances and learning opportunities for children and adults at community, regional, and national levels. As well as playing a major role in concert programming at the Sage Gateshead—the £70 million Norman Foster building in which it is housed—Folkworks has provided extensive workshop series, residential weekends, and summer schools for adult and youth attendees. These formally structured, professionally managed, and closely taught educational experiences provide instrumental, song, and dance tuition (although the emphasis is on the former, as is congruent with the North East England folk music culture from which the organization developed and in which it continues to operate).8 Although the vast majority of Folkworks’ activities remain located in the North East region, their influence on a developing younger generation of folk musicians is felt across England and Britain as a whole. The success of the institution has for some time taken the form of an upward spiral in popularity nationally and internationally. Secured funding from the Arts Council England (among many other funding bodies and sponsoring organizations) and reliable track records in publicity and marketing have enabled Folkworks to offer securely waged employment opportunities for professional folk and traditional musicians from across the country and beyond; thus, high-profile artists are drawn from a range of geographical areas and musical traditions to work as tutors at summer schools and other workshop-based events. This influx of nationally and internationally renowned teaching personnel, in turn, attracts greater numbers of tutees from further afield. This has been particularly true of the relationship between tutors and tutees hailing from the English folk music tradition, resulting in a partial translocation of English traditional music tuition to the home of Northumbrian traditional music

504   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter culture. This culture is characterized by pluralism and adoptive attitudes toward repertoires, and English folk is now to be found alongside Celtic and Northumbrian in the area, as well as—to a lesser extent—Scandinavian, American, and eastern European traditional musics (Keegan-Phipps 2007: 29–31). In 2001, the International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS) at Newcastle University joined forces with Folkworks to deliver an undergraduate degree (B.Mus.) in “folk and traditional music.” Hailed as the first of its kind in England, the four-year course is designed to offer a higher education opportunity for folk and traditional musicians with an emphasis on performance, and tuition is delivered by a combination of professional musicians, Folkworks personnel, and ICMuS academic staff. As part of this degree course, tuition is provided in the extramusical elements of a performance-based musical career, such as stagecraft and arts administration. Almost from the conception of the degree course, students have enjoyed opportunities to perform in professional contexts, such as “showcase” concerts in the Sage Gateshead’s programming. More importantly, students (many of whom have come through the Folkworks summer schools and workshop experience) are able—and encouraged—to form groups, many of which go on to perform professionally. They are also given such social and musical access to existing high-profile professionals that the course can be reasonably regarded as a potential launchpad for a successful career as a folk or traditional musician. Multiinstrumentalist Ian Stephenson, for instance, not only performed professionally as a soloist and ceilidh band musician during his time as an undergraduate earning the “folk degree”; he also played as part of the Kathryn Tickell Band, accompanying Tickell, probably the best known contemporary Northumbrian small-piper, who is one of the leading lecturers on the course and, since 2009, the artistic director of Folkworks. Institutionalization of folk and traditional music in England has occurred through not only advanced education but also the strengthening profile of competition. Here, too, connections with a developing folk music industry and related media coverage are clear. Beyond simply broadcasting British folk music, BBC Radio 2 has also been associated with the development of a competition culture via the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.9 These have been awarded since 2000, and the award ceremony has been televised each year since 2004 for BBC’s digital station, BBC4. The awards cover a range of categories, including Folk Singer of the Year, Best Traditional Track, Best Duo, Best Album, and Best Live Act, and are determined by a judging panel of unnamed experts in the field of folk and traditional music. It is notable that the award categories indicate evaluation of both the social performance of folk (Folk Singer of the Year; Best Live Act) and the folk recording as a commoditized product (Best Traditional Track; Album of the Year). Considering the high profile of ceilidhs and ceilidh bands in the folk community (particularly in England), coupled with the fact that ceilidhs often represent the first contact with folk music for many new audiences, the failure to recognize this particular sector of the professional folk music scene in these awards is telling. Many professional ceilidh bands do produce albums, but these are, for the most part, collected only by a small proportion of ceilidh enthusiasts and are often treated by the bands as a way of advertising the nature of their sound and repertory in order to secure bookings for the actual

Contemporary English Folk Music and the Folk Industry  505

dances. An award for Best Dance Band was presented to the ceilidh band Whapweasel in 2005 but has not been awarded before or since. It is perhaps possible to infer from the ceilidh bands’ general absence from the award listings that the experiential and predominantly unrecorded commodity offered by such acts does not meet with the more commercial-product-led interests of an industry whose outlook gravitates toward the needs of the mainstream media. Of course, a counterargument lies in the continual presence of the Folk Club Award, which would appear to suggest an interest in rewarding participatory, community-oriented institutions. It is interesting to note that no Best Folk Festival category has yet emerged, despite the far greater media profile, total number of attendees, and visible impact of these events in comparison to the clubs. The awards are highly regarded among folk musicians, managers, promoters and festival/venue programmers, and references to Folk Awards and nominations are prominent in artists’ promotional materials. They therefore play an important role in the professionalization of the folk musicians they celebrate, guaranteeing not only national media exposure to audiences but also widespread recognition from prospective clients. Nonetheless, it is essential to bear in mind that the BBC remains a publicly funded broadcasting organization with a cultural brief that demands a fundamentally charitable support of the arts. Here, then, is a further indication of the extent to which an increasingly commercialized English folk arts culture simultaneously maintains identification with a socially conscientious ideology, through its associations with—and reliance on—a noncommercial (and ultimately state-sanctioned) cultural institution. The BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award, on the other hand, represents the drawing together of competition, industry celebration, and educational institutionalization. Much of the event’s organization (including unrecorded semifinal judging) was conducted by Folkworks from 1998, when the competition was started (notably preceding the main BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards), until 2005.10 The links between the folk industry and this competition are perhaps even more explicit than those between the industry and the “adult” version of the awards: the prizes of the Young Folk Award have, for a number of years, consisted of live recording sessions for broadcast on BBC Radio 2’s Mike Harding Show, as well as guaranteed performance slots at the Sidmouth International and Towersey Village Festivals. A representative of both festivals has appeared on the judging panel of the competition in the form of Steve Heap, while other past judges have included John Leonard, director of Smooth Operations, the company that produces the Mike Harding Show. Clearly, then, the judging criteria must include consideration of the saleability of the products offered by the contestants. Over recent years, the points of intersection between the educational institutionalization of Folkworks, the folk degree, and the professional folk music industry have developed beyond the competition context of the Young Folk Award. At the annual Folk Industry and Association of Festival Organisers Conference in 2009, the free promotional packets handed out to delegates included a free CD, Folk Degree Sampler 2009, that provided a recorded showcasing of a number of promising performers currently studying for the degree, and a two-track single, SpinnDrift, that served as a preview of a forthcoming album by a band made up of folk degree students. During the conference

506   Simon Keegan-Phipps and Trish Winter (organized by Steve Heap as the head of FolkArts England and the AFO), busking spots were provided to give new performers the opportunity to be heard by festival organizers and programmers. Folkworks-nurtured talent featured heavily, and cofounder Alistair Anderson was also at the conference, not only speaking to delegates but also lending his support to these budding professionals. Just as the provision of recording opportunities to amateur performers at festivals feeds a cyclical system for market rejuvenation, an infrastructure has developed in order to mature and present students of folk music education for professional careers—careers that not only support the burgeoning industry’s thirst for new young performers (each with a good grounding in arts administration and the nonmusical aspects of the trade) but also provide advertisement for the educational institutions wherein they have achieved such high technical standards and gained their performance and recording opportunities.

Conclusions A folk industry is growing, then, in the context of a music culture that has, since its inception, been framed within versions of an anticommercial ethos. The industry is developing with the professionalization of folk music products and artists and the commercialization of participation but appears largely to reconcile this commercialization with underlying principles of amateurism, social philanthropy, participation, noncommercialism, and voluntarism. Indeed, the extent to which these trends are reconciled and the professionalism of the folk industry is embraced can be striking. The festival draws together the celebration of a developing, professionalizing industry with a powerful “more-important-than-money” discourse. Festival programming reveals an emphasis on social interaction as a folk-defining fundamental, from which cultural philanthropy (widely referred to as “folk activism”) maintains and negotiates the justification of professionalization as a means to an essential, culturally valuable end. But the development of an industry is not merely seen as a necessary progression for folk to be “taken seriously” by a mainstream-music-oriented media (and thus the wider society) but also is celebrated as demonstrative of success—as the trappings of achievement in this pursuit for cultural credibility and popularity. The significance of the increasing commercialism in England’s folk culture is that it is one manifestation—and, simultaneously, one active vehicle—of a cultural identity in flux: it speaks to larger (political) issues currently under negotiation in English folk music and dance—concerns for engagement with the contemporary, the urban, the realist, and the progressive. As we have shown, to declare the contemporary developments in English folk music culture a “revival” per se is questionable: The music being performed is not deemed to be in danger of disappearing by those involved, and there are very few expressions of intent to create a new music culture, or one that offers an alternative to a contemporary mainstream. Contemporary English folk music is, however, undergoing a significant

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process of recontextualization. This process has involved a partial shift in demographic (in the form of a growing young audience) but hinges primarily on a cultural realignment of folk music with the commercial structures more commonly associated with pop music. Far from being a hegemonic resolution to earlier revivals, however, discourses remain that maintain a central “folk” identity. A valued sense of authenticity is retained through processes rather than through musical material: The “folk ethos” is consolidated through an emphasis on inclusive participation that mitigates any potential concerns about the “selling out” of professionalization or the “artifice” of media representation. The lack of clearly underpinning cultural objectives by participants actually fuels the sense of authentic expression by suggesting that the resurgence is inherently organic, rather than something “manufactured” by political agenda. To put it another way, the “other” to which the current resurgence is offering an alternative is the explicitly directed, heavily politicized revivalism of previous revivals. The resurgence is taking place in a cultural context where professionalization and industrialization are the natural order, and where attempts to reject that order would not only undermine the success of English folk music but would actually erode its claims of authenticity or legitimacy as a popular movement.

Notes 1. Our choice of the term “resurgence” is discussed later. 2. The nature of this resurgence in the popularity and profile of English folk arts—and the ways it speaks to a broader growth of interest in a notion of English national and cultural identity—was the subject of a two-year ethnographic and ethnomusicological research project, Performing Englishness in New English Folk Music and Dance (2007–9), hosted by the University of Sunderland and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research presented in this essay draws on ethnographic data, including interviews and participant observation, collected as part of that project. 3. For more detailed historical accounts of English and British folk, see Boyes 1993; Brocken 2003; Harker 1985; MacKinnon 1993; Sweers 2005. 4. For more on the politics of the American revival, see Reuss and Reuss 2000. 5. See MacKinnon (1993: 70–76) for an account of the rise of the folk professional. 6. See Thomas (2008) for an expanded discussion of this, albeit one that is closely focused on large mainstream festivals. 7. The most significant of these are the chains Hobgoblin and The Music Rooms, which have stalls at most of the large folk festivals. 8. For more on Folkworks, see Keegan-Phipps 2007. For a broader discussion on the educational institutionalization of traditional musics, see Hill 2009. 9. The more explicit nationalism, local-national stratigraphy, and technical orientation of Norwegian fiddling contests examined by Goertzen (1997) make them an interesting case for comparison with the competitions discussed here. 10. For a more detailed analysis of Folkworks’ involvement in the training of many successful competitors, see Keegan-Phipps 2008.

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References Association of Festival Organisers. 2003. A Report into the Impact of Folk Festivals on Cultural Tourism. Matlock: Association of Festival Organisers. Boyes, Georgina. 1993. The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brocken, Michael. 2003. The British Folk Revival 1944–2002. Aldershot: Ashgate. Burns, Robert. 2012. Transforming Folk: Innovation and Tradition in English Folk-rock Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press. FolkArts England. 2007. FAE Training Days; Folk Industry Focus Days; The Association of Festival Organisers Conference (Programme). Matlock: FolkArts England. FolkArts England. 2008. The Folk Industry & AFO Conference 2008. Matlock: FolkArts England. Francmanis, John. 2002. “National Music to National Redeemer:  The Consolidation of a ‘Folk-song’ Construct in Edwardian England.” Popular Music 21 (1): 1–25. Gammon, Vic. 1980. “Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1843–1914.” History Workshop 10: 61–89. Goertzen, Chris. 1997. Fiddling for Norway:  Revival and Identity. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Harker, Dave. 1985. Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hill, Juniper. 2009. “The Influence of Conservatory Folk Music Programmes:  The Sibelius Academy in Comparative Context.” Ethnomusicology Forum 18 (2): 207–241. Karpeles, Maud. 1967. Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Keegan-Phipps, Simon. 2007. “Déjà Vu? Folk Music, Education, and Institutionalization in Contemporary England.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39: 84–107. Keegan-Phipps, Simon. 2008. “Teaching Folk:  The Educational Institutionalization of Folk Music in Contemporary England.” PhD diss., Newcastle University. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. MacKinnon, Niall. 1993. The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Proper Distribution. 2010. “Proper Access.” http://www.properdistribution.com/properdistribution/proper-access.php?pg=1. Reuss, Richard A., and JoAnne C. Reuss. 2000. American Folk Music and Left-wing Politics, 1927–1957. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Schofield, Derek. 2004. The First Week in August:  Fifty Years of the Sidmouth Festival. Sidmouth: Sidmouth International Festival. Sharp, Cecil J. 1907. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. London: Mercury Books. Shrewsbury Folk Festival. 2008. Shrewsbury Folk Festival Programme. Bridgnorth: Shrewsbury Folk Festival. Storey, John. 2003. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Sweers, Britta. 2005. Electric Folk:  The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Peter. 2008. “Geographies of the Music Festival:  Production, Consumption and Performance at Outdoor Music Festivals in the UK.” Ph.D. diss., Newcastle University. Winter, Trish, and Simon Keegan-Phipps. 2013. Performing Englishness: Identity and Politics in a Contemporary Folk Resurgence. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Discs Cited Moray, Jim. 2008. Low Culture. NIAG Records. Newcastle University. 2009. Folk Degree Sampler 2009. Newcastle University. Spinndrift. 2009. SpinnDrift. Self-published.

A webography featuring annotated links to the websites of organizations, festivals, and artists mentioned in this chapter can be found on the companion website. (See Website List: Annotated Links .)

C HA P T E R  23

I VA NA K U PA L A ( S T. J O H N ’ S E V E ) R E V I VA L S A S M E TA P H O R S O F S E X UA L M O R A L I T Y, F E RT I L I T Y, A N D C O N T E M P O R A RY U K R A I N IA N FEMININITY A DR IA NA H E L BIG

Revivals are an integral part of communal experience and function as a set of social practices that suit a variety of needs at a particular point in time. That which becomes constituted as a revival depends on context and on social forces that create the opportunity for revival. Revivals may be rooted in practices that have gone out of mode or practices that were perhaps censored or abandoned due to broader economic, political, or social changes. They may also be rooted in ongoing processes that are deemed more effective if reconstituted as revivals. Revivals offer connections to sought-after experiences. As such, revivals are common in societies where a consciousness of change is evident. Shared experience is couched in frameworks of nostalgia and remembering that foster a sense of connectedness to other participants and draw on indexes that create understandings of what is being recreated anew. The very idea of “revival” is a modern one and offers a consciousness of the present in relation to the past. Revivals garner meaning from that which came before but are tailored to suit the needs of the present day. Revivalists may function within a discursive understanding of the past that may be cast in terms of “authenticity,” often by intellectual elites, or a conscious temporal framing of that which is “old” or belonging to that which is not “now” (Bealle 2005; Peterson 2005; Rosenberg 1993). Revivals adhere to the ever-changing social conditions in which they are experienced. As such, revivals are, as Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta argue, influenced by social movements in which social

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actors produce knowledge and cultural goods as part of processes that are defined by institutional frameworks (Eyerman and Baretta 1996). Not every event that has connections to past traditions succeeds as a revival or is necessarily viewed as such. Certain criteria establish a cultural expression as a revival. First, the practice in question lends itself to being transformed into an expression that is meaningful in the present day. It possesses an ability to be tailored to the needs of the revivalists. Central actors set the tone of the movement and lead revivalists through shared activities that lend meaning to the cultural expression being revived. Second, a revival may assume importance in light of communal gatherings that take place at a certain time of the year or at a certain place that lends symbolism to the revival’s meaning. A revival’s success often depends on the context in which it is shared and how information and cultural products are disseminated. Third, accompanying images, costumes, music, dance movements, and cultural artifacts that contribute meaning to communal involvement are central to creating public and personal spaces where revivals are experienced. Participants constitute their identities as revivalists in the established frameworks of the revival in question. Discussions of class identity in revival settings prevail in scholarly literature, particularly with regard to folk music revivals in the United States in the mid-twentieth century (Cantwell 1996). In contrast to class, issues of gender are rarely analyzed in revival contexts. And yet, with respect to issues of tradition and times of “old,” gender is one of the most defining aspects of social interaction in revival settings. The nature of gender identity in revivals must be viewed in the context of the broader social, economic, and political parameters within which revivals take place. How are female and male identities ascribed a variety of actions deemed appropriate in revival contexts and how are certain spaces and actions, if any, deemed to be gender-specific? In what ways does gender discourse in revival contexts influence or reflect gender ideologies in nonrevival settings?

Revivals in Post-Soviet Spaces If we understand revivals to be a way through which people forge connections to each other via frameworks that are rooted in a certain time that differs from “now,” then former Soviet spaces are rife with possibilities for drawing on various interpretations of the past in order to organize and make sense of the present. More than twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, a new generation born and educated in independent republics is defining ways in which Soviet and pre-Soviet pasts are being negotiated in new contexts. A popular Russian cable television channel, Nostalgia, features films, news, and music from the 1970s and 1980s. Broadcasting in Russia’s “near abroad,” the channel invites viewers to reconstruct their relationship to Soviet culture. In its logo, “Nostalgia,” it replaces the Cyrillic letters c and t with images of the iconic Soviet sickle and hammer, respectively. The word “nostalgia” itself creates a distance between the present and the

512  Adriana Helbig past by objectifying the past, framing it as a new experience. The recasting of information in new contexts is part of a process I term “mediated intimacies”: cultural codes through which social actors create new understandings of physical and emotional sharing and social connectedness through reframed familiarities. A person watching the televised images may experience them on the basis of having lived through the era or of being exposed to them for the first time via a nostalgic rendition of a time gone by. In this way, each person’s interpretation and process of mediation is unique to a set of experiences they have had in the past. Relationships to the Soviet past in former Soviet republics such as Ukraine are highly politicized in the media due to a long history of Soviet censorship and Russia’s continued stronghold on popular culture, media, and economic and political developments in the region. A heightened need to rediscover the past guides much of Ukraine’s youth, as evidenced in a proliferation of popular culture that deals with historical themes. Films, documentaries, novels, and festivals feature aspects of pre-Soviet life, whether through “rediscoveries” of important cultural and political figures or through a renewed appreciation of village folk music genres and peasant crafts. A proliferation of festivals reflects a renewed nationwide interest in ethnic Ukrainian lore, particularly village folklore that was destroyed through collectivization, Soviet modernization, censorship, and government terror. Since independence in 1991, aspects of village folklore and life that could be salvaged or remembered have become festivalized and marketed for consumption among the emerging middle class. Festivals are perceived as revivals that invite participants to embrace and learn about pre-Soviet traditions that have for the most part fallen out of public practice. A  variety of such festivals are organized by local governments as a way to encourage local tourism and to create events that are ethnic Ukrainian in content in a public sphere that is dominated by Western and Russian cultural aesthetics. Some festivals are ethnic-oriented, such as the Kyiv-based festival of Jewish music titled “Klezfest in Ukraine,” which aims to draw awareness of Jewish history through music. Others are culture-oriented, such as the festivals of beer, coffee, and chocolate in Lviv that highlight the city’s long-standing culinary traditions. In many ways, contemporary festivals have parallels with Soviet-era government-sponsored social gatherings. Soviet ideologies were spread through communal celebration, whether concerts, parades, festivals, or widely organized social events with speeches, music, and dancing. Such effective organizing was rooted in the structures of long-standing social traditions in the region that were modified and made socialist in form and content. Contemporary revivals draw on the organizational tactics of Soviet events but fill the content with traditions that are pre-Soviet in origin. Certain public events borrow the frames of traditional pre-Soviet gatherings but have a distinctly post-Soviet flavor. Reflecting political and economic changes that have occurred since the early 1990s, such events take place with financial support from corporate sponsors, ticket sales, advertising, technology, and financial support from local and national political parties. In Ukraine it is in the interests of the government to support festivals that promote certain ways of being in order to influence society to act in certain ways. Sponsorship of

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a tradition such as Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve), which forms the main example in this essay and accents traditional beliefs of female fertility, functions in parallel with social campaigns that are rooted in traditional ethics and family values.1 While the manipulation of tradition for contemporary purposes was characteristic of Soviet times as well, the government of Ukraine is particularly interested in reversing the declining birth rate and a significant population loss due to economic migration to the West. Government campaigns have begun to focus on population growth as a moral responsibility, with slogans such as “There used to be 53,000,000 of us, now there are only 48,000,000—Kokhaimosia!” Kokhaimosia is a play on words that means “Let’s love each other” as well as “Let’s make love.” As such, government sponsorship of Ivana Kupala festivities taps into local ways in which female purity and courtship rituals were regulated in traditional settings. Contemporary cultural emphases on female purity and on the female as mother evident in Ivana Kupala marketing processes and celebrations aim to overturn two decades of realities of Ukrainian women entering the roles of internet brides (Taraban 2007), prostitutes, pornography workers (Barker 1999), and sex trafficking victims (Malarek 2003). In the early 1990s, the influx of Western popular culture overturned Soviet-era aesthetics that did not celebrate overt displays of sexuality in the media, a shift that culminated in widespread access to pornography in printed media and on television (Barker 1999). The female, celebrated as mother in the Soviet era, came to be viewed in public media predominantly as a sexual object, reinforced by a spike in local prostitution and sex tourism to Ukraine from Western countries. At this time, Ukrainian women also became the primary targets of international sex trafficking. An antitrafficking protest in Kyiv by a group of young women calling themselves FEMEN symbolically fused the figure of the crucified Christ and a trafficked Ukrainian woman. The headdress donned by the protagonist in this public action evoked the wreath of flowers donned by young unmarried women during Ivana Kupala festivities. Such artistic public actions tie Ivana Kupala festivities to broader social campaigns that aim to reclaim women’s bodies on female terms and overturn the stigma placed on victims of sexual transgressions. Elements of such a “purification” discourse are embraced by public figures such as former prime minister YuliaTymoshenko, who wears her hair in the form of a braid, a hairstyle culturally associated with unmarried young girls.2 Tymoshenko’s plait also evokes Christian iconography regarding Ukrainian folk portrayals of the Mother of God (forbidden in the Soviet era). It further draws on Slavic pagan mythology from a time when a matriarch, later named Berehynia, the Mother Protectress, was believed to preside over the ancestral Ukrainian hearth (Bilaniuk 2003: 54). The symbolism of Tymoshenko’s hair has not been lost on the public, especially her political enemies in Parliament, who taunted her in session to prove that the braid was real. Tymoshenko undid her braid, a symbolic gesture at weddings that signifies the deflowering of the young bride and is usually done by the mother-in-law. However, because Tymoshenko undid her own braid, she held agency over her body and reinforced the popular idea that only a woman can and should decide who will do what with her body, and when.

514  Adriana Helbig Political and social symbolism associated with Ivana Kupala capitalizes on a renewed public interest in ethnic Ukrainian traditions that were wiped out or manipulated by the Soviet regime. Kupala celebrations are spaces where people are welcome to explore their heritage via language, music, dance, and costumes while experiencing a context in which female fertility and the nuclear family play a central role. Stripped of their spiritual connotations during the Soviet era, contemporary Ivana Kupala celebrations offer ways through which participants connect to nature, to the past, and to each other. In what ways do Ivana Kupala celebrations influence contemporary understandings of the feminine in post-Soviet society? What roles do traditional expressions play in (re)defining contemporary social values? To what extent do relationships with gendered deities in spirituality-based revivals influence understandings of gender identity among revival participants?

Ivana Kupala as Revival Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve), was among the most widely celebrated folk holidays in central and eastern Ukrainian villages before World War II. In the Lemko regions of western Ukraine, the holiday was known as Sobitka. Young people burned bonfires called sobitky in honor of Perun, the ancient Slavic god of thunder, fire, and lightning. In the early part of the twentieth century, Ivana Kupala was perceived as a religious Christian holiday that celebrated the birth of St. John the Baptist. Local priests encouraged the blessing of herbs, rooted in the pagan myths that herbs gathered on St. John’s Eve had special healing powers. Such myths have been written about by Ukrainian writers such as Olha Kobylianska, who describes Ivana Kupala rituals in her book On Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs (1909). Despite overt pagan references, the association of the pagan effigy Kupalo with the figure of St. John the Baptist marked the festivities as Christian and in opposition to anticlerical Soviet ideology. Nevertheless, Ivana Kupala is represented in Ukrainian literature and in pre-Soviet memory as a night during which freedoms from socially prescribed sexual norms were socially accepted among the rural population. Traditionally, on the evening of July 6 (according to the Julian calendar), large crowds gathered alongside rivers and lakes to participate in celebrations whose ritual elements are described in chronicles dating as far back as the eleventh century. The term “Kupalo” was itself first mentioned in the Hypatian Chronicle under the year 1262. The Ivana Kupala rituals were so deeply rooted in the folk practices of the Ukrainian people that no attempts to ban them—for instance, by the ruling Cossack hetman Ivan Skoropadsky, who in 1719 decreed Ivana Kupala celebrations to be the root of all evil and disease— were successful. These rituals were once celebrated to ensure a bountiful harvest, as well as the fertility of young women, in rites closely tied to nature. During the 1960s, Ivana Kupala was restructured as a celebration of agricultural bounty devoid of overt religious and spiritual meaning in the Ukrainian SSR.

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Ukraine was known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” and the reconstruction of Ivana Kupala as an agricultural holiday was molded to fit the structure and ideology of Soviet-influenced work holidays. Following Khrushchev’s Thaw (Vidlyha) from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, certain villages were allowed by local leaders to incorporate new versions of Ivana Kupala into their annual calendar of Soviet holidays that celebrated the worker (Klymets 1990). These holidays were usually organized and run by the zavkluba, the head of the local klub, who also took on the responsibility of reporting on the festival to socialist media outlets such as local magazines and newspapers, while simultaneously accenting the lack of religious traditions such as the festival’s calendar association with the Christian feast of St. John the Baptist (Kononenko 2004). Such articles, printed in Ukrainian-language Communist journals such as Prapor (Flag), Sotsialistychna Kultura (Socialist culture), and Chervonyi Prapor (Red flag), as well as ethnographic journals such as Narodna Tvorchist ta Etnohrafija (Folk culture and ethnography), point to the festivalization and mass organization of Ivana Kupala events in villages and towns throughout the central and eastern Ukrainian SSR by the early 1960s. In a 1963 article titled “New Birth of an Old Holiday” published in the journal Sotsialistycha Kultura, the author, M. Tryzna (gender unknown), cultural director of the Bohodukhiv regional Dom Kultury (Building of Culture) in Kharkiv oblast, includes a picture of a kolhosp (collective farm) milkmaid, Yefrozynia Pomazan, “Hero of Socialist Labor,” greeting the event participants with traditional bread and salt presented on a traditional Ukrainian embroidered towel (Figure 23.1). She is clad in regular clothing, her chest decorated with Soviet medals. Standing next to her, a man in a Ukrainian embroidered shirt holds the microphone for her. According to the author, Pomazan reportedly stated: “I pass on to you the baton of my work. Hold it tightly, so that the list of worker-leaders of the region fills with new names. The older generation of workers believes that the youth will stand strongly on the frontlines of development” (Tryzna 1963: 25–26). It seems clear that by the 1960s, the Ivana Kupala celebration in this village shifted from a traditional emphasis on spirituality and female fertility and focused on gains in agricultural development, the Soviet celebration of the worker, and communal striving for socialist ideals (Kuveniova 1967; Lohozha 1964; Petrone 2000; Tarasenko 1966). The artifice of this event is further evidenced through the conscious performance of socialist discourse among rural peasants, the emphasis on influencing generational attitudes toward the land, and the controlled pageantry that interweaves traditional Ukrainian folk elements such as embroidery and traditional Kupala songs with Soviet slogans and a portrait of Lenin onstage. According to Tryzna’s article, more than two hundred singers performed as members of various kolektyvy, performance groups usually associated with the workplace or the village House of Culture. Among the songs was one titled “Lenin,” with music by V. Vermenych and words by V. Sosiura.3 Alongside the performance of “Lenin,” young women danced khorovody around a Kupala derevtse (literally, “small tree”; a branch decorated with ribbons) and sang the well-known traditional Kupala song “Kruhom Marynonky” (Around Maryna): “Around Maryna the girls danced / While the rain came down upon them / And onto my red rose.”

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FIGURE  23.1  Kolhosp (collective farm) milkmaid Yefrozynia Pomazan, “Hero of Socialist Labor,” greets Ivana Kupala participants in Bohodukhiv village, Kharkiv oblast, 1963. Reproduced with permission of the Periodicals Division of the V.  Stefanyk Lviv Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The emphasis on the gendered pagan effigies of the female Maryna and the male Kupalo reflect the maintaining of the gendered structure of Ivana Kupala festivities from the pre-Soviet to the Soviet era. Kupalo was believed to be the god of love, harvest, and the earth’s fertility. This allowed for the Soviet-era transformation of the holiday as a celebration of agrarian labor tied to the harvest. Kupalo was represented by fire, while Marena was represented by water; similar figures of sirens, water nymphs (rusalki), and mermaids reflect associations between water and female sexuality common to many cultures.

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Ivana Kupala since Independence Since Ukrainian independence in 1991, Ivana Kupala revivals have become celebrations of ethnic pride (Kononenko 2004) and renewed celebrations of community and the nuclear family. The significance of Ivana Kupala celebrations in their present rural and urban forms lies in the reconstructed belief that on some levels Ivana Kupala revivals foster personal and collective forms of Ukrainian identity, particularly through song, revived ritual, and ethnic dress. Concurrently, these events encourage celebrations of ethical values, understood as acts of social responsibility regarding family, community, and the nation (Kuehnast and Nechemias 2004; Rubchak 1996; Zhurzhenko 2004). Ivana Kupala revivals, particularly those that feature collective singing on stage and communal dancing and chanting among the audience, play a significant role in contemporary discourses regarding the role of women in society by blurring traditional discourses of gender with contemporary social responsibilities associated with population growth. Reconstructions of pre-Soviet versions of Ivana Kupala festivities have contributed greatly to a broader nationwide shift in reconceptualizing the female as mother and protector of the nation’s moral and family values in opposition to that of female as sexual object, a discourse that influenced gender relations in the 1990s (Barker 1999; Buckley 1997; Gal and Kligman 2000; Johnson and Robinson 2007; Marsh 1996). Ivana Kupala revivals are marketed in contemporary contexts in Ukraine as family celebrations, with a specific focus on the purity and innocence of young women, who are meant to index the sociopolitically revived figure of the Slavic Berehynnia—the pagan protectress of Ukrainian lands.4 The fertility of Ukraine’s land is often compared to female fertility. In anti-Soviet discourse, people often personalize the experience of collectivization by comparing Ukraine to a victim of rape by Russian occupiers. To what extent do Ivana Kupala celebrations reflect and influence contemporary perceptions of women as cultural matriarchs and ethnic tradition-bearers? What types of musical, linguistic, and gender discourses inform such revivals? How does corporate sponsorship and financing from nongovernmental organizations or local government influence the ways in which cultural messages regarding tradition and identity are marketed and received among different members of the population? In posters that advertise Ivana Kupala-themed events, girls adorned with wreaths of flowers signify renewed connections to nature and, by extension, pre-Soviet cultural roots, allegedly untainted by the cosmopolitan and consumerist ideologies that have become the norm in postsocialist society (Humphrey 2002). On a poster (Figure 23.2) advertising an event called Den Dnipra (Dnipro River Day), held on July 6, 2008, the traditional date for Ivana Kupala celebrations, the words “Ivana Kupala” do not appear, but the cultural framework for the festivities is implied through the depiction of the young woman holding a magical flower, kvit paporoti, believed to blossom only at midnight on

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FIGURE  23.2  Poster on a building in the center of Kyiv advertising Den Dnipra (Dnipro River Day) on July 6, 2008, the traditional date of Ivana Kupala celebrations. (Photo:  A.  Helbig)

St. John’s Eve. People believe that the person who finds kvit paporoti will be lucky in love and happy in life. (See Web Figure 23.02  .) The event featured in this poster may be described as a local rock concert held in a public square popular with young people in the Podil district near the Dnipro River in Kyiv. The young people in attendance danced and sang along with the popular musicians who were hired by the festival organizers, which in this case included a radio station, a soft-drink company, a nongovernmental organization, and local government. As in all Ivana Kupala celebrations, there was no entrance fee, and the event was accessible to anyone who wished to attend. The central feature of this event was that it was social in nature and helped participants forge connections with others who arrived at the celebrations from different parts of the city and its outskirts. This forging of community

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relations at a time of great change in urban contexts, particularly with an influx of migrant workers from rural areas, has been a central motivating factor behind many such sponsored events.

Ivana Kupala in Kyiv To show the variety of ways Ivana Kupala is celebrated and understood, I draw on two Ivana Kupala festivals—one held in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and the other near Kharkiv, a city close to the border with Russia that served as the first capital of the Ukrainian SSR (1919–34). These contexts demonstrate differing relationships with the past through the medium of pre-Soviet folk traditions gathered and revived by ethnomusicologists and enthusiasts in surrounding villages. Kyiv, the center of Ukraine’s postsocialist music industry, is rife with groups who perform a variety of revived folk styles and repertoires. Kharkiv oblast is often viewed by intellectuals from western and central parts of Ukraine as an assimilated region that was not able to retain pre-Soviet folklore due to a longer history of collectivization and the destruction of local traditions during the Soviet-induced famine-genocide of 1932–33 (known in Ukrainian as Holodomor, literally “death by hunger”) that resulted in tremendous population loss. The differing relationship to the past has a direct influence on the ways Ivana Kupala celebrations are staged and the music that is presented at these regional festivities. On July 6, 2008, I  attended the neighborhood-based Ivana Kupala celebrations in Kyiv (referred to earlier) that drew hundreds of participants to the banks of the Dnipro River. The chosen area was a park amid high-rise apartments in an area of the city called Obolon. Traveling for half an hour by metro from my rented apartment in Kyiv’s city center and then continuing on foot, I followed scores of people dressed in jeans and ethnic embroidered shirts and blouses. Many young women and girls wore wreaths of flowers and greenery on their heads, recalling how, on the eve of Kupala—as described in Olha Kobylianska’s 1909 novel V Nediliu Rano Zillia Kopala (On Sunday morning she gathered herbs)—young women would set their wreaths afloat on the water. If a girl’s wreath flowed out of a young man’s reach, it was believed that she would not wed that year. A stage was erected from which an emcee (master of ceremonies) guided the early evening festivities and on which a children’s folk music and dance group presented “scenes” of traditional pre-Soviet Ivana Kupala celebrations. The apparent purpose of these performances was to entertain and to instruct the festival attendees in traditional Ivana Kupala rituals. The emcee often repeated: “This is how your grandmothers and grandfathers celebrated Ivana Kupala.” This kind of expression of self-awareness functioned as a discursive ritual throughout the evening and established a consciousness regarding Ivana Kupala as a celebration of ethnic identity, cultural memory, and oral history. The staged scenes were presented by a Kyiv-based children’s folklore group called Dai Bozhe (Let It Be, God), founded in 1989 by Olha Melnyk, wife of Taras Melnyk, a

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FIGURE  23.3  Young performers from Dai Bozhe perform a scene around the straw effigy of Kupalo. Kyiv, July 6,  2008. (Photo:  A.  Helbig)

well-known figure on Ukraine’s festival scene for his work in organizing and running Chervona Ruta, the first Ukrainian-language music festival in independent Ukraine. The scenes performed by Dai Bozhe included spoken word, chanting, singing in traditional bilyi holos (white voice) style, and khorovody, ritual dancing. Bilyi holos refers to the throaty, tense vocal aesthetics associated with female polyphonic singing in rural Ukraine. These vocal aesthetics have become popular through the reclaiming of rural repertoires by young urbanites, as well as through a growing consciousness that the folk ensembles of the Soviet era presented an arranged folklore that altered or did not truly represent village traditions. The children were dressed in ethnic costumes that were similar to peasant everyday wear in villages of central Ukraine more than a century ago.5 Stage props included straw and grass effigies of the feast’s main pagan figures, Kupalo and Marena (Figure 23.3). (See Web Figure 23.03  .) Following the official program, the emcee guided the audience members through the lighting of the Kupalo fire—a relic of the pagan custom of bringing sacrifice—around which people performed ritual dances and sang songs about lovers’ fates. Couples were instructed by volunteers about what to chant as they leapt across smaller fires; people used to believe that those who made it across would marry within the year. Young members of Dai Bozhe intermingled with the crowds and indicated where to dance and when to run toward the burning Kupalo effigy (Figure 23.4). The excited crowds, the tall burning effigy whose falling ashes burned holes in participants’ clothing, and a swirl of media cameras gave the event the feel of a semicontrolled social experiment that oscillated between freedom of personal expression and self-aware cultural experimentation. The crowds were guided by the taped Ivana Kupala music, which was punctuated by

IVANA KUPALA (ST. JOHN’S EVE) REVIVALS IN UKRAINE  521

instructions on the dance moves given to the revelers by a young woman with a microphone. (See Video Example 23.01 and Web Figure 23.04 .)

Ivana Kupala in Kharkiv Soviet alterations and assimilations of Ukrainian folk traditions have been most evident in eastern and central Ukraine (Noll 2000). Here Lenin’s death, together with the relatively low degree of consolidation and the unclear future direction of the Communist Party in the 1920s, allowed for public displays of Ukrainian national consciousness and the promotion of the Ukrainian language and culture, particularly in education and media. The 1930s under Stalin, however, brought vast socioeconomic changes, including the collectivization of peasant landholdings into kolhospy (large communally owned farms), significant investments in industrialization, expansion of the transportation system, and rapid urbanization. At the same time, the Soviet-orchestrated famine-genocide of 1932–33—a horror intentionally induced by Stalin to weaken Ukrainian nationalism and gain control over Ukrainian agricultural lands—took the lives of four million victims in eastern Ukraine in a single year.6 Conscious Soviet-era alterations to Ukrainian traditions, such as those described earlier with reference to the village of Bohodukhiv in Kharkiv oblast in the 1960s, have created significant problems for ethnographers and ethnomusicologists wishing to collect and revive pre-Soviet cultural practices in certain regions of Ukraine. Many Ukrainian scholars believe that there is very little actual pre-Soviet tradition left in eastern and central Ukrainian villages. This thinking is so deeply rooted among scholars in other parts of Ukraine that ethnomusicologists from Kharkiv are hardly ever invited to national ethnomusicology conferences held in the capital, Kyiv, and in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where scholars conduct research in the nearby Carpathian Mountains, where they believe fewer rural traditions were destroyed by the Soviet regime. Assessments regarding processes of Soviet/Russian assimilation among the rural population in central and eastern Ukraine are argued from various points of view (Noll 2000). Villagers in these areas speak surzhyk, a mix of Ukrainian and Russian (Bilaniuk 2005), and a significant part of the local population has much stronger beliefs in the overall benefits of Ukraine having closer ties with Russia (in opposition to the population of western Ukraine). As if reinforcing the alleged stereotype that eastern Ukraine has suffered a more significant loss of tradition, the Kharkiv regional Ivana Kupala festival that I attended on July 5, 2008, opened with young women dressed as rusalky (water nymphs) performing ballet-like movements with Kupalo wreaths in their hands. These modernized, “nontraditional” expressions were interpreted by a fellow ethnomusicologist who grew up near Lviv, the ethnic Ukrainian stronghold of western Ukraine, as “evidence of assimilation and cultural destruction.” The wreath-clad female and male announcers invited the audience members to join the traditional Ivana Kupala festivities that had been

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FIGURE  23.4 Young performers from Dai Bozhe lead the crowds in khorovody around a burning effigy of Kupalo, Kyiv, July 6,  2008. (Photo:  A.  Helbig)

brought to them “on the wings of ancient songs.” (See Video Example 23.02 .) To a background of new-age fusion music, the young rusalky called out to Kupalo to join the festivities. This fusion-style introduction framed the performance of the following group, Muravskyi Shliakh (The Murav Way), led by Halyna Lukianets of the Kharkivskyi Narodnyi Tsenter Narodnoii Tvorchosti (Kharkiv Center for Folk Traditions), as “traditional.” Muravsky Shliakh markets itself as a “research and reproduction group.” Its members collect folklore during ethnographic expeditions to eastern and central Ukraine (Slobozhanshchina and Poltava oblasts) and recreate the village style of singing, bilyi holos or “white voice.” Thus, their singing is much closer to what would commonly have been heard at Ivana Kupala celebrations in the pre-Soviet era. On this occasion, however, Muravskyi Shliakh was forced to follow the festival setup as regards staging and technology and had to lip-sync to a prerecorded track, a feature that is common to many public events in the postsocialist space. The Kharkiv oblast Kupala celebration differed from that in Kyiv on many levels. Most significant, it was multiethnic, featuring both ethnic Ukrainian and Russian performers from neighboring villages and towns. In the scene shown in Figure 23.5, the four women holding the kupalske derevtse (Kupalo tree) at the center of the picture are ethnic Russians from a nearby village and wear the sarafanka, a sleeveless folk dress worn by Russian women in the nineteenth century. This Russian presence dates back to the 1930s, when the ethnic Russian population in eastern Ukraine increased as a result of Stalin’s Russification policies introduced as a backlash to the Ukrainianization movement of the 1920s. In the post–World War II years, more Russians migrated into Ukraine as part

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of Soviet repopulation and industrialization efforts. Despite ethnic tensions between Russians and Ukrainians in other parts of Ukraine, particularly in western Ukraine, the celebrations on the outskirts of Kharkiv appeared to be conscious expressions of ethnicity, but not nationalism, which seems to have been more the case at the Kyiv celebrations. (See Web Figure 23.05  .)

Ethnomusicology and the Political Significance of Collected Musical Folklore Postsocialist attempts to reclaim Ivana Kupala as a celebration of youth and courtship have gone through several stages of change since the early 1990s. Initial events were small-scale and were sponsored by enthusiasts. The transitional, strongly pro-Russian government in Ukraine was not interested in promoting ethnic Ukrainian folk traditions. There was also little cultural memory regarding how Ivana Kupala had been celebrated in pre-Soviet times. An improved economy, a fostering of ethnic Ukrainian pride, and the growing influence of world music markets have added cultural and financial value to village music genres such as those once associated with Ivana Kupala. The influx of recording technology and the growth of ethnomusicology as a discipline have also contributed to a wealth of publicly disseminated traditional music recordings, which in turn have helped foster widespread public interest in traditional music festivals and music-related cultural events such as Ivana Kupala. The repertoires revived and performed during Ivana Kupala festivities, as well as being simultaneously taught to the festival-goers, are gathered and researched by scholars, performers, and enthusiasts from older, predominantly female interlocutors in rural settings who practiced pre-Soviet, Christian, and pagan-influenced forms of Ivana Kupala rituals in their youth. While descriptions in literature and ethnographic studies focus predominantly on pagan-influenced lore, Ivana Kupala was nevertheless at some point tied to the Feast of St. John the Baptist, and Christian elements crossed with pagan ones. The descriptions of Ivana Kupala festivities in the 1960s from central and eastern Ukraine published in Soviet ethnographic journals stress the nonreligious character of the village-based Ivana Kupala revivals. In the new millennium, the stress is on neither the Christian nor the pagan elements but rather on the fact that the repertoires are pre-Soviet and therefore perceived as authentic, untampered with by Soviet cultural policy. The ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky describes this process as “rooted in Herderian nostalgia and Romanticism striving for the authentic ‘soul of the folk,’ transmuted through the confusing push-and-pull of Soviet formulae for socialist folklore, and now reinvented in the first tumultuous era of Ukrainian independence” (Sonevytsky 2010: 16). A search for lost Ukrainian musical traditions and an attempt to rescue relics that represent pre-Soviet ways of life guide the present-day revivals. People collect

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FIGURE  23.5  Ethnic Ukrainian (far left and far right) and Russian performers (center) hold kupalski derevtsia (Kupalo trees) and prepare for Ivana Kupala festivities near a rural lake on the outskirts of Kharkiv, July 5,  2008. (Photo:  A.  Helbig)

artifacts (songs, instruments) as texts through which to reconstruct the past (Noll 1997). Adhering to an ideological commitment to uncover (pre-Soviet) truths, their practice of ethnographic antiquarianism and historical ethnography contributes to mediating practices through which the past informs the present (Bauman and Briggs 2003). The passing on of musical traditions via female channels (evidenced also in the high number of female ethnographers and female students in newly established ethnomusicology programs in Ukraine) points to gendered generational networks of transmission. The recording of older peasant women by younger urban female scholars (Figure 23.6) disproportionately situates aurally associative performative aspects of Ukrainian ethnic revival in the rural traditional female realm: the nuclear family and the home. In this way, one may argue that Ivana Kupala revivals aim to instill family values within loosely defined frameworks of emerging ethnic consciousness. Music is tied to ethnic identity through the recording of Ukrainian-language songs from rural areas. The revival of presocialist forms of such repertoires helps elevate the Ukrainian language in the public sphere. Linguistic anthropologist Laada Bilaniuk points out that during the Soviet era, Ukrainian was publically held in low regard and was viewed in Soviet-Russian public discourse as a language appropriate mostly for folkloric venues and singing (Bilaniuk 2003:  51). Ivana Kupala revivals tie Ukrainian language usage in music to broader Ukrainianization movements in literature, culture, and society, as well as politics, as witnessed during the 2004 Orange Revolution. (See Web Figure 23.06  .) Perhaps more significant than the ethnic and moral incentives to stage Ivana Kupala, however, is the wish among performers to earn money from their folk craft. In a brief

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telephone conversation in July 2010, Taras Melnyk, the festival entrepreneur whose wife, Olha, leads the children’s Dai Bozhe folk ensemble in Kyiv, indicated his disappointment that festival organizers do not pay folk music performers enough money to make their craft economically worthwhile. Such disappointments have also been voiced by ethnomusicologists such as Iryna Klymenko, who leads the performance group Hurtopravtsi at the Kyiv Conservatory of Music. Klymenko stresses the lack of copyright protection as a detriment in her work as an ethnomusicologist and claims that her folklore research issued on CD has been copied and performed for profit at Ivana Kupala celebrations by folk groups who do not undertake their own collecting in the villages. This also brings into question the role of village women in the revival process. Klymenko recounts how, during a past Ivana Kupala festival, two groups who were invited to perform had inadvertently prepared an identical repertoire that had originally been collected, arranged, and released on CD by a group of ethnomusicologists. The older women from whom the repertoire had been recorded learned of this incident and demanded that next year they be invited because they were the original carriers of the pre-Soviet musical culture. Ironically, the repertoire they sing is that of young unmarried women and does not therefore sit well, in terms of age appropriateness, either with the older women themselves or with the academic-conservatory-based ensembles that appear on stage (Figure 23.7). (See Web Figure 23.07  .) These situations bring to mind Tamara Livingston’s discussion of “core revivalists,” people who are so strongly involved in revived traditions that they assume individual responsibility for passing them on to others. Livingston notes that these actors do not merely “rescue,” they create “a new ethos, musical style, and aesthetic code in accordance with their revivalist ideology and personal preferences” (1999: 70). Actors in such revival circles may play particular attention to recreating the manner in which the repertoires used to be performed, but at the same time they may alter the traditions in ways that make them more appropriate for the stage. In the case of the Ivana Kupala festivals described here, the involvement of city councils, cultural institutions, and organized performance ensembles gives the events a loose structure that nevertheless offers participants opportunities to enjoy a day out with family and friends. The nationalist and gendered experience of Ivana Kupala festivals garners support from the government and general public in ways that fuse discourses of wholesome spiritual revival, environmental awareness, and population growth. Central to the enactment are young women who wear traditional flower wreaths that reference images of women as “natural” and as saviors of national ideals. These symbols function in opposition to the new cultural, political, and economic processes that create anxiousness regarding the need to protect ethnic Ukrainian identity from global (i.e., Russian and Western) assimilation. The involvement of scholars attests to the high level of mediation and cultural control within which Ivana Kupala festivals function. The repertoires in Ivana Kupala festivities are researched, collected, and arranged by ethnomusicologists, who then release them, often in a chronological arrangement of events, on CD; often they will also publish the songs that have been remembered by the largest number of informants. Performers such

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FIGURE  23.6  Ethnomusicology students from the Kharkiv Conservatory of Music interview and record older female interlocutors in the village of Lyman, Kharkiv oblast, June 8,  2008. (Photo:  A.  Helbig)

as Dai Bozhe learn the repertoires from such CDs and interpret the music through staged scenes with music and dance. In turn, the performers teach the audience members the “proper” ways Ivana Kupala is celebrated. Through such intimate mediations, Ivana Kupala festivals offer opportunities to practice and embody new postsocialist attitudes toward love, family, and tradition. The emphasis on the practice, by audience members, of rituals such as jumping across the fires and setting wreaths afloat on the river reveals the performance-mediated ways that ethnically framed gender expectations are being reconstituted through music- and dance-based revivals in postsocialist Ukraine.

Conclusions Revivals of Ivana Kupala are processes that gather meaning from social contexts in which a variety of factors foster interest in communal sharing and celebration. These revivals are reflective gatherings during which participants forge relationships to past identities and forms of expression while creating new understandings of ideologies that are relevant to their present experience. Revivals may be political, ethnic, cultural, spiritual, or social in nature. Their structure may change in line with broader economic processes, and their staging may differ from one manifestation to another on the basis of their context-defining nature. Revival events can draw participants in on many levels, offering a space in which to explore both personal and communal identities. They are deeply influential structures that also function as aural expressions of memory through

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FIGURE  23.7 A  svynarka (pig farmer) from the former collective farm in Lyman—also seen being interviewed and recorded in Figure 23.6—performing the songs of young maidens at the Ivana Kupala festival near Kharkiv, July 5,  2008. (Photo:  A.  Helbig)

which people engage with their own surroundings by lending consciousness to that which has come before and to that which is now. The most important aspect of gatherings such as those described in this essay is the fluidity that they lend toward interpreting the past. Individual rituals may be recast to suit the needs at hand, while broader revivals may be tailored to accommodate values deemed most fundamental at a certain point in time. Previous knowledge of what is being revived is crucial to drawing a depth of understanding and to lending meaning to the revival itself. As such, there are as many ways to analyze revivals as there are ways to experience them.

Acknowledgments Special thanks are due to Yurii Romanyshyn, Director of Periodicals at the V. Stefanyk Lviv Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, for helping me to gain access to the Soviet-era journals in July 2010.

Notes 1. In Ukrainian speech and song, “Ivan Kupalo” is referenced most often in its conjugated form “Ivana Kupala” or simply “Kupala.”

528  Adriana Helbig 2. Yulia Tymoshenko was prime minister of Ukraine from January 24 to September 8, 2005, and again from December 18, 2007 to March 4, 2010. She was dismissed from the post by the Ukrainian Parliament, Verkhovna Rada, after losing the runoff vote in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential elections against Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych ran for president in 2004 against Viktor Yushchenko. His voting falsifications fueled the popular protests that came to be known as the Orange Revolution, led by Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, and others. 3. The poet Volodymyr Sosiura (1898–1965) fought in the Ukrainian People’s Army. When the short-lived Ukrainian independent state was overrun by the Bolsheviks in 1921, he joined the Red Army. His literary output reflects his ideological loyalty to the Soviet Union and his patriotic feelings for Ukraine. In 1948, he was awarded the Stalin Prize, but in 1951 he came under attack for his 1944 poem “Liubit Ukrainy” (Love Ukraine), deemed too nationalistic after the war. Sosiura’s portrait and the title of this poem are featured on the 2-Hryvnia coin, the currency of independent Ukraine. 4. This study excludes Ivan Kupalo events among Ukrainians in the North American diaspora, where the holiday functions as a celebration of courtship among people who share a Ukrainian ethnic background. 5. These costumes differ greatly from the types of ethnic Ukrainian costumes that were popularized by Soviet-era national folk dance ensembles such as the Pavlo Virky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble and Moiseyev Dance Company. 6. In addition to the four million who died from forced starvation, Ukraine’s Famine-Genocide (Holodomor) of 1932–33 led to an estimated birth loss of six million people, placing the total number of victims at ten million.

References Barker, Adele Marie Barker, ed. 1999. Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bealle, John. 2005. Old-time Music and Dance:  Community and Folk Revival. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bilaniuk, Laada. 2003. “Gender, Language Attitudes, and Language Status in Ukraine.” Language in Society 32: 47–78. ——. 2005. Contested Tongues:  Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Buckley, Mary, ed. 1997. Post-Soviet Women:  From the Baltic to Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cantwell, Robert. 1996. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Eyerman, Ron, and Scott Barretta. 1996. “From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States.” Theory and Society 25: 501–543. Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparativehistorical Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Johnson, Janet, and Jean Robinson, eds. 2007. Living Gender after Communism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Klymets, Yurij. 1990. Kupalska obriadovist na Ukrajini [Kupalo rituals in Ukraine]. Academy of Sciences, Ukrainian SSR. Kyiv: NaukovaDumka. Kobylianska, Olha. 2001 [1909]. On Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs. Translated by Mary Skrypnyk and Maxim Tarnawsky. Manitoba: Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies Press. Kononenko, Natalie. 2004. “Karaoke Ivan Kupalo: Ritual in Post-Soviet Ukraine.” Slavic and East European Journal 48 (2): 177–202. Kuehnast, Kathleen, and Carol Nechemias, eds. 2004. Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition:  Nation Building, Economic Survival and Civic Activism. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press. Kuveniova, O. 1967. “Nev’anucha krasa zhyttia” [Unwilting beauty of life]. Sotialistychna Kultura 7: 45. Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Lohozha, S. M. 1964. “Sviato litnioho tsvitinnia” [Celebration of summer blossoming]. Narodna Tvorchist ta Etnohrafia 1: 108–109. Malarek, Victor. 2003. The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade. New York: Arcade. Marsh, Rosalind, ed. 1996. Women in Russia and Ukraine. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Noll, William. 1997. “Selecting Partners:  Questions of Personal Choice and Problems of History in Fieldwork and its Interpretation.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 163–188. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 2000. “Ukraine.” In Europe, edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen, 806–825. Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8. New York: Garland. Peterson, Richard. 2005. “In Search of Authenticity.” Journal of Management Studies 42 (5): 1083–1098. Petrone, Karen. 2000. Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rosenberg, Neil, ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rubchak, Marian. 1996. “Christian Virgin or Pagan Goddess: Feminism versus the Eternally Feminine.” In Women in Russia and Ukraine, edited by Rosalind Marsh, 315–331. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sonevytsky, Maria. 2010. “Three Perspectives on Ethnography from Ukraine: The Mysterious Tale of a Lost Hutsul Manuscript, Its Recovery, and the Dialogues That Ensued.” Harriman Review 17 (2): 15–21. Taraban, Svitlana. 2007. “Birthday Girls, Russian Dolls, and Others:  Internet Bride as the Emerging Global Identity of Post-Soviet Women.” In Living Gender after Communism, edited by Janet Johnson and Jean Robinson, 105–127. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tarasenko, I. 1966. Pro “Snihuronku ta Ivana Kupala” [About Snow White and Ivan Kupalo]. Prapor 2: 55.

C HA P T E R  24

T R A I L I N G I M AG E S A N D C U LT U R E B R A N D I N G I N P O S T- R E NA I S S A N C E HAWA I ‘ I JA N E F R E E M A N MOU L I N

Almost 500 times every day across the state of Hawai‘i, the Consolidated Amusement theater chain projects a well-known trailer before each feature screening.1 In a practice dating back to 1992, conversations quiet and the theater darkens as a triumphant horn call heralds the sonic move to a different world—one where waves lash dramatically on a rocky coast, an orchestral score accompanies canoe-paddlers in the fading light of the sunset, and torch-bearing hula dancers descend a rocky coastline to the accompaniment of an ancient chant. Chant gives way to dance, and the fire-lit movements of traditional hula kahiko (ancient Hawaiian dance) seem to reach from the very depths of time. The scene is riveting, and the gradually building rhythms of the ancient pahu drum are powerful and slightly ominous, as if to make us wonder what lies ahead. The final seconds have little to do with traditional Hawaiian culture, however. To the sounds of wind, drum, and horn calls, the camera moves away from the dancers to focus on a petroglyph representation of the Consolidated theater logo and the words “Consolidated Amusement—entertaining Hawai‘i since 1917.” (See trailer on companion website  .) As part of Hawai‘i’s theater-going public, I have been pulled into this image for over two decades, even as my ethnomusicological training simultaneously forces me to wonder how the community reads this and what factors shape that reading. Why does this particular trailer impact audiences—even those who have viewed it repeatedly as the longest running trailer in Hawai‘i’s history? Why did the sale of the theater chain to a mainland company in 2008 prompt anxious phone calls by people who feared the trailer might disappear? How in the world did this become so embedded in local culture that an out-of-town visitor was told he had missed a part of the “real Hawai‘i” by not experiencing the trailer? Clearly this bit of cultural minutia finds meaning in something much more consequential than simple theater branding.

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Long a site of commodification, it is not surprising to find hula encapsulated here as imaging the entertainment industry. These images, however, counter the widespread portrayal of Hawaiian performance perpetuated by the national media and international tourism. Far from the smiling hula girl on the stage of a Waikiki hotel and the “long tradition of ‘celebrating’ (or rather, objectifying) difference as light but exotic entertainment for the dominant culture” (Fusco 1995: 27), these dancers are serious and intense. They come from a different world and do not endeavor to pull us into their performance. In fact, this does not even seem like a performance; rather, it hints at a ritualistic past that touches on a source of deeper purpose. Knowing that hula and chant link firmly to identity expression in these islands raises questions concerning the trailer’s ongoing role and opens the way to multiple interpretations of identification in this one-minute of cultural reflection. Moreover, hula possesses a strong history of encoding music and dance as indigenous resistance, pointing to theories of opposition and counter-hegemonic practice as possible leads to interpreting this unique trailer. The selection of imagery, choice of music, style of movement, and attire all situate this production in the period of the late twentieth-century Hawaiian Renaissance. Springing from a rebirth of interest in the Hawaiian language and pre-colonial traditions, and propelled by Native Hawaiians’ desire to know and perpetuate a range of ancestral practices (e.g. chant, dance, navigation, farming, mediation, health, etc.), the Renaissance encompassed multiple strands of cultural activity. Analysis must look to revival theory and the role of media in perpetuating and reinterpreting expressive culture but also consider hula as a multi-dimensional performance in which language, music, movement, costuming, and related cultural knowledge link to convey powerful messages. Finally, the trailer is a form of theater branding for Consolidated, but this particular one moves beyond the commercial interest of the theater chain to connect to something else. In an economy dominated by a vast visitor industry that relies on the conscious construction of culture through print and visual media, residents easily pick up cues differentiating what is “for us” and “for them.” The study must consider how this trailer contrasts with the imaging of culture by the tourist industry to find meaning in the lives of Hawai‘i residents. Unlike Texans in Texas, the term Hawaiian applies to a specific ethnic group, not all residents of the state. The concept of “host culture” is critical, and the Renaissance was instrumental in reinforcing the imperative that Hawai‘i’s many immigrant communities must acknowledge and respect the indigenous culture of the islands—one that has accommodated group after group of immigrants, but whose people retain special rights as the original settlers of these lands. In such a climate, the multi-ethnic category of “local” becomes an important multi-ethnic signifier of identity in Hawai‘i. Despite a complex history grounded in the politics of power and race (Rosa 2000: 101), the category experiences ongoing transformation through what Hall describes as the “continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power” (Hall 1990: 225). Today, “local” continues to mark the “dialogic process . . . between Hawai‘i and the continental United States” (Rosa 2000: 100) and functions as a way for people to mark the distinctions between those

532   Jane Freeman Moulin who spent their formative years in the islands and possess cultural and political sensitivity to island ways and those who are part of the constant stream of visitors and new arrivals. Drawing on these threads, this exploration starts with the cultural milieu of the trailer’s production and examines its contemporary interpretation as grounded in the Hawaiian Renaissance. Then, turning to the artistic elements of producer intent, it uses information from the producer and press accounts to provide a background to the history and making of the trailer. Incorporating data from public surveys and looking to the cinematic image as a vehicle for cultural meaning, it analyzes how culture is purposely configured on the screen to create ongoing messages in a post-Renaissance Hawai‘i. Finally, it examines the concept of “localness” to understand audience reactions to the work. The goal is to show how this trailer functions at multiple sites of cultural purpose that move it far beyond a tool of commercialization and commodified culture, allowing it to invoke, support, and reaffirm contemporary perceptions of place and culture in an ethnically pluralistic Hawai‘i.

“The Birth of Hawai‘i” The trailer’s title, “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” provides a hint about the social and cultural life of Hawai‘i leading up to the time of its release in 1992 and the multiple meanings audiences ascribe to that time-situated production. Not coincidentally, this trailer came to life during the mature phase of a period of birth and rebirth for Hawaiian culture. The two decades prior to the production witnessed the development of the cultural movement known as the Hawaiian Renaissance, which first emerged in 1969 and then flowered into widespread community recognition and acceptance. I use this designation out of deference to Native Hawaiian sentiment and practice, while acknowledging both the historical discourse that has surrounded the issue of revival terminology (Slobin 1983) and the earlier need of ethnomusicology to grapple with issues such as the fluidity of tradition (Linnekin 1983) and the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Speaking years before this scholarly debate and fourteen years before Feintuch’s observations that musical revivals are actually musical transformations (Feintuch 1993: 184), Hawaiian cultural expert George Kanahele eloquently talked about “reviving traditional values and practices of a culture, but incorporating new elements. Since each generation brings perforce something new into the world—new perspectives, new forms, new concepts, new words—traditions must accordingly change . . .” (Kanahele 1979: 7). Cautioning people not to get hung up in terminology—“What’s important is the reality, not the rhetoric” (2)—he clarified that “the Renaissance does not mean a literal rebirth of classical Hawaiian traditions, dances, chants and so forth. To believe otherwise is to make a fetish out of tradition. . .. Consequently, today’s chants are not the same as those of 1778. They are different, but yet they still retain some identifiable characteristics that we can call Hawaiian” (7). Then, displaying great insight, he wisely points

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out: “It may well be that much, if not most, of what we are reviving is new traditions that look like old traditions” (7). In highlighting the performative aspects of cultural renewal, its temporal recontextualization, the changes wrought by that displacement in time, and the notion of creating new traditions, Kanahele directly aligns the Hawaiian Renaissance with the concerns and approaches of this volume. The cyclical nature of music revivals noted in the literature is also apparent in Hawai‘i and calls for a brief clarification of terminology. An earlier revitalization of culture took place during the reign of King David Kalākaua (1874–1891), who specifically encouraged hula and the traditional arts. Although this has prompted some to label the recent revival the Second Hawaiian Renaissance, throughout this essay I  use the widely accepted Renaissance or Hawaiian Renaissance labels to refer to the twentieth-century revitalization. Understanding this movement requires a brief overview of events leading up to and surrounding the florescence of “new traditions that look like old traditions.” Following America’s illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, Hawai‘i became a U.S. Territory. Admission to the United States in 1959 by an overwhelming majority vote capped decades of assimilationist thought in a now-criticized ballot offering only the options of continued territorial status or statehood—with no possibility of independence. As Hawai‘i’s focus turned increasingly to the continent, growing awareness of events taking place in the larger United States moved into island society. The civil rights and free speech movements, anti-war sentiments, and the push for Ethnic Studies all became important causes in this new state with a long history of racially based labor struggles, a large military presence, and an ethnically diverse population. The growth in air travel in the 1960s meant that Hawaiian culture was packaged and sold to an expanding tourist market, even as the language and many aspects of that culture were already falling into disuse. In the 1960s, Kamehameha Schools, founded by the estate of Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pau‘ahi Bishop and dedicated to the education of Hawaiian children, still promoted an American-centric education. Given the long legacy of missionary disapproval, hula and chant held particularly ambivalent positions because of their historical association with non-Christian rituals and purported licentiousness. In fact, up until 1965, Hawaiian female students were forbidden to perform standing hula on campus for fear that the girls would “wiggle too much” (King and Roth 2006: 55, 58). Against this background, something remarkable happened—a new consciousness emerged that would breathe life into Hawaiian traditions. People generally trace the beginning of the Renaissance to the realm of Hawaiian popular music and, particularly, the release of the album Guava Jam in 1969 by the group The Sunday Manoa. Nettl, noting the ability of traditional music to offset cultural disorientation and displacement, states: “As other means of identification become less effective, music is increasingly stressed” (Nettl 1985: 65). The irony of Hawai‘i’s experience is that what eventually became a strongly traditionalist movement actually was prompted by an album that launched music in a decidedly non-traditional direction. In this post-statehood phase when Hawai‘i’s eyes turned outward, the ears of its youth were tuning in to the developments taking place in the world of late 1960s rock music. What The Sunday Manoa did was to infuse a new energy into island music by taking Hawaiian language songs

534   Jane Freeman Moulin and updating them with new instrumental sounds—interesting chord treatments and ‘ukulele strums, together with solo licks and riffs echoing rock and jazz. The effect of hearing an altered version of the traditional chant “Kāwika” juxtaposed with song, syncopated rhythmic interest, an extended driving ‘ukulele solo, and a final nod to the Rolling Stone’s 1967 hit “Let’s Spend the Night Together” was both tradition-shattering and empowering for local youth. “ ‘They stole our hearts,’ says veteran radio personality Honolulu Skylark. ‘Now it was cool to listen to Hawaiian music, it wasn’t just for our parents’ ” (Bolante and Keany 2004: 32). Notably, the album reaffirmed the importance of the language (in an age when many entertainers were not familiar with it and many did not even sing in Hawaiian) as well as music’s ability to adapt aspects of the dominant culture while remaining intensely local and true to the spirit of Hawaiian performance, which values primacy of the song text. The ethnic composition of the group, with Korean-American Peter Moon and part-Hawaiian brothers Roland and Robert Cazimero, confirmed the ethnic diversity of the Hawaiian music scene. The sparking of the Renaissance was unintentional. As musician and founder of the group Peter Moon relates, “It was really the events of the time that made this album. . .. We were surprised at how the album was received, because we didn’t set out to change anything” (quoted in Bolante and Keany 2004: 32). Robert Cazimero, a young 18-year old musician at the time he recorded this album, echoes those words: “People still ask me what it was like being at the forefront of the Hawaiian Renaissance, but we didn’t realize it. We were just having a good time playing music” (32). Attributing the catalyst for renewal to this one album belies other actions and sentiments that were already swelling under the surface to create a surge of cultural activity that would sweep the state in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1961–1962, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa enrolled 27 students in Hawaiian language courses; by 1992–1993, that number was 1,277 (Warschauer and Donaghy 1997: 351). Around 1970, UH also started offering classes in hula kahiko (old hula), which features chant and traditional instruments. This represented a major change from the homophonic, chordophone-accompanied hula songs associated with the modern hula taught at local studios of the time; it also provided institutional validation of art forms that, given Hawai‘i’s outward focus, were not receiving widespread support in the community. Ma‘iki Aiu Lake, however, was one of the few in the community who instructed local students in both traditional and modern styles; in 1972 she launched her first classes to train kumu hula (hula teachers) in the traditional way.2 All of this activity aligned nicely with the launch of the first Merrie Monarch hula competition in 1971 as an event devoted to “the perpetuation, preservation, and promotion of the art of hula and the Hawaiian culture through education” (Merrie Monarch Festival website).3 Whereas The Sunday Manoa had opened the door to making Hawaiian music current and attractive to a new generation, it was these three iconic symbols of traditional culture—language, music, dance—and their convergence in renewed activity that provided a highly visible presence and strong impetus for the Renaissance. Part of the reclamation of culture meant that young men began dancing again, a resurgent interest in the language appeared, and old traditions and repertoire were brought back—not

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necessarily in strict conformity to the past, but retaining identifiable elements important to Hawai‘i’s residents rather than its visitors. Musicians, such as Gabby Pahinui and the Sons of Hawai‘i, Sonny Chillingworth, and Raymond Kane, found new audiences and became the revered elder statesmen to help a young generation connect with its roots. What developed out of this artistic growth, however, soon broadened into a movement that led to important social and political actions, including the valorization of Pacific knowledge as both a confirmation of cultural confidence and opposition to the domination of Western views, the growth of political protest as a demonstration of belief in the power of community action, and the realization that language was a crucial foundation for a new era of cultural identification. The sheer force and earth-shaking consequences of this birthing process prompted cultural expert George Kanahele to use the simile of a dormant volcano coming to life in his description of this new Hawaiian consciousness (Kanahele 1979: 1). A political and counter-U.S. positioning began to develop as the 1970s progressed. Highly publicized civil action included protests against the eviction of farmers in Kalama Valley to make way for proposed tourist and residential development (1970–71), the occupation of the island of Kaho‘olawe by Hawaiian activists protesting U.S. military bombing (1976), and the passage of several pro-Hawaiian bills in the 1978 Hawai‘i State Constitutional Convention.4 In the 1980s, continued community activism, the opening of the first schools offering Hawaiian language immersion education (1987), and the growth of sovereignty groups all created new contexts for music and dance, aligning with Ginsburg’s argument that the products of indigenous expressive culture are linked to these very efforts of representation, governance, and cultural autonomy that follow decades of assimilation politics (Ginsburg 2002). In the new millennium, Hawaiians continue to face challenges in legislation, school admission policies, and land issues that erode self-determination.5 While the actual content of cultural products related to the institutions and events that grew out of the Renaissance, such as specific pieces of music and dance, may be apolitical in nature, the type of music used and its very performance in a Renaissance context can become political statements that take on additional layers of signification and new functions, i.e., keeping issues of representation, governance, and cultural autonomy in the public eye. In a similar way, the apolitical nature of a corporate theater trailer took on a larger meaning that also was attached to the life and meanings of the Renaissance. The Renaissance moved into general community consciousness as Hawai‘i residents began to comprehend many of the dissidents’ issues and people of various ethnicities became involved personally in Renaissance activities—not because they wanted to claim Hawaiianness, but because they wanted to understand more about a Hawaiian world and, in many cases, to participate more directly in Hawaiian culture. Hawaiian causes, arts, and perspectives were constantly in the news and ever-present in the community. Certain activities became icons of the cultural movement, and foremost among these were music and dance. One significant part of the reclamation of culture was a reach backwards to embrace hula kahiko as dance and chant untainted by modernity, as expressive culture that reached back to an era when Hawaiians were in control

536   Jane Freeman Moulin

FIGURE  24.1 Male hula dancer in a photo entitled “O Kona, ia o ke Kai Malino a Ehu (It is Kona, Home of the Calm Seas of  Ehu).” (Photo courtesy of Randy Jay Braun. © Randy Jay Braun  2011.)

of their own land and their own destiny, and as a dance that survived missionary attempts to stamp it out. As Kanahele remarked, “The more traditional the dance, the keener the interest. It’s as if people want to get as close as they possibly can to the first hula that [L]‌aka did” (1979: 5). In referencing the Hawaiian goddess Laka, the creator and patron of hula, an important detail emerges. Unlike the late nineteenth-century Renaissance prompted by King Kalākaua, this revival of 100 years later would reach back even further in time. Part of that search for the authenticity attached to the “old” meant looking for costume ideas that would also convey a sense of antiquity. Male dancers began to wear malo, a type of loincloth (Figure 24.1, Web Figure 24.01 ), while women retained the simple, strapless, loose bodice with a full skirt and sported the long, loose tresses of “hula hair.” Dancer adornments, which reflect fashion trends as much as any clothing item, took on a decidedly late twentieth-century look, albeit one founded on older ways of making the requisite head and neck lei as well as ankle and wrist adornments (kupe‘e). These costuming trends became an integral part of the look of the Renaissance. The photograph in Figure 24.1 is clearly a Renaissance image—in its male representation, featuring of ancient hula, costuming, style of lei and ti leaf adornments, and its

Trailing Images and Culture Branding  537

non-modernity. It is this now normalized imagery that the trailer evokes in portraying Hawaiian culture, and it is an understanding of those same symbols that the audience draws on to imbue the trailer with meaning as part of a larger cultural matrix. In turn, the trailer itself becomes a representation of the Renaissance and the specific culture created around it.

“It’s Not Hawaiian Music” Tracing the creation of this trailer takes us to its producer Jon de Mello, a fascinating person in the late twentieth-century development of Hawaiian music and a major figure in state record production and distribution (Figure 24.2, Web Figure 24.02  ). Jon is the son of well-known composer Jack de Mello, a descendent of the original Portuguese immigrants to Hawai‘i and a musician who shaped the soundscape of post-World War II Hawai‘i. Working with outstanding Hawaiian singers of the 1950s and 60s—such as Emma Veary, Nina Keali‘iwahamana, and Marlene Sai—he merged the orchestral sounds of mainland America with lyrical songs of the islands to create an “updated” sound for a mid-century Hawai‘i that was moving towards, and eventually into, a new political identity as the 50th state. Growing up surrounded by outstanding Hawaiian performers, son Jon (hereafter referred to as de Mello) cultivated his talents in piano, composition, and the visual arts. His many contributions to Hawaiian music include the founding of the Mountain Apple recording company, the promotion of artists like the Brothers Cazimero and Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole (IZ),6 and his successful effort in 2005 to have a Hawaiian Music category added to the Grammy Awards.7 His Mountain Apple products are notable for their high audio quality, outstanding visual design, and ability to convey a Hawaiian sound with a distinctively contemporary edge. De Mello’s involvement with the Consolidated project grew from the firm’s desire to replace the cartoonish animated popcorn trailer featured on its statewide screens in 1991. President Phil Shimmen, looking for something special to mark the company’s upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary in 1992, called de Mello over to his office and asked him for his input. Upon returning to his home studio, de Mello’s mind kept floating to that request when suddenly an inspiration struck him. He sat down at his keyboards, samplers, and instruments, and finished the complete soundtrack in two hours, playing each individual line and overdubbing slowly to build up the multi-layered sound. That initial tape was essentially the final product; de Mello says that once he had penciled out the scratch track and started layering, it all came together very easily. He made only a few clean-up changes to bring it to its final form. With his background in fine arts, de Mello also had specific visual ideas in mind. He knew “It’s gotta have the culture thing,” (Jon de Mello, interview, February 23, 2008, Honolulu) and that it needed to include elements of an island world—the ocean, dancing, and ceremony; it also had to be dark, because people are transitioning to a movie. As

538   Jane Freeman Moulin

FIGURE  24.2 Producer and composer Jon de  Mello. (Photo by Ray Wong. Courtesy of Mountain Apple Company.)

he says, “There . . . is a blend of different worlds . . . and what it ends up to be. And sometimes I wasn’t even aware of that when I was actually doing it” (ibid.). Shimmen, who was enthralled by the cassette tape brought to him the following day, spared no expense on the project; the prints alone cost $100,000, a sizeable sum at the time for a one-minute film. The total piece was completed within a month and copyrighted as “The Birth of Hawai‘i, Consolidated Amusement Trailer, 75th Anniversary” (http://www.copyright. gov/records/). De Mello related that a researcher from the Guinness Book of World Records visited him several years ago, claiming this was the most listened-to piece of Hawaiian music in the history of the world (de Mello, interview, February 23, 2008). In speaking with de Mello, I probed, “And do you call it Hawaiian music?” “No,” he responded, “I call it contemporary island-based music, but it’s not Hawaiian music in any sense of the word” (ibid.). His reluctance to consider this Hawaiian is well-founded, and his preference for the term “contemporary island music” conforms to the current practice of artists who incorporate Hawaiian elements without being restricted to their traditional use.

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De Mello uses a synthesized French horn sounding a triumphant perfect fifth to open the scene,8 saying he was inspired by the famous 20th Century Fox fanfare. This is followed by percussion, more horns, and big pads underneath that move up the scale. De Mello talks about having equipment with a pitch spin wheel on it. By going in and modifying the attack and decay envelope on a vibraphone sound, he could play a chord, slow down the attack, and push the wheel to “bend the sound” to resemble a steel guitar. The chord slides up and hangs there as a voice enters with a traditional Hawaiian chant. But in the background, we hear a Tahitian slit drum pattern sampled on a woodblock, something de Mello inserted to reference Hawai‘i’s connections to a larger Polynesian world. Brass and strings take over, and the sound of pahu drums (indigenous hand-struck, single-headed membranophones) beating a traditional rhythm builds, but—just as the “steel guitar” alludes to Hawai‘i without becoming the “real thing”—de Mello adds a cymbal to the ancient drum beat. Referencing the split bamboo rattle, pū ‘ili, used by hula dancers and underscoring both the thought and the inventiveness that shaped each sound, de Mello said, “I rationalized that by saying that this vibrating metallic sound was a hybrid sound of split bamboo. I didn’t want it to overpower, knowing that there was no metal [in ancient Hawai‘i], so I just sort of buried it. But it gave it the bite” (ibid.). When I inquired about the unresolved string chord in the middle, de Mello confirmed, “That I did on purpose—to get you on the edge of your seat for the movie. This is something that does not have an ending” (ibid.). I focus on the sound here, but the seamless linking of the visual and aural is so effective that many people merge the two. The careful juxtaposition of sound and image (e.g. waves, the ocean, canoe paddlers) with placement of the first horn sounds at the very beginning—as if announcing an event—recalls the traditional function of the shell trumpet in the Pacific. Viewers attach to the larger symbolism rather than focusing on the accuracy of details. As with the cymbal sound, something in the overall trailer allows viewers to suspend their notions of sonic authenticity and to accept the departure from tradition. Some of this may be due to the built-in fantastical setting of the movie theater. Or perhaps the trailer attaches to something “cultural,” as de Mello planned, drawing on a set of pre-inscribed meanings and values that speak to island viewers. With strong cultural reference points, small inconsistencies in sound become innovative twists on culture rather than distractions from it.

“That’s the Kaona Behind the Whole Thing” In discussing the meaning he personally attaches to the trailer, de Mello uses the Hawaiian term kaona, an admired technique of Hawaiian poets who use metaphorical

540   Jane Freeman Moulin language to create secondary, or even tertiary, levels of song text comprehension. The idea here is that anyone can say the obvious; the art comes in a skillful use of imagery and an intertextuality that requires listeners to bring their past experiences and knowledge to an appreciation of the poetry. In a visual age, it is tempting to expand the use of kaona to open a window to understanding both de Mello’s discerning use of particular symbols and the various interpretations that a theater-going public in Hawai‘i brings to the viewing event. De Mello says that the opening waves and the canoe at sunset are intended to transport the viewer into a visually dark place in preparation for the movie to follow, and “That’s the kaona behind the whole thing” (ibid.). However, the stream of evocative symbols intertwined in the images he selected is considerably more complex. These images are effective primarily because they tap into other memories. And that is the genius of de Mello’s creation. Producer intent and viewer perception do not always align, nor do they need to; ultimately what counts is the message the audience receives. According to de Mello, the use of fire was strictly for dramatic purposes; to the audience, however, that same dramatic effect may invoke an element of danger (as in “don’t play with fire”). The trailer, moreover, sets this up in a way that resonates with Hawai‘i residents who grew up listening to stories about the nighttime movements of the hukai pō, ancient warriors whose torches on Hawaiian hillsides still can be seen by believers. Generally described by storytellers as marching to the accompaniment of chanting and drumming, these ghostly apparitions command respect and force onlookers to “play dead” for fear that a deadly gaze could spell disaster. The scene with torch-wielding men processing down the cliff to the sounds of chant taps directly into strong memories of the famous night marchers and adds to the sense of apprehension and foreboding. “The chanting seems like it is a ghost procession,” remarked one viewer, while many others in a survey I conducted (see below) invoked words such as “scary,” “creepy,” or “chilling,” a response that undoubtedly links to this kaona. Similarly, the canoe is not simply a means of transport or a favored local sport. One highly significant event in Hawaiian Renaissance history was the voyage of the long-distance sailing canoe Hokule‘a from Hawai‘i to Tahiti in 1976. This crossing validated indigenous knowledge of the sea and prompted renewed interest in non-instrument navigation and long-distance canoes based on traditional designs. In the songs prompted by the canoe and its travels, the lessons learned from the trips, and the warm greetings that awaited the travelers when they reached lands throughout the Pacific, the canoe came to represent the strong pride that Polynesians feel in their heritage and confirmed the connections and stories related over the centuries in their songs and dances. The subsequent development of “canoe culture” became embedded in the life of the Renaissance and influenced de Mello’s belief that the trailer had “to include the ocean” (ibid.). Aside from the foregrounded physicality of strong, powerful males, the opening scene of paddlers is a direct referent to the importance the Renaissance placed on Hawaiian connections—to an ancestral past, across oceans and, specifically, away from a U.S.-centric view. De Mello aurally touches on this felt past when he incorporates a Tahitian slit-drum rhythmic pattern (sounding as a woodblock) to accompany

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the march of the dancers down the cliffside, and he ties it directly to Hawai‘i by continuing the sound under the words of the chant. The whole opening is simultaneously a highlighting of both connections and the notion of original settlement. It represents the very birth of Hawai‘i as a separate and unique culture. As with revival movements elsewhere, part of the power comes from reframing “old” in a positive way—not as a useless and insignificant past, but as a valued resource for contemporary action through remembrance. In this particular case, the past is recast as a pro-Hawaiian and pre-colonial heritage that highlights Islander, specifically Polynesian, origins. Other images also signal the ancient past through a set of visual and aural symbols that the Renaissance made visible to the community. The Renaissance ideals of hula kahiko, prominent male dancers, and traditional costuming are all strong prompts for a population that, by 1992, already had been educated in the difference between traditional hula and the modern form that dominated most of the twentieth century. But there are several aural clues as well. Some may hear drums and think “old,” “traditional,” or even “primeval.” Those with more knowledge, however, will recognize the pahu drum as the most sacred of Hawaiian instruments and the particular rhythm as that used to accompany the chant and dance “Kaulilua,” one of a small handful of dances thought to descend from rituals on the ancient, pre-Christian temple sites. As with the drum, interpretation of the different layers of other symbols lies in the experience that each viewer brings to the theater. The use of traditional chant immediately situates the sound in the ancient past for the general audience; those with in-depth hula training will recognize “Kūnihi ka mauna” (Steep stands the mountain in calm), a mele kahea (lit. “calling song”) often chanted to request entrance to a setting of formal learning, such as a hālau hula (dance school) (Emerson 1909: 40). Such complex images carry political meaning in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a fact that may contribute to the trailer’s remarkably long life. Reconstruction and validation of the past, whether historically accurate or reimagined for a new age, was a crucial part of the Hawaiian Renaissance and remains part of the public debate surrounding Hawaiian sovereignty. Making a political statement was not de Mello’s desire nor purpose, but that social climate of discussion seeking a return to Hawaiian ways of doing and, specifically, independent rule under Hawaiian leadership is certainly what viewers—regardless of their ethnicity or political stance— bring with them to the theater and to their interpretation of Hawaiian artistic presentations that reference a pre-colonial past. I was curious about how the audience views this island-based contemporary work so thoroughly enmeshed in Renaissance imagery and its attendant political undercurrents and yet purportedly intended to provide a simple transition from the everyday world to the imaginary realm of moviedom. Is the trailer perceived as something as non-complex as a theatrical transition? I surveyed 224 people ranging from ten to seventy-four years old and representing Hawai‘i’s multi-ethnic spread.9 Those surveyed reported residence in the islands from two months to over sixty years.10 I specifically requested three words they would use to describe the trailer, and respondents provided 625 one-word descriptions. Collapsing closely related categories, the highest responses in descending order included: ancient/traditional (56 responses),

542   Jane Freeman Moulin cultural (55 responses), and indigenous/Hawaiian (50 responses). In other words, despite de Mello’s claims of non-Hawaiian music and his intended kaona of simply transporting the audience, 25.8% of all possible responses indicated that viewers read this trailer foremost as a cultural statement of Hawaiianness conveyed by invoking the ancient traditions of the land. Numerically, the next set of responses included more emotionally packed terms, with the top ones being powerful/strong (23), intense (17), and dark (11). While 32.88% of those surveyed were neutral about their reaction to the trailer, 64.86% stated that they liked it; a mere 3.15% noted dislike. Most comments were positive, but not all. “Boring,” “monotonous,” “stale,” and “I’ve seen it so many times already, it doesn’t leave much of an impact on me” all appeared on survey sheets, but were outnumbered overwhelmingly by people who voiced feelings like “I never get tired of watching it,” “I like the familiarity,” “It’s cool. I have seen it all my life,” and “I’ve seen it so many times that the movies would not be the same without it.” A very small group sees the trailer primarily as a cue: “I like it because it means the movie is starting.” This trailer presents an unusual study topic. The work does not fall under the rubric of indigenous media by virtue of its non-Hawaiian creator. Despite de Mello’s intense involvement with Hawaiian music, his Portuguese ethnicity adds complexity to this study by moving his work beyond the category of the native eye to that of culture-supportive producer. Second, the piece is not a film. This sixty-second work has no developed narrative to bring it within the field of film study per se. It is promotional material based on an unrelated series of images added after the sound, a very atypical process for film. Third, its locationality moves it out of the interests of television or film by virtue of its decidedly non-twenty-first-century lack of mobility and its existence as non-circulated display. It is not national or transnational; it does not move beyond Hawaiian shores. Rather, it finds meaning as a reflection of identity for a geographically restricted community that views it communally on the large screen. It is precisely in this Hawaiian space where the trailer defines Hawai‘i as both markedly separate from and something more than homogenized American culture, doing this by paying tribute to the host culture and personifying that difference through an island lens. And it is that sense of Hawaiianness that allows Native Hawaiian scholar Lia Keawe, invoking the semiotics of Pacific imaging and highly critical of the appropriation and misrepresentation of the hula girl image, to begin her 2008 M.A. thesis on imagery and colonialism in Hawai‘i with a lengthy description of the trailer and her continuing sense of astonishment at the allure and beauty evoked by the piece. She reads the shell trumpet as a signal of arrival; the ocean as not a rhetorical trope of paradise, but rather as power and control; waves as colliding world views and Hawaiian resilience; fire as a reawakening; and the pahu drum as restoring the spiritual mana of hula. For her, the sole reference to entertainment is the theater logo at the end (Keawe 2008: 1–3, 126–130). The same tendency to attribute cultural importance rather than mere entertainment value was reflected in my survey results. Only seven responses mentioned the terms “commercial” or “entertainment,” which would seem to negate the original intent of the Consolidated-de Mello partnership. For those familiar with the islands, however, three

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important features locate this trailer beyond the realm of only entertainment and, specifically, the type of entertainment local residents normally associate with tourist marketing or films about Hawai‘i produced by outsiders. First, the natural, almost primeval setting of the Makapu‘u cliffs on the east side of ‘Oahu spatially removes the local viewer from the tourist-overrun beaches of Waikiki, presenting a site that is read as a local space, not a tourist one. The barren setting and lava rocks portray the very birth of the land, in contrast to the constructed environment of international travel enterprises and the mushrooming hotels lining Waikiki shores. Yes, the trailer taps into the ancient and the primitive, but the activities portrayed—canoe-paddling, hula, chant, descending the rocks to the ocean—are all familiar parts of contemporary life in Hawai‘i as well; and, I might add, activities that stand a bit apart from the typical tourist experience, just as the trailer experience does. The movie theater is a non-touristic site, just by virtue of the fact that most people do not spend their vacations watching movies. Nothing prohibits the tourist from that site, but it is nevertheless one that residents claim as a local space by default. The non-performative, almost ceremonial, nature of the dance also establishes it as something not conceived for tourist eyes. Instead, there is a sense of peeking in on some primal ritual and this distinguishes it from the staged presentation of culture in tourism. Indeed, only five survey responses out of 625 described this as “touristy,” and only three indicated “entertainment” as one of their word choices. A perception of authenticity matters here. Local audiences recognize performers who are very well trained in hula, strong chant performance, and traditional styles of dance and music normally not widely performed in Waikiki. The dance and chant carry the weight of cultural authority, not only because of their roots in time but also because of the high skill level displayed. Those with direct knowledge of the culture recognize and appreciate the mastery of the language and skilled use of admired vocal techniques by chanter Kepa Maly, a cultural resources specialist who is a fluent Hawaiian speaker and a kumu hula (hula master). But even more powerful than recognitions of place and performance style are the recognitions of people. ‘Oahu is a small place, and those familiar with the hula community recognize performers selected from the hālau (hula school) of the highly-respected Robert Cazimero, as well as Heali‘i Kihune, the daughter of Leina‘ala Heine, one of Hawai‘i’s revered hula masters. Although it is their youthful images that are captured on screen, some of these people are known to a younger generation as teacher, coach, or popular performer.11 Five of the six dancers still reside in Hawai‘i—shrinking in the theater seat as a child calls out loudly, “There’s my Daddy!” or modestly deflecting fame when a viewer stops after the film to inquire, “Aren’t you the dancer in the trailer?” These are not anonymous personalities from some far-off world. These are Hawai‘i’s own.12 Situating the trailer in this very Polynesian locus of land, activity, tradition, and people is what allows Hawai‘i residents to identify with this work—even if they are not ethnically Hawaiian. Much like Rosenberg’s notion of revivals “feeding music from the margins into the center” (1993: 5), the Renaissance shifted the parameters of cultural placement to move what had become marginalized Hawaiian traditions to center-stage and taught residents that Hawaiian culture could—and should—be the focal point as

544   Jane Freeman Moulin the host culture of the islands. De Mello, drawing on revival symbols and shared community connotations, also situates Hawai‘i as the center of focus, thereby allowing the trailer to assume a stronger meaning than that of pure entertainment. Through presentation on the big screen, Hawai‘i basks in the grandeur associated with cinematic space, but it does so in a particularly local way. This is not Hollywood imaging. Rather, the audience sees the trailer as intervening in the status quo articulated by a mainland film industry and appreciates the bold statement of that intervention. The work is completely inventive. There is no storyline, there is no real dance, there is no music for dance, and people in Hawai‘i do not dance on rocky shorelines. Yet, amid contemporary portrayals of Hawaiians that so often thoroughly miss the crucial identifiers of culture, de Mello’s art displays a skill in imagery, attachment to place, excellence in performance, and knowledge of the kaona that allows a Renaissance-educated audience to accept the trailer as an “insider” view that understands Hawaiian culture. A small number of respondents viewed the trailer as feeding into dominant imaging of Hawai‘i as foreign and exotic. Perhaps what they do not understand is that many local residents, regardless of ethnicity, do view themselves as “foreign” to American life and prefer to maintain this distancing—if done in a way that upholds Hawaiian values. Dávila states, “Media discourses are never produced in a vacuum; they are part and parcel of greater discourses of identity and identification” (2002: 277). In a similar way, the messages embedded in the trailer are comprehensible only in the full context of the late twentieth-century Hawaiian Renaissance. A contemporary audience may take them completely for granted, but these symbols and their messages would not have been imaginable a half-century earlier.

“It’s Gotta Have a Shelf Life” De Mello’s work has become such a mainstay of life in Hawai‘i that there is now a whole generation that has grown up knowing only this trailer in Consolidated Theaters. When the sale of the theater chain spawned a flood of phone calls in 2008, the news anchors on two local TV stations felt compelled to go on the air and reassure the public that Consolidated had confirmed the trailer would remain in place. This reaction is amazing, especially considering that this is a non-consumer, non-choice product; the “consumer” is already in the theater, and the work is ancillary to the main feature film. The public response to the news story, however, was echoed in my subsequent survey results, where only seven survey respondents—out of 224—thought the trailer should be redone or dropped. Asked if they would make changes, one respondent said “No, and if I did people would probably hate me!” Indeed, “classic” and “nostalgic” were words that appeared several times, indicating that the trailer is ingrained as a tradition for many of those surveyed. One graduating high school senior mused, “I don’t know what it’ll be like to leave for college and not see this.”

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The burning question is why so many people, almost 63% of those surveyed, are still invested in this work. On one hand, de Mello is outstanding at what he does and perhaps some people simply view this as a brilliant creation. There are, however, also reasons that lie in Hawai‘i’s post-revival cultural life. Initiated and spearheaded by Native Hawaiians, the Renaissance eventually reached out to touch the entire community. As Kanahele declared, “anybody who claims Hawai‘i to be home, in some degree or another, wants and even needs to share in its Hawaiian-ness” (1979: 9). Addressing what he calls the “paradox of the Renaissance,” he states that this rebirth “does not only belong to Hawaiians. It belongs to non-ethnic Hawaiians, too” (ibid.). In the early twenty-first century, the traditions that the Renaissance molded into a Hawaiian culture for the present are now firmly established and institutionalized in hālau hula and school curricula stretching from pre-school to the university, as well as in state-wide organizations and events. Even the rituals of government become involved when construction ground-breaking includes chant, the untying of a maile lei,13 and the ceremonial lifting of dirt with an ‘o‘o stick rather than a shovel. The images and practices of the Renaissance have been normalized by not only Hawaiians, but by the community at large. The ethnic diversity of any hula troupe attests to the impact of cultural revival on those of non-Hawaiian blood. In some ways, the outward dressings of Renaissance culture now function as a lingua franca in an intensely multi-ethnic community that needs emblems of place that are accessible, relevant, and able to cross ethnic lines. People recognize the cultural display as that of the host culture but also respect, understand, and even embrace its symbols— whether they are ethnically Hawaiian or not. The Consolidated trailer, as a product of the Renaissance, also belongs to the larger community. As one sixteen-year-old Filipino girl said, “It serves to remind me that this is Hawai‘i after all—it’s a special place.” The trailer confirms the fundamental claim that Hawaiians have as kanaka ‘ōiwi o ka ‘āina (‘native people of the land’), the only indigenous group among a society that has seen layers and generations of immigration. But it ultimately taps into a broader, contrastive “local” identity as well. Scholars such as Okamura (2008), Alba (1990), and Rosa (2000) have theorized ethnic and racial boundary construction in Hawai‘i and examined the notion of “localness.” Transcending the racial boundaries often ascribed to “local” or the individual groups subsumed in that collective (e.g., local Japanese-Americans versus mainland Japanese-Americans or Japanese from Japan; “local haole (Caucasian)” versus whites born and raised on the mainland), Okamura situates localness in a category of people who have a commitment to Hawai‘i. He points to the late 1960s and early 1970s as a time when a “new meaning of local emphasized a shared appreciation of the land, peoples, and cultures of the islands” and considers local a shared identity that “serves as a basis of collective agency to contest the penetration by non-local forces that threaten local communities” (Okamura 2008: 117, 121). Part of the trailer’s allure is in performing a communal space that appreciates the specialness of Hawai‘i by acknowledging the traditions that the original people brought to these lands and invoking the sacredness of the past. De Mello takes the non-local foreignness of the big screen (both as an industry and in terms of content that seldom concerns island stories and people) and,

546   Jane Freeman Moulin using Renaissance imagery, delivers a one-minute confirmation that there is something distinctive about Hawai‘i. As one nineteen-year-old local Japanese respondent remarked, “It reminds me that the land I am on has a wonderful, unique history.” That power to summon an emotional response linked to place is apparent in survey comments. “Power,” “pride,” “strength,” “awe,” “beauty,” “meaningful,” and “moving” were all descriptors included in participant responses. It is that contestation of globalness, paired with emotions of place, that is engaged in many respondents when the lights dim and the trailer comes into view. It is also important to realize that at the time this work first appeared, the Renaissance had a strong presence in the community but not in movie theaters.14 Predating the expansion of indigenous media in the 1990s, the trailer brought Hawaiian culture to the theater screen, seemingly attaching the images of Hawai‘i to the lofty heights of Hollywood. It did so, however, in way that counters Hollywood hegemony of visual and sound imagery and its generally insensitive, stereotypical representations of Hawaiian people and their culture. This is the big screen, but in a way that encapsulates a local perspective and sense of identity from the viewpoint of a general audience—not the cultural specialists or academics, but the theater-going public. Comments such as “synthesized 80s sound” or “I think after so many years it needs a sequel” bring up the notion of “shelf life” and point to audience acknowledgement of a disconnect between the trailer and contemporary practice, even though these same respondents nonetheless indicated they liked the work. Most respondents were cautious about meddling with de Mello’s creation. Underscoring the role that familiarity and repetition plays as part of the meaning audiences ascribe to this trailer, one person said that any alterations “would have to be done carefully. With such a long standing tradition, too much change would ruin the effect.” The trailer has become a part of island life that, like other widely accepted aspects of the Renaissance, contributes to a feeling that “these things have always been here.” It is a generational reality that young people today cannot imagine a 1950s world without frequent performances of ancient hula and chant nor envision a society that forbade the Hawaiian language and down-played Hawaiian culture rather than appreciating and upholding it. With the normalization of Renaissance ideology and practices throughout the islands, the page has now turned to a Post-Renaissance age.

“Ha‘ina ‘ia mai ana ka puana” Traditional Hawaiian hula songs include the formulaic phase “Ha‘ína ‘ia mai ana ka puana,” or a variant thereof, as part of the final verse. Translated as “tell the refrain/ theme,” “the story is told” or “thus goes the story,” it provides a closing restatement prompting reflection on the song’s theme(s). In a similar way, closing thoughts on the trailer offer an opportunity to review its significance. Just as the Hawaiian Renaissance produced a musical composite of old and new traditions, de Mello creatively reaches across centuries to achieve his goal in this trailer. He

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teases us aurally with synthesized sound interspersed with the aural icons of Hawaiian history while interweaving the whole with visual images that represent the Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than presenting cultural reality, however, he skillfully manipulates the cues to create something that steps beyond the sounds and images the audience typically associates with the Renaissance. De Mello readily admits the music is not Hawaiian—in either its instrumentation or the way the audio track builds to a dramatic climax that movie-goers associate with cinematic sounds and epic dimensions. In a similar way, he does not attempt to portray the reality of Hawaiian performance; instead, he uses Renaissance symbols that invoke a range of associated meanings that draw from life beyond the theater screen but do not duplicate it. Although this case study is specific to the Hawaiian Islands, it underscores some important points for the field of revival study. First, localization and knowledge of that locale are crucial both to cultural revival and to the long-standing success of this trailer. Hawai‘i residents read the aural and visual symbols in ways that draw on a nuanced understanding of revival ideals. Such representations work to their fullest when there is knowledge of both the icons and the broader socio-political framework they reference. Culture here transcends slick entertainment to become a means of supporting Hawaiians in their political and social struggles. Second, the trailer aligns with the Renaissance recasting of culture as pro-Hawaiian and pre-colonial to support a collective and selective remembrance noted throughout revival studies. Doing this in sonically innovative ways and through a very non-conventional medium, it demonstrates how creativity can help to convey tradition and how commercialized space can be used effectively to support and popularize revival ideology. In the viewers’ eyes, a tool of commercialization and the big screen is co-opted and used to counter the typical imagery associated with those spaces. For this non-documentary trailer, cultural authority is necessary to credibility, but the overall message is seemingly more important than strict accuracy in all details. Third, the constant repetition built into the medium and Consolidated’s wide reach across the state played a large role in normalizing both it and Renaissance ideas. This repetitiveness and ubiquitousness contrasts with film, particularly indigenous film which often struggles for inroads to theater distribution, prompting reflection on both effective ways to spread and reinforce revival messages as well as possible new avenues for doing that. Finally, the world of the trailer is undeniably local and intensely personal in the sense that people attach specific meaning to its setting, its actors, and its symbols. With sensitivity, de Mello moves beyond an Outsider representation of Hawaiian culture to allow a multi-ethnic population to share in a sense of uniqueness surrounding the islands, a sense of belonging. The trailer is a distinctive imaging of Hawai‘i, but the fact that it is experienced communally in the islands heightens its meaning as an expression and experience of place. The trailer evokes a deep-felt recognition of things Hawaiian, not as a romanticized icon of commodification, but as a tribute to the host culture. As the trailer stretches across the generations, de Mello acknowledges that this work has “to have a shelf life

548   Jane Freeman Moulin sometime” (de Mello, interview, February 23, 2008). For the time being, however, it continues to help Hawai‘i residents to transition—to the movies, yes, but also to larger ideas concerning the role of Hawaiian culture in a modern age. As long as that role is continually challenged by political, land, and cultural issues or stereotypical outsider portrayals, there is still a need to position Hawaiians as powerful and to portray the culture as something that endures across time to link past and present in a “contemporary Island” place. The future will decide the destiny of the trailer, but the past has already recognized it as creating a previously unimagined space of possibility for Hawaiianness—even if only for one minute at a time.

Notes 1. Publications quote trailer showings of 200 to 1,000 times per day. Although several theaters have closed during the years since the trailer was released, my daily count on three dates in July 2010 ranged from 442 to 502. In the number of feature film screenings per day, Consolidated is the largest of the three major theater chains in the islands. 2. Ma‘iki stressed the importance of male dancers in Hawaiian history and worked to bring young men into her hula classes (Gordon 2006: FF8). Musician Robert Cazimero of The Sunday Manoa was one of her early students and became a kumu hula under her tutelage. 3. The 1970s also ushered in cultural organizations such as the Polynesian Voyaging Society (1973), Historic Hawaii Foundation (1974), Nā Hōkū Hanohano Music Awards (1977), and the opening of ‘Iolani Palace as a museum (1978) (Correa 2007: 88). 4. For a discussion of the Kalama Valley controversy, see Milner 2006. The “Hawaiian package” recognized the Hawaiian language as one of the two official languages of the state, confirmed various traditional rights, and established the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to represent the interests of Native Hawaiians (Hawaii Legislative Reference Bureau, http:// hawaii.gov/lrb/con/conart12.html). 5. The issues surrounding self-determination touch on a far-reaching assortment of serious concerns for Hawaiians. Bills to limit gathering rights for native practitioners of hula, proposed rulings to force the sale of lease-hold Bishop Estate land of the late Princess Pau‘ahi, legal challenges to Kamehameha Schools’ policy of admitting only students of Hawaiian blood, and the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 (with subsequent control of former crown lands by the US government) are among the problems that undermine Hawaiians’ control of their own destiny. 6. The impressive Mountain Apple catalog features many of Hawai‘i’s most outstanding performers, including Emma Veary, Nina Keali‘iwahamana, Keali‘i Reichel, Richard Ho‘opi‘i, Keola Beamer, Amy Hanaiali‘i, Raiatea Helm, Ho‘okena, Nā Palapalai, and others. 7. The separate Hawaiian category was suppressed as part of Grammy reorganization in 2011. 8. There are two versions of the sound track. A 1:17 minute version, designed for surround sound and used in only a few theaters, begins with the entrances of three conch shells and ends with a sustained string chord that builds in volume. A shorter one-minute version is the norm. 9. Hawai‘i’s demographic includes large Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Caucasian populations as well as smaller Pacific Islander and Southeast Asian communities; no one group claims a majority of the overall population.

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Generations of intermarriage also result in combinations of these heritages—both in the individual and in creating multi-ethnic extended families. It is worth noting that ethnicity was not an apparent factor affecting responses to the survey or general like/dislike of the trailer. 10. Those surveyed included University of Hawai‘i students and participants in the Hawai‘i Youth Opera Chorus. UH students in film, ethnomusicology, Hawaiian language, choir, Hawaiian studies and Pacific Islands studies classes and high school students in the Youth Opera chorus were shown the trailer one time and asked to complete a short questionnaire. Surveys took place during summer and fall terms of 2008 and the summer term of 2009. Of the 224 people surveyed, twenty-five had never seen the trailer previously. All twenty-five had been in Hawai‘i for less than one-and-a-half years. 11. Michael Casupang is a kumu hula at Mid-Pacific Institute; Arletta Johnson Soon, a teacher of Hawaiian language and culture, works at Kamehameha Schools; legendary hula dancer Jackie Booth performs with well-known contemporary Hawaiian performers like Amy Hanaiali‘i Gilliom, the Ka‘au Crater Boys, and HAPA; Reggie Keaunui is involved with Polynesian voyaging canoes and coaches youth divisions in outrigger canoe paddling; Heali‘i Kihune works for Sandwich Isles Communications, a company that services Hawaiian homestead customers; and Keola Kamahele is a real estate agent in Las Vegas (Pang 2002). 12. Although this was certainly not typical when surveying UH classes, approximately 50% of the seventeen students in one Hawaiian Studies class said they were either related to or personally acquainted with one of the performers. 13. A garland of fragrant leaves often used for important occasions. 14. Options for viewing Islander stories were limited in 1992. The Hawai‘i International Film Festival, established in 1981, initially featured predominantly Asian films but has expanded in this century to include films from the Pacific and works by Native Hawaiians. Pacific Islanders in Communications, a member of the National Minority Consortia (NMC), aims “to support, advance, and develop Pacific Island media content and talent that results in a deeper understanding of Pacific Island history, culture, and contemporary challenges” (http://www.lifeonfourstrings.com/faqs/ pacific-islanders-in-communications-co-producers/). Emerging in 1991, it was in its infancy at the time of the trailer’s release.

References Alba, Richard D. 1990. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bolante, Ronna, and Michael Keany. 2004. “The 50 Greatest Hawai‘i Albums of all Time.” Honolulu, June: 30–54, 63–64, 81. Correa, E. Sean. 2007. “The ’70s: Viva la Cultural Revolution!” Honolulu, November: 81–90. Dávila, Arlene. 2002. “Culture in the Ad World:  Producing the Latin Look.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 264–280. Berkeley: University of California Press. Emerson, Nathaniel B. 1909. Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, the Sacred Songs of the Hula. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 38. Washington: Government Printing Office.

550   Jane Freeman Moulin Feintuch, Burt. 1993. “Musical Revival as Musical Transformation.” In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 183–193. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fusco, Coco. 1995. English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York City: New Press. Ginsburg, Faye D. 2002. “Screen Memories:  Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media.” In Media worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 39–57. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gordon, Mike. 2006. “Ma‘iki Aiu Lake.” Honolulu Advertiser. July 2: FF8. Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hawaii Legislative Reference Bureau. The Constitution of the State of Hawaii. http://hawaii.gov/ lrb/con/conart12.html. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kanahele, George. 1979. “Haw’n Renaissance Grips, Changes Island History.” Ha‘ilono Mele V (7): 1–9. Keawe, Lia O’Neill Moanike‘ala Ah-Lan. 2008. “Ki‘i Pāpālua:  Imagery and Colonialism in Hawai‘i.” PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i. King, Samuel P., and Randall W. Roth. 2006. Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Linnekin, Jocelyn S. 1983. “Defining Tradition: Variations on the Hawaiian Identity.” American Ethnologist 10 (2): 241–252. Merrie Monarch Festival website. http://www.merriemonarch.com/about-the-festival. Milner, Neal. 2006. “Home, Homelessness, and Homeland in the Kalama Valley: Re-imagining a Hawaiian Nation through a Property Dispute.” The Hawaiian Journal of History 40: 149–176. Nettl, Bruno. 1985. The Western Impact on World Music: Change, Adaptation, and Survival. New York: Schirmer Books. Okamura, Jonathan. 2008. Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawaii. Philadelphia:  Temple University Press. Pacific Islanders in Communication. http://www.lifeonfourstrings.com/faqs/pacific-islandersin-communications-co-producers/. Pang, Gordon. 2002. “Big-screen Hula Dancers Faring Well.” Starbulletin.com April 6: A3. Rosa, John P. 2000. “Local Story: The Massie Case Narrative and the Cultural Production of Local Identity in Hawai‘i.” Amerasia Journal 26 (2): 93–115. Rosenberg, Neil V. 1993. “Introduction.” In Transforming Tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 1–25. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New  York Folklore 9: 37–44. United States Government. Copyright records. http://www.copyright.gov/records/. Warschauer, Mark, and Keola Donaghy. 1997. “Leokī: A Powerful Voice of Hawaiian Language Revitalization.” Computer Assisted Language Learning 10 (4): 349–362.

C HA P T E R  25

GRASSRO OTS R E V I TA L I Z AT I O N O F N O RT H AMERICAN AND WESTERN E U R O P E A N I N S T RU M E N TA L MUSIC TRADITIONS FROM F I D D L E R S A S S O C IAT I O N S T O C Y B E R S PAC E R IC HA R D BL AU ST E I N

In Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), the renowned American folk music collector and folk revival promoter Alan Lomax predicted that the worldwide impact of mass media and popular culture would lead to “cultural grey-out”; loss of the distinctive cultural identities that fulfill the universal human emotional need for meaningful connections with significant others. The work was filled with a sense of urgency. To a folklorist the uprooting and destruction of traditional cultures and the consequent grey-out or disappearance of the human variety presents as serious a threat to the future of mankind as poverty, overpopulation, and even war. . .. Our western mass production and communication systems are inadvertently destroying the languages, traditions, cuisines, and creative styles that once gave every people and every locality a distinctive character—indeed their principal reason for living. (Lomax 1968: 4)

But that did not happen. Instead, new hybrid forms of world music combining traditional and contemporary elements have flourished, along with widespread local, regional, national, and ethnic musical revitalization movements. The formation of

552   Richard Blaustein organizations devoted to reviving and preserving various forms of traditional instrumental music, including fiddling, has been taking place in the Western world since the late eighteenth century and still continues in the early twenty-first century. Formal associations centered around traditional fiddling and dance music are active in the United States, Canada, Australia, and western European countries, including Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. In the early twenty-first century, grassroots revival activities have found new life as fiddle enthusiasts around the world have made use of newly available internet-based technologies to build networks, communities, and identities. In this essay, I discuss some of the social and psychological motivations of revitalization movements and how revival-related organizations and activities have helped meet individuals’ needs for community and identity from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

The Emergence of Fiddling and Traditional Dance Music Communities on the Internet In Neil Rosenberg’s edited volume Transforming Tradition (1993), I described the rise of old-time fiddlers associations in the United States in the 1960s as a grassroots musical revitalization movement. The words “internet” and “cyberspace” do not appear in Transforming Tradition. We were already living in the early internet era and didn’t realize it. None of the contributors to Transforming Tradition, including myself, had any idea that the advent of the personal computer and the internet were creating new special interest groups focused on various genres of traditional music. But social scientists were already beginning to study the social and cultural impact of digital communications technology. Howard Rheingold’s work The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World, an early and widely cited study of the social impact of the internet, was published in 1994. By the late 1990s, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and cultural anthropologists were increasingly coming to appreciate the social and cultural impact of the internet. In 2003, cultural anthropologist Rene T. A. Lysloff published his article “Musical Community on the Internet: An On-line Ethnography,” a major scholarly contribution to the emerging literature of online ethnography. As Lysloff observes, “The realization that communities are based on a sense of belonging that is not necessarily dependent on physical proximity is not new in itself. . .. What is of interest is how the Internet as a technology makes possible communities and new social practices that were unimaginable before (Lysloff 2003: 235).” In sociological terms, devotees of various types of music, including fiddling, are members of special interest groups, also termed common interest groups or affinity groups. Sharing a common interest in a particular sort of music fulfills a fundamental human need for meaningful communication with significant others. Nowadays, members of musical special

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Table 25.1.  Number of Hits for Internet Searches of Fiddle Key Terms, November 2011 Search term “Fiddle” “Fiddling” “Fiddle camp” “Fiddle contests” “Fiddle links” “Fiddle resources” “Fiddle tunes” “MP3” “Fiddle tunes MIDI” “Old time fiddle” “Old time fiddling” “Old time music” “Old time fiddlers association” “Old time fiddle contest” “Fiddle contests”

Approximate number of hits 24,500,000 7,360,000 35,700 21,200 709 1,550 47,000 264,000 144,000 30,200 601,000 957 16,100 21,700

interest groups like fiddle music enthusiasts use computers, digital recorders, and the internet to share their passion for particular genres of music. The extent of interest in fiddle music on the internet can be roughly gauged by internet searches for key terms I made in November 2011, which resulted in millions of hits for “fiddle” and thousands of hits for various phrases including the term “fiddle.” (See Table  25.1). Old-time fiddling is only a minor special interest compared to fiddling in general, and fiddling is a minor musical genre compared to major popular musical genres. Compare the number of hits for fiddle terms listed in Table 25.1 with the approximately 45,800,000 hits for “rock n’ roll,” 4,260,000 for “rhythm and blues,” and 430,000,000 for “jazz.” When I first encountered them in the mid-1960s, members of old-time fiddlers associations in the United States were communicating through newsletters produced on office copy machines and exchanging reel-to-reel tapes. Personal computers and the internet have enabled devotees of fiddle music to communicate with kindred spirits around the world in real time. The primal human desire for meaningful connections with significant others that inspires traditional fiddling and dance music enthusiasts to form organizations is a constant, but the technology these groups employ is changing so quickly that it is virtually impossible to describe these internet-based groups accurately. We need to need to freeze this movement in time by adopting the anthropological convention of the ethnographic present, which begins with the advent of personal computers and the internet. When I  first began exploring fiddling communities on the internet in the late 1990s, these groups were making use of now outmoded technologies such as listservs and newsletters, but they have quickly adopted newer, more dynamic technologies as they have

554   Richard Blaustein come online. At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, many North American and European fiddling and traditional dance music organizations have set up their own websites including links to other organizations and websites of special interest publications and entrepreneurs selling recordings and instruments. Fiddlers and other traditional instrumentalists with personal computers and internet connections have access to thousands of transcriptions and recordings of fiddle tunes. Collections of MIDI and mp3 digital audio files enable fiddlers to learn tunes by ear, creating a new medium of aural transmission for fiddle music. There are numerous postings of all types of fiddling and traditional dance music on video hosting services, particularly YouTube. As of April 2012, there is not yet a single integrated all-inclusive web ring that ties together all of the various individual blogs, websites, newsgroups, and listservs devoted to fiddling and traditional dance music. There are two basic types of fiddlers’ special interest groups on the internet: 1. Place-based: groups that are actually located in a particular geographic location and have adopted internet technology; they are extensions of older pre-internet fiddlers associations and clubs. 2. Cyberspace-based: groups that have been set up on the internet and have developed into virtual communities with globally distributed participants. In addition, numerous web sites and blogs of individuals actively express their interest in fiddle music on the internet. These special interest communities on the internet are essentially contemporary folk groups, though they do not depend on face-to-face oral communication as traditional folk groups did in the past. Here are my working definitions of special interest communities, networks, and constellations in cyberspace: 1. Communities are particular special interest groups, traditionally defined by kinship and proximity but now by sharing common concerns and exchanging meaningful information. 2. Networks comprise individuals and formal organizations linked by common interests that communicate among themselves. 3. Constellations are aggregates of networks and communities that share a common interest but may not necessarily communicate with one another—just as there are no actual connections between the individual stars that constitute a celestial constellation. In the 1960s and 1970s, old-time fiddle music enthusiasts took part in jam sessions, contests, newsletters, tape-swapping, and producing and marketing custom recordings aimed at special interest groups too small to merit exploitation by commercial mass media. Twenty-first-century old-time fiddling enthusiasts do many of the same things, making creative use of personal computers and the internet, linking individual web pages through sites like FiddleFork (fiddlefork.com) and the Fiddle Web Ring (www

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.webring.org/hub/fiddle?sid=130) and taking part in specialized social networks like Fiddle Hangout (www.fiddlehangout.com) and Fiddle World (fiddleworld.groupsite .com). In addition, many individual fiddling and traditional dance music enthusiasts and groups have set up their own pages on Facebook, the largest social network on the internet, with roughly three hundred million users worldwide.

Fiddling Associations in the Cyber Age: A Postrevival “New Steady State” The grassroots cultural revival movement that led to the establishment of old-time fiddlers associations in the United States during the post–World War II era is still vital and growing in the early twenty-first century. While some older fiddlers associations have dissolved, the movement as a whole continues to grow. The creation of new contexts for the preservation and perpetuation of cherished forms of traditional expressive culture, including fiddling and dance music, corresponds to what cultural anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace called the “New Steady State” phase of cultural revitalization: Once cultural transformation has been accomplished and the new cultural system has proven itself viable, and once the movement has solved its problems of routinization, a new steady state may be said to exist. The culture of this state will probably be different in pattern, organization and Gestalt as well as traits from the earlier steady state; it will be different from that of the period of cultural distortion. (Wallace 1956: 275)

Postrevival culture is nothing more or less than Wallace’s New Steady State. Wallace’s revitalization movement theory consists of five stages of development:

1. Steady State 2. Period of Individual Stress 3. Period of Cultural Distortion 4. Period of Revitalization 5. New Steady State

The first phase of the revitalization process, (1) the Steady State, is a period during which traditional social and cultural patterns are functionally and structurally coherent, providing effective means of reducing stress and attaining expressive gratification for most people. Changes that bring about the perceived deterioration of these traditional institutional and cultural systems (such as migration, invasion, acculturation, technological and economic innovations, even changes in customary forms of social play) generate (2) individual stress and ultimately (3) cultural distortion, which is subjectively

556   Richard Blaustein experienced as a loss of meaningful connection with significant others (see Hsu 1971). During stage 4, the period of revitalization, members of a society may compensate for the state of psychosocial disintegration that Emile Durkheim described as anomie (literally “namelessness”) by reviving selected aspects of their traditional culture and developing new institutional patterns centered around them, or they may choose to adopt the cultural styles of idealized exotic others. If such a movement produces viable new social institutions, like the old-time fiddlers associations in the United States since the late 1950s and early 1960s, it has reached the stage of development Wallace terms (5) the New Steady State, his revitalization movement theory provides a very powerful and useful starting point for discussions of postrevival culture The end-product of the process of cultural revitalization, old-time fiddlers associations, and similar groups devoted to traditional music and other forms of expressive culture selectively incorporate symbolic elements of an earlier culture into a new social and technological context, thereby creating a postrevival culture. The development of organizations like the old-time fiddlers associations in the United States compensates for the emotional trauma of disruptive social and cultural change. As the social anthropologist Robert T. Anderson has stated, “where societies are experiencing rapid social change, formal voluntary associations typically are found” (1971: 209). He continues: “[O]ften associations reorganize or duplicate old institutions to give them a legal-rational structure. In this way, traditional institutions remain viable in a changed society. The process may take the form of the reorganization of the old groups” (217). Old-time fiddlers associations are still thriving in the United States and in Canada at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Their participants can now communicate with fellow fiddle music enthusiasts around the world in real-time thanks to personal computers and the internet. I searched the internet in November 2011 to locate active old-time fiddlers’ associations and fiddlers clubs in the United States and Canada. I found 101 groups; 74 had website addresses, 27 did not, and 7 had set up Facebook pages. (See Web Table 25.1 for live links to these sites  .) Traditional music organizations, including fiddlers, are evidently flourishing in the Nordic countries as well. As Byron J. Nordstrom notes in Culture and Customs of Sweden (2010), there was a widespread revival of interest in traditional Swedish music following World War II: “literally hundreds of local folk musician organizations (spelmanslag) are spread across the country” (Nordstrom 2010: 131). My internet search for Swedish traditional music groups in November 2011 identified eight-six active fiddlers associations and twenty-six local musicians’ clubs, all of which had website addresses (see Web Table 25.2 for live links to these sites ). In Fiddling for Norway:  Revival and Identity (1997), Chris Goertzen describes the complexities of the twentieth-century revival of Norwegian traditional music, which inspired the proliferation of fiddle contests and local fiddlers organizations (spelemannslag). My internet search for spelemannslag yielded about 58,100 results. I  also found a detailed list of Spelemannslag on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_Spelemannslag). This list mostly includes Norwegian fiddling groups but also

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some from Sweden and the United States. Some but not all of these groups have their own websites. (See Web Table 25.3 for live links to the sites .) My internet search for spillemandslaug, the Danish word for “fiddlers’ club” or “fiddlers association,” turned up about 7,890 results. Though not as well known as their counterparts in Sweden and Norway, there seem to be a good number of these associations, and several have their own websites (see Web Table 25.4 ). Finland’s traditional musicians’ associations websites are very advanced (see Web Table 25.5  ). Fiddlers associations and traditional music groups can be found elsewhere in Europe. Here are just a couple of examples. An active fiddlers association in Northern Ireland, the Counties Antrim and Derry Fiddlers Association, constituted officially in 1953, has its own website (http://antrimandderryfiddlers.com/default.aspx). There is an active Italian fiddlers association whose website is named “Il sito del violino tradizionale in Italia” (italianfiddle.com). Traditional music associations are also flourishing in the second decade of the twenty-first century. in Australia (See Web Table 25.6 “Active Fiddling and Traditional Music Association Located in Australia” ). The Grassroots Revitalization Of Traditional Music And Dance Through Formation of Organizations Though members of fiddlers associations and traditional dance music clubs in the early twenty-first century are using the internet to communicate with fellow fiddling enthusiasts around the world, the idea of the fiddlers association itself is nothing new. The earliest known fiddling organization in the United States is the Old Fiddlers Association, founded in 1901 in Fort Worth, Texas, by Confederate veterans, including Captain Mose J. Bonner and Henry Gilliland, who recorded for Victor Records with fellow Texan Eck Robertson in 1922 (Malone 2002: 158). In his book Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy, Gene Wiggins notes that the famous Atlanta fiddle contests were sponsored by the Georgia Fiddlers Association, which dates back to 1913(1987:  46). During the 1920s, old-time fiddlers associations were established in various states; the Old Fiddlers Association of Iowa, established in 1924, and the Old Fiddlers’ Club of Rhode Island, founded in 1929, are still active and have set up their own websites. It is uncertain whether Henry Ford’s efforts to promote old-time fiddling during the 1920s had a direct influence on the establishment of old-time fiddlers associations in Iowa and Rhode Island. Nonetheless, his crusade to revitalize old-time music and dancing occupied a great deal of his attention between 1923 and 1927. Antijazz and anti-popular-dance sentiment was already prevalent among white Anglo-Saxon Protestant right-wingers in 1923, when Ford and his wife purchased the historic Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and proceeded to hold highly publicized old-time dances. Also in 1923, he began seeking out and recording authentic old-time fiddlers. There was an undeniable xenophobic element in his attempts to revive old-time music and dance. His privately owned newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published articles with titles like “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music” and “How the Jewish Song Trust Makes You Sing” (Lipset and Raab 1973: 136–138). Ford sponsored major fiddling contests involving thousands of fiddlers, and extensive efforts were made to promote old-time dancing, including

558   Richard Blaustein the publication of Good Morning (1926), a dance manual issued under the names Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford but actually ghostwritten by the dance master Benjamin Lovett. Some intriguing parallels can be drawn between the American old-time fiddling revivals of the 1920s and the 1960s. Both revivals followed major wars; both took place in periods of rapid urban and industrial growth and drastic social and cultural polarization; both postwar periods saw stylistic revolutions in which black-derived forms of popular music (jazz after World War I; rock and roll following World War II) attracted progressive, cosmopolitan Americans while repelling conservative, authoritarian fundamentalists who believed that these new genres of pop music were part of a diabolical conspiracy to undermine the moral fiber of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant youth. While the fiddling revival of the post-WW II period is less obviously tied to WASP xenophobia, it is nonetheless a nativistic revitalization movement. According to the cultural anthropologist Ralph Linton, the development of the Old-Time Fiddlers Association, movement is an example of a “conscious, organized attempt on the part of a society’s members to revive or perpetuate selected aspects of its culture” (1943: 230). In The Invention of Tradition (1983), the Marxist social historian Eric Hobsbawm describes a recurrent process of imputing antiquity (hence authenticity and legitimacy) to new forms of cultural expression that bolster the distinctive identities of marginal groups. Reflecting the influence of Antonio Gramsci, Hobsbawm interprets Romantic nationalist and ethnic separatist movements, typically led by alienated middle-class intellectuals, as attempts to offset the hegemony (cultural dominance) of an elite establishment. However, Hobsbawm notes, such cultural movements are not restricted to disaffected intellectuals who identify with common people and their cultural traditions; they are also grassroots reactions to physical and psychological displacements created by modernization, urbanization, and industrialization. Whether cultural revitalization movements stem from ideological alienation or actual socioeconomic displacement, they share a common goal, the restoration of an idealized culture believed to be in danger of disintegration: Such a break is visible even in movements deliberately describing themselves as “traditionalists,” and appealing to groups which were, by common consent, regarded as the repositories of historic continuity and tradition, such as peasants. Indeed, the very appearance of movements for the defense or revival of traditions, “traditionalist” or otherwise, indicates such a break. Such movements, common among intellectuals since the Romantics, can develop or even preserve a living past (except conceivably by setting up human natural sanctuaries for isolated corners of archaic life) but must become “invented tradition.” On the other hand the strength and adaptability of genuine tradition is not to be confused with “the invention of tradition.” Where the old ways are alive, traditions need not be either revived or invented. (Hobsbawm 1983: 8)

However, when devoted tradition-bearers come to believe that cherished forms of cultural expression are in danger of dying out, they actively attempt to preserve them by establishing voluntary organizations devoted to their revival.

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The Organization of Traditional Music Revival Activities from the Eighteenth Century On Organized efforts to preserve folk music date back to the beginning of the eighteenth century in the British Isles; these early revivals of Welsh, Scottish and Irish folk music were promoted by nostalgic immigrants, a pattern still very much in the early twentyfirst century. Peter Cooke (1986) recognizes the importance of organizations devoted to the active preservation and perpetuation of traditional music. Several organizations in the Shetlands promote fiddle music, including the Shetland Folk Society (which was established in 1946 and includes the famous fiddle band Da Forty Fiddlers, founded in 1960 by the noted fiddler and revival promoter Tom Anderson; see www.shetland-music .com/prominent_artists/artistes/shetland_fiddlers_society). The several local groups include the Lerwick Accordion and Fiddle Club (no date given) and the Unst Fiddle Society (established 1967). These organizations all provide regular opportunities for performers and enthusiasts to play and enjoy traditional music. Cooke stresses that the style of music that comes out of these clubs is not necessarily “da aald Shetland fiddling”; as in North America, fiddling has been heavily affected by classical violin tone and technique; in the particular case of the Shetlands, contemporary mainland Scottish fiddling has also been very influential. An interesting development in Shetland has been the incorporation of fiddling into the local educational curriculum. On his retirement from business in 1971, Tom Anderson devoted himself entirely to teaching fiddle to Shetland schoolchildren, most of them girls, in the public schools. Peter Cooke and Pamela Swing, an American folklorist and fiddle music scholar who worked with Anderson as a fiddling teacher in the Shetland schools, observes that this project has encouraged the emergence of a “New Shetland” style, with clearly transregional elements, rather than the antiquarian resurrection of older Shetland fiddling styles (see 127–128.) Comparable developments can be found in Ireland and the United States, where we observe elaborate, standardized contest or exhibition styles seemingly submerging older, more localized repertories and performance techniques as the institutionalization of traditional music through formal organizations and competitive events, and the development of specialized media networks diffusing custom albums and cassettes of currently fashionable fiddle stylists, replaces the premodern “classic folk” patterns of performance and communication based on oral transmission and direct face-to-face contact. These changes in Shetland fiddling provide a clear example of the selective reconstruction of tradition. On the mainland of Scotland, active attempts to collect, publish, and promote traditional music date back to at least two hundred years earlier. George Emmerson states that devotion to Scottish national music by members of all social classes continued through the course of the eighteenth century (1971: 39). Published collections of Scottish songs and dance tunes compiled by amateur and professional musicians appear in print

560   Richard Blaustein as early as 1726 in Edinburgh. The Highland Society, established in 1776 by Scottish gentlemen residing in London, sponsored a piping contest at the 1781 Falkirk Tryst, a yearly cattle market. As Mary Ellen Alburger comments, the Disarming Act of 1746 banned the use of the bagpipes except by cattle drovers (1983: 160). Fiddle contests were also part of Scottish musical culture; an article in the Scots Magazine in 1809 describes the young Niel Gow (1727–1807), Robert Burns’s favorite fiddler, winning a contest that included the finest players in all Scotland; Gow’s victory resulted in his patronage by the duke of Atholl and later the countess of Gordon (Alburger 1983: 94). George Emmerson records that J. Scott Skinner (1843–1927) won a similar competition that included the major fiddlers of his day in Inverness in 1863, and that fiddling contests then had been common for over a century (102). Another wave of Scottish grassroots cultural nationalism expressed itself in the formation of strathspey and reel societies. The Edinburgh Strathspey and Reel Society was established in 1881; “interest in fiddle music then seemed to be in decline,” noted the organization’s first president, James Stewart Robertson, in the society’s minutes, hence it was “very desirable that this class of music not be allowed to fall back as undoubtedly it was doing for the past few years” (Alburger 1983: 195). The outcome was the establishment of a voluntary association for “upholding and developing the taste for our old national highland strathspey and reel music on the fiddle” (195). As Alburger comments, the idea of the strathspey and reel society spread only gradually; a Highland Reel and Strathspey Society was founded in 1903, a similar group was organized in Aberdeen in 1928, and the Elgin Strathspey and Reel Society in 1937. Emmerson (1971) refers to an Orkney Reel and Strathspey Society as well. These groups feature large numbers of fiddlers playing written arrangements of fiddle tunes under the direction of conductors and are still quite popular. A more recent development in the revitalization of Scottish traditional music has been the advent of accordion and fiddle clubs since the early 1970s. Alburger notes that there are now over fifty such clubs in various parts of Scotland. Like American old-time fiddlers associations, these groups meet monthly or bimonthly and provide their members with opportunities to meet and play with other amateurs of traditional music; occasionally the clubs also sponsor concerts by outstanding professional fiddlers and accordionists (1983: 197). Ailie Munro (1984) notes the existence of a coordinating organization, the National Association of Accordion and Fiddle Clubs, which corresponds to the National Old Time Fiddlers Association in the United States (boxandfiddle.com). Fiddle contests are still important in Scotland. Alburger makes reference to several major contemporary contests, including the National Fiddle Competition initiated by the BBC in 1969, the Golden Fiddle Award contest organized by the Daily Mail in 1977, and the National Fiddle Championship, sponsored by the Lothian District Council, also in 1977 (1983: 203). Like Scotland, Ireland also has a long, continuous history of folk music revivalism. Captain Francis O’Neil, (1849–1936), himself one of the greatest of Ireland’s migrant folk revivalists, notes that the revival of the Irish harp was initiated by James Dungan, an Irish merchant living in Copenhagen, who organized and subsidized three gatherings

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of Irish harpers in Granard, County Longford, in 1781, 1782, and 1783. In 1791, a group of “patriotic gentlemen” organized a harp festival in Belfast; [I]n 1807 they formed the Belfast Harp Society, which sponsored an annual harping festival that lasted through the 1830s. A Dublin Harp Society was formed in 1807, and a later revival of Irish harping was led by Father T. V. Burke, who founded a new Harp Society in Drogheda in 1842 that only lasted a few years (O’Neil 1913: 474–475). The formation of the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland by the collector-revivalist George Petrie resulted in the publication of Petrie’s Ancient Music of Ireland in 1855. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893, was very active in promoting Irish traditional music and dance around the turn of the century. Edwin O. Henry (1989) examined the history of Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (CCE), the most substantial modern organization devoted to the preservation of Irish traditional music (comhaltas.ie). Founded in 1951 as an outshoot and extension of the Piper’s Club of Dublin, which dates back to 1908, CCE presently has four hundred branch societies in Ireland and ten other countries that meet regularly to offer instruction in Irish music and dance; sponsors a series of contests that culminate in an annual international Irish folk arts festival, the Fleadh Ceol; and maintains a paid professional staff through membership fees and government grants (68). The current membership of the organization is approximately thirty-five thousand, with thousands of competitors and hundreds of thousands of spectators taking part in its events. Like the old-time fiddlers contest in the United States, the fleadh cheoil is perhaps the most important context of performance for modern performers of Irish traditional music. These competitions are organized in hierarchical order, ranging from county and regional to provincial and national. Forty-three fleadhs were held in 1981, forty-five in 1984. The national competition, the Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann, attracts participants from all over Ireland, with substantial contingents from Britain and the United States. Henry notes various effects of this centralized organization on Irish traditional music that have parallels to modern contest music in Scotland and North America. While certain instruments and genres are encouraged, others are not. Players of the uilleann pipes are welcomed; musicians playing Irish tunes on the bouzouki are excluded. To simplify the task of judging, only the jig, reel, hornpipe, and slow air are permitted in competition; other more restricted tune types such as the polka and the slide are banned from competition. As Henry says, this policy favors certain selected aspects of the ongoing tradition while dismissing and downgrading others. Parallels to this situation can be found in arguments among American contest fiddlers concerning the age of tunes and the use of tunings other than the standard GDAE. As elsewhere, competition accelerates stylistic change and standardization. It is only natural that competitors should emulate the performances of winning contestants, but the unintended result is the restriction of the full range of styles and tunes to suit the criteria of the judges. According to Henry, one of the obvious effects of competition is the increasing technical refinement of fiddling and the assimilation of classical violin technique—which Peter Cooke refers to as “the Westernization of Western music.” As in the United States, tape recorders and

562   Richard Blaustein custom albums have made the music of outstanding competitors easily accessible to aspiring contestants (Henry 1989: 92). Clearly not a purist or antiquarian, Henry feels that revivalist organizations like CCE can only preserve the traditions they espouse in a selective fashion and that their major role in modern societies is to provide new contexts of performance for evolving cultural traditions: “[T]he role of sponsorship should be to provide the stage for the drama to be acted out, to continue to involve people that speaks of their collective experience, music that they can perform with the old/new balance they prefer. By these criteria, the CCE has been quite successful” (1989: 49).

Revivals of Traditional Music as Responses to Social and Cultural Change Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl believes that such revivals of traditional music enable modern people to offset disorientation and displacement by enabling them to periodically regenerate an idealized primordial community evoked through particular historical musical styles: The fact that most humans can no longer conveniently exhibit their cultural specialness by dress, social structure, material culture, or even by their location, language or religion has given music an increased role as an emblem of ethnicity. Culture units, nations, minorities, even age groups, social classes, educational strata all identify themselves by adherence to particular repertories and styles of music. As other means of identification become less effective, music is increasingly stressed. I would agree this is why world music of the twentieth century has retained its diversity. (1985: 165)

Displacement can be symbolic as well as literal; a more abstract form of displacement, alienation, lies at the heart of transcultural folk romantic movements like the urban folk music revival in the United States and Britain in the twentieth century. Historically, the alienation of middle-class intellectuals from urban, industrial, commercial, bureaucratic values has characteristically led to romantic identification with idealized folk communities that have seemingly preserved their primitive integrity, uncorrupted by the metropolis. Anthony D. Smith’s description of the attraction that marginal, exotic Brittany held for nineteenth-century French pastoral romantics applies to folk romanticism in general: “They turned their backs on the materialism of city life, on technological advance and commercialism, and on the ever-increasing complexity of a centralised, regulated state, and sought instead some antidote far from the capital, which might restore them to themselves and express concretely a more “natural” and “spiritual” form of existence than that they had abandoned” (1981:  xi–xii). Disaffected people reacting against an oppressive social order will often attempt to create more satisfying

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identities for themselves by selectively adopting and adapting the cultural symbols of idealized exotic others. To quote cultural anthropologist George De Vos: “[I]n brief, the ethnic identity of a group of people consists of their subjective symbolic or emblematic use of any aspect of culture, in order to differentiate themselves from other groups. These emblems can be imposed from outside or embraced from within” (1982: 16–17). Folklorist R.  Raymond Allen addresses the controversial issue of adoptive cultural identity in his article “Old-Time Music and the Urban Folk Revival” (1981). Allen notes that academic discussion of the urban folk revival movement dates back at least to 1963, when the New York Folklore Society published the proceedings of a symposium devoted to the controversial subject. Allen asserts that Jan Brunvand’s dismissal of urban folk revivalism as “irrelevant to the study of folklore” is a reflection of “historical shortsightedness and failure to recognize the cultural significance of the phenomenon” (1981: 66). According to Allen, the recent urban folk revival is not an isolated event but rather a specific manifestation of a continuing history of at least two hundred years of romantic folk revivalism in the Western world (see 71). Essentially, Allen postulates that old-time music “revivalists,” that is, musicians who have adopted traditional rural American styles of instrumental folk music not part of their immediate ethnic or geographic backgrounds have nonetheless developed an authentic sense of community based on shared affinity. Like other folk romantic movements, the old-time music revival entails the rejection of what is perceived to be a dehumanizing, hegemonic social order and the quest for an idealized primordial community. This particular movement has strong elements of antimodernism, anticommercialism, and antiurbanism: “this romanticizing of rural living through old-time music suggests that what is actually being revived is not only a genre of folk music but cultural elements of a bygone era that symbolize a better way of life” (78). Allen is one of very few American folklorists who has attempted to relate the development of folk music revivals to the theories of nativism and revitalization propounded by cultural anthropologists Ralph Linton and Anthony F. C. Wallace: Strong parallels can be drawn between the revitalistic movements described by Wallace and Linton and the old-time music revival. During the past two decades, many young Americans felt a disillusionment with their cultural gestalt. Rapid modernization and technological advancements caused psychological stress, which, for a small group, has been eased by the revival of an old folk form symbolic of a happier past when people lived closer to nature. Whether or not rural culture is, in reality, an idyllic garden of Eden, is inconsequential. The point is that old-time music represents the mythos of simpler existence, and playing it brings revivalist musicians spiritually closer to that way of life. (Allen 1981: 79)

Of course, very much the same thing could be said of nostalgic immigrants, which highlights the inadequacy of the term “revivalist” as used by most American folklorists. The ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin in his essay “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music” (1983) suggests that folklorists misapply the term “revival” in most cases. In

564   Richard Blaustein Slobin’s opinion, traditions do not usually totally die out; what actually takes place is the reinterpretation or reinvention of traditions rather than their literal rebirth. The term “revival” is widely used because cultural forms are subjectively perceived to decay, even disappear, and then reemerge in revitalized forms (1983: 38–39). Why do these movements take hold? Slobin suggests that they stem from the recurrent need of individuals to reconstruct their social and cultural identities (40). Regarding transethnic folk revivalism, Slobin states: A great deal of contemporary revivalism is not done by people who claim a direct lineage to the expressive culture involved. . .. A group of people more or less arbitrarily decides that a certain self-defined tradition means so much to them that they will not only become engrossed in it themselves, but will try to teach it to others, even going so far as returning to the putative homeland of the tradition to do so. (Allen 1983: 42)

Slobin’s students have studied this type of transethnic adoptive folk revivalism in Ireland and Appalachia. In both cases, we find “tourists,” who are occasionally and marginally involved in soaking up an exotic tradition, and “immigrants,” who attempt to adopt what they perceive to be the traditional lifestyle of a given culture and develop apprentice-acolyte relationships with “old masters,” who have bona fide organic connections with the communal tradition in question; these “immigrants” typically serve in mediating and interpretive roles between the “tourists” and the “old masters” (43). Here again, we can see that transethnic cultural relationships based on affinity, on shared common interest, can often supplement and even come to replace classical communal relationships grounded in kinship and territoriality. The interaction of grassroots preservationists and folk romantic revivalists creates new social institutions that selectively reconstruct an idealized cultural past. As such, both forms of folk revivalism have a great deal to tell us about the meaning, function, and value of folk traditions to people. As Slobin puts it, “they come close to the heart of folklore studies in complex societies whose patterns of affinity-grouping, taste-making and self-conceptualization are extremely fluid and highly stimulating” (43). The folk romantic movement, or folklorismus, has been continuously vital since the eighteenth century. Rejection of the hegemony of urban-industrial-commercial-bureaucratic values and return (symbolic, periodic, or actual) to an idealized rural-pastoral-spiritualorganic community has manifested itself in various forms, including the development of academic folklore itself. To quote Anthony D. Smith once again: To regenerate the community, and endow it with an original personality, writers and artists institute periodic folk revivals; they go out among the peasants and farmers, commune with nature, record the rhythms of the countryside, and bring them back to the anonymous city, so that rising urban strata may be “reborn” and possess a clear and unmistakable identity. (1981: 106)

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Modernization does not inevitably lead toward cultural homogeneity; instead, pressures toward hegemony generate regional, ethnic, and nationalistic separatism. The emergence of voluntary associations devoted to the active preservation and perpetuation of traditional cultures is a commonplace in the modern world. Contrary to Alan Lomax’s dire predictions, the advent of new communications media does not necessarily result in “cultural grey-out,” marginal cultures being eclipsed by the mainstream. Instead, we see all sorts of special interest groups actively producing their own media networks in response to their dissatisfaction with mass culture. Are musical special interest groups on the internet real communities? I would say yes: They are communities based on shared values and concerns that create very real bonds between participants. These are my basic observations concerning musical communities on the internet:







1. Participation in these music-oriented common interest groups fulfills a need for communion with like-minded others. 2. A  number of fiddlers associations and traditional dance music groups in the United Stated, Canada, British Isles, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Australia have developed web pages and websites that are extensions of preinternet organizations specifically established to preserve and promote fiddle music (“place-based”). 3. However, various individual fiddle enthusiasts have also set up Usenet groups, websites, listservs, blogs, web rings, and specialized social networks. The composition of fiddling communities on the internet has changed as the technology has evolved (“cyberspace-based”). 4. Fiddling enthusiasts participate in social networking websites such as Facebook, taking part in informal exchange networks sharing favorite videos, particularly from YouTube, and sound recordings in various digital formats from the numerous special interest websites devoted to their favorite forms of music. These internet-based informal exchange networks are an extension of tape-swapping networks in the past, when the home reel-to-reel tape recorder enabled enthusiasts to copy old recordings and exchange them with others. It is safe to predict that devotees of fiddling and traditional dance music will make use of new platforms and applications as they come online. 5. While geographically based fiddlers clubs and associations have increasingly made use of the resources of the internet, they are now part of a global constellation of internet-based musical common interest groups focusing on various types of fiddle music. Local, regional, national, and transnational musical traditions have become the focus of globally distributed common interest groups. This trend will expand as internet and personal computer-based technology continues to develop. Contacts made on the internet can lead to real friendships and visits with these new friends in other parts of the world. (I have personally experienced this.)

566   Richard Blaustein The subjective perception that valued aspects of traditional culture are in danger of dying out prompts efforts to revive them. It really does not matter if these traditions are actually in danger of disappearing or not. If people believe this to be true, then they will take active steps to revive them, actually reinventing and reconstructing them in the process. Revitalization and revival stem from the same Latin root and mean the same thing: “to bring back to life.” Cultural anthropologist Francis L. K. Hsu’s (1971) concept of “psychosocial homeostasis” (jen = 人) basically states that human beings need to maintain coherent and meaningful connections with members of in-groups who share their values, concerns, and modes of communal expression, including language and music. When such meaningful connections are threatened, we respond by attempting to revive them, constructing a new steady state or gestalt in attempting to restore an older one. In practice, revitalization movements transform or reinvent the cultural traditions they set out to preserve. As I stated earlier, Anthony F. C. Wallace’s revitalization movement theory provides a powerful and very useful explanatory framework for understanding the development of postrevival culture: “[T]he culture of this state will probably be different in pattern, organization and Gestalt, as well as in traits, from the earlier steady state; it will be different from that of the period of cultural distortion” (1956: 275).

Summary and Conclusion Folk revivals in the Western world are historically a compensatory response to modernization. They first arose as part of the Romantic movement in the early eighteenth century. Following the lead of Antonio Gramsci, folk revivals can also be interpreted as counterhegemonic movements, expressions of resistance to loss of identity stemming from the assimilation of a dominant culture. This is a very complex subject, and there are many possible alternative theoretical explanations of the development of such cultural revivals. Historically speaking, though, it is indisputable that musical instruments like the harp, bagpipes, and fiddle have been the symbolic focus of revitalization movements from the beginning of the eighteenth century up to the ethnographic present of this essay, the early twenty-first century. Chris Goertzen’s study of Norwegian fiddling (1997) and Peter K. Marsh’s account of the twentieth-century revival of the Mongolian horse-head fiddle (2009) are particularly relevant in this regard. Revivals of fiddling in the United States go back to the post–Civil War era. There was a wave of fiddlers’ associations and contests in the late 1800s and early 1900s connected, at least in part, with former Confederate sympathizers, notably Colonel Henry Gilliland, who played with his fellow Texas fiddler Eck Robertson on one of the very first Victor records of early country music in 1922. There were fiddlers’ associations and contests in the northern United States prior to World War I as well.

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In my 1975 study of the rise of the Old Time Fiddlers Association movement in the United States (Blaustein 1975) I proposed that people who were emotionally attached to older forms of country music featuring the fiddle responded by forming voluntary associations devoted to preserving and promoting older forms of music that were meaningful to them; these movements are international in scope. And the fact is that genuine grassroots efforts continue to preserve cultures and languages perceived to be in danger of disappearing. The romantic adoption and adaptation of the cultures of idealized exotic others has also been going on for a very long time. Regardless of what folkloristic purists may think, the urban folk revival movement’s historical impact is very real and consequential; it should not be dismissed out of hand. Participating in a musical common interest group situated in cyberspace enables people to commune with significant other people around the world who share their passion for particular types of music such as fiddling. The composition of fiddling communities and networks on the internet will inevitably change as communications technology continues to develop. In the end, though, my basic position is the same as it was when I first stumbled on the Old Time Fiddlers Association movement in the United States in the mid-1960s and realized that it could be explained in terms of Anthony F. C. Wallace’s revitalization movement theory. These movements compensate for social and cultural changes threatening our subjective attachments to particular communities and landscapes. Sense of community is strongly related to sense of place, evoked by forms of traditional music such as old-time fiddling. What do these grassroots cultural revitalization movements share in common?

1. They stem from a collective sense of discontent with an unsatisfactory status quo and the consequent belief that forms of cultural expression embodying meaningful connections with significant others are in danger of disappearing. 2. This belief leads to the selective reinvention of an idealized collective past represented by particular forms of expressive culture that provide the basis for the formation of new common interest groups. 3. These groups avail themselves of any and all modes of communication available to them to maintain meaningful connections with significant others.

At the end of my essay in Transforming Tradition, I asserted that the historical authenticity of reinvented traditions is beside the point; we need to appreciate the emotional authenticity of the personal and social needs these musical revitalization movements fulfill. The proliferation of special interest groups like the old-time fiddlers associations in the United States and their counterparts in other countries challenges the inherent validity of Alan Lomax’s pronouncements concerning cultural grey-out. Instead of passively succumbing to mass culture, members of these groups at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century are using personal computers and the internet in creative ways to share their devotion to musical styles that bolster their sense of distinctive identity and community.

568   Richard Blaustein As Mark Slobin observes in “Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Study,” revivals of traditional music were taking place throughout much of the world in the late twentieth century:  “[traditional musical styles] have not disappeared, despite the dismal forecasts of earlier commentators. If anything, they are proliferating today as part of a great resurgence of regional and national feeling and with the rapid deterritorialization of large populations, particularly in the Euro-American sphere” (1992: 1). These cultural movements are still vital and growing. Studying them in an international, comparative perspective can help students of music and other expressive arts gain a more realistic understanding of the meaning and value of traditional culture to living people around the world in the early twenty-first century.

References Alburger, Mary Ellen. 1983. Scottish Fiddlers and Their Music. London: VictorGollancz. Allen, Raymond R. 1981. “Old-Time Music and the Urban Folk Revival.” New York Folklore Quarterly 7 (1–2): 65–82. Anderson, Robert T. 1971. “Voluntary Associations in History.” American Anthropologist 73 (1): 209–222. Blaustein, Richard. 1975. “Traditional Music And Social Change:  The Old Time Fiddlers Association In The United States.” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, Bloomington. Blaustein, Richard. 1993. “Rethinking Folk Revivalism: Grass-roots Preservationism and Folk Romanticism.” In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil Rosenberg, 258–274. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cooke, Peter. 1986. The Fiddle Tradition of the Shetland Isles. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Emmerson, George. 1971. Rantin’ Pipe and Tremblin’ String. Montreal:  McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ford, Mr. and Mrs. Henry (actually by Benjamin B. Lovett). 1926. Good Morning. Dearborn, Mich.: Dearborn. Goertzen, Chris. 1997. Fiddling for Norway:  Revival and Identity. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Henry, Edwin O. 1989. “Institutions for the Promotion of Indigenous Music:  The Case for Ireland’s Comhaltas Ceoltoiri.” Ethnomusicology 33 (1): 67–96. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hsu, Francis L. K. 1971. “Psychosocial Homeostasis and Jen: Conceptual Tools for Advancing Psychological Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 73 (1): 23–44. Linton, Ralph. 1943. “Nativistic Movements.” American Anthropologist 45 (2): 230–240. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. 1973. The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970. New York: Harper and Row. Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lysloff, Rene T.  A. 2003. “Music Community on the Internet:  An On-line Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 18 (2): 233–263. Malone, Bill C. 2002. Country Music, U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Marsh, Peter. 2009. The Horse-Head Fiddle and the Cosmopolitan Reimagination of Tradition in Mongolia. New York: Routledge. Munro, Ailie. 1984. The Folk Music Revival in Scotland. London: Kahn and Averill. Nettl, Bruno. 1985. The Western Impact on World Music:  Change, Adaptation and Survival. New York: Schirmer Books. Nordstrom, Byron J. 2010. Culture and Customs of Sweden. Santa Barbara:  ABC-CLIO/ Greenwood. O’Neil, Francis. 1913. Irish Minstrels and Musicians: With Numerous Dissertations on Various Subjects. Chicago: Regan. Rheingold, Howard. 1994. The Virtual Community:  Finding Connection in a Computerized World. London: Secker and Warburg. Rosenberg, Neil, ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New  York Folklore Quarterly 9 (3–4): 37–44. Slobin, Mark. 1992. “Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Approach.” Ethnomusicology 36 (1): 1–87. Smith, Anthony D. 1981. The Ethnic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, Anthony F.  C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58 (2): 264–281. Wiggins, Gene. 1987. Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

PA R T V I I I

DIA SP OR A A N D T H E G L OBA L V I L L AG E

C HA P T E R  26

G E O R G IA N P O LY P H O N Y A N D I T S J O U R N E YS F R O M NAT I O NA L R E V I VA L T O G L O B A L H E R I TAG E C A ROL I N E BI T H E L L

Situated in the Caucasus, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Georgia has often been portrayed as a polyphonic island in a sea of homophony and (together with neighboring Armenia) an island of Christianity in the Islamic world. The iconic status of vocal polyphony in Georgia itself, where it is typically represented as the ultimate expression of both national character and regional identity, has been reinforced by outside recognition. Marius Schneider (1940) followed Siegfried Nadel (1933) in proposing that Georgia might be considered the cradle of European polyphony and its ancient singing traditions direct precursors of medieval art polyphony. Igor Stravinsky spoke of Georgian folk polyphony as “a wonderful treasure that can give for performance more than all the attainments of new music” (Levin 1989: 5), whereas Izaly Zemtsovsky has dubbed Georgia “the Treasure Island of Traditional Polyphony” on account of the remarkable diversity of forms and styles concentrated in such a compact territory (Zemtsovsky 2010:  253). In 1977, the song “Chakrulo”—an elaborate table song from Kakheti in eastern Georgia—was included on the Golden Record sent into space on the Voyager spacecraft, and, in 2001, Georgian polyphonic singing featured in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s first Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.1 Like cultural icons in many other parts of the world, Georgian polyphony has been subject to cycles of revival that have coincided with different historical moments. In this chapter, a selective review of the changing fortunes of folk polyphony during the periods of Russian and Soviet occupation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and of the revivalist initiatives to which these developments gave rise forms the foundation for my more detailed discussion of the most recent wave that gathered force after Georgia’s

574   Caroline Bithell achievement of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This latest wave was marked most visibly by the proliferation of traditional-style performance ensembles, as well as by renewed scholarly activity, with the capital, Tbilisi, serving as the epicenter. At the same time, increasing numbers of Georgian choirs—most of them made up entirely of non-Georgians—were to be found outside Georgia, with the greatest concentration in Britain, North America, Australia, and France. Georgian songs also began to feature in the more eclectic repertoires of many community choirs in these same countries. These networks of (mostly amateur) enthusiasts have helped facilitate the ever more frequent overseas concert and workshop tours undertaken by Georgian ensembles. Meanwhile, growing numbers of converts have made the pilgrimage to remote Caucasian villages to study more intensively with revered songmasters. These trends took on more complex dimensions following the 2001 UNESCO declaration, with investment and promotion now coming from several different sources, both internal and external. In the post-Soviet era, polyphony has been made to do important cultural work as part of Georgia’s reimagining and repositioning of itself in the global arena. The choice of terminology used to describe processes of cultural renewal is often subject to debate. Georgian scholars employ the term “revival,” albeit with reservations; the terms “restoration” and “renaissance” are also used. Many are keen to emphasize that Georgian polyphony has never literally died out and that the post-Soviet revival impulse is not new but provides continuity with earlier waves of revival. Others argue that since contemporary performance practices involve the recontextualization and transformation of what is considered “primary” or “authentic” folklore, they cannot be seen as a literal revival of past practice. “Revival” is less problematically applied to liturgical chant, which was formally suppressed during the Soviet period. My purpose here is not to ascertain whether the Georgian case constitutes a revival in any absolute sense but rather to identify revival-like features, to probe more deeply into the question of what exactly has been revived, to examine the mechanisms by which such revival has taken place, and to consider related issues of recontextualization and transformation as productive areas of study in their own right. More particularly, I wish to view foreign involvement in Georgian singing through the lens of revival and to examine the internationalization of Georgian folk polyphony as a postrevival process. In models of cultural imperialism, the act of embracing elements of another culture’s heritage is all too often represented in wholly negative terms as a wanton taking of any object of one’s desire and a cannibalistic consumption of a powerless “other,” as suggested by titles such as Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference (Root 1996). The Georgian case prompts me to challenge such assumptions by suggesting that the phenomenon of non-native, amateur singers becoming participants in the musical traditions of another culture might be viewed as an extension of internal revival processes, especially when increasing numbers of culture-bearers are apparently eager to share their heritage with outsiders. A revival often involves the translation of musical practices, functions, and meanings from highly localized, usually rural contexts, where music making is a natural part of ordinary people’s day-to-day lives, to translocal, often urban environments where selected genres are

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adapted by a new constituency of music makers—typically younger, more highly educated, and with a consciously articulated agenda—who may themselves be considered outsiders to the original tradition. Georgian scholars represent this distinction in terms of primary and secondary folklore, or folklore’s first and second existence. So-called primary ensembles are based in villages and operate as an integral part of daily life and ritual cycles, whereas secondary ensembles operate in professional or semi-professional contexts, mostly in urban areas, presenting songs from a variety of regions on stage. From this perspective, the new lease of life enjoyed by Georgian polyphony in the wider world might be represented as a third existence of folklore, with the shift to non-native singers being viewed as just one more stage in a series of appropriations and relocations spreading out in concentric circles from the original nucleus. At the same time, it is in this shift that the transformative impacts of revival processes are most starkly revealed. The drama that is to be played out in the pages that follow takes place against a broader backdrop populated with concepts of global cultural flows, imagined communities, transnational networks, and new world orders. Its actors inhabit a landscape where borders, both physical and metaphoric, have become increasingly permeable, where once primordial identities are now seen as fluid and negotiable, where lifestyles are—for some, at least—as much a matter of choice as of destiny and where the future is still to be claimed.

Polyphonic Singing Traditions in Georgia: A Brief Overview Georgia’s polyphonic repertoire is immensely varied with respect to both song genres and regional styles.2 Lullabies, laments, healing songs, wedding songs, love songs, work songs, riding songs, dance songs, historical songs, table songs, joking songs, and ritual songs—some dating back to pre-Christian times—can all be found in multipart arrangements.3 The majority of these are in three parts, with each of the two upper lines performed by a single voice, allowing for free variation and improvisation. Georgian ethnomusicologists map the country into fifteen regional “singing dialects” whose styles range from the three-part songs of Svaneti, in which the voices are arranged in vertical block chords (designated “chordal units polyphony” in Georgian writings), to the spectacular table songs of Kakheti, in which two soloists weave elaborate melismatic lines over a bass drone (“drone polyphony”), to the boisterous and spirited songs of Guria featuring three or four independent lines that may undergo extensive embellishment (“contrastive-linear polyphony”). The Gurian tradition is further distinguished by the yodel-style krimanchuli voice. A rich heritage of polyphonic church chant, again for three voices, crystallized in the medieval period. Three regional styles have been preserved through oral tradition and the efforts of the late-nineteenth-century preservation movement: These are represented

576   Caroline Bithell by the Kartl-Kakhetian school in eastern Georgia and the monastery schools of Gelati and Shemokmedi in western Georgia. Chanting operated as a professional activity, set apart from the world of folk song by its formalized teaching methods. Accomplished chanters were appointed to direct church choirs, and master chanters would memorize all three voice parts for thousands of chants, aided by a system of medieval neumes. As the monasteries and their schools were put under increasing pressure under foreign occupation, some master chanters set up private schools in their own homes where students would pay to attend lessons. In some regions, the graduates of these chant schools were also instrumental in the refinement of secular genres. Part of the appeal of Georgia’s polyphonic heritage to a Western ear lies in its preservation of seemingly ancient modal styles with their distinctive tunings and a penchant for procedures that have long been proscribed in Western European music—so-called dissonances, parallel fifths, tritones, and other forbidden pleasures. (Georgian musicologists do not distinguish between consonance and dissonance.) The fifth or fourth, rather than the octave, forms the basis of Georgian scales, and the ubiquitous 1–4–5 chord (referred to in some early-twentieth-century writings as a trichord or “Georgian triad” and now most often labelled a fourth-fifth chord) acts as the most characteristic indicator of the Georgian “sound.” The unusual harmonic sequences that bear no relation to procedures found in Western functional harmony, together with the untempered but finely tuned intervals of what some scholars identify as the “Georgian scale,” also lie at the heart of the national mission to safeguard a sound world that is seen to be authentically and uniquely Georgian.

Cycles of Revival The ways in which musical practice and scholarship in Georgia have evolved in recent times have inevitably been influenced by changes in the country’s geopolitical orientation. Having voluntarily become a protectorate of tsarist Russia in 1783 in an attempt to escape centuries-long pressure from Persia and the Ottoman Empire, Georgia found its trust betrayed when, in 1801, Alexander I  abolished the Georgian monarchy and the whole territory was gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire. Following the October Revolution of 1917, the country enjoyed a brief period of independence as the democratic Republic of Georgia before falling to the Red Army in 1921 to become the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1991, Georgia finally broke free of the crumbling Soviet regime, once again declaring itself an independent republic, and, in 1999, it became a member of the Council of Europe. My purpose in the following sections is to highlight the main factors behind the revival impulses that emerged in these different historical periods and to outline the kinds of shifts and innovations that occurred with respect to the musical fabric, modes of transmission, and the infrastructures that supported musical production, preservation, and promotion. My particular interest here is in the way in which such trends can

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be brought into dialogue with the later adoption of Georgian polyphony by non-native singers.

Revivalist Trends Under the Russian Empire My retrospective begins with the revivalist initiatives aimed at protecting and promoting the national heritage that took shape during the years of Russian occupation. From around 1860, musical activity was closely aligned with the rise of the democratic revolutionary and national liberation movements, and the notion of revival was explicitly invoked by the patriotic writers of the day. The nation’s “ancient” polyphonic songs were identified as a central component of the “pure” Georgian heritage that kept alive a glorious past uncontaminated by influences from more recent Islamic incursions. Promoting the practice of folk song and chant was also seen as a way of achieving national unity. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the staging of the first formal concerts of Georgian folk music, as well as the publication of the first essays and folk song collections. The Kartuli Khoro (Georgian Choir), founded by Lado (Vladimer) Aghniashvili in 1885, was the first professional “ethnographic” choir. Aghniashvili’s aim was to collect and perform songs from the different regions as a way of acquainting the populace with their national heritage. Songs were transcribed from traditional singers and then retaught to the choir, and a professional Czech musician, Iozef Ratil, was brought to Georgia expressly to serve as conductor. The choir’s inaugural performance in Tbilisi in 1886 went down in history as the first concert of Georgian folk music to be staged in the so-called modern manner. Yet, although the Khoro’s appearance was hailed by some as a triumphant celebration of the nation’s heritage, for others, it was the beginning of an inevitable process of homogenization as regional nuances were lost. In this sense, the Khoro has been seen as heralding the displacement of authentic folklore by folklorism and the transformation of traditional folk singers into “receiver[s]‌of a ready-made folklore” (Tsurtsumia 2010: 261). It also represented what was for purists a regrettable imposition of Western European aesthetic values and practices. In particular, Ratil would later be criticized by Dimitri Araqishvili (the “father” of Georgian ethnomusicology) for “spoiling” and “contaminating” Georgian songs through overuse of the Western harmonic interval of a third, which he characterizes on one occasion as “the trivial third” (Tsitsishvili 2010: 101). Liturgical chant attracted revivalist attention of a different kind. The independent Georgian patriarchate had been abolished in 1811, and Georgian singing in the churches was suppressed as Georgian Orthodoxy was replaced by Russian Orthodoxy, with Old Church Slavonic taking over as the new language of the liturgy. Although the teaching of chant continued in the private schools and homes of established families of chanters, the oral tradition of chanting was nonetheless in decline, and this prompted the establishment, in 1860, of the Committee for the Revival of Georgian Church Singing (sometimes translated as Committee for the Restoration of Georgian Chant, or Council for the Resurrection of Georgian Church Song—the implied equivalence of “revival,”

578   Caroline Bithell “restoration,” and “resurrection” is noteworthy). The committee’s main goal was to formalize the transmission process and make the chants accessible to a wider constituency of practitioners. Dedicated transcribers set to work, collaborating with individuals who still preserved sizeable proportions of the material in their memories. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, thousands of chants were painstakingly rendered into Western staff notation. Among the most prolific transcribers was the opera singer Pilimon Koridze (1835– 1911), who devoted the last thirty years of his life to transcribing nearly five thousand chants; fifteen hundred copies of his first book of transcriptions were printed in 1895 (Koridze 1895).4 The dawn of the twentieth century saw the beginning of recording activity. The British Gramophone Company opened an office in Tbilisi in 1901 and assembled a substantial collection of folk song recordings before it was forced to cease operations with the outbreak of World War I. Musicologist and composer Dimitri Araqishvili recorded more than five hundred songs in different parts of Georgia, later publishing transcriptions based on his collection. Collections held at the Berlin Phonogram Archive include thirty-eight wax cylinders recorded by Adolf Dirr in Georgia between 1909 and 1913 and seventy-one cylinders recorded by George Schünemann in German prison camps between 1915 and 1918. Like the chant transcriptions, these and other early recordings—not all prompted by revivalist impulses but representing invaluable records of the pre-Soviet sound world—would later constitute a precious resource not only for scholars but also for the new generation of performing ensembles that would proliferate in the post-Soviet period, with many being remastered and released in new compilations as part of the explosion of activity that followed the UNESCO declaration (see discography).

Musical Transformations and Cycles of Renewal in the Soviet Era The few years of Georgian independence between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik takeover of 1921 saw a flurry of activity as Tbilisi blossomed into a vibrant cosmopolitan city that attracted artists and intellectuals from other less prosperous and less tolerant parts of the former Russian Empire (see further Ninoshvili 2010: 55–58). If this golden age was short-lived, it served nonetheless to put in place some of the structures that would support musical scholarship in the Soviet years. These included Tbilisi Conservatoire and Tbilisi State University, established in 1917 and 1918, respectively. Under the new regime, music making had to adapt to Soviet ideology and to a state-imposed system that supported particular kinds of approved activity while pushing other practices underground. Singing was nonetheless encouraged as a professional art, with substantial support also extended to amateur musical collectives. Houses of Culture were established in towns and villages, expert singers and trained conductors were employed to set up performing ensembles, and the latter were then encouraged to compete in the national festivals and Olympiads that served as showcases for a new

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brand of “modernized folklore.” Ensembles increased in size as different district authorities strove to outshine one another, with some of the largest choral collectives numbering a hundred voices or more. These massed choirs, like the more polished, professional performing ensembles epitomized by the State Ensemble of Song and Dance (founded in 1936), necessitated changes in performance practice for pragmatic as well as ideological reasons. The two upper melodic lines, traditionally executed by a single voice, were now sung in unison by large forces. This called for standardized arrangements that left no scope for improvisation. Highly choreographed versions of carefully selected songs were further fixed through their dissemination via state radio and television. These and other nontraditional practices—among them the use of conductors, the deliberate teaching of individual song parts, and the addition of instrumental accompaniment with traditional folk instruments now tuned chromatically—were resented by many not only as Soviet impositions but also as symptoms of further Europeanization. Viewed in a different light, these interrelated processes of standardization and Westernization, combined with the new pedagogical methods, might be seen to have paved the way for the later transfer of Georgian repertoire to non-native choirs. The post-Stalin era of the 1950s to 1980s saw a partial return to more traditional, smaller ensembles, some of which specialized in songs from a single region. The early trailblazers of this new style were Shvidkatsa and Gordela (established in 1957 and 1961, respectively), followed by Rustavi (1968). In retrospect, these formations are seen to occupy a transitional position. On one hand, they adopted methods viewed at the time as progressive: Members of Gordela, for instance, studied archival recordings, undertook field trips, and worked with master singers, with the joint aim of cultivating what they considered to be a more authentic style and searching out lesser known variants of songs. On the other hand, they continued to reinforce the so-called academic style of performance of the larger Soviet choirs (e.g., employing trained voices and adding dynamic coloration). The retention of certain aspects of performance practice otherwise identified with state control was also to some extent a conscious choice, understood as a necessary compromise when the objective was to cultivate new audiences overseas (see Gabisonia 2007). Questions of national identity and authenticity came to the fore once more in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union began to fail. Two leading figures in the wave of revival that bridged the pre- and postindependence years were Edisher Garakanidze and Malkhaz Erkvanidze, both accomplished singers and energetic researchers associated with the Department of Georgian Traditional Music at Tbilisi State Conservatoire. Both were also to become popular teachers of Georgian songs in Britain and elsewhere. Their careers therefore offer valuable insights into the motivations and methods of native practitioners who teach their songs to outsiders and the way in which this undertaking relates to their revivalist endeavors within their own society. Garakanidze is generally acknowledged as having initiated a new return-to-the-roots movement by shifting the focus back to the villages that provided the primary habitat for folk music. He undertook regular fieldwork expeditions to remote parts of the country,

580   Caroline Bithell in the process amassing a wealth of knowledge relating to indigenous life ways and beliefs, as well as expertise in interpreting the different styles of song that he recorded and documented so meticulously. Rusudan Tsurtsumia (director of the conservatoire’s International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony) writes of how he “tried to rear a ‘folklore subject’ in his own self, to awaken genetic memory” by spending long periods living “in village conditions” (Tsurtsumia 2010: 261). Garakanidze’s recognition of the difficulties of sustaining so-called primary folklore in its natural environment led him to found the all-male, Tbilisi-based ensemble Mtiebi in 1980, followed in 1986 by the female ensemble Mzetamze, whose members were fellow ethnomusicologists trained at the conservatoire. In Britain, Garakanidze is revered for having first introduced Georgian songs to the amateur singing community, with the help of his colleague Joseph Jordania, and the thriving network of Georgian choirs there is an important part of his legacy (see later section “Georgian Singing in Britain and Ireland: The Legacy of Edisher Garakanidze”). Other new ensembles came together as part of the movement to reintroduce the practice of Orthodox chant, live chanting in the churches having been suppressed for almost seventy years. Malkhaz Erkvanidze is credited with having led this latest chant revival on both practical and academic fronts; his contribution to Georgian scholarship includes several volumes of chant transcriptions (under the title Georgian Church Chant) that serve as a rich resource for researchers and singers alike (Erkvanidze 2002– 2011). In 1988, Erkvanidze founded the Anchiskhati Choir, which began by chanting at the Anchiskhati Church (Tbilisi’s oldest Orthodox church dating back to the sixth century) and went on to become a leading exponent of Georgian polyphony on the world stage. Later, in 2006, he formed Sakhioba (Figure 26.1), an ensemble made up of younger singers (some of them students at Tbilisi Theological Academy and Seminary) who describe themselves as “members of Georgia’s newest generation of revivalist musicians” (http://www.sakhioba.ge/eng). Like other contemporary ensembles such as Zedashe, Shavnabada, and Sathanao, Sakhioba again assumed an interesting bridging role as it directed its energies to the continued promotion of Georgian folk song and chant both at home and abroad. (See Web Figure 26.01 .)

Independence, UNESCO, and the Turn to the West The collapse of the Soviet Union gave Georgian scholars and artists, in principle, greater freedom to pursue contacts with colleagues and audiences in the West. Such aspirations were, however, severely hampered by the profound economic and political crises into which the country was plunged after the initial spell of postindependence euphoria. Military conflicts, uncontrolled banditry, mafia-style corruption, and economic instability blighted the 1990s, with fuel shortages and widespread power outages seriously restricting professional as well as domestic life. It was only toward the end of the decade that Georgian ethnomusicologists were finally able to resume fieldwork expeditions, some being funded by the Open Society Georgia Foundation (part of George Soros’s

GEORGIAN POLYPHONY FROM NATIONAL REVIVAL TO GLOBAL HERITAGE  581

FIGURE  26.1 Ensemble Sakhioba, with Malkhaz Erkvanidze (seated). (Photo:  © Gia Chkhatarashvili).

Open Society Institute).5 In 1998 and 2000, the conservatoire also hosted conferences on “Problems of Folk Polyphony” and “Problems of Polyphony in Sacred and Secular Music” (see Tsurtsumia et al. 2000, 2001), the second of these again supported by the Soros Foundation. These events picked up the thread of an earlier series of international conferences on folk polyphony that had taken place in Georgia in 1984, 1986, and 1988. The real turning point in the country’s political fortunes came with the Rose Revolution of 2003 that unseated President Eduard Shevardnadze in favor of the younger, U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili. Alongside his many projects aimed at improving Georgia’s economic prospects and attempting to bolster national security by realigning the country with Western democracies, Saakashvili would assign significant sums to the promotion of Georgia’s cultural riches—an investment that was, to begin with, a requirement of the contract entered into by the state in conjunction with the 2001 UNESCO proclamation of Georgian polyphony as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Because to secure UNESCO support a case has to be made that the heritage in question is endangered, the accompanying plan of action is almost de facto framed in revivalist terms. In Georgia, UNESCO recognition prompted a surge of revivalist activity, including the preparation of new publications, audiovisual materials, and websites. New performing ensembles and festivals also appeared. The conservatoire launched a fresh series of biennial symposia that built on the earlier conference model but attracted a far wider range of delegates from overseas.6 The First International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony, held in 2002 and organized in partnership with the nongovernmental International Center for Georgian Folk Song, led directly to the establishment, in 2003, of the conservatoire’s International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony

582   Caroline Bithell as part of a major UNESCO-funded project entitled “Safeguarding and Promotion of Georgian Traditional Polyphony.”7 Running from July 2003 to November 2006, the project had the explicit aim of “facilitat[ing] the safeguarding of Georgian polyphony through fostering its inter-generational transmission and its collection and inventorying” (UNESCO 2008:  1). The Research Center was equipped with state-of-the-art audiovisual and computer equipment that allowed it to embark on an ambitious plan to digitize its archival holdings and create a database, and a new bilingual website (Georgian/English) was designed with sufficient capacity for these and other materials—including the full published proceedings of the symposia from 2002 onward—to be made available online (see http://www.polyphony.ge). Another central component of the program (described in the postproject report as a “key sustainable output”) was the founding of seven regional Youth Folk Song Centers. The buildings that housed the centers were provided free of charge by the local municipalities and then equipped with teaching materials, audiocassettes, CDs, and sheet music prepared by the International Center for Georgian Folk Song (ICGFS). The report emphasizes the use of new media and technology as an important means of making traditional material appealing to a younger generation. The ICGFS also ran seminars on teaching methods and use of the equipment for the performers/teachers attached to the centers. In each hub, a group of between ten and fifteen students received training from older songmasters in the singing style and song repertoire of that region; many of these young “graduates” then went on to form ensembles of their own. Following the initial period of UNESCO investment, four of the centers continued to operate with the help of local sponsors, and an additional School of Krimanchuli was opened in Guria, funded jointly by the ICGFS and the Georgian Patriarchate. The terms used to record these developments offer interesting perspectives on the question of what might be revived in addition to the music itself: “The notions of social responsibility and engagement in the private sector and the religious authorities were values and practices discouraged during the 70 years of communist regime in the country, and are now being revived and motivated by the international and national recognition of local cultural value” (UNESCO 2008: 2). Continuation funding was also made available by the new government. In 2006, a budget of 1.5 million lari (US $867,000) was set aside for cultural development, and Saakashvili launched his “President’s Support for Folklore” program with the donation of 2,500 costumes to members of regional folk ensembles across the country (Ninoshvili 2010: 3). Among other presidential initiatives were an award of 70,000 lari to the Folklore State Center of Georgia to resurrect the folk Olympiad of the Soviet years, now rebranded as a National Folklore Exhibition-Festival, and the nomination of Anzor Erkomaishvili (founder of the multi–award-winning Rustavi Choir and director of the ICGFS) to coordinate a national project to integrate Georgian polyphony into the school curriculum. Working alongside the International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony, the ICGFS issued a number of publications aimed at “specialists and enthusiasts of Georgian folk song,” including anthologies of musical notation, monographs on folk singers and chanters, and CDs featuring both archival and contemporary recordings.

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A  series of teach-yourself-style resources was launched with Let Us Study Georgian Folk Songs: Gurian Songs, co-edited by David Shugliashvili and Malkhaz Erkvanidze and issued to coincide with the First International Festival of Georgian Folk Song, Chven Mshvidoba, held in Guria in 2004. A second set, Teach Yourself Georgian Folk Songs: Megrelian Songs, again included a songbook with musical transcriptions and lyrics, supported by CDs on which the songs were presented with each part sung separately as well as in ensemble. Although these materials were intended primarily as resources to help cultivate a new generation of Georgian singers, foreign enthusiasts were also able to acquire copies during visits to Georgia or via online platforms. Although the programs supported by UNESCO were aimed first and foremost at revitalizing musical activity at the national level, the accompanying commitment to disseminate the heritage to the wider global community, together with UNESCO’s more general redefinition of regional and national traditions as world heritage, resonated with Georgia’s postindependence desire to forge new alliances with Europe and America. At the same time, evidence of the increased recognition accorded to Georgian polyphony by the international community helped to further raise its status nationally.

The Internationalization of Georgian Polyphony: Foreign Choirs and Networks By the time of these latest developments, the phenomenon of foreigners performing Georgian songs was already well established, as evidenced by the selection of visiting choirs and ensembles that appeared at the First International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony in 2002, presented as part of the program of concerts staged alongside the academic panels. These included Gorani and Golden Fleece from Australia, Kavkasia from the United States, Darbazi from Canada, Maspindzeli from Britain, Irinola from France, and Geinoh Yamashirogumi from Japan. Of these, the majority had been established in the mid-1990s, although Geinoh Yamashirogumi—the first known foreign ensemble to adopt Georgian songs into its repertoire—had been active since 1974. A few of these and other formations that have appeared outside Georgia do include Georgian emigrants; the trio Golden Fleece, for example, was established by ethnomusicologists Joseph Jordania and Nino Tsitsishvili following their relocation to Melbourne in 1995, with Joseph also providing the Georgian expertise for Gorani, a larger Melbourne-based choir devoted to Georgian and Bulgarian songs (Figure 26.2). Most foreign ensembles, however, are made up of amateur singers with no ethnic connection to Georgia. (See Web Figure 26.02 .) From the foregoing survey of the trajectory of Georgian polyphony within Georgia itself, we may note a series of trends and developments that helped pave the path by which these foreign exponents made their entry:  (a)  the accumulation of archival recordings, latterly reassembled, remastered, and rereleased, with some being made

584   Caroline Bithell

FIGURE  26.2 Melbourne-based ensemble Gorani, 2001. Back from left:  Nick Weiss, Roger King, Frank Hajncl, Grant Mathews, Dudleigh Morse, Martin King. Front from left:  Philip Shaw, David Robinson, Joseph Jordania, Jorg Metz. (Photo:  © Roger  King).

more widely available through online databases; (b)  the existence of historical transcriptions informed by an original desire to make the material more accessible; (c) the more recent addition of teaching materials using up-to-date media and methods and designed specifically for new recruits who had not grown up in the tradition; (d) the presence of pioneering researcher-practitioners like Edisher Garakanidze and Malkhaz Erkvanidze who had embraced the task of revival as their life’s work and had already successfully initiated a new cohort of practitioners, mainly in Tbilisi; (e) the presence of older village songmasters who again were experienced in transmitting their art to the younger generation; (f) the fact that the repertoire itself had already been subject to processes of standardization and Westernization as it was adapted for performance by large choirs and accommodated to Soviet conventions and the assumed tastes of European audiences; (g) the renewed postindependence desire to bring Georgia’s cultural heritage to the attention of an international (especially Western) audience, subsequently reinforced by the strategies and discourses promoted by UNESCO; and (h) a new wave of traditional-style ensembles whose well-trained and more cosmopolitan-minded members were keen to establish concrete links with musical networks in the West and whose recordings and filmed performances could easily be found on the Internet. These national-level developments met with other trends in the places to which Georgian songs would find their way. Most significant was the appearance of community choirs and world music choirs whose repertoires consisted of an eclectic mix of

GEORGIAN POLYPHONY FROM NATIONAL REVIVAL TO GLOBAL HERITAGE  585

multipart songs from many different parts of the world, a phenomenon that was especially prominent in the United Kingdom and parts of the United States. The singers associated with these choirs already had a taste for radically different kinds of music, and they were accustomed to learning by ear and singing in languages that were not their mother tongue. In the United Kingdom, the community choir scene—itself part of a broader movement that crystallized around the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network— was further supported by a culture of weekend workshops and by initiatives such as the biennial Giving Voice Festival that brought together artists from all over the world for a program of performances and intensive master classes, the latter typically spread over several days. For the next part of my discussion, I step back in time to uncover the more singular stories of how some of the foreign choirs and ensembles devoted exclusively to Georgian music came into being. In the process, I seek to probe the motivations of the different stakeholders and the benefits that they have each derived from these acts of cultural exchange and to identify further points of articulation between these developments and revivalist trends within Georgia itself. Particular attention is paid to those who have acted as intermediaries and to the methods of teaching and learning that have proved most effective.

Becoming an Ambassador for Someone Else’s Culture: Converts and Intermediaries The careers of fellow Americans Carl Linich and Frank Kane offer interesting insights into the trajectories of non-Georgians who have dedicated themselves to Georgian music following an initial life-changing encounter and have subsequently been responsible for the induction of large numbers of Westerners into the art of Georgian singing. The short accounts that follow serve to shed light on (a) the manner in which a personal relationship with Georgian music has developed; (b) the process of refining teaching methods for relatively inexperienced singers in the West; (c) the way in which certain properties of Georgian singing have been linked with broader principles; and (d) the phenomenon whereby deepening involvement with the music has led to more extensive, long-term involvement in Georgian affairs. Carl Linich began his Georgian singing journey as a member of the Kartuli Ensemble (founded by Frank Kane in 1985). In 1994, he joined forces with fellow singers Alan Gasser and Stuart Gelzer to form Kavkasia. Motivated by the desire to go deeper into the music in a way that was not practicable for a sizeable amateur group that rehearsed relatively infrequently, their adoption of the trio format also allowed them to return to the more authentic practice of having one voice to each part, leaving greater scope for improvisation. In 1995, the friends traveled together to Georgia “to do our homework” and “to be at the source” (Carl Linich, interview, October 8, 2010, Tbilisi). The five months spent studying the language, as well as the music, was, for Carl, “a turning point . . . in my life.” In the United States, they had learned songs from transcriptions

586   Caroline Bithell and recordings but now they were able to take lessons with none other than Anzor Erkomaishvili. Learning by ear from someone so well versed in the tradition gave them a clearer understanding of the ways in which Georgian scales differed from the Western tempered scale and, on returning home, they spent “countless hours . . . really working on these very fine nuances of tuning.” Old archival recordings from the early Soviet and pre-Soviet years also provided valuable models, just as they did for the new generation of revivalist singers in Georgia itself.8 Carl soon returned to Georgia, which became his main home for the next ten years, and in 2001 he founded Okros Stumrebi (Golden Guests), a choir for expatriates of different nationalities living in Tbilisi. He had already begun teaching Georgian songs to a wider network of singers back in the United States when, in 1999, he was invited to lead workshops for the Vermont-based association Village Harmony. He subsequently served as the point of introduction for Village Harmony’s first summer camps in Georgia, which took the form of singing tours combining study and performance. In 2007, in collaboration with Georgian colleague Maia Kachkachishvili, he launched his own “songmaster tours,” designed for smaller groups to study intensively with teachers drawn from the older generation of village singers. Carl also went on to collaborate with Tbilisi State Conservatoire, the Folklore State Center of Georgia, and the ICGFS on a number of publications, including the teach-yourself anthologies of Gurian and Megrelian songs referred to earlier. Having been awarded a Silver Medal by the Georgian Ministry of Culture in 1997, in recognition of his profound knowledge of Georgian folk music and his achievements in promoting Georgian culture abroad, in 2009, he became a recipient of the prestigious President’s Order of Merit Award.9 Initially, Carl was following in the footsteps of Frank Kane, likewise a recipient of the Silver Medal. Frank first traveled to Georgia in 1984 with the Yale Russian Chorus. This experience inspired him to launch the Kartuli Ensemble, dedicated entirely to Georgian songs, the following year. In 1988, he moved to Paris to study Georgian at the Institute of Oriental Languages and sang with a group made up largely of Georgian emigrants before founding the all-male ensemble Marani in 1993, followed by Irinola, a female ensemble, in 1997. Under the auspices of the Marani Association, he established a program of cultural exchange, as part of which he invited songmasters from different regions of Georgia to lead workshops in Paris (paradoxically, this was at a time when, because of the troubled political and economic situation, they had very few opportunities to teach in Georgia itself). Outside France, Frank has built a reputation as a popular workshop leader in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the United States, and Canada. Frank’s case is especially interesting in respect of the original methodology that he has developed as a means of helping non-Georgians achieve a more authentic sound. His conviction that simply listening and repeating was not enough, since what Western students hear is “put through the filter of their own prior experience and frame of reference” (Kane 2003: 558), led him to experiment with exercises designed to help his French students locate the nontempered intervals used in Georgia and improve their perception of harmonics and vibration. Aided by his knowledge of tai chi, hatha yoga,

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and Alexander Technique, he also worked with what he terms the “physical disposition and intention” of the singers. Careful study of the way in which Georgian singers stand, open their mouths, move their jaws, and breathe, for example, prompted a series of revelations about how such factors were implicated in vocal production and timbre. “By gaining a better understanding of how Georgian singers produce their sound,” he concluded, “non-Georgian singers are no longer simply imitating a sound, they are imitating the physical gestures and intentions which form this sound” (Kane 2003: 561). Frank’s deepening relationship with Georgian polyphony also took on more universal dimensions with his conviction that the vibratory fields produced in the body by this kind of singing had powerful healing potential. All of these insights informed his proposal that “Georgian singing, as a point of entry to gain a knowledge of the voice, vibration, and harmony singing, has a pan-human dimension and, like hatha yoga or tai chi, is a practice that can and should be shared with and available to all humanity” (personal communication, February 28, 2012).10

Georgian Singing in Britain and Ireland: The Legacy of Edisher Garakanidze The case of Georgian singing in Britain and Ireland offers further insights into the manner in which affinity groups and practical networks develop in places far removed from the original source. In this instance, an almost chance beginning led to quite momentous consequences as dedicated Georgian choirs multiplied and ever-greater numbers of ordinary singers with no prior knowledge of Georgia were drawn into the wider, transnational Georgian-singing community. The journey began in 1994, when, on the recommendation of a recent visitor to Tbilisi, Edisher Garakanidze and Joseph Jordania were invited to Cardiff by the Centre for Performance Research (CPR) and tasked with preparing an ad hoc choir to perform a set of Georgian songs at the closing feast of a week-long conference on the theme “Performance, Food, and Cookery.” For many of the participants, this was the beginning of a lifelong passion for Georgian culture. With the help of singer and composer Helen Chadwick, who would later form the London Georgian choir, Edisher returned to Britain several times before his untimely death in a road accident in 1998. In addition to leading further workshops for the CPR and other organizations, he worked with community choirs across the country, many of which were directed by singers who had been part of the original Cardiff choir, and also with theater companies and schools (Figure 26.3). In this way, he helped establish a common repertoire that would be consolidated by the posthumous publication of 99 Georgian Songs: A Collection of Traditional Folk, Church and Urban Songs from Georgia. 99 Georgian Songs was, in Edisher’s words, intended as a workbook “for singers in the West who want to learn these songs, but want to know about the meaning, where the songs come from, singing style and so on” (quoted in Mills 2004: vi). In his introduction, Edisher spoke of workshop participants becoming “the co-owners of a culture that stems from the depth of centuries and millennia” (Garakanidze 2004: ix)—a notion that is

588   Caroline Bithell

FIGURE  26.3  Edisher Garakanidze leading a workshop in a primary school, c. 1997. (Photo: © Simon Richardson).

indicative of the ecumenical mindset he adopted and his secure conviction that in sharing one’s heritage one is not left deprived. Edisher had his own style of teaching that enabled his British students to achieve a more Georgian sound. Helen Chadwick recalls being especially struck by how the stories he told to set the songs in context would enable workshop participants to imagine themselves in the settings he described, with the result that “the song would fly in a different way . . . . as opposed to it just being some nice harmonies and a few words—giving a reason to sing” (interview, February 4, 2008, London). Edisher deliberately made certain musical and textual adjustments that would make the material more accessible for beginners. The Georgian language, with its predilection for complex consonant clusters, initially poses a considerable challenge for foreign learners. Edisher’s solution was to “select songs with as little text as possible” and to “deliberately decrease the number of consonants” (e.g., rendering “ganbrtsqinvebuli” as “gatsinebuli”), with the aim of allowing singers to focus their attention primarily on the music and so make more rapid progress before returning later to refine their pronunciation (Garakanidze 2004: xv). Musical arrangements also underwent a degree of standardization for reasons already described. Making such compromises was in keeping with Edisher’s categorization of the “authentic” rural performance style as “a higher level of learning which is by no means compulsory for all of those interested in Georgian music.” Achieving this higher level “involves listening to authentic recordings, travelling to Georgian villages in different regions, and establishing personal contact with traditional singers”—a path already taken, he adds, by some Western singers such as Helen Chadwick and the members of Kavkasia (Garakanidze 2004: xvi). Since Edisher wrote these words, many more Georgian-singing converts from Britain, North America, Australia, and different parts of Europe have deepened their knowledge and practice in precisely these ways. For Edisher’s many British friends, the shock of his sudden loss was combined with an urgent sense of responsibility to honor the gift of the songs he had shared by continuing

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his work. The Georgian Harmony Association was formed to act as a hub for disseminating information about workshops, concert tours, and other Georgian cultural events in the United Kingdom; this would later be complemented by the Northern Georgian Society. Helen Chadwick formed the London choir, Songs of the Caucasus (precursor to Maspindzeli), initially as a means of raising funds for the medical care needed by Edisher’s son, the sole family member to have survived the accident.11 A decade into the twenty-first century, Georgian choirs in Britain and Ireland continued to multiply, joining those already established in places as far afield as Cambridge, Bristol, Aberystwyth, Leeds, Edinburgh, and the northern Scottish village of Findhorn. Although the most recent recruits populating (and in some cases founding) these choirs had never met Edisher, they may nonetheless be seen as part of the legacy of his work. Meanwhile, the culture that he was instrumental in establishing was now well served by a new wave of visiting teachers from Georgia. Residential workshops in different parts of the United Kingdom fulfilled a bonding function for members of different choirs and continued to add to a shared repertoire. New choirs were also invited to Georgia to perform at the conservatoire’s biennial symposium or at festivals such as Art Gene and Chveneburebi. (See Video Tracks 26.01 and 26.02 .)

Georgia’s Transnational Affinity Groups: From Attraction to Belonging My discussion thus far has offered support for my initial proposal that we might conceptualize the activities of foreign practitioners as being in continuity with internal revival processes. Stories of the kind just related suggest a further subset of questions that warrant further probing. What does it mean to become part of someone else’s revival or an ambassador for another culture? How does this articulate with notions of identity, ownership, and belonging? Is there a sense in which Georgian singers in Britain and elsewhere are involved in a local or personal revival of their own? What more might be said about mutual aspirations and rewards? Many of those drawn to Georgian polyphony describe their first experience of hearing the music in terms of an epiphany. The prominence of intensely visceral imagery in the accounts I have gathered is striking: “It was like reaching into my heart and just grabbing me”—“It was like a key unlocking something in my chest”—“It was like lightning going down and cutting my body up.” This experience has typically initiated a quest for the keys to the mystery, which for some has evolved to become part of their life’s purpose. The new insights that follow resonate in interesting ways with features that often appear as components of intentional revivals, especially those that originate as part of a social movement seeking to restore practices and meanings from the past that are viewed as more wholesome or authentic. Singers from overseas are often struck by the fact that so many songs still in circulation in Georgia have a specific function: in contrast to life

590   Caroline Bithell at home, as one interviewee put it, “[E]very human activity has a song attached to it.” In the company of their new Georgian friends, they experience a heightened sense of communitas and conviviality that is reinforced in the context of the supra, an elaborate feast animated by eloquent toasts and impassioned singing. This sense of community extends to the singing networks they join or cultivate at home. The pre-Christian ritual music and dance traditions of Georgia’s remote mountain regions hold a particular fascination for those already attracted to pagan survivals. At a strictly musical level, Georgian polyphony may relate to a bigger project of reviving older sounds and procedures similar to those that would have been the norm in Western Europe before the introduction of equal temperament and functional harmony. In the context of the natural voice and a cappella movements in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia, with their conviction that “everyone can sing,” Georgian songs are also part of a broader revival of oral tradition and this, too, can be framed as a desire to restore the ways things used to be. In these and other ways, Georgia—whether real or imagined—offers a missing link to a lost past, a means of revitalizing the present, and a tantalizing glimpse of alternative futures that may still be within reach. If such intimations lie at the root of many national revivals, their transformative potential takes on more complex dimensions in the context of lives lived elsewhere because they prompt more profound changes that reach to very heart of personal identities. Affective reactions of the kind cited above are often further described in terms of an uncanny sense of recognition or homecoming. Joan Mills (co-director of the Cardiff event where Edisher and Joseph made their British debut) recalls hearing British-Asian singer Sheila Chandra, whose solo albums include Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices (1992), talking about how the voices of the ancestors can call you, even if they are not literally your own ancestors. This is what she herself felt, she explains, when she first heard Georgian songs (interview, July 24, 2005, Llanrhystud). Many of the American singers who find their way to Georgia, conversely, do have historical ancestors who came from different parts of Eastern Europe and so they may be in search of more tangible roots. Mark Slobin, in elaborating his model of affinity groups as “charmed circles of like-minded music-makers drawn magnetically to a certain genre that creates strong expressive bonding” (1993: 98), has written of how “a choice to follow up an affinity leads to belonging” (1993: 56). This can be pragmatic as well as affective. The notion introduced at the start of this chapter—that the adoption of Georgian traditions by outsiders might be viewed as a “third existence” of folklore and a natural extension of a once inward-facing revival process—might help to elucidate Edisher’s proposal that workshop participants become “co-owners” of a culture. Most pertinent of all is the way in which the involvement of foreign practitioners has reached far beyond the simple fact of singing Georgian songs and paying lip service to the rhetoric of honoring Georgian culture. Many have entered into long-term relationships with the country and its people, some becoming part of an adoptive extended family based on personal friendships and others (like Carl Linich) playing a more direct part in national infrastructures and histories. These relationships bring a sense of responsibility. Members of the international Georgian-singing community have contributed financially as well as practically

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to a variety of cultural initiatives and humanitarian causes in Georgia, sometimes on the basis of a personal connection (leading, e.g., to local collections for a struggling orphanage) and sometimes as part of a public response (e.g., following the earthquake that struck Tbilisi in 2002). As Russian tanks rolled into Georgia in the summer of 2008, an international rallying call was immediately issued with the tagline “Let’s Sing for Peace in Georgia.” Members of choirs across the world sang Georgian songs in churches, town halls, and squares as a statement of solidarity and to raise public awareness of Georgia’s plight, and donations were raised for the project of recovery and reconstruction. Those participating in singing holidays in Georgia also contribute, through the monies they pay for tuition and home stays, to the provision of modern amenities (such as indoor bathrooms) or the renovation of community buildings in under-resourced villages. This investment in turn allows local youth to glimpse the possibility of carving out a sustainable future without having to relocate to the cities. Several young Americans who first visited Georgia to take part in a Village Harmony summer camp later returned on Fulbright scholarships and became fluent Georgian speakers. Others have relinquished their jobs back home and established a new life in Georgia. Away from the capital, the concert stage, and the festival circuit, the task of revitalizing local practices in Georgia continues and here, too, visiting singers have been assigned a role. In 2011, a group of mainly British visitors found their way to Lakhushdi, a remote hamlet in the region of Svaneti (Upper Caucasus) that is home to extended families of accomplished musicians (Figure 26.4). It was the latter who issued the invitation for “sympathetic” foreign guests to help revitalize the feast of Limkheri by learning the pre-Christian songs and dances associated with it, their hope being that this would “send a powerful message to their own young people—children who have been born into a modern Georgia and a new generation of ‘virtual’ communications . . . . a clear message about the intrinsic value of roots, and about the spirit of a shared humanity” (http://www.braveheartgeorgia.org/). (See Video Tracks 26.03 and 26.04 .) Here, a message that originated with older family members in the local community was given added weight by the endorsement of visitors who could be viewed as representatives of the international community. The funds generated were used to start a cooperative that would oversee the development of a sustainable community enterprise; the first projects included filming previously undocumented rituals, launching a new local choir, and establishing a heritage center. (See Web Figure 26.04 .) If we wish to make a more direct comparison between the foreign affinity groups that have formed around Georgian singing and “classic” revival movements as analyzed by writers such as Tamara Livingston (1999) and Owe Ronström (1996), we may identify several characteristic ingredients. These include the key roles played by charismatic leaders or “burning souls,” the circulation of publications and recordings, the establishment of formal networks and infrastructures, performance activity at different points on the scale from amateur to professional, a quest for authenticity balanced by processes of recontextualization and negotiation, the acquisition and display of ethnic artefacts (e.g., embroidered hats and waistcoats), and the adoption of cultural practices that mark one’s membership in a recognizable subculture (e.g., holding supras). In many ways, as

592   Caroline Bithell

FIGURE  26.4 Song-learning session in Lakhushdi, Svaneti, July 2011. From left:  Imke McMurtrie, Derek Wilcox, Irene Railley (from Germany, England, and Scotland), with local teachers Murad (front) and Givi Pirtskhelani. (Photo:  © Caroline Bithell).

we have seen, overseas ensembles have also mirrored trends and refinements in performance practice, musical understanding, and research activity that have taken place in Georgia over a longer timescale. Larger choirs have given rise to smaller ensembles with one voice to a part, and individual singers have progressed to more intensive study of the Georgian system of pitches and intervals and the art of improvisation, sometimes undertaking their own fieldwork expeditions to Georgian villages. Notably, foreign students of Georgian polyphony have at times had easier access to the older generation of songmasters than many of their Georgian counterparts, thanks in part to their superior mobility and spending power. Some have therefore approached more closely to the inner sanctum of the tradition than have young singers honing their craft in Tbilisi, where the music is already recontextualized and subject to a different kind of learning process, and this direct apprenticeship has added legitimacy to their efforts. The songmasters have been overjoyed to find such ardent acolytes with whom they can share a lifetime of knowledge in an age when—UNESCO and presidential promotional programs notwithstanding—the interest shown by young Georgians in their own heritage has undoubtedly diminished. The growing numbers of foreigners who have made their way to Georgian villages or arranged for the songmasters to travel abroad have also helped fill a void left by the dismantling of the old Soviet infrastructures by providing these aging singers with a new source of livelihood.

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These affinity groups may, perhaps, be viewed in terms of a sympathetic diaspora. In an age in which discourses of multiculturalism have given way to notions of the transcultural (Hannerz 1996) and postethnic (Hollinger 2005), diasporas—like national belonging— can be elective as well as literal. The path taken by outsiders who have penetrated to the heart of Georgian polyphony might be conceived as conventional diaspora-formation in reverse. For many, Georgia becomes a surrogate motherland and, for others, quite literally a second home. At different points in this unfolding drama, the desires and responses of foreign extras meet with the aspirations of the Georgian lead actors in an exchange that is directed and produced by cosmopolitan culture-brokers who bridge the insider-outsider divide. Through this process, ostensible outsiders with no genetic, territorial, or otherwise logical connection to Georgia become part of a quasi-kinship group that operates as a community of consent—with the added twist that, although they may not have Georgian ancestry, a small minority who marry into Georgian families have descendants who do, in fact, have Georgian blood running in their veins. The case of those who pursue their passion to its limit, arriving at a depth of cultural understanding commensurate with (or even exceeding) that of some insiders and sometimes being described by Georgians themselves as having “become almost Georgian,” contributes important perspectives to debates on identity, heritage, and belonging in a fluid, postethnic age.

The Postrevival Turn: Transnational Connections and New World Orders A decade into the twenty-first century, Georgian polyphony might be considered to have attained the status of what Anthony Wallace (1956), in his model for revitalization movements, termed a “new steady state” in which it no longer needs to fight for survival but has become part of a new norm. The transnational Georgian-singing community would seem nonetheless to have a part to play, at different levels, in ensuring a sustainable future. A concert given in 2007 by a group of singers from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, who (with Carl Linich) had spent two weeks studying with songmasters Islam Pilpani, Polikarpe Khubulava, and Tristan Sikharulidze, prompted the following response from Malkhaz Gulashvili, president of The Georgian Times: Foreigners, who are getting acquainted with Georgian culture, certainly need support. It is our patriotic duty to hold them up, as our culture still lacks popularization . . . . Our goal is to acquaint the whole world with Georgians and Georgian culture. For that we need those people, who will promote it. (Quoted in Kintsurashvili 2007)

Reflecting on the same event, Rusudan Tsurtsumia characterized these developments as “moving in step with modern times” and “meeting with the new social orders”

594   Caroline Bithell (Tsurtsumia 2010: 260). She went on to observe that the “utility value” of polyphony in contemporary Georgia is further enhanced by its “symbolic value” (2010: 264). This applies to both internal and external affairs. Like all revivalists, the different stakeholders in the country’s cultural currency are simultaneously “reaching back” and “stretching out” (Slobin 1983: 42)—not only for musical sounds and repertoires but also for meanings and connections, kinship and community, for a sense of the natural or authentic, the sacred or transcendent—as they negotiate a place for ancient truths in the contemporary world. Georgia’s international friends have undoubtedly played a part in the latest cycle of revival. In both their literal and symbolic manifestations, they may also be configured as occupying, in some respects, the realm of postrevival. The “post” prefix does not indicate that revival is over and done with. Like the “post-” of postcolonialism, it suggests that the old world of revival has undergone substantive transformation and is now part of a far bigger story that needs to be theorized within a different kind of frame and using a different kind of language. The meeting ground on which the intercultural exchanges described here are played out might be likened to Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of a “third space” that is emancipatory in allowing personal, social, and political transformation to take place. As such, it also sits within a broader politics of hybridity and cultural interdependence. Ulf Hannerz has stressed that, in the transnational arena, it is not necessarily the corporate enterprises of nations and states that occupy center stage; rather, “the actors may now be individuals, groups, movements” (1996: 6). Certainly, in Georgia, the formal advances of the post-UNESCO years are only half the story. The top-down initiatives that have helped achieve the new steady state have their complement in the continued potency of grassroots activity. Mark Slobin has pointed out that an intriguing dimension of the phenomenon whereby musics “seem to call out to audiences across nation-state lines even when they are not part of heritage or of a commodified, disembodied network” is that this is particularly likely to happen “when the transmission is of the old-fashioned variety—face to face, mouth to ear” (1993: 68). Again, the Georgian case offers a striking example, with the space in which national and supposedly global agendas meet with individual passions, aspirations, and primordial desires for human contact emerging as the most productive focal point. Stuart Hall has written of identities as being less about “roots” (where we have come from) and more about “routes” (where we are going) (Hall 1996: 4). It is in this journey toward the future, with its connotations of new beginnings rather than neat endings and its tantalizing promise of self-determination, that the potential of the postrevival moment lies. When patriotic writer Petre Umikashvili declared (in 1882) that “revival is . . . when we will hear Georgian singing and chanting at all party dinners and feasts, indoors and outdoors, in the church and theatre, in streets and on ships” (Tsitsishvili 2010: 59), little did he guess that these same songs and chants would later be heard not only on concert stages across the world but also on barges and bridges, in castles and caves, and in countless other unlikely places thousands of miles from their source. I leave the reader to speculate about how many more acts there may be in this play of

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voices before a spacecraft lands, a box is opened, a disc is spun, and the harmonies of “Chakrulo” vibrate across the landscape of a world yet to be imagined.

Acknowledgments This study is informed by my association with the Georgian singing network in the United Kingdom from 1995 and four visits to Georgia made between 1998 and 2011. I am grateful to the British Academy for the Small Research Grant that funded more concentrated fieldwork in 2010–2011. Special thanks are due to Rusudan Tsurtsumia and colleagues at Tbilisi State Conservatoire and to members of the international Georgian singing community for their willing collaboration with my enquiries. Joseph Jordania, Carl Linich, and Frank Kane offered helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. I am particularly indebted to the work of Joseph Jordania and Nino Tsitsishvili for furnishing me with a firm historical foundation. Lauren Ninoshvili’s excellent doctoral dissertation came to my attention in the final stages of my writing and helped fill a few remaining gaps; Carl Linich also shared with me his unpublished paper on “Authenticity in Georgian Folk Singing.” I owe my own introduction to Georgia to the late singer and ethnomusicologist Edisher Garakanidze.

Notes 1. Voyager 1 and 2 carry a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc containing a selection of sounds and images intended to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth (see http:// voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html). For the UNESCO profile on Georgian Polyphonic Singing, see http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?RL=00008. 2. For a comprehensive and accessible introduction to Georgian musical traditions, see Jordania (2000). 3. Christianity was introduced to Georgia in the first century; formal conversion followed in 337 CE, making Georgia the world’s second Christian nation (after Armenia). Pre-Christian, pagan rituals can still be observed in remote mountain regions, and some old ritual songs include words thought to be the names of ancient gods related to, for example, the cult of the sun. For an example of a ritual that combines Orthodox Christian elements with more ancient polytheistic beliefs, see Hugo Zemp’s documentary film The Feast-Day of Tamar and Lashari (1998). 4. The story of the chant revival as described here is told in the film Knights of Georgian Chant (2010). 5. For an introduction to the philosophy of George Soros and the work of the Open Society Foundations, see http://www.georgesoros.com/ and http://www.opensocietyfoundations .org/. 6. At the 1998 symposium, I had been the only presenter from outside Georgia. 7. The bulk of the funding for this project (just over US$166,000) was provided by the Japan Funds-in-Trust.

596   Caroline Bithell 8. See Kavaksia’s highly acclaimed 2006 release The Fox and the Lion for a selection of finely tuned examples representing Georgia’s diverse song genres and regional styles. 9. Fellow Kavkasia members Alan Gasser and Stuart Gelzer are also Silver Medal holders. 10. For further discussion of Frank Kane’s methods, see Bithell (2012). 11. In 2012, Gigi Garakanidze, who continued his father’s work both in Georgia and overseas, would also meet an early death at the age of only thirty.

References Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bithell, Caroline. 2012. “Songs, Sounds and Sentiments in Translation: The Transnational Travels of Corsican and Georgian Polyphony.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 21 (2): 333–348. Erkvanidze, Malkhaz. 2002–2011. Georgian Church Chant. 6 volumes. Tbilisi:  Georgian Patriarchate. Gabisonia, Tamaz. 2007. “A Song Dies When Young People Forget It.” Interview with Anzor Erkomaishvili. Bulletin of the International Research Centre for Traditional Polyphony 6 (June): 27–31. Tbilisi: V. Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire. Garakanidze, Edisher. 2004. “Introduction.” 99 Georgian Songs: A Collection of Traditional Folk, Church and Urban Songs from Georgia. Aberystwyth: Black Mountain Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Introduction:  Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections:  Culture, People, Places. London and New York: Routledge. Hollinger, David A. 2005. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. Tenth anniversary edition. New York: Basic Books. Koridze, Pilimon I. 1895:  Kartuli Galoba, Liturgia Partitura No. 1. Tbilisi:  Sharadze and Friends Press. Jordania, Joseph. 2000. “Georgia.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8: Europe, edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen, 826–849. New  York and London: Garland Publishing. Kane, Frank. 2003. “Learning Techniques for Georgian Singing Used by Georgian Choruses Abroad.” In The First International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony (Proceedings), edited by Rusudan Tsurtsumia and Joseph Jordania, 558–563. Tbilisi:  Tbilisi State Conservatoire. http://www.polyphony.ge/uploads/simposium/engl1/kane_learning.pdf. Kintsurashvili, Mari. 2007. Column in the Culture section of The Georgian Times, June 25. http://www.geotimes.ge/index.php?m=home&newsid=5286. Levin, Ted. 1989. Liner notes to The Rustavi Choir, Georgian Voices. Elektra Nonesuch 979224–2. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Mills, Joan. 2004. “Preface.” 99 Georgian Songs: A Collection of Traditional Folk, Church and Urban Songs from Georgia. Aberystwyth: Black Mountain Press. Nadel, Siegfried F. 1933. Georgische Gesänge. Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz. Ninoshvili, Lauren. 2010. “Singing Between the Words: The Poetics of Georgian Polyphony.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York. Ronström, Owe. 1996. “Revival Reconsidered.” The World of Music 38 (3): 5–20. Root, Deborah. 1996. Cannibal Culture:  Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schneider, Marius. 1940. “Kaukasische Parallelen zum europäischen Mittelalter.” Acta Musicologica 12: 52–61.

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Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New  York Folklore 9 (3–4): 37–44. ——. 1993. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Tsitsishvili, Nino. 2010. National Unity and Gender Difference:  Ideologies and Practices in Georgian Traditional Music. Saarbrücken: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing. Tsurtsumia, Rusudan. 2010. “Georgian Multipart Singing and National Identity.” In Echoes from Georgia: Seventeen Arguments on Georgian Polyphony, edited by Rusudan Tsurtsumia and Joseph Jordania, 257–267. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Tsurtsumia, Rusudan, ed. 2000. Problems of Folk Polyphony. Materials of the International Conference Dedicated to the 80th Anniversary of the V. Saradjishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire. V. Saradjishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, Tbilisi. ——. 2001. Problems of Polyphony in Sacred and Secular Music. Reports of the International Scientific Conference Dedicated to the 3000th Anniversary of Georgia’s Statehood and the 2000th Anniversary of Christ’s Birth. Tbilisi V. Saradjishvili State Conservatoire, Tbilisi. UNESCO. 2008. “Safeguarding and Promotion of Georgian Traditional Polyphony.” New  York:  Intangible Heritage Section, UNESCO. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/ index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00008 Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58: 264–281. Zemtsovsky, Izaly I. 2010. “The Georgian Model: Toward the Ethnogeomusical Approach to the World of Polyphony.” In Echoes from Georgia: Seventeen Arguments on Georgian Polyphony, edited by Rusudan Tsurtsumia and Joseph Jordania, 249–256. New  York:  Nova Science Publishers.

Discs Cited Chandra, Sheila. 1992. Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices. Real World CDRW24. Drinking Horns and Gramophones: The First Recordings in the Georgian Republic, 1902–1914. 2001. New York: Traditional Crossroads 80702–4307–2. Echoes from the Past: Georgian Folk Music from Phonograph Wax Cylinders. 2006, 2007, 2008. Three boxed sets totaling sixteen CDs. Tbilisi: International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony. Let Us Study Georgian Folk Songs: Gurian Songs. 2004. Tbilisi: International Center for Georgian Folk Song. Teach Yourself Georgian Folk Songs: Megrelian Songs. 2004. Tbilisi: International Center for Georgian Folk Song. Trio Kavkasia. 2006. The Fox and the Lion. Traditional Crossroads 4331.

Films Cited Janelidze, Nana. 2010. Knights of Georgian Chant. Tbilisi: STUQO. Zemp, Hugo. 1998. The Feast-Day of Tamar and Lashari. http://www.der.org/films/feast-day-oftamar-and-lashari.html. An extended discography with recommendations for further listening and an annotated list of Georgian music websites can be found on the companion website: see Discography and Website List.

C HA P T E R  27

I R I S H M U S I C R E V I VA L S T H R O U G H G E N E R AT I O N S O F D IA S P O R A SE A N W I L L IA M S

Exploring musical revival among the members of the Irish diaspora requires an examination of the processes of emigration, the reconfiguration of Ireland as an inaccessible homeland (as opposed to just “home”), and the multiple modes of connection to that homeland. The engaged Irish diaspora—that is, the people who are aware of their Irish heritage and look to Ireland as a source for identity marking—has at its core both a search for authenticity and an attempt at connection to an Ireland of the imagination. That sense of authenticity, however, is a moving target, colored by generational interests, needs, and priorities. For each generation that sees its own position as essential in the diasporic connection, a specific musical genre emerges that responds to the needs and priorities of that generation. In addition, the ubiquitous presence of emigration narratives in story and song, their profound associations with death and with Tír na nÓg (the Irish “otherworld”), make the issue of revival one that springs from a larger cultural sense of loss. Each genre of revived music then serves to connect the diasporic Irish with Ireland and its people through specific signifiers, whether lyrical, timbral, harmonic, rhythmic, modal, or melodic. These signifiers have changed over time to respond to the changing needs of the emigrants over time and space. This chapter connects generations of diasporic Irish with their roots in Catholic Ireland1 and reveals the ways in which music has played a strong role in each generational connection. Beginning with a history of emigration from Ireland and continuing with the essential concepts of isolation, exile, and death—which characterize notions of home across the diaspora—this first section focuses on sonic and visual cues used as a type of shorthand for connecting with home. A brief discussion of lyrics (in vocal music) and timbral and melodic features (in instrumental music) that characterize Irish music follows. In setting the stage for notions of revival in the diaspora, Ireland and its people began a long process of engaging with nostalgia and revival at home. Our focus

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shifts, then, to an exploration of the ways in which music and historical events in both Ireland and the diaspora have moved in lockstep: each new generation to leave Ireland developed its own relationship with music abroad. Members of the diaspora tend to regard Ireland as an isolated island. That sense of isolation is part of the personalizing effect of seeing it as a homeland: If it is perceived to be isolated, it must be a lonely place, matching the emigrants’ own perceived loneliness. That Ireland has long emphasized its rural destinations in its tourism literature (and the understanding that islands are, in fact, harder to reach than simply traveling across land) adds to the sense of isolation. In contrast to this view, Ireland’s position in northwestern Europe, with easy access from the Mediterranean (together with its proximity to the island of Britain), ensured early and continuous contact with other people and resulted in layers of settlement. It also ensured a continuous outflow of Irish emigrants into Europe and further afield. Although studies of the early emigrants focus on missionary efforts by Catholic priests (requiring the departure of many priests from Ireland and their establishment on the European mainland), later studies reveal that a continuous flow, back and forth, took place over the centuries and continues in the twenty-first. In many ways, because the diaspora is hundreds of years old, its continuing relationship to the perceived life of the homeland is simultaneously class-based and generational, varying according to shifting parameters. If we adhered to the strictest principles of what constitutes the Irish diaspora, then it would include only those people born in Ireland who currently live abroad. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the Irish diaspora comprises not only those Irish-born citizens living abroad but also the descendents of all Irish-born citizens who have moved abroad in history, numbering in the tens of millions. Collectively, the Irish diaspora is everywhere, even if most studies of this group focus on its transference to elsewhere in the English-speaking world (particularly North America, but also the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand). For many people around the world who claim Irish ancestry, that ancestry is only sometimes “fully” Irish. Irish emigrants left home for many different reasons—both voluntary and involuntary, depending on economic and political circumstances— and married specific people abroad for different reasons as well. In some cases, Irish Catholics sought out other Catholics; in other cases, working or socializing brought Irish immigrants into contact with non-Irish locals or other immigrants. The reality of the diaspora is that, of the alleged ninety million (or more) descendents of Ireland who live abroad, only a very few possess the key credential of having at least one grandparent born in Ireland—that one element paves the way to Irish citizenship.2 One feature that animates the Irish diasporic imaginary (Axel 2002: 411) is the development of a powerful relationship to home that has existed largely in the hearts and minds of those people for whom a physical connection to Ireland no longer exists. By this I mean that there is no longer any connection to potential relations in Ireland, and even the possibility of a visit is remote. This relationship also presupposes, in some ways, the disappearance of home through the disappearance of representations of home, including musical representations. Because enough time has passed since the time of the Great Hunger (the famine of 1845–1850) that led to the death or emigration of more than

600   Sean Williams half of Ireland’s population, those people in the diaspora whose grandparents might remember their grandparents’ stories of leaving home have passed away. With that passage from living memory has come a loss of stories, of songs, and of a real-life connection, together with its replacement by very different cultural materials. These materials, often shrewdly marketed to the Irish abroad, tend to reinforce stereotypes while simultaneously masking whatever may have been true for the first generations to leave home. That the diasporic imaginary necessarily contains an ideology of loss is crucial in understanding the earliest groups of the Irish who traveled abroad. The largest period of emigration from Ireland was in the thirty years surrounding the Great Hunger (or Famine) of 1845–1850 (sometimes referred to as the “Irish Potato Famine”), when Ireland’s population plummeted from approximately eight million to three and a half million.3 The proportion of Irish people who died of specific causes will always be disputed, but the combination of hunger, disease, and loss during passage abroad contributed to memories of a traumatic event that looms particularly large in the received memory of the members of the diaspora. Further complicating the events surrounding the Famine is the concept of deoraí, exile; the Irish language (which many more people spoke then than they do now) has no word for emigrant (Miller 1985: 105). Thus, the notion of leaving home as an exile, not as an emigrant, acknowledges both the permanent ties to a homeland and a shared culture of loss that can sometimes characterize diasporic reactions to the representation of Irish history both at home and abroad. The majority of Irish who left home in the nineteenth century traveled to North America; from an Irish perspective, factors such as the cost of transport to North American ports, the presence or absence of relatives in particular cities, and the availability of a berth on a ship at the right time determined where one ended up. Although most of North America’s Irish population has been concentrated in the eastern part of the continent since the early nineteenth century, significant numbers of Irish immigrants settled in Chicago, Butte, and San Francisco. Both England and Scotland have seen waves of Irish immigrants, not only in permanent settlements such as Glasgow, Liverpool, and northwestern London, but also as seasonal workers. It has been common for decades for Irish men in particular to travel to Scotland and England for part of the year, often leaving families behind, and then to spend part of the year at home. The proximity of Ireland to England and Scotland has made this seasonal migration possible even during times of economic hardship. In Australia, approximately one-third of the population claims Irish ancestry. Although the nation saw its population increase dramatically after World War II, many of Australia’s Irish and Irish-descended population had already arrived by the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps its most famous immigrants were Irish convicts, who faced transportation to Australia from Ireland for crimes large and small. However, many more were brought over by the colonial government to work in service industries. One of the major differences between the Irish in North America and the Irish in Australia and New Zealand is that the North American Irish started out primarily as urbanites, whereas the Irish “down under” were found both in cities and scattered across the Outback. In New Zealand, the largest numbers of Irish immigrants came from

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County Dublin and the Ulster region in Ireland, and these settled in Auckland. Unlike in Australia, which brought in large numbers of Irish Catholics, many of the Irish New Zealanders were Protestant. Connected to the members of the diaspora, regardless of where they settled and where their descendents live, is the possibility of further loss through death, abandonment, forgetting, and replacement. Each of these themes has asserted itself in musical responses to the diaspora, whether through the presentation of certain song lyrics, the use of particular musical instruments (but not of others), or the claim that the musical representation of Ireland is permissible only through idealized “authentic” channels of authority. These channels might include claiming heritage from a place known for its wealth of music and dance, having studied or played with an acknowledged expert on a particular Irish musical tradition, or being related to an important representative of the tradition. In each case, however, the diasporic Irish must grapple with the understanding that they will always be at least once removed from the source and that the homeland of their imagination remains, in many ways, tantalizingly out of reach. With the concept of revival comes its extension:  reviving from (alleged) death. A large part of the connection between the historical Irish diaspora and the concept of Ireland-as-homeland is this continuing image of death or near-death, which makes revival an important focus among the Irish abroad. For a number of reasons, one of the most prominent among them being the concept of family members having been left at home in Ireland to die, some Irish (and particularly their descendents) in the diaspora have continually assumed that death and/or old age characterize the people of Ireland. People visiting Ireland for the first time tend to reserve their most intense culture shock for the moment that they see the number of young people; expecting a nation of sad old people (a classic image from song), they are shocked to find a thriving, vibrant youth culture contemporary with their own, and not just in the city streets of Dublin. One verse of the emigration song “The Green Fields of America,” by Paddy Tunney, vividly focuses attention on age and death, contrasting remarkably clearly with direct evidence of youth and life. Oh my father is old, and my mother’s right feeble To leave their own country, it grieves their hearts sore Oh the tears in great drops down their cheeks they are rolling To think they must die upon some foreign shore.

Implicit in musical revivalism across the generations, including in this song and many others like it, has been the primacy of death in the Irish and Irish diasporic experiences. Although many immigrants from Europe refer to death both at home and abroad, the Irish have tended to bring up the subject openly through song and poetry. When emigrants have departed from Ireland, particularly to go to North America, they have moved in a westward direction. In Ireland, to go west is to die; it is to go to Tír na nÓg (“the land of the young”), the Irish Otherworld. Even though the Irish have historically traveled all over the world (and as close as to Wales, Scotland, and England) as part

602   Sean Williams of their long diasporic journey, there is no question that the metaphoric direction for departure and death has been west. When someone dies a physical death, connections are maintained to those who remain behind through various Irish Catholic customs (e.g., family members might display photographs or possessions—such as a beloved fiddle—on the western wall). The body of the deceased is “waked,” which means to gather family, friends, and community members during the time between when physical death occurs and when the body is taken to the cemetery. Although no set ritual was fixed across the island, until the nineteenth century, wakes often included the presence of women who engaged in ritualized mourning.4 At a wake, the body is present in one room (the parlor or a main bedroom) and is watched over continually until the burial; visitors pay their respects and say a prayer and a blessing. In another, larger room within the “wake house”—either the home of the deceased or of a family member—the community and family members tell stories, play games and music, sing songs, and dance. These activities celebrate the life of the deceased, connect the community members, and reaffirm local and familial customs. An American Wake is a uniquely Irish way of handling the profound loss to the community that occurs as a result of emigration. At an American Wake, the person who was preparing to emigrate was celebrated with songs, stories, drinking, and dancing, all taking place the night before he or she left the village. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Irish emigrated, the chances of someone’s returning to Ireland were remote. Holding a wake was a way of acknowledging the loss of one’s loved ones, with the assumption that—as in death—the family members might never see the person again. For the emigrant, the liminal sense of disembodiment that came from already being waked but not yet dead was a feature that he or she carried to the place of settlement, wherever it might have been. Because the west was the place of death, songs of death and loss, together with all of the sonic cues that signaled death and loss in the homeland, were crucial to maintaining the connection to home. Visual cues were also a key feature of connecting Irish immigrants of multiple generations with home. Some images—for example, those on sheet music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—appear to freeze Ireland and its people in an archaic sense of what constitutes a “real” Ireland of the contemporary imagination: [I]t is rural, its people wear peasant clothing, and everyone is hospitable and has the time to chat (using the Irish language) all day and play traditional music all night. This image of the good old days of home pervades the music of a particular age demographic: People who were in their youth during the 1930s and 1940s, and who passed on that set of images to their children (who have been simultaneously exposed to it through the works of the Irish film industry). This image is dramatically at odds with twenty-first-century Ireland, in which anything available in the diaspora is also available at home, few people speak Irish or play traditional music, and the latest mobile phones outnumber landlines. Because the diasporic population is diverse in terms of age, degree of connection to Ireland (as opposed to where they currently live), and distance from Ireland, however, the images of Ireland are also diverse and have either a closer or further distance from reality.

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The Sound of Home: Lyrical and Musical Features The lyrics of home, as developed by the Irish abroad, have tended toward the negotiation of Irish identity abroad and what a relationship with the homeland is like (Williams 1996: 4). The irony of that negotiation is that it developed, over time, into something of a feedback loop in that diasporic hit songs were also popular in Ireland for a time, and the presence of so many relatives abroad—in whatever diasporic nation—engaged the imaginations of the Irish at home. These songs were intended to be sung in a bel canto fashion. In the song “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland” (1936) by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr, nothing is said of a new context; the only important issue is the source: Ireland. By offering a particular set of images, presented with a rich, full vibrato in what is now known as “Irish tenor” style (see “Setting the Stage for Revival in the Homeland,” below), composers and performers set up expectations in their listeners of what constituted home: Did your mother come from Ireland For there’s something in you Irish Can you tell me where you got those Irish eyes? And before she left Killarney Did your mother kiss the Blarney For that little touch of brogue can’t be denied.

This type of vocal music, which leans so heavily on the sound and image of the domesticated Irishman (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011: 143–146), came to characterize what it meant to “sound Irish” so deeply that older vocal timbres and performance practices were lost in the diaspora. Sean-nós (“old style”) singers—often characterized as free of vibrato and singing with a reedy, thin sound in the Irish language—have been considered so far away from the diasporic song repertoire and practices as to no longer be considered authentically Irish by the Irish abroad. In Irish instrumental music, its perceived timbre is twofold: It is both scratchy, as represented by the sound of the fiddles, and reedy, represented by the sound of the pipes. In a diasporic context, the fiddle does not even need to be producing Irish melodies to alert the listener that he or she is listening to the “right kind” of timbre that awakens longing; the timbre alone can do the job. Similarly, the use of the Scottish great highland pipes in the diaspora triggers timbral signals in the brain, to the point that Scottish pipers in full Scottish performance regalia, performing American tunes such as “Amazing Grace,” can make the members of the Irish diaspora awash in tears of longing. It is a specific timbral signal that appears almost under the radar, but which nonetheless hits its intended target with considerable emotional power. Other musical signals can cue the right kind of sonic Irishness. Traditional Irish music has not been known for its harmonic complexity, particularly in the realm of

604   Sean Williams song. However, the uilleann pipes include specific keys called regulators; they allow players to include chordal accompaniment to the melody. In addition, instrumental sessions both in the diaspora and at home may include the use of the guitar as one of the accompanying instruments. The guitar, often tuned to what is called DADGAD (from lowest string to highest), eschews most manifestations of major and minor. This allows tunes that shift rapidly from one mode to another to be accompanied without any jarring discontinuities. In its overwhelming popularity, the reel (4/4) far outweighs other forms, including jigs, hornpipes, marches, barn dances, slides, or polkas. However, in the popular imagination of the members of the diaspora, the jig (6/8) and hornpipe (4/4 with triplets scattered throughout) are perceived to be quintessentially Irish.5 Melodies in Irish music draw from four main modes: Ionian, Aeolian, Mixolydian, and Dorian. In addition, it is common for a single tune to draw from more than one mode between sections or to shift pitches from sharp to natural and back within a single phrase. For example, a tune in the key of D might include both an f# and an f natural within the same phrase. Melodies— whether sung or performed instrumentally—that step outside the mainstream boundaries of major and minor may pack a larger emotional punch for the diasporic audience.

Setting the Stage for Revival in the Homeland Perhaps the first major cultural event in Irish history that alerted the Irish to the possibility that a genre of music (and the last generations of musicians) might disappear was the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792. This festival brought together ten of the last surviving eighteenth-century harpers, most of whom were quite elderly, to perform. The young organist Edward Bunting was asked to transcribe the pieces performed by the harpers, and his published collections (Bunting 2002 [1796, 1809, 1840]) still serve as a focus of study for contemporary harpers.6 Singers also use the Bunting collection as a source of earlier versions of song melodies. Harpers of the nineteenth century played more than tunes intended exclusively for the harp; many of the tunes transcribed by Bunting belong to the song repertoire of hundreds of sean-nós singers who perform in the Irish language. This harp festival coincided with the trend of revival and preservation that swept Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which—in Ireland—found expression in local enthusiasm for folklore and song collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fact that Ireland was not isolated made a difference in its responses to the European movement of Romantic Nationalism. The eighteenth-century philosopher Johann von Herder (1744–1803) spurred a broad interest in the local-as-national. He regarded the act of collecting and celebrating folkways as an essential key with which to understand and engage a nation’s authenticity (Bendix 1997: 16). When it seemed that

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scholars all over Europe were collecting folkloric anecdotes and incorporating traditional melodies into symphonic pieces, Ireland, too, was responding by inviting contributions to folkloric collections from the entire island. Although Ireland was not yet a formally recognized nation (having been joined with England in the United Kingdom during the Act of Union in 1800), the material collected was unequivocally considered Irish in content. That this movement coincided with outward migration from Ireland set the stage for the highlighting of traditional materials in the hearts and minds of those who left. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Moore’s collection of songs, the Irish Melodies (1808–1834), was one of the great standard-bearers of Irish music in the diaspora, for a certain class of salon-goers. Engaging the searing nostalgia represented by these songs was a form of trading in authenticity for both listeners and performers. That Moore’s collection was so directly tied to the salon had to do with the contract with his publishers, requiring that he himself perform these songs in English salons (Davis 1993: 14). The salon—largely the domain of the feminine in terms of hosting and entertaining—rendered Moore himself a feminized subaltern male and brought with that shift a sense that the music belonged within that category as well. Moore was the template for what is now known as the classic Irish tenor; the role captured the imagination of a particular demographic in Irish diasporic history. The Irish tenor is—for some members of the Irish diaspora and for non-Irish listeners alike—the paramount sonic representation of the Irish “civilized homeland” in that both the image and the overall sound combine in the minds of listeners and observers. The Irish tenor—often depicted as a formally dressed, boyish, slightly rotund man with a high-pitched voice—sings in English with a steady, broad vibrato. The expected context of performance is the parlor, which calls to mind one’s imaginary ancestors: at once genteel, cultured, and wealthy enough to afford a home with a parlor. In some cases, those imaginary ancestors stand in for the homeland, just as images of the homeland and its aging or dying abandoned people stand in for the ancestors. Many of the songs that Thomas Moore collected, edited, and altered for publication bore clear traces of his nationalist tendencies, and, for several generations, his songs provided a kind of popular backdrop to expressions of their sense of what the homeland constituted. His songs have been referred to as the most popular (together with those of American composer Stephen Foster) in the English language during the entire nineteenth century (Hamm 1983: 44). As such, the songs’ presence in England, Australia, North America, and other places where Irish emigrants and their descendants gathered established its own dominant narrative of nostalgia, survival, and romance in the context of longing simultaneously for Irish independence and for a home that could welcome them back. At the end of the nineteenth century, four societies were founded, each of which served a different segment of Irish society, and each of which established connections with members of the diaspora who saw in themselves a need for a particular type of Irishness in relation to home. In 1879. the Land League focused attention on tenants’ rights and on the possibility of Home Rule for the Irish. In 1884, the Gaelic Athletic Association was

606   Sean Williams founded to support and promote Irish-only sports competitions, with an eye toward the rejection of English sports and the development of physical strength and endurance in preparation for the upcoming battle for independence. In 1892, the National Literary Society aimed to develop a strong Irish literary tradition in English; its founding members included William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge. Last, founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde, the Gaelic League (in the Irish language, Conradh na Gaeilge) promoted the continuing use and development of the Irish language in poetry, literature, and conversation. Although its primary purpose was to support the Irish language, it also served to engage people in debate and activities in music and dance. To that end, Irish music and dance were also to be promoted. Contests would be held to judge the best and most representative proponents of singing, dancing, piping, and harping, among other elements. The Gaelic League was not without its detractors, its internal conflicts, and its political elements. In addition, some of the earliest judges at music and dance competitions are alleged to have not always been qualified to judge based on local standards. Nonetheless, it is the initial goals of the Gaelic League that have seen some of the most dramatic results in terms of musical performance in the diaspora. The overall idea was to infuse life into Irish nationalism through the revival of its language and its literary and performing arts. The League was mainly an urban movement with connections to the Irish middle class, and its cultural conservatism was deeply connected to the Catholic Church (Williams 2010: 70–71). One of the aims of the Gaelic League was to foster a culture in which artistic elements that were native and local would be supported; those that were imported or did not directly support the promulgation of the language would be ignored or actively suppressed. For example, the popular nineteenth-century custom of set dancing—which came to Ireland from France—was judged to be a foreign influence and was largely supplanted by what the Gaelic League referred to as céilí dancing. This form of dancing, in which multiple numbers of couples dance in large groups or lines, was established as the primary form of social dance in Ireland by the early twentieth century. In some cases, new dances were created and presented as traditional forms. In music, specific techniques were upheld while others were dismissed. As Gedutis explains: The céilí dances satisfied the revivalist cultural mores of the Gaelic League. The Gaelic League in London first used the term céilí in reference to dance in 1897; it felt that the word céilí—a term in use primarily in Ireland’s northern counties to describe a friendly house visit—would impart a homey feeling and attract a crowd to an upcoming league-sponsored dance. The dance repertoire, consisting of “Sets, Quadrilles, and Waltzes to Irish music,” was carefully conceived that evening to create a strong image of Irish identity. (Gedutis 2004: 35)

The Gaelic League competitions had a significant effect on the ways in which Irish young people in particular regarded such musical activities as singing, piping, and

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harping. The first such competition (in Irish, An tOireachtas na Gaeilge) was held in 1897 in Dublin and primarily featured literary work (recitations of poetry, for example), although song was included. As the Gaelic League branched out across Ireland and the diaspora, local branches varied strongly in their support of the music. In the twenty-first century, the Oireachtas competition continues to be a popular draw for singers and old style (sean-nós) dancers. A different competition, in instrumental music, was founded in 1896; called the Feis Ceoil, its aim was the promotion of Irish music in all its forms, including classical, traditional, and in between, with a focus on classical-style competition. It would later shift to the point at which it included only some music that purists might regard as traditional. Because the principles of the Gaelic League were exported into the diaspora, their essential conservatism and focus on the “right way” of doing things also found a ready home among those of Irish descent who wished to stay true to what they perceived as the authentic values and activities from home. In the early twenty-first century, in the United States alone, more than 50,000 people attend Irish step-dance competitions each weekend. In Ireland, the War of Independence (1918–1921) established a foundation for an important move toward a new wave of revitalization that had echoes in the diaspora. The Easter Uprising of 1916, during which a coalition of activists from several nationalist organizations declared Ireland’s independence as a republic, essentially launched the conflict that led to independence and, later, to Ireland’s division into two nations. The civil war that followed remains a dark chapter of Irish history, and one that still divides families and neighbors. A large number of participants in both upheavals emigrated during or shortly after that time, and family histories around the Irish diasporic world include references to both male and female relatives “doing their part” to free the homeland. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Irish at home worked with what they felt to be Irish heritage materials to establish the new nation, and that included folklore collection. In the late 1930s, the Irish Folklore Commission collaborated with the Irish National Teachers’ Organization and the Department of Education to engage Irish schoolchildren as folklore collectors. Known as the Schools’ Folklore Scheme, for several years the project consisted of schoolchildren being given weekly writing assignments that included interviewing their older relatives and neighbors about specific topics (songs, tales, customs, etc.). The result—known as the Schools’ Manuscript Collection—was a staggeringly large collection of half a million entries, all housed at the University College of Dublin.7 Its growing availability to online scholars is an exciting development. As an exercise in nation building by enlisting the new nation’s youngest members to interview its oldest, the Schools’ Folklore Scheme ensured at least a temporary—although profound—connection between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It connected a nation of the imagination in the past with a nation of genuine political standing in the present of 1930s Ireland. In essence, the colonial territory of Ireland had to symbolically die so that it could be reborn as an independent republic, and the focus on folklore collection before it was “too late” contributed both to an understanding of the death of the colony and to

608   Sean Williams its ultimate revival as a thriving homeland. In addition, the entire political premise of nation building came to rest on the national acceptance of the perceived nobility of Ireland’s rural past, as evidenced by a famous speech by Éamon de Valera, Ireland’s first Taoiseach (head of government) in 1943: That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. (de Valera 1991 [1943]: 748)

Although this image of an idealized rural Ireland that could thrive in the twentieth century through hard work, the unity of families and communities, and local industry has been critiqued, De Valera’s speech encapsulates the ideal of a continually reviving Ireland as many in the National Literary Society had envisioned it decades prior. Tamara Livingston emphasizes that very often revival musics (as promoted in events like the Belfast Harp Festival) are “social movements which strive to ‘restore’ a musical system believed to be disappearing or completely relegated to the past for the benefit of contemporary society” (Livingston 1999: 66). In the case of the harps, they were indeed nearly gone, along with their performers. As part of her colonization campaign, Queen Elizabeth I gave the order to “hang all harpers where found” and to destroy the instruments (O’Boyle 1976: 10). A similar campaign had been carried out in Wales in 1568, in which the Queen decreed that she intended to “rid Wales of numerous vagraunt and idle persons naming theim selfes mynstrelles Rithmers and Barthes” (Suggett 2003: 157). If the Belfast Harp Festival had not occurred before the last generation of harpers died, or if Edward Bunting had not been available for transcription purposes, it is questionable that a future revival of the instrument could have taken place. This event, however, not only set the standard for future revivals but also set in place the idea that Irish performing arts were perpetually in danger—as was Ireland’s grasp on the possibility of future independence from the English.

The Performance of Irishness in the Diaspora In the United States, both the minstrel show and the vaudeville stage were important locations for the representation of Irishness, and this included blackface minstrelsy

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(Ignatiev 1995: 42). Many of the minstrel and vaudeville performers were Irish immigrants; some wore blackface to enact stock scenes to represent African American life, and some dressed in drag, playing the role of Bridget or Nora, the clumsy Irish maid. Songs about freedom from British rule, weepy exhortations to remember “Ireland, Mother Ireland,” and trade in any of the stock Irish caricatures (the sweet colleen, the weeping mother, the weak son, or blustering father) were all part of both the minstrelsy and vaudeville repertoires, and burnt cork on one’s face could signify Irishness almost as easily as it signified a kind of one-step-removed blackness. In these performances, Ireland was frequently represented as needing a savior because it was somehow close to death. Ironically, it was an American touring minstrel show in the late nineteenth century that brought both the banjo and the bones to the Irish traditional music instrumentarium. The combination of emotional delivery, the image of the downtrodden nation, and the need for a savior all pointed toward death. The revivalist agenda of that moment in American (and, by extension, Irish) history, then, served the purpose of “reviving” a nation that was not yet a nation. As the international marketing of Irish music shifted from sheet music—and the songs published by Thomas Moore—to the recording medium (wax cylinders and 78 rpm gramophone recordings), it was Irish immigrants to the States whose tunes were captured, packaged, and resold both abroad and at home. The Sligo fiddlers Michael Coleman, James Morrison, and Paddy Killoran made many recordings, and these became quite influential, resulting not only in record sales but also in the spread of the Sligo sound to other parts of Ireland and throughout the diaspora (Gronow and Saunio 1998: 47). The rich connection between these (and many other) instrumentalists and musicians in Ireland and elsewhere marked a different approach to the sound of Ireland. Whereas the popularity of, for example, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies was predicated on the popularity of song, these recordings focused attention on tunes performed for dancing. Directly relevant to players, not just auditors, these seminal recordings were purchased by many, despite the poor quality of the piano accompaniment. The excitement that they generated on both sides of the Atlantic meant that individual Irish fiddle styles in both Ireland and North America began to shift toward a Sligo-based sound as players sought to emulate the new “international” sound of the three men. The large east coast cities of North America included enough Irish immigrants and new arrivals that a critical mass—sustainable due to its large numbers—was in place. The standard tripartite configuration of Irish-led political wards, unions, and parishes served to maintain some of the most outwardly visible aspects of Irish life. Dance halls were among these visible elements of Irish social scenes; to dance at a hall was to listen to live music, see people that one might know, meet new people, and be Irish in America. Rather than function as a planned revival site, with its implication of reviving something that has died or is close to being lost, however, the dance halls were a primary social outlet for first- and second-generation Irish to perform their identity in contemporary, socially acceptable ways (Gedutis 2004: 59). The music performed at these halls included both traditional tunes and songs in English (both popular songs

610   Sean Williams from Ireland and contemporary or recent songs popularized by the American Tin Pan Alley composers). Dance hall music, both in Ireland and abroad, included what, from a twenty-first-century perspective, might be considered a remarkable combination of musical instruments. In addition to the fiddles, button accordions, banjos, and other stringed instruments that would later be considered traditional session instruments, the dance hall sound included horns (trombones, trumpets, and other wind instruments), a piano, and drum set (Gedutis 2004: 165). Because the music revival of the folk bands in the 1960s and 1970s served to nearly obliterate the memories of the dance hall scene through the bands’ popularity, enhanced by recordings and tours, the use of horn instruments became associated with an older generation of performers and listeners. The American east coast was also a place in which the vestiges of vaudeville survived in the form of the Irish family band. Tight-knit family groups, such as the McNulty Family, would tour major cities and perform (McGraw 2010: 451). The fact that these were members of the same family allowed men and women to appear together onstage and in recordings. In addition, the tours would allow—just as later tours by Irish supergroups allowed—those of Irish descent and of non-Irish descent alike to know something of what it meant to be Irish by seeing its representation onstage. The organization that has continually fostered the development of traditional music through competition and festivals is Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (Gathering of Musicians of Ireland), which founded the Fleadh Cheoil—an annual festival of traditional Irish music—in 1951. It has expanded into many local branches, including throughout the diaspora, and most branches are connected to the home organization through shared values and the sponsorship of competitions and festivals. The strength of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann has served to reinforce an inherent conservatism through competition. However, the dramatic expansion of which musical instruments may enter into competition gives the lie to the outward appearance of conservatism; instruments as diverse as piano, harmonica, and bouzouki are all a welcome part of the annual fleadh (festival). The ideals of Comhaltas also continue to be disseminated through the maintenance of a website carrying audio and video recordings, among other resources (http:// www.comhaltas.ie). The fact that Comhaltas continues to be relevant, decades after its founding, through its festival and competition sponsorship and the ready accessibility of materials on its website, reveals it to be capable of change in ways that some of the generation-specific organizations and genres may not have been. After decades of continued out-migration—particularly by Ireland’s young people—and the economic gloom that accompanied that migration, the 1960s saw the first steps of an economic revival in Ireland. The newest wave of folk song revival that was gathering pace in England—and that included numerous Irish performers, such as the sean-nós singer Joe Heaney of Connemara—then spread to North America and other diasporic regions. The Clancy Brothers initially came to the United States to find work in acting but quickly discovered the market for their particular brand of staged folk song. They, in turn, paved the way for other Irish musicians to be welcomed abroad, and tours of Irish performers (especially singers or instrumentalists whose performances included

Irish Music Revivals Through Generations of Diaspora  611

songs) characterized much of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Dubliners—who got their start in Dublin’s Abbey Tavern—offered a more politically engaged type of sound with a rougher edge to it, and they, too, toured extensively. For many years, the two groups connected with international enthusiasts of the folk song revival and focused audience attention primarily on song, particularly songs in the English language. As audience members sang along, learned the songs and guitar chords themselves, and passed the songs among themselves, the Irish songs began to take on a life of their own among singers with no Irish heritage connection at all. One of the most remarkable developments to occur during the 1960s and 1970s was the tremendous upswing in what are sometimes referred to as “revival groups.” In 1963, a group was formed from an ad hoc collection of players and became known as The Chieftains. Later credited with being Ireland’s first supergroup, The Chieftains traveled all over the world, inviting local musicians to perform with them and making dozens of recordings. They were largely responsible for the initial contact of the non-Irish world with careful arrangements of traditional instrumental tunes and songs. Other Irish groups formed during this time, such as Sweeney’s Men, Planxty, The Bothy Band, and Dé Danann, were responsible for thousands of musicians around the world—both of Irish descent and of other heritages—taking up the fiddle, uilleann pipes, and other instruments. These supergroups of the 1960s and 1970s offered a sharp contrast to the Irish tenors and céilí bands of the 1930s and 1940s, appealing to a new generation of musicians and listeners who themselves had been raised largely on rock’n’roll. The quality of the recordings in particular—in contrast with the inept piano accompaniment on the early Sligo fiddler recordings—led not only to strong record sales but also to the appearance of these specific arrangements at music sessions. These recordings and bands were therefore particularly influential in setting the standard for the generation of diasporic musicians born in the 1950s and 1960s. The growing popularity of all things Irish—as a result of media attention, “heritage films” (e.g., The Dead [1987], The Field [1990], The Secret of Roan Inish [1994]), and the relative ease of traveling to Ireland from points abroad—led to the increasing establishment of places in the diaspora for Irish music sessions to occur. Very often, the sessions would involve several melody players (on fiddle, accordion, uilleann pipes, and banjos), often with an accompanying instrument like a guitar, playing a collection of jigs, reels, hornpipes, slides, and polkas in heterophonic style. (Songs were comparatively rare.) The increasing presence of Irish musicians at these diasporic sessions—because they live in the diaspora themselves, having been born in Ireland—has led to the creation of Irish music groups with their membership drawn from potentially anywhere in the world. The growing popularity of Irish music among Irish Americans and others who have attached themselves to Irish culture as an “ethnic option” (see Waters 1990: 123) has led to an increased interest in festivals celebrating Irish culture. In North America, the four-day Milwaukee Irish Festival, established in 1981 and held every August, draws thousands of people, as do dozens of other Irish festivals in nearly every province of Canada and every state in the United States. Some of these are held in conjunction with St. Patrick’s Day, but others (like the Milwaukee Irish Fest) occur in the summer.

612   Sean Williams In Australia, Irish-themed festivals began appearing in the 1990s. The Koroit Festival began in 1997, with the town of Koroit billing itself as “Australia’s greatest Irish town”; smaller festivals occur in Jindabyne, Tullamore, and Gundagai. In the United Kingdom, dozens of Irish-themed organizations host concerts and festivals. North American adult music camps devoted to Irish music first appeared in the 1980s, increasing significantly in number from the 1990s. Among these are the Friday Harbor Irish Music Camp, the Augusta Heritage Irish/Celtic Week, the Swannanoa Gathering Celtic Week, and the Catskills Irish Arts Week. At these camps, usually lasting several days to a week, students participate in intensive classes and workshops with (mostly) Irish and Irish-American musicians. Like the festivals, these camps have served to dramatically enhance the connections between members of the North American diaspora and Irish musicians. Since the attendees have many opportunities to communicate with, play with, and study with Irish musicians, many of the features that characterized older connections between musicians and listeners of the diaspora in the past have been enhanced. In addition, the fluid nature of contemporary teaching and learning has served to place the musicians of the diaspora and the musicians of Ireland on a much more equal footing; musicians from either place may be considered equally skilled. Another phenomenon of the 1990s was the stage show Riverdance, which began as a seven-minute intermission performance during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. Irish American dancers Michael Flatley and Jean Butler (in combination with thunderous drumming and newly composed music) impressed audiences with a style of Irish dance that moved beyond traditional step dancing and focused attention on Irish performing arts in ways that had not yet been encountered either at home or abroad. The worldwide success of Riverdance was aided by multiple touring groups (three touring simultaneously); these included very large dance ensembles whose members, for the first time in Irish history, had steady employment performing a version of traditional dance. The show also succeeded in its re-imagining of the Irish body for a multigenerational audience. Several elements made Riverdance different from other forms of Irish dance and music. Musically, the compositions of Bill Whelan drew freely from a variety of traditions, including familiar jigs and reels, but also flamenco, Russian folk music, newly composed choral songs, and African American gospel (Carby 2001: 325–349). It was the first fully staged show that acknowledged Ireland’s musical and other connections with non-Irish traditions and forms. It also included connections to the diaspora through the enactment of an American Wake and a departure scene. The initial lead dancer, Michael Flatley, raised his arms away from his sides, smiled at the audience, and emphasized his chest through the use of costuming and arm movement. The shocking contrast between this stance and the rigid, downward-pointing arms and straight body of dancers favored by the Gaelic League was the subject of conversations, reviews, and internet debates. Rows of dancers onstage, none of whom wore the heavy, appliquéd dress or tightly curled wigs featured in contemporary Irish-American step dance competitions, were likewise a revelation.8 This was Irish dance as it had never been seen before: an unashamedly spectacular display which, for once, accepted the sexual undertones of the dance and reveled in

Irish Music Revivals Through Generations of Diaspora  613

its power. The sound was magnified to a volcanic rumble by the combined power of the dancers’ feet. . . . The result was electrifying. Ireland was agog. The familiar had been utterly transformed. (Brennan 1999: 155)

Riverdance received both praise and criticism from audience members and scholars, and academic essays explored the simultaneous explosion of its popularity and the economic upswing now known as the Celtic Tiger (see, e.g., Lin 2010). It reframed the Irish as international, sexy, and cutting edge. In doing so, it became emblematic to many members of the Irish diaspora of how cosmopolitan and contemporary this new type of performance could be. The final major element of this opening up of Ireland was the direct acknowledgment of the presence and importance of the diaspora by Ireland’s seventh president, Mary Robinson, during her inauguration in 1990: “There are over seventy million people living on this globe who claim Irish descent. I will be proud to represent them” (Harris 1999: 16). Robinson’s explicit references to the diaspora throughout her presidency signaled a shift in the ways in which both the Irish and the Irish-descended people abroad regarded the connection between themselves. In her famous 1995 address to the Irish Oireachtas (governing body) titled “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora: On a Matter of Public Importance,” she noted: “The men and women of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and losses. They remain, even while absent, a precious reflection of our own growth and change, a precious reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story.”9 Irish cultural nationalism had shifted during the 1990s to include, rather than exclude, the extended diaspora. Irish and Irish-diaspora punk bands such as Flogging Molly (Los Angeles), the Saints (Brisbane), Dropkick Murphys (Boston), the Pogues (London), and many others have performed almost exclusively outside of Ireland. Their popularity among the teen and college-age set abroad has set up a kind of secondary diaspora in which audience members turn to diasporic musicians (the punk bands) for their connection to Ireland. Common themes in Irish punk lyrics include working-class issues, nationalism, and Irish and Irish American history; musical elements include the infusion of traditional Irish instruments and forms (jigs, reels) among the standard punk instruments of guitar, bass, and drums. What makes Irish punk part of the musical revival scene is twofold. First, it appeals to a generation of working-class people for whom the possibility of travel to Ireland is remote at best—hence their reliance on a secondary connection. Second, some of the songs—such as the Pogues’ “The Sick Bed of Cú Chulainn”—refer directly to events from Irish history or mythology and combine them with contemporary events, building the same connection that previous musical revival groups had built with listeners’ parents and grandparents. The mid-1990s marked a dramatic change in the nature of relations between Ireland and its diaspora: use of the internet became widespread on both sides; the economic powerhouse referred to as the Celtic Tiger dominated the media and presented a dramatically different image of Irishness to the diaspora and the rest of the world; large numbers of Irish people and their descendents began moving back to Ireland in response to economic opportunities at home and moribund conditions abroad; Ireland’s

614   Sean Williams improved economy led to an upswing in tours by Irish musical groups, including Solas, Lúnasa, Danú, Dervish, and Altan, which led to increased sales of CDs; and the stage show Riverdance opened. Each of these elements also signified a dramatic change in the mechanisms of musical revival. In particular, the increased ability to communicate instantly and effectively with musicians and family members in Ireland from anywhere in the (internet-capable) world changed the entire dynamic of Irish/diasporic relations into one that was immediate, vibrant, and up-to-date. The opening of parts of Ireland and the rest of the English-speaking world to the internet quickly led to the development of international themed discussion groups, internet bulletin boards, and listservs. Because of the relatively anonymous nature of these internet groups, within a comparatively short time, the notions of authenticity, authority, and correct performance practice became a topic of continuous and sometimes vitriolic debate. At the same time, musicians of the generation inspired by the revival groups of the 1970s were able to connect with a number of like-minded people, make new connections, set up their own bands, and tour in the diaspora, as well as making pilgrimages “home” for infusions of experience. However, the explosion of these new forms of international connections meant that one could have no Irish blood at all and still long for “home.” What does it mean when a listener with no familial connection at all to the Irish homeland has chosen to become a member of the Irish diaspora? In Japan, for example, it is common to join a group of enthusiasts in activities supporting and promoting a particular type of music or dance. For those Japanese who have chosen to join the Irish diaspora through their enjoyment of Irish music and dance, the historical connection between Irish songs and the songs disseminated through the newly emergent post-Meiji national school system in nineteenth-century Japan created a sonic template that continues to link the two disparate nations. By engaging in the creation of nostalgia for a homeland that was never theirs, the Japanese simultaneously create community through their shared emotional reactions to Irish music (Williams 2006: 110), which are, in turn, bound up in their own history of loss and change. The development of social networking sites such as Facebook has connected Irish and diasporic musicians and their followers across the globe in ways that could not have been anticipated even in the Celtic Tiger/Riverdance days of the 1990s. That musicians and dancers who themselves may or may not be of Irish descent make recordings and videos, give lessons in Irish music and dance, and travel to and from Ireland regularly is a testimony to the homeland’s accessibility to the diaspora and the diaspora’s accessibility to the homeland. The result of this dramatic increase of connection and communication, then, has been the melding of a quite mobile and informed Irish population with a diaspora that is simultaneously fluid, of mixed heritage, and of multiple generations and levels of contact with “home.”

Dying to Be Reborn Despite the fact that the Irish and their descendents have traveled everywhere, the sheer size of North America has led to the invention of almost a secondary homeland for the

Irish Music Revivals Through Generations of Diaspora  615

Irish in the diaspora. The word “America” might even be said to stand in not only for the United States and Canada, but also for the sense of an Ireland that stretches all the way across the globe. As O’Toole argues: America and Ireland represent not opposites, not a dialogue of modernity and tradition, but a continual intertwining in which far from Ireland being the past and America being the future, America can constitute Ireland’s past and Ireland can invent America’s future. When we deal with this relationship, we are dealing not with something final and closed, but with something obsessive, repetitive, continually unfinished, all the time renewing itself in old ways. (O’Toole 1997: 33)

Ireland has such a long history of emigration that much has been made of the ways in which families are scattered and relations are counted off in Australia, America (either the U.S. or Canada), New Zealand, Glasgow, London, and elsewhere. These are all the famous locations of the Irish diaspora. However, Irish people also live and perform music in St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, and Bangkok. These places, too, are an essential part of the diaspora. What looks at first like a network of places in which English is the first and only language shifts with consideration into a network of Irish people who work and play abroad, but who frequently return home. For the people whose ancestors left Ireland well over a century ago, Ireland remains tantalizingly within reach, particularly in comparison to its accessibility in the nineteenth century. We might speak of the Irish in America, but perhaps it is more appropriate to think of Ireland as a location on land and in the mind. The interconnectedness of Ireland and “America,” in its global sense, has been fostered by their shared pasts as well as by their two-directional musical links over several centuries (Wells and Sommers-Smith 2010: 395). Even though it may be helpful in some surface-level ways to think of Ireland as remaining in the rural past and the diaspora as hovering in the urban future, such a dichotomy is inaccurate. In many cases, musical developments have happened almost simultaneously. Consider the shipment of Sligo fiddler recordings back to Ireland, the shifting of Irish-American hits (1912’s “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” for example) from American parlors to Irish musical contexts, and the relatively new development of the “country Irish” genre: original country songs in the style of Nashville songwriters, but sung in the Irish language. Neither Ireland nor the diaspora has the upper hand on who is influencing whom. The moving target of generational authenticities has shifted auditory attention— not only of Irish emigrants but also of non-Irish people—through an array of signifying sounds in the diaspora over time. From creative combinations of ensembles to the shifting identities of audience members, Irish and diasporic identities have engaged in a dynamic relationship for several hundred years. The issue of music revivals connects directly to Irish and diasporic considerations of death and loss; however, most contemporary Irish and diasporic musicians might argue that Irish music never died and therefore doesn’t need a revival. Note that the presupposition of the emigrant traveling west to meet his or her fate alone no longer applies. That the emigrants and their descendents

616   Sean Williams “died” in the diaspora and kept memories of an aging and/or a dying Ireland fresh in their minds and their song lyrics belies the fact that emigrants represent a healthy, vibrant interchange with a living homeland. In the process of connecting and returning in the twenty-first century, they find that Ireland continues to move forward. The vaudeville singers, dance tune fiddlers, family bands, balladeers, supergroups, and punks that have piqued the interest and nostalgic needs of each diasporic generation have in turn led to mutual cycles of popularity, norms of performance standards, and equally influential exchange. The diaspora has become the world of the Irish.

Notes 1. Although contemporary diasporic people of Irish heritage do not always identify specifically as Catholic—and many do not self-identify as adhering to any particular religious practice—the Ireland of the imagination among the diasporic Irish tends to be Catholic. The Catholicism of the homeland does not appear to faze many members of the diaspora, whether Protestant, atheist, or simply religiously unaffiliated. 2. Among those who could have claimed Irish citizenship are Che Guevara and Muhammad Ali. 3. All terminology surrounding the Famine is contested. See, for example, “Famine Memories,” in Black ’47 and Beyond:  The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Ó Gráda 1999: 194–222), and “Singing the Famine,” in Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song-Man (Williams and Ó Laoire 2011: 71–88). 4. Breandán Ó Madagáin offers a vivid and interesting discussion of the act of “keening”—ritualized mourning—and its powerful impact on the community (Ó Madagáin 2005: 81–88). 5. It is not unusual for a diasporic Irish session band to be asked to “play something Irish,” by which the person making the request means that they hope for a jig, ideally “The Irish Washerwoman.” 6. June Skinner Sawyers offers some specifics of who attended the Harp Festival in her book Celtic Music: A Complete Guide (Sawyers 2000: 33). 7. Some of this material has been digitized and is available through the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (http://ivrla.ucd.ie/ivrla/home). 8. The use of leather pants, among other costuming choices in Riverdance, has been referred to in various ways as being “not your grandparents’ dancewear.” 9. See http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlker/diaspora.html, accessed March 30, 2012.

References Axel, Brian Keith. 2002. “The Diasporic Imaginary.” Public Culture 14 (2): 411–428. Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Brennan, Helen. 1999. The Story of Irish Dance. Dingle, Ireland: Mount Eagle Publications. Bunting, Edward. 2002 [1796, 1809, 1840]. The Ancient Music of Ireland: The Bunting Collections. Dublin: Walton Manufacturing Ltd.

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Carby, Hazel. 2001. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Irish Popular Culture?” European Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (3): 325–349. Davis, Leith. 1993. “Irish Bards and English Consumers: Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and the Colonized Nation.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 24 (2): 7–25. de Valera, Éamon. 1991 [1943]. “The Undeserted Village Ireland.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane, vol. 3, 747–750. Derry: Field Day Publications. Gedutis, Susan. 2004. See You at the Hall:  Boston’s Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gronow, Pekka, and Ilpo Saunio. 1998. An International History of the Recording Industry. New York: Cassell Publishing. Hamm, Charles. 1983. “ ‘Erin, the Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes’: Or, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies.” In Yesterdays: Popular Song in America, edited by Charles Hamm, 42–61. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. Harris, Ruth-Ann M. 1999. “Introduction.” In The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, edited by Arthur Gribben, 1–20. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Ignatiev, Noel. 1995. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge. Lin, Yu-Chen. 2010. “Ireland on Tour—Riverdance, the Irish Diaspora, and the Celtic Tiger.” EurAmerica 40 (1): 31–64. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Toward a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. McGraw, Ted. 2010. “The McNulty Family.” Journal of the Society for American Music 4 (4): 451–474. Miller, Kerby. 1985. Emigrants and Exiles:  Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, Thomas. 1808–1834. Irish Melodies. Five volumes. London: Power. O’Boyle, Sean. 1976. The Irish Song Tradition. Cork: Ossian Publications. Ó Gráda, Cormac. 1999. Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ó Madagáin, Breandán. 2005. Caointe agus Seancheolta Eile—Keening and Other Old Irish Musics. Indreabhán, Ireland: Cló Iar-Chonnachta. O’Toole, Fintan. 1997. The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. London: Verso. Sawyers, June Skinner. 2000. Celtic Music: A Complete Guide. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Suggett, Richard. 2003. “Vagabonds and Minstrels in Sixteenth-Century Wales.” In The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850, edited by Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf, 138–172. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Waters, Mary C. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wells, Paul F., and Sally K. Sommers-Smith. 2010. “Irish Music and Musicians in the United States: An Introduction.” Journal of the Society for American Music 4 (4): 395–400. Williams, Sean. 2006. “Irish Music and the Experience of Nostalgia in Japan.” Asian Music 37 (1): 101–119. ——. 2010. Focus: Irish Traditional Music. New York: Routledge. Williams, Sean, and Lillis Ó Laoire. 2011. Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song-Man. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, William H.A. 1996. ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

C HA P T E R  28

R E V I V I N G T H E R E LU C TA N T A RT O F I R A N IA N DA N C E I N IRAN AND IN THE A M E R I C A N D IA S P O R A A N T HON Y SHAY

In this chapter, I  look at the various ways in which different individuals—Iranians, Iranian immigrants in the West, Americans, and other non-Iranians—participated in several revival Iranian dance movements, beginning in the 1930s and continuing into the twenty-first century. The new interest in dance that began in this period coincided with a period of incipient modernity and its need to find ways in which to construct a modern national identity. As increasing numbers of Iranians made their way to the West, first as students and ultimately as immigrants and refugees, they discovered that dance as a representational field dovetailed with their need to forge an ethnic identity as Iranians both inside and outside of Iran. Dance, which once constituted a scandal when performed in public, became a new, often glamorous vehicle with which to burnish Iranian identities to new publics. I open the chapter by discussing the problematic terms “revival” and “revivalist” and by explaining the theoretical and conceptual frameworks I employ to frame my topic. I then provide a brief overview of the historical and cultural context for traditional dance forms in Iran before moving on to describe the creation of new hybrid forms in early twentieth-century Iran and dance performances in both Iran and the diaspora. Finally, I describe and analyze the three broad modes of revivalist dance creation and performance throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  619

What Is Revival Dance in an Iranian Context? I characterize the use of the term “revival dance” in the context of this chapter as “unfortunate” because the stagings of Iranian dance that occur in the diaspora, and those which occurred before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran itself, are not, strictly speaking, revivals of a tradition. The traditions themselves are very much alive. Peasants and tribesmen continue to perform their dances, and urban Iranians perform solo improvised dance both in Iran (albeit clandestinely) and in the diaspora, as evidenced by internet videos on YouTube. Thus, the use of the term “revivalist” addresses the performers of those choreographic forms that are derived from the bricolage of regional folk dances, solo improvised dance performed in social gatherings, the movements of former professional dancers, and Western ballet. The dances performed in public contexts, often labeled Persian classical or folk dance, such as those seen in dance concerts and festival settings in Europe and the United States, are often individual creations and constitute, in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) terms, “invented traditions.” Only half of the population of Iran can be considered Persian, if by “Persian” we mean an individual whose mother tongue is Persian (Farsi). There exists no dance that is specific only to that ethnolinguistic group. Although a Persian classical music tradition exists for which the vocal portions are sung in Persian, no analogous classical dance tradition exists (see Ameri 2003). The term “revival” is saturated with too many meanings and contexts, most of which may seem inappropriate to the phenomena that many scholars characterize with this term. Basically, the term “revivalist” dancer or musician, as used especially by folklorists and ethnomusicologists, refers to any outsider performing music or dances not of their own culture; that is, someone who is not a native performer to the tradition. In other words, it is a euphemism used to refer to performances and individuals that the speaker considers “impure” and inauthentic. Most individuals, including many scholars outside of folklore and ethnomusicology, understand the meaning of “revival” in either of two ways. First, they may understand the term “revival” as it is used to describe movements like the great “religious revival” that occurred in the United States in the nineteenth century. Or, second, they may understand “revival” as it is used in the arts and popular culture: for example, “reviving” a work by Vivaldi that has fallen out of the repertoire or staging a “revival” of The Sound of Music. These acts revive a work that has laid dormant for a period, and, usually, an attempt is made either to perform the work in the same way that it was performed earlier or else to stage a modern reinterpretation of the work. However, in the parlance of folklorists and ethnomusicologists, the term “revivalist” applies to “individuals who celebrated traditions not their own” (Jackson 1993: 73). Furthermore, in matters of public funding for folk and traditional dance and music (in the United States, at least), the

620  Anthony Shay presence of revivalist performers constitutes grounds for denying funding to these performers who are not of “pure blood.” (See Nooshin, ­chapter 13 in this volume.) The discourse among folklorists and ethnomusicologists, although moderating recently and consequently growing less strident (Rosenberg 1993), almost always involves issues of ethnicity, authenticity, romanticism, and appropriation. Having lived a life as a “revivalist”—that is, as a professional choreographer and dancer performing, for more than fifty years, dances that are not native to my Anglo-American background— I know from personal experience that this label—“revivalist”—is not a neutral one. It is often accompanied by a smug expression of superiority from many purist folklorists and ethnomusicologists who seem to have forgotten that they often came to their chosen field through their own revivalist performances. Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon, who has served as a panelist on the National Endowment for the Arts Folk Arts panel, stated: “Folk Arts did not fund revivalists. Some panel members felt that the presence of revivalists tainted the project” (1992: 220). Titon found it ironic that, while serving as a panelist, he often worked with “mostly lapsed revivalists” (1992: 222). Folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes even more forcefully in describing the funding of folk artists, their participation in folk festivals, and the rejection of revivalist artists: Underlying much celebratory diversity is an affirmative racialism coded in the terms of culture. It reveals itself in the privileging of origins . . . and authenticity, especially when linked to primordial claims. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994: 236–237)

This “racialism” results, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett indicates, in separating the pure from the impure: “Quivering with issues of authenticity and iconicity, these events tend to make a clear distinction between doers and watchers. Mainstream Americans are the designated watchers and ‘ethnics’ and ‘natives’ are the doers” (1991: 424). Yet another notion of “revival” is bound up in the idea that any dance or genre of music that is performed outside of its original context of village or tribal wedding or celebration, even if by native performers, becomes “revivalistic” because of the alterations required by a specific performance. And although many revivalist individuals have, not infrequently, developed an original and professional level of artistry within a tradition in which they were not born but in which they have participated for most of their lives, there is the suggestion that they can never achieve what a native performer can. The term “revivalist,” then, covers far too much scholarly territory. I write here as an unreconstructed and unrepentant revivalist artist, and I combine these different understandings of “revival” for the purposes of this chapter. If we understand the phenomenon of revival dance traditions as being those performances that anyone other than a native to a particular tradition in his or her own normal cultural context performs, we can see that several layers exist. In this tradition, I would include those Iranian peasants and tribesmen performing regional folk dances in festival settings (in which the context is significantly altered from the normal circumstances

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  621

in which they spontaneously perform their native dances), as well as dancers in the professional urban genres of so-called Persian classical dance. Thus, “revival” Iranian dance in its presentational form constitutes several layers; here, I use the term “revival dance” to refer to dance performances that occur in any decontextualized context outside of dance in the field. I identify three periods in which these revivalist presentational styles may be seen to fall: (1) the beginnings of the so-called national dance style from the late 1920s until the late 1950s, (2) the state folk dance ensemble model period of 1958–1990, and (3) what I call the “new vision” period (a term I borrow from Iranian choreographer Jamal) that began in the 1990s. It is important to stress that not only do the three periods overlap but that all three styles continue as modes of presentation into the twenty-first century.

Theories, Concepts, and Viewpoints To analyze and describe revivalist Iranian dance, I use five conceptual approaches. First, anthropologist David M. Guss, following Richard Handler (1988), provides a concept of “cultural objectification,” one of the results of which I use to illuminate aspects of the staged dance productions analyzed in this chapter: The aesthetic makeover required in order to translate these forms into national spectacles shares many features cross-culturally. The privileging of the visual, accomplished through colorful costumes and dramatic choreography, combines with technical excellence and virtuosity to present a cheerful, unceasingly optimistic world. This increased theatricalization abjures any mention of true historical conditions and replaces them with the staged creation of a mythic detemporalized past. (Guss 2000: 14)

Here, Guss encapsulates the way in which technical aspects of staged performances—of all three styles but especially the first two—produce the kind of choreographic and staging strategies used in the production of Iranian dance by revival performers and choreographers, both Iranian and non-Iranian, to achieve the effects and results described. Second, Jane C. Desmond offers insight into the crucial way in which dance and other movement systems not only reflect but are constitutive of ethnicity and identity: So ubiquitous, so “naturalized” as to be nearly unnoticed as a symbolic system, movement is a primary not secondary social “text”. . .. Its articulation signals group affiliation and group differences. Movement serves as a marker for the production of gender, racial, ethnic, class, and national identities. (Desmond 1997: 31)

622  Anthony Shay The Iranian government during the Pahlavi years grasped this concept and used dance as a vehicle to construct Iranian national identity and to cultivate nationalist emotions (Meftahi 2007). Third, because Iranians regard the public performance of dance, historically associated with prostitution and homosexuality, with considerable ambiguity, I utilize my concept of “choreophobia” from an earlier study (Shay 1999) to theorize how Iranians and others turned to dance as a means of creating a vehicle of cultural representation. I  show how choreophobia haunts these performances (Shay 1999:  1, 123–150). Thus, I refer to dance as the “reluctant art” because many Iranians regard it in a negative light and do not consider it as proper behavior, much less an art form. Fourth, I use the concept of “parallel traditions” that I developed in an earlier study (Shay 2002a). Because there are multiple ways in which Iranian dance is presented in a staged fashion, it is necessary to separate the threads of this intricate garment to see its cultural, aesthetic, and social structure. We may distinguish, then, dances performed by villagers and tribal people in the Iranian world (what Theresa J. Buckland [1999] has termed “dance in the field”) from a wide variety of other manifestations, including performances by tribal groups on public stages in Tehran and regional cities; performances by Armenian Iranians who began teaching dance in Western-style classes and recitals; so-called national dance performances or stagings created for the former Pahlavi state-supported national dance companies (the Mahalli Dancers and National Folklore Organization); performances by Iranian students in the United States and other countries; performances in tourist settings; performances for weddings and other celebratory occasions in the Iranian diaspora; and performances by non-Iranians of various Iranian dance genres. These constitute only a suggestive list of possible layers. In the past, many scholars have been reluctant to engage with anything but “authentic” dance in the field, regarding all else as “fakelore.” Dance ethnographers Georgiana Gore and Maria Koutsouba encapsulate this attitude: “Any representation of traditional dance outside its customary context is not more than ‘imitation’ and may be seen as an artificial and adulterated version of the ‘original’ ” (1992: 104). To fruitfully analyze and theorize dance contexts, apart from dance in the field, I created the concept of parallel traditions (Shay 2002a) to avoid invidious comparisons between the various layers and without making elaborate scholarly excuses to undertake the study of different dance genres. As artificial, slick, or cheesy as some of these layers may appear, each is worthy of study because each layer contains social and political messages regarding ethnicity, class, and gender, and each raises deeply complex issues of authenticity, appropriation, and ownership. In addition, the individuals who spend hours perfecting their performances generally believe deeply in the choreographic activities in which they participate and thus endow these performances with a kind of authenticity. Fifth, and finally, I utilize Edward Said’s (1978) concept of orientalism From the outset of the creation of a new Iranian dance genre (Iran’s “national dance”), the term “orientalism” was most often used as a synonym for “character dance” in the classical ballet classes in which it was taught and performed from the late 1920s. Orientalist images flooded those performances and still characterize many contemporary performances (Shay

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  623

1999: 156–170). Character or national dances combined classical ballet vocabulary with elements of folk or urban dances of a particular country, and they were popular because they responded to the nationalism that was spreading throughout Central and Eastern Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. The degree to which actual folk and urban elements are utilized alongside classical Western ballet vocabulary varies a great deal in individual performances and choreographies. Because most choreographers, Iranian and non-Iranian, claim that their work is authentic and true to the dances in the field, it is important that we look briefly at dance in the field. First, however, I will contextualize these parallel traditions by providing historical and cultural background for the changing uses, meanings, and practices of Iranian dance.

Historical and Cultural Background The dance traditions found in Iran reflect its ethnic diversity. These dances are also found in neighboring jurisdictions such as Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan, the Republic of Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Turkmenia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which together form a larger Iranian world in cultural and historical terms, sometimes referred to as the “Persianate.” There are two major choreographic traditions in Iran: solo improvised dance, which is associated primarily with urban areas but is also found in specific movement traditions in rural districts, and regional folk dances, which are largely group dances, although they may occasionally be performed as solos and which are stylistically specific to certain ethnic groups or geographic areas. Historically, Iran has had a long history of multiethnic, multilingual, and religious diversity, and many of the populations, such as the Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, Turkmen, and Azerbaijanis of Iran, constitute parts of ethnic and linguistic groups that extend well beyond the political borders of the contemporary Iranian state into neighboring states. Iranians lived under three different regimes during the twentieth century: the Qajar dynasty (1785–1925), the Pahlavi regime (1925–1979), and the Islamic Republic (1980– ). Each of these regimes held a different stance toward the phenomena of both professional and private dance performances. During the Qajar period, dancing boys and women constituted part of professional entertainment groups known as motrebs. These were large and small groups, urban-based and ambulatory. The companies during this period were frequently all male or all female. Motrebs played music, danced, and acted, among other performance expressions. To this day, the word motreb constitutes an insult to performers, especially serious musicians. Most individuals in Iranian society regarded public dancers of both sexes as prostitutes, and these performers occupied the lowest possible social rung. Nevertheless, their performances permeated all classes of society, including the court, and their presence was regarded as de rigueur for major celebrations and happy occasions, such as weddings. In addition, dance constituted an important aspect of urban women’s social lives, in which they danced, acted, and sang theatrical playlets to

624  Anthony Shay entertain themselves in the privacy of the women’s quarters, well into the Pahlavi period (‘Enjavi-Shirazi 1972; Shay 1995b, 1999). The two Pahlavi sovereignties, but especially that of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, turned to a new dance genre—(mis)named “national dance”—that was practiced throughout the 1930s and beyond and that served, alongside regional folk dances performed in concert format, to build a sense of Iranian nationalism among the multiethnic population and to represent Iran culturally at international events such as world fairs and concert tours (Meftahi 2007). One of the first acts of the Islamic Republic was to prohibit dance in all forms, although the ban on folk dance was later lifted. Dancing professionally ended, and, even into the new millennium, dancing solo improvised dance in private carried the potential for harsh punishment if discovered. Because of the ban, which continues into the twenty-first century, I argue that solo improvised dance now constitutes a form of resistance to the Islamic regime because many Iranians continue to dance in secret, as well as to use solo improvised dance as a means of taunting the regime in public spaces (Mahdavi 2009; Shay 1999, 2008b).

Dance in Iran If one thinks of folklore as denoting “expressive forms, processes, and behaviors (1) that we customarily learn, teach, and utilize or display during face-to-face interactions, and (2) that we judge to be traditional” (Georges and Jones 1995: 1), then both of these choreographic traditions, regional folk dances and urban solo improvised dance, must be considered as forms of folklore since they are both “traditional” and overwhelmingly learned in “face-to-face interactions” rather than in formal educational settings, although diasporic Iranians attend classes in growing numbers to learn to dance.

Regional Folk Dances Throughout Iran, dancing constitutes an appropriate form of expression for celebratory events such as weddings and, less often, circumcision ceremonies. Dance is never a part of religious observances, a point that cannot be overemphasized in an Islamic context. This is a crucial observation because many of the Shi’ia religious rites are characterized by specific movement systems that must not, in an Islamic context, be confused with dance (Shay 1995a, 1999). In rural areas, regional folk dances, which are frequently performed in large groups, are generally performed out of doors due to the small size of houses (see Figure 28.1). For full descriptions of regional folk dances, see Hamada (1978), Hasanov (1988), Shay (2002b), and Shay and Sellers-Young (2005: 5).1 In addition to celebratory occasions, during the Pahlavi period, young dancers in Bojnurd, a town in Eastern Iran, also formed amateur performance groups that

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  625

FIGURE  28.1  “Raqs-E Chupi” Qashqa’i folk dance. Choreographed by Anthony Shay. Photo by Darren Young, Los Angeles, 1978. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.

appeared on national holidays or other special occasions. These dancers only performed the dances of their region and specific ethnic group. As is common in the more familiar festival circuits of Eastern Europe, the dancers would arrange the order and length of the dances and rehearse them for festival appearances in front of audiences in a formal setting, but they did not choreograph the dances in the manner of state-supported professional folk dance ensembles, a practice that thus constitutes a separate parallel tradition (Hamada 1978: 58). I saw village groups that appeared in a series of exhibitions held at the Golestan Palace in Tehran during the Pahlavi era, in which the arts and crafts—including dancing and music—and folk arts of the various provinces were displayed to introduce the capital’s population to the expressive cultures of the villages and tribes of Iran. In addition, variety television shows, like those hosted by Feridun Farrokhzad and Parviz Gharib-Afshar, also frequently hosted performances by rural dancers. These performances also constitute a parallel tradition because, although the peasants and tribesmen who appeared in these performances were the authentic inhabitants of their respective areas, performing their own dances, the circumstances were very different: They rehearsed for these performances rather than performing spontaneously, the performances were timed, they were oriented toward an audience, the performance space was restricted, the dancers were all young, and they used the finest dancers of their respective regions. Thus, these performances were already removed from dance in the field in a number of ways that constitute a different parallel layer. And, although these performances are certainly

626  Anthony Shay closer to dance in the field than a performance by a state-supported ensemble, they are, nevertheless, qualitatively distinct.

Urban Solo Improvised Dance Although examples of solo improvised dancing abound in rural areas such as the Persian Gulf, tribal regions, and the Caspian Sea provinces, these dance genres exhibit specific regional styles, with emphasis placed on the repetition of specific movements such as the twirling of kerchiefs in the dances of Fars or the pelvic and shoulder shimmies of the Persian Gulf or Gilan. The urban solo improvised dance genre, sometimes referred to as majlesi (meaning party or social gathering, after its most common venue of performance) in its domestic form, derives its aesthetic impulses from different sources: the visual world of the Iranian city with its rich images of geometric forms, and improvisation, which underlies all forms of Iranian cultural expression from calligraphy to storytelling, architecture to music (Shay 1999). Like the visual arts, dance is linked to geometry and is, in fact, an embodied manifestation of the geometry found in the calligraphy, architecture, and architectural decoration that permeate urban life (Hill and Grabar 1964; Pope 1964–1965a,b; Shay 1997). Like theater and music, as well as the visual arts, as shown by Gülru Necipoglu’s magisterial study (1995) of architectural scrolls (tumar), improvisation is a key element in the production of dance as well as calligraphy, architecture, Islamic decoration, and music. All of these forms, visual and performing arts, depend on the learning and assimilating of brief choreographic, visual, or musical motifs; the artist then combines and recombines these elements to create new and fresh compositions—architectural, decorative, musical, or choreographic. Hill and Grabar propose that “[t]‌he more significant facts about the geometric units used seem . . . to be first, their constant mobility in time and space” (1964:  80–81). It is this flowing movement that characterizes all of the arts, and above all it is embodied in solo improvised dance. This element of improvisation maintains the freshness of expression in the most gifted performers. (For descriptions of solo improvised dance, see Ameri 2003 and Shay 1999.)

Choreophobic Environment Historically, throughout the Middle East, both male and female professional dancer-entertainers plied their trade in large urban centers and as itinerant performers. As was the case for most public entertainers, their mode of expression was nearly always associated with prostitution by the population at large. This choreophobic attitude continued unabated into the twenty-first century (Shay 1999). The following observation, made a century ago by the Qajar princess Taj Al-Saltana (died 1937) in her diaries, sums

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  627

up most Iranians’ attitudes toward public dancers, even today, when such performances are banned: That night ‘Abdi Jan’s troupe had been called so that the harem occupants could watch the show. Of course, you remember ‘Abdi well. Let me, nonetheless, give you a description of his looks. He was a lad of about twelve or thirteen, with large, black eyes, languid and incredibly beautiful and attractive. His face was tanned and good-looking, his lips crimson, and his hair black and thick. Renowned throughout the town, the boy had a thousand adoring lovers. Being a dancer, however, he was unworthy of being anyone’s beloved. (Al-Saltana 1993: 163)

Theater historian Bahram Beiza’i notes that dance constituted the basis of traditional comic theater, a frequently highly ribald form of entertainment (1965: 169). In this context, the dances were basically highly elaborate, virtuosic, and athletic versions of the domestic form of solo improvised dance. These athletic feats are depicted in paintings of the Qajar period (Falk 1972; Diba and Ekhtiar 1998). With the lack of royal and aristocratic support after the beginning of the Pahlavi era, this dance tradition faded away, and the new forms of professional dance, the so-called national dance, no longer featured the daring virtuosic feats of the finest dancers of the old traditional style. Although traditional motrebi music and dance (named for the traditional entertainer, the motreb) persisted in the more traditional parts of Tehran, the loss of its former patronage doomed it to a slow death. The advent of the Islamic Revolution (1979) caused its final demise because of clerical hostility toward these forms of entertainment. Both Imam Khomeini and Ayyatollah Khamene’i pronounced in their fatwas that “Motreb music is illicit” (Fatemi 2005: 19). All dancing in public ceased, and the government attempted to ferret out parties in which solo improvised dance occurred, meting out severe punishment to those it caught (Mahdavi 2009; Shay 2008b).

The Beginning of Revival Iranian Dance: “National Dance” After the beginning of the Pahlavi era (1925–1979), the government and educated elites increasingly ignored traditional dance and theater, turning instead to Western forms such as classical ballet, which represented the modernity they craved. The first teachers and choreographers of ballet performances based on Iranian themes or featuring performances in which Iranian traditional movements were mixed with elements of ballet, were Armenians who immigrated to Iran. Prominent among these were Madame Yelena, Madame Cornelli, and Sarkis Djanbazian, all of whom had been trained in Russian ballet before coming to Iran. The introduction of Western

628  Anthony Shay forms of music and dance resulted in a division between the northern, more Westernized half of Tehran and the southern, more traditional and conservative areas of the city. This division continues today (see Mahdavi 2009). New contexts, such as proscenium arch theaters, began to appear to provide space for Westernized choreographic forms, whereas, in the southern districts, traditional performers continued to perform in traditional settings, for example, on planks thrown over a garden fountain (ru-howz), a stage that constituted one of the most common performance sites for traditional dance and music. Traditional theater (ru-howzi), which included dance and music, took its name from this practice. (See especially Fatemi’s 2005 study.) From the beginning, the newly established Armenian teachers created a new hybrid choreographic form in which ballet was combined with traditional Iranian movements and other choreographic elements—a form that would later be referred to in Iran as “national dance.” As Meftahi describes it, “[Following] the popular concept of ‘national dance’ in Europe [the Armenian choreographers, and later the American Nilla Cram Cook] adapted some movements from Iranian dance in their performances and re-crafted their own classical dances with Iranian movements” (Meftahi 2007: 149). Although some individuals or companies performed en pointe, most performed Iranian character or national dance in bare feet or with special slippers or character shoes. Knowing that they inhabited a choreophobic environment, the early choreographers chose to link their productions with poetry and bucolic or historical themes as a means of gaining support and cultural legitimacy among the more liberal and better-educated elements of the population. They did this by using images well known from Persian poetry, such as those of the rose and the nightingale, by turning to heroic, pre-Islamic themes as found in old Persian mythological sources such as the Shahnameh, or by choosing “innocent” themes from an idealized peasant life in which happy villagers go to the well for water or dance after a harvest. Such strategies recall Guss’s concept of cultural objectification. Nesta Ramazani, a dancer in these early ballet productions, states: “I moved easily from performing a Zoroastrian temple dance to interpreting mystical Sufi poetry and to portraying the love of a rose and a nightingale” (2002 xv). She observed of one of the first dances she performed in the role of a village girl: Through pantomime we conveyed such activities as sifting flour, kneading bread, washing clothes, and playfully splashing each other with water. Our work finished, we beautified ourselves, preening while coquettishly swinging one hip. Picking up our chiffon handkerchiefs, we coyly twirled them overhead or from side to side, occasionally flipping them into the air, while spinning rapidly around and around. Unlike the dress of real village girls, our bodices were brief, revealing a bare midriff, and garnished with baubles and bangles that glinted in the stage lights. (Ramazani 2002: 5)

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Elsewhere she writes: “My longings and desires found expression through music and dance based largely on Western fantasy images of the East, images reinforced by my dance teacher, Mme. Cornelli, in whose choreography the Orient was represented as a magical land filled with flimsily clad dancing girls” (Ramazani 2002: 75). Thus, these dance performances embodied the essence of Said’s notion of orientalism as well as Guss’s concept of cultural objectification—the choreographic depiction of a dream-like world in which fantasy images of great luxury, sensuality, and an ahistorical Orient served to create a nostalgic never-never land past and a fantasy present. Such choreographic images continue to be popular in the Iranian diaspora, where, for example, in 1997, thousands of Iranian Americans flocked to the Orange County, California autumn Mehregan Festival to watch local community members dressed (in incorrectly rendered Sasanian clothing) as the “Iranian royal family” view a series of imagined dances, including those of a group of scantily clad, modern cabaret belly dancers. Ramazani frequently refers to the choreophobic atmosphere in which she first performed: “For me, it was a simple matter: Dancing filled me with joy. For Tehran society, however it was scandalous. Good girls did not perform in public, baring their legs for all to see, putting themselves in the limelight to attract the lust of strangers” (2002: 1). This is a theme that Ramazani frequently reiterates throughout her narrative. And, indeed, in the beginning, due to this corrosive atmosphere, most of the performances were invitation-only, private recitals held in ballet studios rather than in public concert spaces. In 1946, American Nilla Cram Cook founded a group that was supported by the Iranian government and toured several neighboring countries from 1947 to 1953 (Kiann 2000; Ramazani 2002). Cram Cook became an influential figure in the Iranian Ministry of Culture and served as a censor of Iranian theaters and cinema (Ramazani 2002: 171). Although her dance group performed the newly created genre, which mixed ballet with traditional movements, Cram Cook represented herself as reviving old historic traditions (Ramazani 2002: 76, 147, 170, 172–174), naming her dance program “The Revival of Ancient Iranian Arts” (Kiann 2000). As part of an attempt to legitimate dance, Medjid Rezvani, one of the earliest revivalist performers active in Paris from the 1930s, wrote a history of dance aiming to prove the existence of a “classical” Iranian dance tradition complete with formal rules of performance and training (see especially 1962: 150–159). He concluded that “they are guarded, right up to our own times, the rules of the classical dance, even if a few old dancers are the only repositories of them” (Rezvani 1962: 159). Rezvani’s fantasy of a classical dance tradition using codified movements (which he invented for his book, together with names for some eight steps and movements in the style of Western ballet) has been effectively shattered by ‘Ameri’s study (2003). In effect, Rezvani attempted to create an ancient history for a recently created dance genre. In 1954, the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Arts opened the National Academy of Ballet with its performing arm, the Iranian National Ballet. For this project, the ministry

630  Anthony Shay brought in several American and British teachers, such as Ninette de Valois, who continued the practice of creating ballets with Iranian themes drawn from poetry and history. In this way, traditional music and dance genres that were mixed with Western elements found official government patronage and new performance venues such as radio and later television, as well as newly constructed concert halls and theaters. In 1958, the Iranian government established a state folk dance ensemble, the Iran National Folklore Organization, under the direction of Nejad Ahmadzadeh. In the late 1960s, Robert de Warren, an English ballet dancer and choreographer, was invited to direct a similar group, the Mahalli Dancers, again using this style of mixed Iranian and Western elements. The companies performed staged versions of both solo improvised dance and regional folk dances based on historical and poetic themes. In 1966, Abdollah Nazemi, who trained in the National Academy of Ballet and danced for several years with the National Iranian Ballet, formed his own company, the Pars National Ballet, which was associated with National Iranian Radio and Television. According to his printed program, the company’s repertoire consisted of an eclectic mix of staged folk dances, Persian poetry and historically themed ballet, conventional Western classical ballet works, and modern works with both Western and Iranian musical scores. After the Revolution, Nazemi founded a group of the same name, but greatly reduced in size and scope, in southern California. Thus, in these early performances, the use of Orientalist motifs, costumes, and staging strategies somewhat mitigated the choreophobic atmosphere, at least for the more Westernized Iranians. Nevertheless, choreophobia never disappeared, in spite of later Pahlavi government efforts to use dance as a means of constructing a national identity, as Jane C. Desmond has suggested. One of the first acts of Ayyatollah Khomeini in the Islamic Revolution (1979) was to ban all public performances of dance.

Revival Dance in the Diaspora It is important to emphasize that most individuals who see Iranian folk dancing, including both Iranian city dwellers and foreigners, view it in the context of performances by the professional and semiprofessional dance ensembles found in pre-Revolution Iran and in the diaspora, rather than in the context of the village. In other words, they are exposed only to revival dance traditions. This style of choreography is still found in dance performances in which, as Guss describes in his concept of cultural objectification, a fantasy world of nostalgia is created. The multitude of displaced Iranians crave this choreographic nostalgia that revival dance provides. Of the few Iranians who lived in the West before 1979, the vast majority were students and more than 90% were male (Shay 1999). A  few Iranian and non-Iranian

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  631

FIGURE  28.2  Qajar dance. Choreographed by Ixchel Diemetral-Maerker. Photo by Darren Young, Los Angeles, 1978. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.

choreographers and dancers outside of Iran utilized this same combination of Westernized ballet and Iranian character or “national” dance begun in the 1930s in Iran. Several untrained Iranian students simply elaborated the solo improvised dance that they had learned at social gatherings, dressing up in fantasy costumes that owed more to Hollywood than to Iranian history to lend their performances an exotic aura. Later, after the formation of the diaspora in 1980, new styles evolved in which social dances such as hip hop and salsa were added to the already eclectic mix (see Figure 28.2). The Iranian dancers and choreographers who left Iran after the 1979 Revolution found several non-Iranians already at work. Sometimes they cooperated and performed together; at other times, they found themselves in competition. The early performances from the 1930s featured Iranian character dance. This revival dance genre from the 1930s remains among the most popular genres in the diaspora down to the present day. Beginning in the late 1950s, choreographers in Iran who worked with the government-sponsored companies and non-Iranians in the United States began using choreographic strategies based on the state folk dance ensemble model, using, for the

632  Anthony Shay first time, large numbers of musicians and dancers. In a final phase, during the late 1990s, we see some bold Iranian artists, like Jamal, Banafsheh Sayyad, Ida Meftahi, and Sashar Zarif, begin to create serious works of art, using an even more eclectic fusion of elements that include modern dance, flamenco, and tai-chi, as well as traditional Iranian themes and movement vocabulary.

The First Known Performances Outside Iran The first documented performances of Iranian dance outside of Iran occurred in the 1930s, when Medjid Rezvani (1900–1962) moved to Paris with his Iranian wife, Nahide, and the two performed frequently in Paris and other French cities (Décoret-Ahiha 2004; Rezvani 1962). The first known performances in the United States occurred in the early 1950s, with performances by Nasrin Hekmat Forough, Homa Mojallal, Mahin Shahrivar, Leila Bedalian, Assad Torfeh, and Najmeh Najafi. These dancers generally performed as soloists.

FIGURE  28.3  Classical Persian dance. Soloist Lynette Houston. Choreographed by Jamal. Photo by Darren Young, Los Angeles, 1996. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  633

Nasrin Hekmat Forough occasionally trained small groups, often relying on non-Iranians because of the reluctance of Iranians, especially men, to perform in public. I learned and performed my first dances from Hekmat Forough in 1954. Large repertory ensembles only came into existence in the 1960s, following the first appearance of Eastern European companies like the Moiseyev Dance Company in the late 1950s, and these were almost all founded and directed by Anglo-Americans. No attempt to create revivalist versions of regional folk dances for the stage occurred before the late 1960s, and choreographers and dancers exclusively used stage versions of solo improvised dance (see Figure 28.3). The music that was available for dance in the period before 1980 was extremely limited. Although a few students were able to play dance music on violins, tars (long-necked lutes), santurs (hammered dulcimers), accordions, and tombaks (goblet drums) for special occasions, most performances were accompanied by classical rengs (dance melodies) and folk tunes played by small urban orchestras on delicate 78 rpm records. These recordings were few in number. In Iran and in the diaspora, poetry is the most important and beloved form of cultural expression. Its ubiquitous presence in a wide variety of social, political, and spiritual contexts attests to its popularity, even if its linguistic specificity limits its usefulness outside of Persian-speaking contexts. However, Iranians coming abroad as students quickly grasped that dance constituted one of the most popular representational forms of culture in the West and that it was more accessible to the general public than musical or verbal forms of expression. This was especially true in the United States, where several events caused folk and traditional dance performances to become enormously popular. Beginning in the late 1920s, cities and towns across America began to host large-scale annual international folk dance concerts and festivals (Shay 2006). Colleges and universities, which—especially after World War II—had large numbers of foreign students, also provided many concert opportunities. Later, ethnomusicology departments offered numerous music and dance performances. In addition, the international recreational folk dance movement that had begun in the 1930s expanded significantly in the 1950s and 1960s; the hundreds of thousands of individuals who now participated in this movement provided large audiences for international folk dance performances. In the late 1950s, following the appearances of professional state folk ensembles from Yugoslavia and the Moiseyev Company of the Soviet Union, professional and amateur performances of folk dance became more popular than ever (Shay 2002a, 2006, 2008a). It was during this period in Iran and the United States that attempts were made to stage regional folk dances that had remained largely unknown to urban dancers prior to this period, thus bringing to life Guss’s notion of “cultural objectification.”

Autoexoticism Beginning with Medjid Rezvani and Najmeh Najafi, Iranians quickly understood that coming from Persia carried the cachet of the romantically exotic, and they began to spin

634  Anthony Shay pungently spiced exotic tales about solo improvised dance that appealed to the orientalist fantasies held by many Westerners. Najmeh Najafi, for example, wrote: Many of our dances tell stories: some are survivals from a very ancient time, like the Zoroastrian Dance of Fire. Some came from the Islamic influence. At first I used to dance just as I felt; but later I learned the traditional dances, blending my emotion with the emotion of the dance story. In our dancing the movement of the hands tells special things. There is a language of motion, and people who know this language can interpret the story as well as if it were in spoken words. People in America who have seen me dance say, “Your hands are so graceful!” Hands must be graceful in order to be talking hands. . . . Maybe one of our traditional dances will explain this. It is the story of a dancer who was loved by a prince. He could not marry her because she was a dancer, so she went away with a broken heart. Without her he could not be happy so he found her and told her that he would give up being a prince in order to marry her. If there were a choice between the kingdom and her, he had made that choice. But she knew that he must be a prince and later a king for the good of his people, so she told him that her broken heart had been healed by another and that she no longer loved him. (Najafi 1953: 28–29)

Najafi’s colorful and meretricious account of Iranian dance had perhaps been inspired by examples of Indian classical dance forms, such as the bharata natyam or kathak, which do utilize narrative hand movements. However, Iranian dance is not a narrative art form but an abstract one. There is no form of codified movement such as that found in bharata natyam. Iranian dancers created these orientalist tales to make their performances more appealing. Thus, we can see in this example and in the earlier descriptions of Ramazani’s performances that Said’s notion of orientalism constitutes a persistent feature of many of these revival dance performances. Rezvani’s book on Iranian dance (1962) is likewise filled with a fantasy history and descriptions of a nonexistent, pre-Islamic classical dance tradition that he claimed was guarded in secret by certain families throughout the Islamic period. He and his wife are depicted in this book and other sources, romantically costumed as “villagers” or dressed as pre-Islamic historical figures (Décoret-Ahiha 2004; Rezvani 1962). Individuals who claim to utilize Persian miniatures as the basis of their dances have developed another form of exoticism and autoexoticism. Robert De Warren, the English former director of Mahalli Dancers, stated in a printed program: Collection of his [the poet Nezami’s] works. . . also contain a rich tapestry of miniatures. . . the representation of the dance is very evident, the Safavid [1501–1725] versions being the richest in movement and style. Not only has it been possible to trace actual dance movements, but also musical and percussion instruments that have long been lost. . .. Each step and gesture is a reproduction of the real traditional painting. Choreographed after almost two years of research. (Program of the Mahalli Dancers of Iran, 1976)

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  635

In an interview, De Warren stated that he was able to lay “twenty or so of them [Persian miniatures] side by side” to recreate an authentic production of dances performed during the Safavid period (1501–1722) (1973: 29). (For the problems of using historical visual art as a source for dance reconstruction see Lawler 1964.). This kind of autoexoticism and exoticism continues unabated in many performances, and Americans and other non-Iranians continue to make their performances more interesting to geographically challenged Americans by giving them orientalist flavorings from The Thousand and One Nights, as mediated through the lens of Hollywood. Some Americans and other non-Iranians who participate in the world of Iranian dance, especially those who came to it through the performance of belly dance, are often as prone to exoticism as the early Iranian dancers and choreographers, as Cram Cook’s choreographic plots and De Warren’s quotation demonstrate.

The State Folk Dance Ensemble Model In the 1950s, the Moiseyev Dance Company from the Soviet Union and other state-supported dance ensembles from Eastern Europe created a revolution in the presentation of folk dance as a field of representation for ethnic identity and diversity. Nation-states as politically diverse as the Philippines, Greece, Venezuela, Mexico, Iran, Egypt, and Ghana scrambled to follow the example set by Igor Moiseyev (Shay 2002a). Iranian dance was almost exclusively performed solo, both traditionally and in the early ballet dance performances in Iran. Each of the dancers in the new ballet productions had his or her role, and there is little description of dances performed as ensemble productions using synchronized choreographies. The early dancers I encountered in the diaspora, such as Nasrin Hekmat Forough, Mahin Shahrivar, Leila Bedalian, and Homa Mojallal, all danced solos that were largely improvised and used costumes exhibiting various degrees of orientalism. The appearances of the Moiseyev Dance Company, Kolo, the Serbian State Folk Dance Ensemble, Tanec, the Macedonian State Ensemble, and later LADO, the Croatian State Folk Ensemble, altered that trend and provided choreographers like myself with a new vision of how dance could be presented in a more spectacularized fashion. In 1960, I founded the UCLA Village Dance Group, and, in 1963, I changed the name to the AMAN Folk Ensemble. I began choreographing Iranian dances for the stage using the types of choreographic strategies that I saw in performances by the Eastern European companies, rather than those used by Iranian companies. (See Web Figure 28.1 for a photograph from my choreographed piece “Savaran.”  ) Americans involved in Iranian dance differed from Iranians in two significant ways. First, we did not feel compelled to confine our interest to the nation-state of Iran and its contemporary borders. I found examples of Uzbek classical dance on films that the Soviet Embassy, and later the Committee for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, generously provided me. I found an interest in the vibrant dances of the ancient Iranian cities of Bukhara and Samarqand, renowned in Persian poetry, that my Iranian colleagues never did. From 1960, together with my co-artistic director

636  Anthony Shay in AMAN, Leona Wood, I produced many choreographies from Iran, as well as from surrounding areas such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. I continued this work with the AVAZ International Dance Theater, which has boasted a large Iranian-Central Asian repertoire into the twenty-first century. In 1990, Jamal joined AVAZ and in 1995 became its sole director. (See Figure 28.4 for a photograph from an Azerbaijani dance that I choreographed, and see Web Figure 28.2 for a photograph from my choreographed version of a piece from Samarqand. ) The second way in which Americans differed from Iranians was the Americans’ intense interest in authenticity. This resulted in many American choreographers conducting research through field work; taking classes with experts; attending events, concerts, and festivals in which dancing took place; and acquiring books, films, and other documentation. Many learned the requisite languages for conducting fieldwork. In general, their choreographic works were informed by this intensive research. Although in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s the academic concept of appropriation had not yet appeared in the world of folk dance, American choreographers nevertheless felt the need for accuracy and authenticity to show respect for the people whose culture they were representing in public venues, even while creating works that were theatrically arresting. In the 1960s and 1970s, Americans—in contrast to most post-Revolution Iranian and European performers—founded very large ensembles, frequently numbering sixty to eighty performers. This serendipitously coincided with the search for ethnic heritage and “roots” that was one of the most important characteristics of that period. Other Americans who joined the counterculture had deep feelings of anomie toward the consumerist, middle-class values and political conservatism that characterized the period following World War II. Becoming Balkan or Middle Eastern peasants, garbed in colorful costumes, answered their search for experiences that would give meaning to their lives. This meant that large numbers of talented college and university students, as well as members of the international recreational folk dance movement, were eager to devote the many hours of rehearsal required to perform at a professional level the Balkan and Middle Eastern dance genres they had recently discovered (Shay 2008a, 2008c). These ensembles, many of which lasted for decades, created new repertoires and often toured widely. During this period, following the strategies of the national companies, choreographers like myself produced large-scale productions, often featuring dozens of dancers accompanied by live orchestras. Simple folk dances were combined into suites, the time frames of the dances were compressed, and improvised dancing was synchronized and formed into organized choreographies. In the 1990s, these large companies either closed or faded into smaller ensembles because the social basis that permitted the formation of these large ensembles that characterized the 1960s and 1970s disappeared. Americans and Europeans became attracted to disco and other dance genres, and the recreational folk dance movement contracted. In the Iranian diaspora, however, many smaller dance companies continued to grow and proliferate. These companies have become an important vehicle for those in the

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  637

FIGURE  28.4 “Dasmali” Azerbaijani dance. Choreographed by Anthony Shay. Photo by Darren Young, Los Angeles, 1980. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.

diaspora to create representational fields for their identity, particularly since dance is banned in Iran—and this provides an added urgency for young Iranian Americans to perform. In contrast to the American concern for authenticity, many Iranian choreographers and dancers—especially those who came after the Revolution—felt that because they were of the heritage, they already knew enough to create works based on their varied knowledge. As one informant told me, “I dance Persian dance perfectly because it’s in my blood” (quoted in Shay 1999: 20). These dance companies were overwhelmingly smaller than those of their American counterparts. In addition, the Iranians—especially those like Abdollah Nazemi, who had directed and choreographed work in Iran—found an entirely new environment in the U.S. diaspora community. First, Iranians of the diaspora overwhelmingly sought entertainment rather than art. They wanted dancers to entertain at weddings and parties. The entire popular music industry of Iran moved to the Los Angeles area and quickly began to make videos in which dance became an important background element. Since most Iranians were reluctant to perform publicly, they found American dancers who could be trained by the few Iranians who eagerly sought work in this new environment. Communications scholar Hamid Naficy described the result of using American dancers:

638  Anthony Shay Recent sexist videos by male Iranian singers feature white leggy dark-haired Anglo female dancers who try to pass as Iranian, using their physical similarity to Iranian women as well as imitations of the Iranian dancing style. If the former qualities favor their inscription as Iranian women, the inexactness and exaggeration of their imitations give away their “inauthenticity.” (Naficy 1993: 180)

As in Iran, the dancers and choreographers, both Iranian and non-Iranian, divided into two separate spheres: the artists who appeared in theaters and concert settings, and the entertainers, in the manner of Mohammad Khordadian, who carried on the motreb tradition of southern Tehran by appearing in weddings, cabarets, and videos. The former, like the AVAZ International Dance Theater, are generally sought to represent the Iranian community in formal settings, particularly to the outside world, whereas the latter provide sources of entertainment within the community. More recently, Iranian student groups have formed across the United States on college and university campuses, and these groups eagerly post their work on YouTube.

The New Vision In the 1990s, non-Iranians and some Iranians alike continued to follow the state folk dance model, aided by the availability of video recordings of former Iranian state-supported dance ensembles, whose choreographies they often copied. Several Iranians of the diaspora who began to encounter new dance genres, such as jazz and modern dance, experimented with fusion and hybrid forms of their own creation. Many of them turned to historical, spiritual, and poetic sources, and the work they produced varied widely. Since the works of the mystic poet Jallal-ad-Din Rumi have become popular in the West, Sufism serves as a source of inspiration for several choreographers like Jamal, the artistic director of the AVAZ International Dance Theater; Nima Kiann, artistic director of the Ballets Persans; and soloists Banafsheh Sayyad, Shahrokh Meshkinghalam, and Sashar Zarif. In this final section, I analyze the work of Jamal, since I am most familiar with his choreographic output. After having choreographed a large repertoire of regional folk dances and solo improvised dance, he declared: I do not want to carry any more baskets and scarves on the stage. I want to create work that is more contemporary. I am an artist of the twenty-first century and I do not wish to be depicted as a primitive man at the dawn of time wearing a robe and beating on a frame drum. (Interview, Los Angeles, June 14, 2004)

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  639

FIGURE  28.5  Guran, choreographed by Jamal. Photo by Sallie D’Ette Mackie, Luckman Auditorium, California State University Los Angeles,  2003. Courtesy of the AVAZ International Dance Theatre.

He began to add new and different works to the group’s repertoire. His first work to constitute a departure was a choreography of Shateri in 1994, an earthy solo improvised dance traditionally performed by working-class men in South Tehran. Jamal, for the first time, refashioned the dance for a large group, mostly female, performing in unison. The Iranians of the diaspora loved this piece, and it has been widely emulated by college and university student groups. (See Web Figure 28.3 for a photograph of Shateri choreographed by Jamal  .) The next year, he created Soug, an impressionistic piece based on the unusual practice found in some regions of the Iranian province of Luristan in which people dance at funerals. He later enlarged this piece as an outdoor work to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001. This time, dozens of performers from several Los Angeles dance companies participated; the performance was staged in an open air plaza and drew hundreds of onlookers. Other dance companies around the United States performed the work precisely at noon on September 11, 2012, a year after the horrific terrorist attack on the Trade Towers of New York City Next, he created Charkh (Turning), inspired by the spiritual character of Sufism and the universal message of Rumi’s inspirational work. However, he chose to avoid creating

640  Anthony Shay orientalist images by avoiding a direct recreation of Sufi ceremonies, using only the turning technique found in the Mevlevi spiritual gatherings as the basis of the piece. In 2004, Jamal created a full-evening, narrative work based on a scene from the Shahnameh, the epic history of Persia. However, instead of the usual telling of the tale from the royal viewpoint, Jamal chose to tell the story from the viewpoint of the animals, especially the gur (wild ass), who were the favorite prey of Bahram-e Gur, a Sasanian prince famous for his hunting prowess. The piece, Guran, caused a sensation in the arts community, with the Los Angeles Times dance critic Lewis Segal calling it “one of the most distinctive achievements of the Southern California dance community” (Segal 2005: E3). (See Figure 28.5 and Web Figures 28.4 and 28.5 for photographs of Guran choreographed by Jamal  .)

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate my concept of the parallel traditions that characterize the many and varied performances of revival Iranian dance, both in Iran and in the diaspora. The creation of large dance companies, both in Iran and abroad, characterized by large, spectacular choreographies and costume displays based on a dance tradition created in the 1930s and continuing into the twenty-first century, reflect Guss’s notion of “cultural objectification.” The Iranian government’s use of these dance companies to foster a positive Iranian identity among its citizens underscores Desmond’s observation that dance is “constitutive of identity.” The content of many of these performances brings to life the fantasy images that Said utilized in his idea of orientalism. The concept of “choreophobia” that I developed around Iranian attitudes toward dance generally clashed with the Iranian government’s attempts to utilize orientalist choreographic works to create a positive and romantic image of the Iranian state that paradoxically created a space of resistance to the regime. Thus, dance, in less than a century, has moved from solo performances of socially disreputable public performers, tribal celebrations, or sexually segregated private performances, to become a multilayered phenomenon that engages Iranians and non-Iranians alike. The use of dance in Iran constituted a governmental attempt to build pan-Iranian national identity at home and to use it as a vehicle for displaying Iranian culture through performing folk dance companies. In the Iranian diaspora, dance began as a means of displaying Iranian identity on American university campus events and festivals, and, more recently, it has constituted a vehicle for the Iranian community to display itself in holiday attire. Revival dance has grown increasingly complex on many levels—as art, as representation, and as celebration. Iranians of the diaspora increasingly attend dance concerts and send their children to dance classes as a way of affirming their Iranian identity. Thus, after an initial

Reviving the Reluctant Art of Iranian Dance  641

reluctance to use dance as a field of representation for Iranian identity, Iranians of the diaspora increasingly turn to dance in a variety of formats to create positive images of Iranian national identity. Both in Iran, where dance constitutes a vehicle for resistance, and in the diaspora, dance has increasingly become the sought after, not the reluctant art.

Note 1. For video examples, search on www.youtube.com with the keywords “dance” and “Iran” (or “Azerbaijan”) followed by the name of a region or ethnocultural group (e.g., Gilan, Mazanderan, Zabol, Kurdish).

References Ameri, Azardokht. 2003. “Raqs-e amiyaneh-ye shahri va raqs-e mowsum be klasik-e Irani: barresi-ye tatbiqi dar howze-ye Tehran.” Mahoor Music Quarterly 2 (Summer): 51–74. Beiza’i, Bahram. 1965. Namayesh dar Iran. Tehran: Kaivan Press. Buckland, Theresa J. 1999. Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography. New York: St. Martins Press. Décoret-Ahiha, Anne. 2004. Les danses exotiques en France: 1880-1940. Pantin, France: Centre national de la danse. Desmond, Jane C. 1997. “Introduction.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. De Warren, Robert and Peter Williams. 1973. “Discovery in Persia.” Dance and Dancers. January, 23: 28–32. Diba, Layla S., and Maryam Ekhtiar. 1998. Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925. New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art. ‘Enjavi-Shirazi, M. A. 1972. Bazi-ha-ye namayeshi. Tehran: Amir Kabir. Falk, S. J. 1972. Qajar Painting. London: Sotheby. Fatemi, Sasan. 2005. “La Musique Legere Urbaine dans La Culture Iranienne: Reflexions sur les notions de classique et populaire.” Ph.D. dissertation, Universite Paris X–Nanterre, Paris. Georges, Robert A., and Michael Jones. 1995. Folkloristics: An Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gore, Georgiana, and Maria Koutsouba. 1992. “‘Airport Art’ in a Sociopolitical Perspective: The Case of the Greek Dance Groups of Plaka.” Proceedings. 17th Symposium of the Study Group on Ethnochoreology. Nafplion, Greece, July 2–10: 29–34. Guss, David M. 2000. The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hamada, Geoffrey Mark. 1978. “Dance and Islam: The Bojnurdi Kurds of Northeastern Iran.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles. Handler, Richard. 1988. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hasanov, Kamal. 1988. Azarbaijan Gadim Folklor Ragslari. Baku: Ishig.

642  Anthony Shay Hill, Derek, and Oleg Grabar. 1964. Islamic Architecture and Decoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Bruce. 1993. “The Folksong Revival.” In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 73–83. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kiann, Nima. 2000. “Persian Dance and its Forgotten History.” http://artira.com/nimakiann/ history/history.htm, accessed July 28, 2012. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1991. “Objects of Ethnography.” In Exhibiting Cultures:  The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 386–443. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1994. “On Difference.” Journal of American Folklore 107 (424): 235–238. Lawler, Lillian. 1964. Dance in Ancient Greece. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Mahdavi, Pardis. 2009. Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Meftahi, Ida. 2007. “Re-thinking the History of Dance in the 20th Century Iran: Nationalizing Dance to Exhibit Iranian Identity.” Proceedings. Society of Dance History Scholars International Conference, 149–152. Naficy, Hamid. 1993. The Making of Exile Cultures:  Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Najafi, Najmeh. 1953. Persia is My Heart. New York: Harper. Necipoglu, Gülru. 1995. The Topkapi Scroll—Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Pope, Arthur Upham, ed 1964–1965a. “Introduction.” In A Survey of Persian Art, vol. 1, edited by Arthur Upham Pope et al., 1–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pope, Arthur Upham. 1964–1965b. “Calligraphy: an Outline History.” In A Survey of Persian Art, vol. 4, edited by Arthur Upham Pope et al., 1707–1742. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramazani, Nesta. 2002. The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale. Syracuse, NY:  Syracuse University Press. Rezvani, Medjid. 1962. Le theatre et la danse en Iran. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. 1993. Transforming Tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Segal, Lewis. 2005. “AVAZ Troupe Shows its Stripes with Revised ‘Guran.’ Los Angeles Times. April 19: E3. Shay, Anthony. 1995a. “Dance and Non-Dance: Patterned Movement in Iran and Islam.” Iranian Studies 28 (1–2): 61–78. Shay, Anthony. 1995b. “Bazi-ha-ye namayeshi:  Iranian Women’s Theatrical Plays.” Dance Research Journal 27 (2): 16–24. Shay, Anthony. 1997. “In Search of Traces: Linkages of Dance and Visual and Performative Expression in the Iranian World.” Visual Anthropology 10: 335–360. Shay, Anthony. 1999. Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Shay, Anthony. 2002a. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

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Shay, Anthony. 2002b. “Dance in Iran.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 6: The Middle East, edited by Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus, and Dwight Reynolds, 875– 879. New York: Routledge. Shay, Anthony. 2006. Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity, and Festival in the United States and Canada. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shay, Anthony. 2008a. Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shay, Anthony. 2008b. “Dance and Human Rights in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.” In Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice:  Dignity in Motion, edited by Naomi Jackson and Toni Shapiro-Phim, 67–85. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Shay, Anthony. 2008c. “Introduction.” In Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching, edited by Anthony Shay, 12–33. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shay, Anthony, and Barbara Sellers-Young. 2005. Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Al-Saltana, Taj. 1993. Crowning Anguish:  Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity, edited with Introduction & Notes by Abbas Amanat, translated by Anna Vanzan, and Ali Neshati. Washington, DC: Mage. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1992. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 220– 240. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Chapter 29

M usical Rem e mbra nc e , E x ile, and th e Re ma ki ng of Sou th Af ri c a n Ja z z ( 1960–197 9 ) Carol ANN Muller

For me this conscious kind of South Africanism came in exile. It was caused by homesickness and a certain disenchantment with [Europe which] from South Africa had seemed a magic and distant world—we realized we had our own movement and began insisting on our roots. —Chris McGregor cited in McGregor (1995: 104)

Diagnosed with a terminal illness, literary critic and political exile Edward Said decided to write his life story, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). A work of memory, Out of Place is “a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world,” a personal story written against the backdrop of decades of transformative world events (1935–1962):  World War II, the loss of Palestine and the formation of the State of Israel, political changes in Egypt, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Oslo peace process (1999: Preface). It is also a story forged out of the uncertainties of incessant movement and is integrally tied to the politics of the Middle East. Although his parents were Coptic Christians living in Cairo, Egypt, they traveled to Jerusalem for Said’s birth in 1935. At the time, Jerusalem was located in Palestine, and the Said family moved regularly between Cairo and Jerusalem for much of Edward Said’s childhood. There are several striking elements in this memoir: first is the formative and recurring presence in Edward Said’s book of his first twenty-seven years in shaping the rest of his life spent in exile. Second, through mostly political circumstances, almost all of his family and certainly most of the places in his story no longer exist. Third, Out of Place is essentially the revival of a forgotten world through the act of writing, and it is

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  645 motivated by the shadow of impending death, a kind of final moment of loss. Fourth, Said comments on the challenge of remembering and translating particular experiences in a context of bilingualism: from an early age he spoke both Arabic and English, but in writing at the end of his life, he recognized the gaps incurred by translating experience from one language to the other. Fifth, we have to consider why Said felt the need to write this book, what it was in his new contexts he thought needed explanation and instantiation. Finally, Said remarks in the early part of the story on the instability of place and geography and on the burden of his “unsettled sense of [inhabiting] many identities” that characterized a lifetime of being and feeling “out of place” (1999: xii). Each of these elements in Said’s Out of Place resonates with the stories of musicians who migrated out of South Africa, ending up in cultural and political exile in Europe and the United States from the early 1960s through the late 1970s. First, the longer musicians stayed in Europe and were unable to return home, the stronger the force of music from their early lives became in the music made in exile. Second, the political power of the apartheid regime in South Africa increasingly destroyed communities and intimidated groups in South Africa, rendering the country less and less familiar to musicians abroad. Music from home inserted into music made abroad was one strategy for not forgetting the past. Third, in the context of increasing loss at home, musicians in Europe began to search for a way to recreate the sounds of home in a medium, genre, and context that would be comprehensible to new audiences—for Said it was a book, for South Africans it was in collaboratively constituted live and recorded performances. Fourth, Said’s struggles with translating personal experience from Arabic to English resonate with the challenge to South African musicians using the generic possibilities offered by the language of American derived jazz as a specifically South African narrative strategy. Fifth, there is the issue of audience—Europeans and often at the time, African American jazz musicians didn’t always believe that jazz could come from “Africa” and knew very little about South African jazz. In other words, the lack of recognition forced South African musicians to insert the sounds of home they remembered hearing earlier in their lives, into the very fabric of their music-making in exile. In some senses this authenticated their rights to participate in the world of European and American jazz. Finally, the adoption of American-born jazz to South African musical ends in the 1950s in South Africa and its expansion as a musical language by South Africans in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s speak of the possibilities of identity and identifying. This was clearly an experimental and uncertain moment in South African political and musical history, and Europe in particular constituted a place for exploring the multiplicity of possible identities forged through the sounds of home in jazz. While conventional thinking about musical revival presumes a coherence, rootedness, and singularity of identity, being out of place opened up musical possibilities (expressed in the ideas of “free” jazz) while incorporating more and more of the sounds of a lost home. This doubleness is implicit in Said’s notion of being “out of place:” it engenders a certain ambiguity depending on which word is accented in the phrase. If one lays emphasis on the word “place,” a measure of comfort is suggested: Here is a repertory or style that comes out of a particular place; it is grounded in its site of origin. If, however, we

646   Carol ANN Muller emphasize the “outness” of the person/thing from a place, we are introduced to a certain lack of fit, and, in its extreme manifestation, to the condition of exodus, diaspora, and even exile. Such a condition pushed musicians first to explore the sounds of “freedom” and then to restore the sounds of home away from home into the more open musical textures. And, although it is Said’s overwhelming sense of the condition of exile in the latter part of his life that dominates his remembrance, he writes that what surprises him in recalling his early life is the acute and detailed memory he has of childhood places and people. In contrast, the South African invocation of the sounds of home is less particular—it creates instead what Diane Taylor (2003) calls “scenarios”—the sounds as produced by the memories of several musicians looking for musical utterances that can be jointly produced in the present, and not the exact replication of sounds individually recalled from a range of places back home in the past. They were, after all, not writing in isolation as was Edward Said, but creating music as a collaborative and collective enterprise. The most prominent South African jazz ensembles that left South Africa were the Dollar Brand Trio and Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes; Bea Benjamin (known as Sathima Bea Benjamin from the 1970s) left South Africa with Dollar Brand (known as Abdullah Ibrahim from late 1960s) but would lead her own ensembles starting in the 1980s.1 These musicians initially departed for Europe: Dollar and Bea, in February 1962, were followed by Johnny Gertze and Makhaya Ntshoko, who filled out the Dollar Brand Trio in 1963 in Switzerland; in 1964, the Blue Notes left from Johannesburg by train traveling to Maputo (formerly Lourenco Marques), Mozambique, where they boarded an airplane for Paris. Like the Dollar Brand Trio the year before, the Blue Notes had an invitation to perform at the Antibes Jazz Festival. The invitation promised the opportunity to expand musical horizons and extend musical networks in Europe and perhaps even the United States, just as opportunities to perform were becoming harder to come by in South Africa. They would soon discover that the transnational world of jazz performance was a difficult, competitive, and at times unwelcoming one. After Antibes, the Blue Notes ended up in Zurich, Switzerland, living in the basement of an international student house under the care of Dollar and Bea. This small community of musicians, initially leaving in search of professional opportunity, ultimately found themselves possessed by an inconsolable longing to return home at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to do so, largely because of the growing repression of the South African apartheid regime toward people of color. Each of these musicians spent his or her life making music in a state of feeling and being “out of place.” Inserting music from their past into the live music making in Europe and the United States was a common strategy for these musicians as a way to restore a feeling of “home” in the music, as a way to educate their audiences about where they had come from, and to authenticate their membership in a global jazz community. In this chapter, I examine music created “out of place” and in the context of the South African exodus/exile to Europe and the United States by the musicians from these two ensembles from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s as a particular kind of musical revival and remembrance. In the first section, I discuss the transformation of South African jazz in the music produced by the South Africans just mentioned, and I suggest three distinct phases in this process, all illustrated with specific musical discussion. Before leaving South Africa, all these musicians were experimenting with recordings of

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  647 American jazz, particularly the works of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, on one hand, but also aware of the need to develop individual voices as jazz musicians on the other. When they left South Africa in the early 1960s, all were exposed to the “free jazz” movement in Europe and were able to meet several of its key African American exponents living in Europe at the time. These included Albert and Don Ayler, Don Cherry, and Cecil Taylor. This musical freedom of free jazz clearly resonated with the South African desire for political and personal freedom from the apartheid regime, and both Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes and the Dollar Brand Trio harnessed the expressive possibilities of the genre to their own purposes. This was a period in which “free jazz” provided the vehicle to move from the hardbop of their South African music making to a more distinctively South African big band sound in the late 1960s. By this time, Dollar Brand had converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim, and he was no longer performing with the Dollar Brand Trio. He began to experiment with a more transnational community of musicians, including Blue Notes bass player Johnny Dyani, to create a stronger feeling of “home” in his music. From the late 1960s and through the 1970s, Brand/Ibrahim and singer Sathima Bea Benjamin2 began to compose music more directly tied to the space of a new kind of African diasporic consciousness. Most of the musicians from McGregor’s original Blue Notes big band had dispersed throughout Europe and South America, and McGregor himself formed a new band, The Brotherhood of Breath, partnering with several other South African and British free players. In 1975, however, Blue Notes saxophonist Mongezi Feza died unexpectedly. The remaining Blue Notes musicians gathered together to mourn his death and memorialize his life and their journey with him in a spontaneous recording sessions lasting close to four hours, a process discussed later. In the second part of the chapter, I locate the South African story of music making in exile as a particular kind of musical revival, and I begin with a cursory overview of the elements of musical revival as outlined by Tamara Livingston (1999). Although, in many ways, the use of South African music in the context of jazz performance and composition resonates with Livingston’s model, I suggest that the condition of exodus/exile produces a particular set of challenges to this paradigm that may resonate in similarly constituted communities elsewhere in the world. In response to these challenges and striving for a more inclusive paradigm, I use Diana Taylor’s ideas about archive and repertory in the performance of cultural memory, and specifically her notion of scenario, to address the more complex social fabric underpinning musical revival that the South African story requires.

South African Jazz Out of Place: At Home and Abroad It felt like both the best and the worst of times in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. On one hand, it was the worst of times. The Afrikaner Nationalist government had come to power in 1948, and they spent the 1950s putting into place the key

648   Carol ANN Muller legislation that created the system of “separate development” or apartheid. In the 1960s, the decade of what came to be known as Grand Apartheid, they enforced these laws using government-controlled radio transmission, the police, and security forces to subdue all forms of resistance to the regime. All urban areas were reserved for “white” South Africans; everyone else was either moved to their own “group area” or exiled in what the regime called “independent homelands” or Bantustans. Black South Africans were only permitted in white urban areas if they were employed there full-time. If they were not so employed, they could visit urban areas for no longer than seventy-two hours. A key part of the post-Sharpeville legislation was the 1963 Entertainment and Censorship law that created racial separation in all entertainment venues and heavy censorship of books, films, and theater performances; this had a devastating impact on inter-racial jazz venues. Even more disturbing were the laws against “terrorism.” The 1967 Terrorism Act No. 83 legalized indefinite detention without trial, without access to a lawyer or any person who was not a magistrate assigned to the prisoner. A “terrorist” was basically anyone thought to have committed any kind of crime. A black person coming into town without the correct documentation could constitute such a crime. In the same period, the Treason Trials sent African National Congress (ANC) leaders like Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and Walter Sisulu to Robben Island prison with life sentences for attempting to overthrow the government, and the regime banned all liberation organizations, including the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress, and the South African Communist Party. In response, the ANC Youth League constituted Umkhonto we Sizwe, its armed wing, which ignited its first bomb in December 1961. It was clear that anything—such as jazz—that enabled South Africans to mix across the Color Bar would become unsustainable, making the decision to leave the country or give up performing inevitable for many musicians. Conversely, these were exciting years for the growth of an international and interracial community of progressive jazz musicians and audiences, initially in Johannesburg, but increasingly in several venues in the city of Cape Town, particularly, although not exclusively, focused around the music made by the Jazz Epistles and Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes. (For background material and examples of South African jazz, see the list of links and bibliography on the Companion Website. ) Although the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg hosted jazz performances on occasion, there were no formal music programs for jazz studies until the early 1980s. Chris McGregor studied at the School of Music at the University of Cape Town in the early 1960s, although his training was in conventional European classical music, its history, performance, and theory. A person classified by the apartheid regime as “Cape Coloured,” Dollar Brand was refused entry to UCT. For the majority of jazz and dance band musicians, wartime entertainment corps experience, dance band performances, imported recordings, and radio transmission from South Africa and neighboring Mozambique comprised the main sources of knowledge transmission in jazz and popular music performance. South Africans were passionate listeners and very precise imitators. Musicians listened closely to jazz recordings imported from the United States, mostly in groups in public library Jazz Appreciation clubs, at each other’s homes, and in after-hours venues. Many of these musicians read a

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  649 wide range of literature by and about African Americans, and some watched films about the black experience in America. Bea Benjamin, for example, recalls the impact that reading Billie Holiday’s autobiography had on her as a woman of color and a singer.3 Pianist Henry February remembers watching a film about the tragic life of Charlie “Bird” Parker, wishing it had more music and less tragedy. In addition to a range of dance bands and other more commercially viable groups (often with a singer), the two most significant progressive jazz bands to form in the late 1950s were the Jazz Epistles and the Blue Notes. The former included Dollar Brand on piano, Hugh Masekela on trumpet, legendary alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, and Jonas Gwangwa on trombone. Although they did some recording in South Africa, the Jazz Epistles didn’t last more than about six months—mostly because the personnel left to travel abroad—Masekela and Gwangwa to the Manhattan School of Music and Moeketsi to perform abroad with King Kong. Dollar Brand took a little longer to get a gig together in Europe. The Blue Notes, a name innocuous enough to deflect any official awareness of the interracial nature of the group, were led by white South African composer, arranger, and pianist Chris McGregor and included a range of black and so-called “Coloured” South African musicians before the group made plans to leave the country. Those of the Blue Notes who left in 1964 included McGregor, alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, trumpet player Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani, drummer Louis Moholo Moholo, and tenor saxophonist Nick Moyake. These musicians spoke a variety of languages and came from several different communities in the Eastern and Western Cape. Dollar Brand was born in the “Coloured” township of Kensington in Cape Town and grew up in the context of African Methodist Episcopal church music transmitted by African American missionaries from Philadelphia, dance bands, carnival music, and some piano lessons. In his early twenties, he spent a year woodshedding his compositional and performance skills in a garage created by a friend. Of St. Helenian and Filipino descent, Bea Benjamin’s story has been told extensively elsewhere (Muller and Benjamin 2011; Rasmussen 2000). Suffice to say she grew up listening closely to popular songs on radio, read literature by and about African Americans generally and musicians specifically, and fell in love with the sounds of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Less is known about the early stories of Makaya Ntshoko and Johnny Gertze. Chris McGregor grew up in the rural parts of the Eastern Cape/Transkei on a mission station, where he heard much traditional and religious music from that region, and he listened to jazz records at night while studying the European classical tradition. Johnny Dyani was born in Duncan Village near East London, and Mongezi Feza grew up around Queenstown in the Eastern Cape; Louis Moholo was born in Cape Town, Dudu Pukwana in Port Elizabeth, and Nikele Moyake was also from the Cape. Each of these musicians would draw on musical memories of their lives in South Africa before they left, using these memories to creatively shape their sounds in Europe and the United States. In February 1962, after finding the country increasingly limited in what it offered for emerging professional musicians, Brand and singer Bea Benjamin left South Africa for Europe. Encouraged by Swiss graphic designer, jazz record collector, and

650   Carol ANN Muller performance organizer Paul Meyer, who lived in Cape Town in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these two musicians traveled to Switzerland. They arrived in Zurich and began looking for work. After playing popular music in Zurich’s cafes and coffee bars, with Meyer’s help, they secured some work at the Club Africana, remembered as a lively hub of jazz performance in the 1960s. In February 1963, while the Trio was at the Africana, Benjamin persuaded Duke Ellington, who was performing in the neighborhood, to come and listen to the Trio. As a result, they all recorded with Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Paris a week later. Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, released in Europe and the United States, would launch Brand’s international career although this was not the case for his singing partner, Bea Benjamin.4 Ellington’s support of and friendship with Brand and Benjamin would open doors for them in the international jazz world in ways that were not available to McGregor and the Blue Notes musicians, which perhaps explains the distinct musical paths of the two groups in this period. Several significant national jazz events were held in South Africa after Benjamin and Brand left, including performances by McGregor-led groups at the second and third Castle Lager Jazz Festivals in 1962 and 1963, respectively; recordings were made and have been reissued of some of these performances. By late 1963, however, it was clear that it was time for what was becoming the septet known as the Blue Notes to look farther afield. Travel in South Africa’s townships was becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous, and inter-racial groups like the Blue Notes were ultimately not permitted to perform together in the cities or be broadcast on the racially segregated South African Broadcast Corporation’s stations. Leaving the country was, nevertheless, a major undertaking because most of the musicians did not have passports, and the apartheid government made it almost impossible for a black South African to acquire one. Chris McGregor’s partner, Maxine, made it all happen after an invitation to the Antibes Festival in 1964. Two weeks before the Antibes Festival, the Blue Notes Septet and Maxine McGregor arrived in Paris, finally free of the burdens of the apartheid regime.

In Europe and the United States I was away from South Africa, away from the chains. I just wanted to be free, totally free, even in music. Free to shake away all the slavery, anything to do with slavery, being boxed into places—one, two, three, four—and being told you must come in after four. . .. Free is it man, it’s so beautiful. The word “free” makes sense to me. . .. Let my people go. Let my people go! And that’s interlinking with politics: they embrace each other. It’s a cry from the inside, no inhibitions. (McGregor 1995: 216)

The sense of freedom from apartheid bondage and the thrill at seeing American musicians perform live, however, was soon replaced by new kinds of alienation and despair.

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  651 Despite high hopes that they would make the necessary connections to the European or American jazz scene at Antibes, the Blue Notes found themselves stranded on the beach at the end of the event. They called Brand and Benjamin, who arranged for the group to stay in the basement of their student house in Zurich. The Blue Notes arrived and did some playing together with Brand and Benjamin in Zurich and Geneva, but, by 1965, with an invitation to play at Ronnie Scott’s club for two weeks, the group moved to London, with the Dollar Brand Trio and Benjamin following soon after. These South African musicians spent much of the 1960s experimenting with musical possibilities in several important venues, including the Club Africana in Zurich, where Ellington heard Benjamin and the Dollar Brand Trio in 1963, an encounter that resulted in a recording session in Paris a week later for the Trio and Benjamin (no parallel support was accorded the Blue Notes in 1964, other than from Brand and Benjamin); and in London at the Transcription Center5 headed by Dennis Duerden, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded center for recently arrived African musicians, poets, and writers, established in February 1962 as a Cold War bulwark against Africans becoming communists. Brand was briefly appointed musical director there, and Maxine McGregor actually worked for the center for a few years as a writer. Another venue was Ronnie Scott’s Old Place, also in London, where, for a short time, less established musicians were provided a space to experiment musically after Scott opened a newer space for more conventional performances. In addition, the Café Montmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark, was an extraordinary venue for meeting American musicians in the free jazz movement; these included tenor saxophonists Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, and Ben Webster; pianist Kenny Drew and bassist Oscar Pettiford; pianist Cecil Taylor; tenor saxophonists Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp; and trumpeter Don Cherry. These musicians and their thinking proved key in shaping a greater sense of musical freedom for Dollar Brand, but perhaps even more importantly for Chris McGregor and the Blue Note musicians. Throughout this period, South Africans moved between a variety of venues and studios across Europe, the United States, South Africa, and even Argentina. And they began to explore the collective remembering of the sounds of each other’s home—rural, and urban, European, Xhosa, mixed, male and female. The Blue Notes didn’t last long as a group in London initially because they had to be resident in the country for a full year before they could become members of the Musicians’ Union, making securing gigs and financial support almost impossible for the whole group,6 and also because individual musicians in the ensemble were invited to perform with other musicians, both in the United Kingdom and Europe at large. Within a year of leaving South Africa, tenor saxophonist Nick Moyake had returned to his home country, and he died there shortly afterward. Once the Blue Notes split up, Chris and Maxine McGregor moved out of London and the country, and, by the end of the 1960s, they had purchased a dilapidated old water mill in rural France, which they restored and where Maxine still lives. In 1966, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo joined American Steve Lacy and Argentinian Gato Barbieri on a disastrous tour to Barbieri’s home country, Argentina. Left destitute, the two South

652   Carol ANN Muller Africans returned to the United Kingdom after a year in Argentina when a friend found the money for their return fares. While the McGregors made London their base for much of the decade until they moved to France and the other Blue Notes dispersed around Europe, Dollar Brand and Bea Benjamin were rarely in any place for longer than a few months. In the 1960s, they traveled extensively around Europe; attended the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965 with Ellington; went to New York, where Brand had a Rockefeller grant to study arranging with Hal Overton at Julliard; traveled back to South Africa in 1968; and regularly moved between southern Africa, Europe, and the United States through about 1975. Their son Tsakwe was born in Swaziland in 1970, and Brand/Ibrahim also recorded several tracks with South African musicians in the early 1970s, including the famous and controversial tune “Mannenberg” with Basil “Mannenberg” Coetzee and others. In early 1977, Dollar (now Abdullah Ibrahim), Bea (now Sathima Bea Benjamin), their son Tsakwe, and their baby daughter Tsidi moved permanently to New York City, in a kind of “strategic retreat” until South Africa was liberated.

Musical Diaspora, Transformation, and Remembrance With Johnny Dyani I touched the Xhosa tradition, and it’s massive what you can do with it. We experienced it and expanded on it and it opened a freedom for us. It allows you space. (Abdullah Ibrahim to Rasmussen 2003: 79) I have to keep a tradition, you know, in order to recognize myself, because when I was born I was born in a tradition. I was taught tradition, how to behave, how to move, how to eat, how to survive. That’s part of the tradition, so the music I’ve heard, I have to keep it with me wherever I’m going . . . that’s what’s given me my life, my being. (Johnny Dyani to Ib Skovgaard, in Rasmussen 2003: 234)

While in the late 1950s there was a close connection between music produced by African American bebop-oriented musicians and the sounds of the South African ensembles, the Blue Notes and Dollar Brand’s ensemble and solo performances gradually transformed through their experimentation with ideas of freedom, spontaneity, and the use of a wide range of South African traditional music well into the mid-1970s. Initially, while still in South Africa, diasporic ties were generated from the outside with an Afro-modern sensibility in the language of American jazz—with the arrival of literature, recordings, films, sheet music, and radio broadcasts by and about African American experiences. In the postwar era, Dollar Brand, Dudu Pukwana, Louis Moholo, Bea Benjamin, and Chris McGregor heard American popular music and jazz and began to form their own musical groups and develop an individual musical style modeled on the bebop and big band music created by Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and others, all heard on records available in South Africa.

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  653 A small international community of passionate jazz consumers supported these performances, and there was some very limited opportunity for the two groups to record. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dollar Brand organized several recording sessions in Johannesburg with musicians from both Cape town and Johannesburg, most notably with his short-lived group the Jazz Epistles. The earliest such recordings with the Jazz Epistles, Verse 1 (1958) and Jazz in Africa Volume One (1959 and reissued on CD in 1992), incorporate American pianist John Mehegan and three additional South Africans.7 They are bebop in style and, although the compositions are predominantly local, the music would probably have been identified as “American.”8 This was before Brand traveled abroad and began to think in new ways about his South African musical past. The Blue Notes were recorded live at two jazz festivals as well: McGregor’s septet appears on the Cold Castle National Jazz Festival (1962, Gallo), and, in 1963, he produced a full recording of his own band, Chris McGregor and the Castle Lager Big Band, on an LP titled Jazz: The African Sound (Gallo). Particularly on the latter recording, bebop origins are evident, even though the recording included local compositions created by McGregor, alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, and Dollar Brand. As such, one hears in the music of bandleaders Brand and McGregor musical ties forged with what is now often termed the “old” African diaspora—a musical and increasingly political identification with African American musicians whose history was created from the transatlantic slave trade. Apartheid was the twentieth-century parallel to slavery. I have termed this first stage of the new musical diaspora “musical surrogacy,” in which the recordings travel and work as substitutes, standing in for the musicians themselves who do not travel to South Africa but whose music creates very close feelings of familial connection for South Africans in this period. It was in this period that “South African” jazz was already defining itself in relation to a foreign source: American jazz. After leaving South Africa, the two groups began to expand their musical horizons into a more transnational realm as they met and occasionally performed with American and European free jazz musicians in Europe. In this context, the second stage of South African jazz style began to be defined more tangibly in terms of musical and political freedom, to the point at which Johnny Dyani cynically recalled that the musicians were often treated as political rather than musical representatives while abroad. Certainly, when they left South Africa, they were seeking freedom from the growing repression of apartheid legislation and practice, and bebop offered one means to such freedom and a certain assertion of black creativity and technical skills. In this context, the 1960 and 1970s might be thought of as decades of musical and political exploration of the possibilities and limits of freedom for these musicians, and it was the free jazz movement’s Don Cherry, John Tchichai, and Don and Albert Ayler, active in Europe at the time, who fostered personal relationships with the South Africans. At the same time, these musicians were self-consciously searching inside for a sound that connected them back to South Africa and the wide range of musical languages and practices recalled from their homeland—a place that just wasn’t that easy to return to. In many ways, harkening back to African American forms of diaspora, both groups generalized their longings into a space called “Africa,” which wasn’t necessarily a

654   Carol ANN Muller particular place, but rather a way of being in the world that was markedly different from what they experienced after leaving South Africa. Once they arrived in Europe, Brand and McGregor followed distinctive paths in articulating their musical styles. As such, I  discuss music made after leaving South Africa separately though both explored at length their ties to a definition of African music from the southern part of Africa. Theirs was a different kind of musical sound and remembering than that created by African Americans.

Dollar Brand/Xahuri/Abdullah Ibrahim and Bea/Sathima Bea Benjamin With the 1963 Paris recording of Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, we already begin to see an opening up of acoustical possibilities with local South African references:  a hauntingly beautiful ballad pays tribute to South Africa’s own Charlie Parker, Kippie Moeketsi; there are lively, upbeat performances in “Dollar’s Dance,” “The Stride,” and “Jumping Rope,” as well as a moderately paced interpretation of Monk’s “Brilliant Corners.” Two recordings made at Copenhagen’s Café Montmartre—Round Midnight at the Café Montmartre (1965) and Anatomy of a South African Village (1965)—plus a third from the same year Reflections (1965) were all recorded by the Dollar Brand Trio. Performed on January 30, 1965, Round Midnight and Anatomy of a South African Village present a more complicated jazz identity. These titles suggest a growing bifurcation in Brand’s musical portfolio: Round Midnight and Reflections ostensibly pay tribute to the old African diaspora, whereas Anatomy references the contemporary (South) African experience. In terms of improvisation and compositional style, however, Brand is beginning to sound far more like an independent voice in jazz. And, although Round Midnight references the music of Thelonious Monk, whom Brand admired and later met, there is also a Danish twist to the title: in the early 1960s, performing in the coveted 10 p.m. slot was an honor accorded to American musicians; playing “around midnight” in Copenhagen’s Montmartre was the lot of musicians considered less skilled—the non-American and Danish musicians. Dollar Brand had finally been elevated to the place regularly assigned to Americans and so was scheduled to perform in the early slot on January 30, 1965—until American Ben Webster arrived in town unexpectedly. To his chagrin, Brand was summarily moved to the later shift to give Webster the more prestigious time slot. Brand began playing his session sometime around midnight. In 1965, Brand and Benjamin were invited to perform with Duke Ellington’s band at the Newport Jazz Festival, after which they decided to stay in the United States and, with Ellington’s help, acquire permanent residence. Assisted by Dennis Duerden and his connections in the United States, in 1966, Dollar Brand was offered a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study composition with Julliard composer Hal Overton, which he took up for a full year. It is from this point on that we see Brand work, once again, as an individual artist, occasionally providing Bea Benjamin with some space in which to sing during his

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  655 live gigs. Here, his focus is on solo piano recordings, with occasional collaborations with other musicians. This enabled Brand to grow personally as a musician, but also provided the freedom to travel wherever and whenever work became available. The 1968 Hamba Kahle/Confluences Brand recording with Argentinian Gato Barbieri in an Italian studio speaks of a greater internationalism and inclusiveness in musical composition. Each musician presents two compositions, and they improvise on each other’s materials. The confluence or solidarity engendered between the two artists takes place in Europe but, by circumventing American musicians, it is clearly a political and musical statement about jazz and the Global South in a musical language of Afro-modernity from the North. The definitive statement of 1960s Dollar Brand, however, is the 1969 release of his recording, African Sketchbook, a project that sets the stage for a far greater focus on all things “African” in the 1970s: One thinks, for example, of the recordings African Piano (1969), Ancient Africa (1974), African Space Program (1974), African Marketplace (1979), African Sun (1994), African Suite (1999), African Magic (2002), and so forth. Much like a visual artist, Brand creates a series of piano/flute solo sketches of those pieces of South African music and culture that he remembers or wishes to bring to the attention of his listeners: from the “Air” on flute reminiscent of his great grandfather’s Scottish heritage, to his Khoisan grandmother’s lineage in “Krotoa,”9 “Slave Bell,” and “Tariq,” to the Xhosa and Chopi sounds in “Nkosi” and “Machopi,” to the senses of place and home embodied in “Tokai,” “Mamma,” “The Dream,” “The Aloe and the Wild Rose,” and “African Sun,” and all framed by the three-language greeting “Peace, Salaam, Hamba Kahle.”10 In live performance as on record, these musical paraphrases interweave into a linear exposition of a range of experiences that reconfigure the first diasporic history of slavery. “Krotoa,” “Slave Bell,” and “Tariq” tell new narratives about South Africa’s own slave past, one derived from Malaysia and Indonesian Muslim princes sent into exile in the Cape of Good Hope. While the late 1960s and 1970s proved to be rich in recording opportunity for Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim, it was his 1973 recording together with Blue Notes bass player Johnny Dyani that created a musical meeting place that most powerfully articulates the search for a specifically South African sound in jazz. In 1972, the two musicians began to perform together in Abdullah Ibrahim’s international group, Universal Silence, which included Don Cherry out of the Ornette Coleman school, Nana Vasconcelos from Brazil, Benjamin, and Dyani “to bring this broad range of genres together into some new sound. Later we added Carlos Ward who originally came from Panama, to join us,” Ibrahim told Lars Rasmussen (2003: 79). Dyani joined their “African Space Program” tour in 1973. Ibrahim recalls: There we really thought about that expansion from tradition, the full circle of experience, swing and bebop, and the African experience. . .. After that I started duo work with him. That really opened up a whole lot of stuff because we could delve into the traditional sounds . . . the idea of vocalizing the songs, like Ntsikana’s Bell. In a sense it was not only playing the music, but reaffirming history. We were

656   Carol ANN Muller actually sort of consolidating our background experience, our history. And we found that it was valid . . . not our individual experience, but our national, African experience. (Ibrahim to Rasmussen 2003: 79–80)

Two recordings came out of the African Space Program, a big band recording with the same title and Good News From Africa (1973). The six tracks of music are all South African originals:  “Ntsikana’s Bell,” “Msunduza,” “Good News,” “Adhan and Allahu Akbar,” “The Pilgrim,” and “Moniebah.” Both Ibrahim and Dyani had recently converted to Islam, but the recording itself speaks to a far greater complexity and layering of South African and individual histories. “Ntsikana’s Bell”11 is one of the oldest Xhosa-language Christian hymns, a core piece transmitted orally in many parts of the Eastern Cape province; “Good News” similarly has a religious tone to it, as does the idea of “The Pilgrim” and the Islamic call to prayer, “Adhan,” and religious invocation, “Allahu Akbar”— meaning “Allah is the greatest.” Furthermore, the overtone-rich, untrained sounds of the two male voices remind listeners of the central place of the human voice in southern African traditional ritual and performance. Good News From Africa conveys a complex, profound, and deeply moving story about contemporary forms of diaspora in the call-and-response, overlapping cries of these two exiled musicians in the non-European languages of Xhosa and Arabic.

Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes: Legacy (1964), Very Urgent (1968), In Concert (1977), and Tribute to Feza (1978)12 Recording opportunities proved to be very different for the Blue Notes than they were for Ibrahim, largely because of the latter’s chance meeting with Duke Ellington and persistent letter writing, constantly looking for work. Ibrahim wrangled with promoters and producers and built alliances with a number of key figures (including Dennis Duerden at the Transcription Center in London and others in positions of power willing to help); his friendship with Duke Ellington opened a range of doors to him in the mid 1960s. Because McGregor preferred to write for and perform with a big band rather than do solo piano performances, his performance and recording opportunities were more limited. Ibrahim clearly privileged solo piano in the 1960s, working and developing as an individual artist who occasionally collaborated with others. That said, from 1968 through the late 1980s, Chris McGregor managed to organize a handful of recording gigs that released his music (there were others in which the music remained unissued). London-based South African-initiated record label Ogun Records provided the richest archive of Blue Note performances. The 2008 Blue Notes reissue compilation includes a recording from the Blue Notes’ 1964 farewell tour in Durban, South Africa that parallels the discussion earlier; two commemorative musical tributes to Blue Notes musicians, one to trumpeter Mongezi Feza recorded in 1975 and one to

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  657 Johnny Dyani from 1986; and a celebratory recording of the group in 1978. In reflecting on the issues of diaspora and exile, I take a look at two of these, the 1968 Very Urgent recording and the commemorative recording made after trumpeter Mongezi Feza’s tragic death in London, in December 1975. They provide two contrasting statements about musical process and African diaspora in the Blue Notes performance during this period. In 1968, Chris McGregor secured the first record date abroad for the Blue Notes, and their first European album, Very Urgent, was released on Polydor records. The lineup included McGregor on piano, Dudu Pukwana on alto sax,  Mongezi Feza on pocket trumpet, ex-South African Ronnie Beer on tenor sax, Johnny Dyani on bass, and Louis Moholo on drums. There are four tracks, two with double titles, making six compositions in all. While, the first, “Marie My Dear,” uses a simple melody in a moderate tempo—a tempo not fully suited to the Blue Notes’ explosively energetic playing, the recording picks up quickly in “Travelling Somewhere,” moving into high-energy, free playing that is reminiscent of the works of Albert Ayler but with even greater rhythmic and emotional intensity. Although the horns remind one of Ayler’s playing, the rhythmic lines—McGregor on piano, played percussively, Dyani on bass, and Moholo on drums—sizzle, to put it mildly. In all remaining tracks—“Heart’s Vibrations,” “Sounds Begin Again/White Lies,” and “Don’t Stir the Beehive,” one has the clear sense that these musicians are completely in tune with each other; they listen, respond to, and put the sounds together in the moment and without inhibition. The energy of the music conveys an urgent drive. While the liner notes don’t explain “very urgent” as a title, two tunes on track three, “The Sounds Begin Again/White Lies,” musically suggest the urgent need for the international community to pay attention to South Africa’s political situation. The extreme measures of the Blue Notes’ spontaneous, deeply emotional outbursts of expressive freedom become musical analogies for the attitude or transformation of consciousness needed to break the chains of apartheid that would enable all South Africans to begin to imagine the possibilities of a more just social and political order. The “traditional” theme of “Don’t Stir the Beehive” warns the apartheid regime that if they push too hard, the effects of “stirring the beehive” will erupt. The hallmark Blue Notes “free” performances of their own compositions characterize all subsequent recordings currently available: They play originals written by band members and arranged by McGregor. There is some overlap in tunes between recording sessions, but most of the material is unique to a particular recording. All tunes have titles, composers, and arrangers individually named. The 2008 Ogun reissue that contains a two-CD musical tribute to trumpeter Mongezi “Mongs” Feza is different from the other recordings made by the Blue Notes. In December 1975, Mongezi Feza died of pneumonia. He had suffered a mental breakdown and was taken to a British hospital where he was treated for the breakdown, but not the pneumonia. Aged thirty, he was basically left to die in a hospital bed.13 The Blue Notes recording was made a few days after Feza’s funeral, when Johnny Dyani (bass, voice, bells), Dudu Pukwana (alto sax, voice), Louis Moholo (drums, percussion, vocals), and Chris McGregor (piano) walked into a rehearsal room in London and recorded for

658   Carol ANN Muller Mongs. They didn’t talk about what they would do beforehand; they just turned to their instruments and began to play. Running almost 160 minutes, one hears the outworking in four movements of a wide range of styles, emotions, and textures. In this extended musical voyage, the musicians string together a series of references to the collective memory of their South African homes and the move into free jazz these South Africans made since leaving, while lovingly paying homage to their friend and fellow musician. The tribute to Feza warrants closer scrutiny here, in much the same way as the Brand/ Ibrahim African Sketchbook and Good News From Africa recordings do, although, unlike Ibrahim’s recordings, this is an intimate moment, a conversation among friends who remember a brother in the music, where he and they come from, and they journey they have traveled together. What stands out most starkly, however, between the tribute to Feza and the other Blue Notes recordings is that there is no clearly identifiable list of compositions; the three CDs simply contain four “movements”—labeled numerically, they each run between thirty-six and forty-three minutes in length. No words are used to describe what they are doing, simply identifying numbers. All the other recordings list the tunes included, so we are able, for example, to listen comparatively between one version of “Funky Boots” and another. We are given clues about sources and origins on the other recordings: “Abalimange” “We Nduna,” and “Kudala” on the 1978 concert recording (In Concert in the Ogun 2008 reissue) are listed as “traditional” but arranged by Dyani, McGregor, Moholo, and Pukwana. This is music to honor the dead, and, like all music for African ritual, it is played collectively, without individual attribution or ownership, for this is a liminal space. This is not a recording that will define a place in jazz history for themselves, there is no ego here; rather, this is a moment to remember Mongezi and to celebrate his extraordinary contribution to the free jazz movement in 1960s and 1970s Europe. And the music does more than simply ensure safe passage in the moment of death into the cosmos, a practice reminiscent of traditional South African ways. On this recording, the musicians acoustically invoke the sounds and feelings of the Eastern Cape rural environment, not as exact repetition or authentic revival of a past musical tradition; instead, the memory of home is recast through fleeting musical references passing through the minds of musicians. One hears for example, the clanging cowbells that sound as reminders of Eastern Cape boy herders; at times, the musical texture is as open and airy as the landscape of the Eastern Cape; and then one suddenly becomes aware of repeating rhythms in the bass and drum, recurring riffs that create a momentary reminder of home and habitat. At several points in the musical tribute, Dyani simply names Mongezi Feza, repeatedly calling out his name as if refusing his death; a little later, he actually speaks to Mongezi in Xhosa as he imagines Feza’s journey to the spirit world. At times, both the bass and drum function as human voices, singing and riffing, remaking for these diasporic musicians the familiar but forgotten sound of ritual and tradition, sounds only ever heard in the music made by the Blue Notes brothers, sounds that reorient them to their roots, sounds that no one else can produce in their absence. One captures the feeling of profound loss in this music, equally for the tragic death of their comrade and friend “Mongs” Feza, as well as for the sorrow associated with

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  659 the pain of exile. In grieving alone in London, they are reminded of the wrenching absence of South African friends and family to share in the mourning, although they evoke their presence musically at the start of the recording. They compensate for the absence of collectively voiced lamentation in the ways in which bass and alto sax imitate the high-pitched ululation of grieving women in the Eastern Cape. At times, the emotions in the music are somber, uncharacteristically for the Blue Notes, controlled and pensive: there is no doubt about the depth of sorrow and despair they convey for the sudden loss of Mongezi Feza. In other moments, their sound has greater energy and exuberance, as they freely riff on 1940s marabi or 1950s kwela rhythms and groove to celebrate the joy and love they have for their friend. And then there are clear moments of the more recently developed “free” playing of the Blue Notes, a style informed both by their European exposure and by the sheer joy of playing together. In other words, we are not only hearing sounds of the past, but are, indeed, bearing witness to what else has happened in their lives since leaving South Africa. And here I suggest that what we hear musically in this moment is South African musicians assessing their position as South Africans in exile. They left the country as the Blue Notes; in the mid-1960s, Chris McGregor formed a second ensemble, the Brotherhood of Breath. This was not just a group of musicians reviving South African traditional music in a free jazz context. Rather, with McGregor in the lead, and frequently with the contribution of English and European musicians, this band of free musicians collectively breathed into being new forms of collective engagement with traces of past South African music woven into its contrapuntal textures. Only when they grasp their sense of historical and cultural connection to South Africa, collectively through memories of African musical iteration, are the musicians able to project forward into new forms of political dispensation. In 1975—a year prior to the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa and the consolidation of an international antiapartheid movement outside the country—the music of the Blue Notes was not positing a narrative of politics in the way that the history of this period would be written. What we can hear was achieved in that moment is a model of practice: musically speaking, the mode of musical engagement is participatory democracy in action. In the music, we hear traces of the past, played in a democratically constituted, participatory, and equal way. The white pianist and leader of the band, Chris McGregor, has no more aural presence on these recordings than its three black members—Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, or Dudu Pukwana. If anything, the performance hinges on the three black musicians; the pianist is often heard in a more distant position. What we hear in this mode of musical engagement is the promise of freedom, the practice of equality of voice, and a taste of things to come. This is a musical capsule in its European milieu giving birth to new South African musical, social, and political possibilities, and it does so first by looking back into the archive of past South African performance histories. In sum, I have argued in this chapter that, on one hand, Brand, who by the late 1960s had converted to Islam and renamed himself Xahuri and then Abdullah Ibrahim, created music in a singular, curatorial, Ellingtonian manner: in doing so, he revealed an

660   Carol ANN Muller untold story of South Africa’s people by invoking a contemporary African diasporic discursive sounds in his music making. Politically, the Brand/Ibrahim process resonated with South African Black Consciousness Movement Steve Biko’s ideas embodied in the phrase “I write what I want” (2002[1978]). In contrast, McGregor’s musical position privileged a participatory, democratic modus operandi and a commitment to equality of voice and collective compositional process for all members of his band. I propose that these more inclusive musical practices resonated with the thinking and writing about participatory democracy espoused by Biko’s friend South African political scientist Rick Turner (1972). These musicians were imagining new ways of being South African, both in the world at large and in a future, more democratic dispensation by restoring a process and history into their music making that was distinctly South African. These ideas were executed from their diasporic positions abroad but created in parallel with radical political ideas at home. Tragically, both Biko and Turner were assassinated in the late 1970s, their ideas deemed too extreme for the apartheid regime. Similarly, the new political dispensation came into being after most of the musicians involved in creating this new form of South African music had already died in exile. Only one member of the original Blue Notes remained to witness the realization of a democratic political dispensation in South Africa—Louis Moholo. Johnny Dyani died in 1986; Chris McGregor and, shortly after him, Dudu Pukwana both passed away in 1990. Ibrahim made his return to South Africa in the early 1990s; Benjamin took a little longer because both her children were still living in New York City. She reluctantly agreed to finally go home in 2011, with her son Tsakwe. Fortunately, the recent reissues of this group of musicians’ recorded archive bear testimony to their extraordinary vision, courage, creativity, and pride in their South African roots that were articulated musically despite despair about apartheid inside their country and their daily struggles to survive in exile abroad.

The Exodus of South Africans and Memorialization of the Sounds of Home What, then, do we learn about musical revival from the story of South African jazz in exile? I begin with a cursory overview of the elements of musical revival as outlined by Tamara Livingston (1999). Livingston defines musical revival as a social movement whose goal is to restore a musical tradition believed to be dying or already lost in the past. The movement strives to recuperate lost values using a discourse of authenticity to stand in cultural opposition to prevailing mainstream culture. She argues that these revivals are not random, that the traditional music selected depends on the feasibility of restoration, availability of sources, and the views of the revivalists themselves. Revival depends on social, political, and economic circumstances.

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  661 Livingston provides six specific ingredients of musical revivals across a range of places and communities: (a) an individual or a small group of key revivalists, always from the middle class, often but not always reviving music of other communities; (b)  the availability of informants or original sources, usually recordings rather than live performances; (c) an ideology or discourse of revival, historical truth, or authenticity, and a balance between tradition and innovation; (d) followers who constitute the revivalist community; (e) a series of revivalist activities—festivals, competitions, new recordings—for spreading the word across distances; and (f) either nonprofit and/or commercial interests involved in the marketing of revivals; often a revival will involve musicians teaching the next generation about the music of a past world. While Livingston’s model resonates with the South African practice of musical restoration, or of reviving the sounds of home driven by the torment of separation and imminent loss, I suggest that the condition of exodus/exile produces a particular set of challenges to this paradigm that may resonate in similarly constituted communities elsewhere in the world. These limits include, first, the near absence of any retrievable recorded archive of prior South African musical performance on which to form a basis for the sounds of revival and a complete reliance on human memory. Second, each individual musician brought a wide range of experiences in terms of race/ethnicity, class, gender, religion, education, language and histories—in other words, one single source for musical restoration does not exist. Instead one hears in this restoration of Africanness as a blended representation, collectively created by those with vivid memories of place and home. Third, the community of listeners was not South African, so the revived music is conveyed as an “authentic” representation of past practices because it is performed by people who come from the musical traditions, it is also recontextualized in a transnational context and articulated in a musical discourse that suits its European or American audience. In this frame, the duality of jazz as a musical language provides a nest for the individually expressed but also improvised, transnationally understood language for articulating sounds of another, related African heart and home. In other words, while there is a clear insertion of the sounds of South African music into the jazz compositions and performances of exiled musicians in Europe, the drive was a response to the European mainstream who didn’t believe that jazz could come from South Africa, and to the pressing urgency and desire to insert the full range of South Africa’s musical heritage into the historical record—to create a feeling of home for exiled musicians in the music itself and to mobilize support for the political cause in a manner that Europeans would understand. Jazz composition and performance became the vehicle of South African musical transport and solace. Clearly, however, this is not a kind of revival that produces an authenticity of similitude, of pure and untainted replication of sound. That was impossible because recordings of the music of a South African childhood simply didn’t exist. Rather, like the details of Said’s memoir, the music produced by these South Africans was pulled from individual memories of home, family, community, and neighborhood, fundamentally transformed by the contingencies of exile: on one hand, shaped by the need to communicate to new audiences, to perform alongside musicians from a range of unfamiliar places; and, on the other, extracted from

662   Carol ANN Muller both the specific and the generalized acoustical memories of people and places one hadn’t been in contact with for many years. And there were multiple sites of memory retrieval. Because of the multiplicity of sources for musical memorialization and quotation, rather than a single source, and its retrieval out of the constant flux of human memory, it is useful here to invoke the notion of “scenario” posited by performance studies scholar Diana Taylor (2003:28–30). Taylor interrogates ideas about the relationship between the archive and the repertoire to examine ways in which performance studies can become a more inclusive and useful field of global inquiry. While the archive, associated with the permanency and immutability of writing and thus of history, is in constant interaction with the repertory—the often oral, mutable, and bodily transmission of live knowledge— it is the repertoire that enacts embodied memory. Such transmission enables a kind of individual agency, a performance of knowledge accrued by having been there. And it was by means of the repertoire that South Africans carried the embodied memories and sounds of home when they exited South Africa and moved abroad. It was as embodied memory that musical and cultural knowledge was transferred across large territories. In this context, the repertoire “allow[ed] for an alternative perspective on historical processes of transnational contact and invited a remapping of [South African music history], this time by following traditions of embodied practice” (Taylor 2003: 20). In the absence of a fixed, recorded archive of prior performance, South African musicians could only revive and perform this music abroad by transferring memories of home in the act of performance. To do so, they created a series of musical scenarios suggestive of a wide range of musical representation and history: an “Anatomy of a South African Village”; “Krotoa,” the first translator for the Dutch colonist Jan Van Riebeeck; “Slave Bell,” in memory of older forms of timekeeping from the Cape of Good Hope; “Tokai” (the forest); “Khoisan,” and then more generally, “African Sketchbook,” “African Marketplace,” “African Piano,” “In My Solitude,” “Very Urgent,” “Funky Boots,” and so forth. In such recreations of musical scenarios—the reiteration not just of sound but, indeed, of entire cultural practices and epistemologies conveyed in a single musical item—these South African musicians in exile collapsed the distinction between archive and repertory. Theirs was the repertory reconstituted out of human memory that came to stand for the nation as a whole, some of which would be recorded and released for wider consumption. It was this repertory articulated in embodied performance, and then recorded, which now stands as one archive of South African jazz history for this period.

Notes 1. There is a growing body of web-based archival material pertaining to South African jazz, and the Blue Notes are no exception. See for example, http://www.mfowler.myzen.co.uk/ (accessed May 20, 2013), a website titled: The Blue Notes, The South African Jazz Exiles. There is the ongoing creation of a South African audio archive, http://www.flatinternational.org/current.php (accessed May 20, 2013) intended to present a visual record of South African recording artifacts.

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  663 2. Brand and Ibrahim left South Africa together, although Brand was still married to his first wife at the time. Prodded by Duke Ellington, Brand divorced his first wife and married Sathima in London in 1965. They were divorced and remarried in the 1970s. They later divorced a second time. 3. See Muller and Benjamin (2011). 4. She would finally find the original tapes and release an album in 1997, in New York City. Called A Morning in Paris, the recording showcases her singing accompanied on different tracks by the Dollar Brand Trio, with Billy Strayhorn or Duke Ellington on piano. 5. Run in parallel to the U.S. “Democracy Tours” of jazz and gospel musicians to places threatened by communism, the Transcription Center was “funded by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (itself a CIA front), and its official brief was to record interviews with African or Caribbean writers, artists, and intellectuals, in London and elsewhere. Recordings or transcripts of these interviews were to be made available to radio stations in Africa, the Caribbean, or anywhere else where interest in them was expressed. . . . In practice however its activities under its director, Dennis Duerden, proved to be much wider than this: branching out into the making of television films, radio plays, and music recordings, or the sponsorship of art exhibitions, concerts, stage productions, and wide-ranging discussions of many contemporary topics. It became something of an informal club for all black artists visiting London and a powerhouse for many of their activities” (Moore 2002: 167). 6. Maxine McGregor (1995) comments that while the Musicians’ Union initially granted the group refugee status so they could play a two-week gig at Ronnie Scott’s new club, this kind of concession didn’t yield much for the musicians beyond the initial two weeks of work. 7. He recorded at the core commercial studios, such as Gallo, but, according to discographer Tom Lord (1992: B739-746, cited in Rasmussen 1998: 228), he also released recordings under the labels of Soultown, Kazz, Giganti del Jazz, Europa, and Mandla, a mix of both South African and European labels. 8. There are fourteen tracks in all on this recording; five have American attribution, and the rest are South African—three each by Moeketsi and Brand, one by Masekela, and two traditional African arrangements. Masekela’s piece is titled “Dollar’s Mood” and Dollar responds with “Blues for Hughie.” Moeketsi’s “Scullery Department” references the racist treatment of black musicians in 1950s South Africa—at intermission, after they had entertained the white clientele, they were sent to the kitchen or “scullery” to eat. On one occasion, Brand and Moeketsi complained to the restaurant owner, who then organized a table for them in the main dining room to eat. This was an act in defiance of apartheid law. 9. Krotoa was a Khoisan woman who was an interpreter for Dutch settler Jan Van Riebeeck in the seventeenth century. Many Afrikaners claim her as an ancestor. (Http://blog.oup. com/2009/05/south-africa/ accessed May 20, 2013.) 10. There are examples of Chopi traditional sounds to be found at http://www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/ samap/category/people/chopi (accessed May 20, 2013); Hugh Tracey’s original recordings, as well as a book on Chopi musicians, are housed at the International Library of African Music (see http://www.ru.ac.za/ilam/ilam/ accessed May 20, 2013). In addition, Chopi and Khoisan music from the Kalahari can be found through the “Music Online” audio archive by typing “Chopi Music,” “Kalahari,” or “Xhosa Traditional” into the search window. 11. The International Library of African Music has a recording of “Ntsikana’s Bell,” available through Smithsonian Folkways. (Http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails. aspx?itemid=40204 accessed May 20, 2013.)

664   Carol ANN Muller 12. With the exception of “Very Urgent,” listed separately in the References section, all of these recordings were reissued in the Ogun compilation (2008). 13. Some have drawn a parallel between the cruelty of his death and that of Black Consciousness leader Steven Biko. Both came from Queenstown in the Eastern Cape and died within a couple of years of each other—both unnecessarily and far too young.

References Biko, Steven. 2002 [1978]. I Write What I  Like:  Selected Writings. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Livingston, Tamara. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. McGregor, Maxine. 1995. Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath. Flint, MI: Bamberger Books. Moore, Gerald. 2002. “The Transcription Center in the Sixties: Navigating in Narrow Seas.” Research in African Literatures 33 (3): 167–181. Muller, Carol, and Sathima Bea Benjamin. 2011. Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rasmussen, Lars, compl. 1998. Abdullah Ibrahim: A Discography. Copenhagen: Booktrader. ——. 2000. Sathima Bea Benjamin: Embracing Jazz. Copenhagen: Booktrader. ——. 2003. Mbizo: A Book About Johnny Dyani. Copenhagen: Booktrader. Said, Edward. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire:  Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turner, Richard. 1972. The Eye of the Needle: Toward Participatory Democracy in South Africa. New York: Orbis Books.

Discs Cited Abdullah Ibrahim. 1974. Ancient Africa. Sackville Records, SKCD-2 3049 ——. 1994. African Sun. Camden International. ——. 1999. African Suite. Enja Records. ——. 2003. African Magic. Enja Records. Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes. 2008. Blue Notes: The Ogun Collection. Five CD set including Blue Notes For Mongezi (two CDs), In Concert, Blue Notes For Johnny, and Legacy: Live in South Afrika 1964. London: Ogun OGCD 024-028. ——. 1968. Blue Notes: Very Urgent. London: Polydor. Cold Castle National Jazz Festival. 1962. Johannesburg: Gallo. NSL 1010. Dollar Brand and Gato Barbieri, 1974. Confluences. LP, Arista, AL 1003. Dollar Brand. 1965. Reflections. Germany: Black Lion BLP 60127. ——. 1969. African Piano. ECM Records. ——. 1973. African Space Program. Enja Records. ——. 1974. Good News From Africa (1974) Enja Records, CD 2048-2.

REMEMBRANCE, EXILE, AND THE REMAKING OF SOUTH AFRICAN JAZZ  665 ——. 1979. African Marketplace. New York: Discovery. ——. 1992a. Round Midnight at the Café Montmartre. CD, Black Lion, BLCD 760111. ——. 1992b. Anatomy of a South African Village. CD, Black Lion, BLCD 260172. ——. Nd. (1974) African Sketchbook. CD, Enja Records, Enj-2026 2. Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio. 1997 (1964). CD, Reprise, 2-6111. The Jazz Epistles. 1958. Jazz Epistles, Verse One. LP, Gallo, unknown. ——. 1992 (1959). Jazz in Africa, Volume One. CD, Kaz Records CD 24. Jazz: The African Sound. 1963. Johannesburg: Gallo, NSL 1011. “Ntsikana’s Bell.” International Library of African Music archive recording. Smithsonian Folkways. http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails.aspx?itemid=40204. Sathima Bea Benjamin. 1997. A Morning in Paris. Enja Records, Enj-9309 2.

Websites Cited Allen, Siemon, curator. 2012. Flat International: South African Audio Archive. http://www.flatinternational.org/current.php. Fowler, Mike, compiler. 2012. The Blue Notes: the South African Jazz Exiles. Wordpress Project. http://blog.oup.com/2009/05/south-africa. “Chopi.” SAMAP South African Music Archive Project. Digital Innovation South Africa, University of KwaZulu-Natal. http://www.disa.ukzn.ac.za/samap/category/people/chopi. International Library of African Music, Rhodes University. 2012. http://www.ru.ac.za/ilam/ ilam.

C HA P T E R  30

RE-FLECTIONS M A R K SLOBI N

As interpreters of culture, we are always playing a chess game against an ambiguous opponent who constantly shifts strategy as we try to gain ground and capture pieces. Often, our expectations are too high. We hope to move a lowly analytical pawn to the end of the board, where it will turn into a mighty queen of theory, so we can proceed confidently to the endgame. In fact, we never make it to the last square before history shakes the board and knocks over the pieces. We might consider the cultural relativity of the rules themselves. When I played chess in Afghan bazaars, a pawn that made it to the end converted only to the piece of the square it landed on, a bishop, knight, or castle, allowing more tactical flexibility to extend the contest with ambiguity. The wide set of places, issues, and approaches represented in this book often offer these supple strategies rather than a master strategy. Without extending the chess metaphor beyond the reader’s patience, I want to deploy three gambits, multiple openings for the game of interpretation, in this case of “music revival.” I’m guided by the precedent of the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (2005), who wrote eloquently around 1920, in a state of exile where he had to imagine how to continue his work, by taking “the knight’s move.” It is a metaphor based on how that chess piece must proceed: by stepping both forward and sideways.

The Dictionary Gambit: ReThe foregoing essays take a re-turn. It seems that re- has re-placed post-, the favored prefix of the late twentieth century, which makes surprisingly few appearances in this volume. True, “postrevival” seems reasonable enough, and was even briefly considered for the title of the book, but what comes after a postrevival stage? Another re-turn? Here are just some of the combination words that follow this fateful prefix: revitalization, reclamation, reimplementation, recreation, reproduction, restoration, rediscovery, revision, resurgence.

Re-Flections  667

Our Anglo-Saxon convention of turning to the Oxford English Dictionary for guidance—if not consolation—can help to map out this verbal territory. But before turning to the English that serves as common tongue for the varied authors here, I should observe that re- is unusual in being so widely applicable to a number of European languages, unlike many ethnomusicological terms adapted from English, sometimes awkwardly: It’s a cosmopolitan prefix that suits our interpretive moment. And it is a complex one. The OED begins by saying that “the extent to which this prefix has been employed in English since the nineteenth century, and especially from the latter half of it onwards, makes it impossible to attempt a complete record of all the forms resulting from its use.” Indeed, the OED goes so far as to say that “the number of these is practically infinite,” quite a concession for lexicographers to make. But they very helpfully go on to say that all uses belong to only three classes, each of which has some relevance for my present purposes. (1) re- stipulates that “the action itself is performed a second time, and sometimes that its result is to reverse a previous action or process, or to restore a previous state of things.”

This seems striking, in two ways. First, does re- have to specify only a “second time,” or can this be the third or more times that people have considered whether today’s resources are sufficient for their needs? This sense of the prefix does not accommodate the cyclical, spiral, or folded nature of musical change. Second, can the prefix work to describe cultural action that might both reverse and restore “a previous state of things?” Here the OED is being prescient. The essays here do in fact speak to both kinds of moves. In the interests of communing with earlier times, people may drop or downplay some of what they do. Suddenly, they see accepted styles and repertoires as kitsch or overbearing, musical objects to be put in the closet to clear the clutter. They might also take out and polish tarnished pieces, now understood as musical sterling. They can do both as part of the same cultural gesture, so the OED should have used “and/or” instead of a simple “or.” (2) re- is used to denote “ ‘making (of a certain kind or quality),’ ‘turning or converting into——’: ‘Tarantino re-Americanized the French hybrids, reclaiming them, as it were.’ (2004)”

This is indeed a different sensibility, where we are dealing not with restoring or reversing but with taking back something that has been taken away, literally or metaphorically. Musically, small groups often need to find ways to overcome the appropriation of their resources. The superculture’s unending drive to simulate, and perhaps sell, people’s vernacular material differs from outright suppression or neglect of musical resources. Micromusics have to turn imitations into originals, so to speak, not just raid the closet for neglected traditions. (3) re- is used to “denote fitting, equipping, supplying, or treating with something. ‘Seeing this grand old hotel being refleshed and reboned gave Mary a twinge.’ (1990)”

668  Mark Slobin This third sense of re- offers more neutrality, less affect. “Fitting, equipping, supplying”—these are efficient and technical approaches to a change to a former state. Just a makeover, not a rebuild. What’s there has not been torn down, and already has a solid enough structure: The grand old hotel of music can be made ready for customers with just workmanlike attention. No imaginative leaps over historical chasms, no new foundation-building on an old half-forgotten site. It’s a matter of turning an eyesore into an eyeful. This mode of cultural re- activity is less romantic and more technocratic, and certainly suits a wide range of practice in many of the systems this book describes.

The Parallel Musics Gambit This book deals with what are usually called “heritage” or “roots” musical systems. Meanwhile, our colleagues are charting similar transformations in parallel musical systems that are themselves now based on memory, nostalgia, or a fresh consideration of the past. The critic Simon Reynolds has written a polemic against this sensibility in a book called Retromania, which includes this litany of re- isms; the OED could not have done it better: The first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the “Re” Decade. The 2000s were dominated by the “re-” prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments. Endless retrospection,” [leading to] band reformations . . . groups reuniting for nostalgia tours in order to replenish . . . bank balances or as a prequel to returning to the studio to relaunch their careers as recording artists . . . rampant recycling:  bygone genres revived and renovated, vintage sonic material reprocessed and recombined. (Reynolds 2011: xi)

Reynolds does not see this trend of the early 2000s as re-freshing but as a slowdown of creativity: “[T]he sensation of moving forward grew fainter as the decade unfurled. Time itself seemed to become sluggish, like a river that starts to meander and form oxbow lakes . . . the pulse of NOW felt weaker with each passing year.” (x) For him, this current is a threat to popular music’s need to surge forth into the future: “could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is . . . its past?” (ix) His position stands in contrast to the stance of the writers in this book, who sometimes approach versions of musical re- at worst with a kind of skeptical detachment but mostly evaluate musical shifts as a neutral or even positive phase. Ethnomusicologists seem to view these moments as just one turn in a long history of aesthetic, political, or ideological movements that may shift the banks of music’s flow but do not dam up creativity, to use Reynolds’s metaphor of the river. Perhaps Reynolds’s pugnacious position responds to the many artists he has interviewed, since musicians themselves do not necessarily want to call attention to the fact that they rely heavily on earlier forms and formats. Sometimes, though, they can be nudged into re- ist discourse by journalists looking for re- moments. To take a random example, the Alabama Shakes says that “they aren’t treating their bluesy soul as a

Re-Flections  669

fashion statement or an antiquarian re-enactment. . .. Ms. Howard soaked [it] up when she spent time with her grandmother, and the other band members learned about [it] from their parents.” This singer is quite adept at re- terms herself: “[W]e’re not trying to recreate anything. I would hear what people call soul music, but it didn’t make me feel like anything. It was regenerated, regurgitated, like ‘This is what soul music is supposed to sound like’ ” (Pareles 2012a). Another musician deploys a more poetic discourse, an abstract sense of revisiting musical pasts that inspires an analytical gambit from the theoretically minded critic Jon Pareles: “perhaps it’s not just retro but meta-retro: a 21st-century take on an already self-conscious late-1970s reclamation of the ’60s.” Ethnomusicologists might call this postrevival. But the singer in question, Asa Taccone, has a more poetic take on this gambit: “ ‘Something perished, past and gone away/And nothing ever lasts that hesitates,’ Mr. Taccone observes, cryptically” (Pareles 2012b). Artists can be theorists, too. Is a musical re- moment a “hesitation” rather than a claiming of a stake in the present through the past, with little concern for the future? It is worth looking across our ethno-fences to see how other musicians and writers struggle with the issues raised in this book.

The Sister Disciplines Gambit We might also move our pieces forward a bit if we survey the strategies in fields of study that are so close to ours as to intersect and even overlap. Among those, one has re- in its name: language revitalization. Leanne Hinton, a leading figure in this domain, defines the core term as “the various ways in which people are working to keep their languages alive or bring them back into use” (Hinton 2001: 5), which sounds pretty close to the main thrust of many of the essays here. It’s useful to think of revitalization as possibly just keeping something alive as well as bringing something back into use, and such thinking might push aside some of the problems that “revival” puts in the path of progressing our pawns. No need to insist on the from-scratch or from-memory points of departure. Language revitalization has other suggestive re- terms, such as Joshua Fishman’s “reverse language shift” (RLS; 1991). Though I don’t think Fishman means to use an automobile metaphor, the RLS reminds me of the process of shifting into reverse gear. You want to change direction, but in a way that involves looking over your shoulder as you move purposefully: it’s awkward and hard to accomplish without veering as you go. You might bump into objects as you go backward, making you think carefully about your position, all of which suits many of the situations raised in the essays here. Another appealing language revitalization approach is the questioning of whether any language actually dies or goes extinct, something we grapple with constantly, since music evaporates easily into the air. Revivalists do talk to surviving specialists but often fall back on written and recorded texts, so as to create canons. This might seem to bypass the problem, since so many instruments, styles, genres, and repertoire do appear to have vanished, but seems too easy an off-ramp from the risky highway of history. Hinton put

670  Mark Slobin it this way: “I prefer the less final metaphor of ‘silence,’ or L. Frank Manriquez’s ‘sleep’ ” (Hinton 2001: 413). The “silence” or “sleep” of music might be developed a bit further in ethnomusicology. To what extent are we watching the rise and fall of breath of a slumbering system, or are we helping to kiss a music awake from dormancy through activism and advocacy? Are we hearing murmurs, amplifying echoes, or giving voice to silence? Our neighbors in language revitalization mull over another question of method: the need to distinguish between linguistic microsystems in small areas of a country—often “endangered”—versus those that might potentially be “national” or “state” languages, for example Irish, Welsh, Hawaiian, and Maori (Hinton 2001: 101). The latter stand a better chance of success for various reasons—large population, symbolic importance, the possibility of monolingualism, the greater ease in implementing social policies, histories of literacy, and so on. This perspective also covers many of the musical contexts discussed in this book: scale, scope, and planes of analysis shift with size, clout, and political potential. Finally, Hinton has always been on our side. She consistently points to the importance of song in language rediscovery, education, and maintenance projects. Music can act as the stone around which the snowball effect of revitalization can cohere so it can gain momentum. But what makes the linguists’ work so supportive is the realization that yes, song helps internal cohesion, but it also enables crossgroup interaction patterns that language might disallow. This is an issue that crops up in this book, but it sounds a bit different coming from an anthropological linguist. In an essay explicitly titled “Song; Overcoming the Language Barrier,” Hinton declares that “words are barriers to unity; words separate people . . . but music unifies. . .. Unification through song has been going on for centuries” across tribal California (Hinton 1994: 32). This recognition of the dual action of musical re- work deserves our attention as a knight’s-move: simultaneously forward and lateral. Now that this anthology has suitably summarized the state of revival, what happens to the term? I imagine we appreciate its long years of service, and we move on. The word itself will continue to be an object of “re-flection,” the title the editors proposed for this afterword. Its base—read as “flexion”—implies the supple articulating of joints through muscles, tendons, and tissue, through space and time, here as extensions of the interpretive body. Elbows can’t move too far backward, and knees can’t flex too far forward. To stay in sync and stride steadily, we need tactile, tactful, and tactical strategies from our own ethnomusicological understandings, our interdisciplinary kin, and our closest musical collaborators.

References Fishman, Joshua. 1991. Reversing Language Shift:  Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Hinton, Leanne. 1994. Flutes of Fire:  Essays on California Indian Languages. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books.

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Hinton, Leanne, and Hale, Ken. 2001. The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice. San Diego: Academic Press. Pareles, Jon. 2012a, April 8. “Cinderella Treatment for Unvarnished Soul.” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/arts/music/alabama-shakes-unvarnished-soul-onshiny-new-album.html?ref=todayspaper, accessed May 13, 2013. Pareles, Jon. 2012b, May 5. “Recharging Retro While Pondering the Ambitions and Choices of Today.” New  York Times, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/arts/music/electric-gu est-at-bowery-ballroom.html?ref=todayspaper, accessed May 13, 2013. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber. Shklovsky, Viktor. 2005 [1920]. Knight’s Move. London: Dalkey Archive Press.

Index

Abdollah, Mirza, 283 Abdullah, Jamal, 377 Abdurahimova, Feruza, 265–66, 268–69, 270 academia: and ancient music, 78, 82–83; Bastin’s research on blues tradition in Southeast, 104; and cultural politics, 102–3; disaffection with impurity of ancient traditions in, 206; folklore as independent discipline in, 73, 95–96; and hyperglobal perspective, 475; perception of authenticity in, 20; and postrevival, 105–6; recent revival studies in, 107–10; and revival as paradigm, 101–2; revival scholarship, 5–8, 99–100, 101; Rosenberg’s experiences in, 96–99; and Transforming Tradition, 100–101; Uzbek musical literacy and, 255, 261–62, 269–72, 273. See also conservatories; education; transmission accordion clubs, Scottish, 560 Aceh, Indonesia: differences in revivals in, 385; distinguishing features of revival in, 374; ethnographic research on, 374; following Helsinki Peace Agreement, 380–81; posttsunami revival in, 375–80 activism: central to American folk movement, 492, 506; in Hungarian dance house movement, 182, 192–94; legitimization and, 4; Livingston on revival and, 8; Native Americans and social, 300–301, 318, 451; revival as, 10–12, 350–70, 393–414, 418–36 Adler, Guido, 82 Adorno, Theodor, 141 aesthetization, 46 affinity groups, 552–53, 554, 565, 589–93 Afghanistan: ethnographic research on, 374; revival in, 382–85, 386 Afghanistan Institute of Music (ANIM), 383–84 Afifuddin, Afeed, 377 Afifuddin, Maulana, 377

African Sketchbook, 655 “African Space Program” tour, 655–56 Afrocreolization, of Garifuna, 350–51, 355–57 Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Afghanistan, 384–85 Aghniashvili, Lado (Vladimer), 577 Akbar, Maulana, 377 Alabama Shakes, 668–69 Ala-Könni, Erkka, 401–2 Alburger, Mary Ellen, 560 Algonquians, 76, 80 alienation, 562 Alimatov, Turgun, 275n8 Alizadeh, Hossein, 288 Allen, R. Raymond, 109, 563 allotment, 446–47 Aloe (NGO), 377–78 “Aman Duniaku Aman” (Secure, my world is secure), 380 amateurs: English folk music resurgence and, 497–98; and foreign singers of Georgian polyphony, 583;  pelimanni revival and, 401–2 American Folklore Society, 95 American Indian Movement, 448–49 American instrumental folk music revival: assessing, 116–19; Hollow Rock String Band and, 120–22; scholar-collectors’ experiences in, 122–29 American student movement, 448–49 American Wake, 602 Americas, as parallel to medieval antiquity, 75–76, 79, 80. See also United States Anatomy of a South African Village, 654 Anchiskhati Choir, 580 ancient music: as departure for experimental improvisation and personal expression, 404–13; Finnish avant-garde folk music and, 415n7. See also early music

674   INDEX Anderson, Robert T., 556 Anderson, Tom, 559 de Andrade, Mario, 423 Andreev, Vasiliy, 257 Anglicism, 207 Anglin, Joe, 125 animation, 244–46 annual commemorative ceremonies, for 2004 tsunami victims, 379 An Sain, 148 Anthology of American Folk Music (Smith), 105–6 anthropology, revitalization theories in, 6–7 “anti-nautch” movement, 210, 214 antiquarians: fifteenth- and sixteenth-century, 6; and revival of early music, 74, 78–80; and study of medieval antiquity, 74–81, 89–90 antiquity, study of, 74–81, 89–90 apartheid, establishment of, 647–50 Arabov, Ilyos, 264 Araqishvili, Dimitri, 577, 578 Araújo, Guilherme, 429 archaeology: antiquarianism morphs into, 78; interpretive, 12–13; musical, 90 archives: of Afghan music, 382, 383, 386; of ancient music, 409; Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, 96; Berlin Phonogram Archive, 578; Dance House Archive, 182, 192; dissemination and, 25; founded by Herbert Halpert, 96; of kantele players, 407– 8; Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive, 97; and Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, 142; repertory and, 662; of runo-song texts, 396; of South African jazz, 660, 661, 662; Taylor’s theories on, 35, 647 Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, 96 Aref Ensemble, 292 Arraes, Miguel, 428 arranged folk music (Uzbek): commonalities of, with traditional music, 272–73; development of, 256–58; history of, 254–56; during post-Soviet era, 262–72; promulgation of, in Uzbekistan, 252; sound of, 253–54; State Conservatory as flagship institution for, 259–62

arts therapy, 379–80, 387n3 Asch, Verna, 450 Ashrafiy, Muxatar, 261–62 Askew, Kelly, 233 Asplund, Anneli, 406 Association des Ressortissants de Thionck Essyl (ARTE), 239–41 Atkins, E. Taylor, 155n30 Aubert, Laurent, 456 audio recordings: and authenticity of early music, 83; of Chickasaw communal dance songs, 312, 315; of Choctaw music, 304; of Chris McGregor and Blue Notes, 656–59; dissemination through, 26; of Dollar Brand, 655; of Georgian folk polyphony, 578, 583–84; of Hungarian folk music, 197, 199; Iranian classical music and, 278, 282, 287, 293, 294; and Irish diaspora, 609, 611; learning music through, 123–24; as representation of music, 49–50, 103; of South African jazz, 653; transcription of, 86 August Revolution of 1945 (Vietnam), 165 Australia: commemorative military music of, 374; and Irish diaspora, 600, 612 authenticity: accepting, of tradition, 125; of American folk music, 105; of American instrumental folk music, 117, 118; of ancient music, 79–80, 83; anxiety over loss of, 165; authority and legitimacy and, 19–24; and authority over kathak dance, 220; Bahianos and, 428, 435–36; of bossa nova, 422, 426; of ca trù, 163; and choro revival, 62, 66; criteria for, 6, 36n15, 406, 413; and Croatian revival, 327–28, 333, 335, 341; debates over, 117; definitions of, 111n5, 297n17; as drive for revival, 434; early music and, 83; and emergence of Casamançais regionalism, 241; emotional, 567; and English folk music resurgence, 497, 507; and Finnish folk creative process, 413, 414; Georgian polyphony and, 579, 585, 586, 588, 589, 591; global hybridity and, 223; Hawaiian search of, 536; historically continuity and, 45, 67, 68; and historical veracity, 286–91; of Hungarian dance house movement, 197; in Hungarian folk music, 197; hybridity and, 223; of Iļģi, 479,

INDEX  675 481; importance of, to revival production, 46–47; improvement of culture through values based on, 61; invocation and manipulation of, 8; in Iranian classical music, 281, 282–85, 287–88, 295; and Iranian dance in diaspora, 620, 622–23, 634, 635, 636; and Irish diaspora, 598, 601, 603, 604, 605, 614; of Ivana Kupala, 523; of kathak dance, 206, 211, 219, 220, 221, 222; of Korean intangible cultural heritage, 138– 39; of Latvian music, 471; legitimization and, 4, 8, 45, 394, 414; Livingston on tradition and, 453; and Native flute, 449, 451, 452, 454, 459; of neo-traditional Senegalese choreography, 229; object-oriented criteria for, 6, 20, 326, 491; and origin fallacy, 118; person-oriented criteria for, 20–22; and processes of professionalization, institutionalization, commercialization, and commodification, 63–64; process-oriented criteria for, 22–23; and promotion of folk music, 6; of public folklore, 105; quality and, 47; of radif, 297n13; and re-creation of ancient music, 406; and rejection of revivalist artists, 620; reproduction as measure of, 14; revival processes and cultures as, 6; and sceptic perspective of globalization, 473–74; sceptics versus transformationalists and, 477–78; of Skandinieki, 469; of South African jazz, 661; in “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 539, 543; theorizing of, 9; tradition and, 453; tradition characterized by, 55; traditions bound to rules governing, 28; in Uzbek performance, 270; William Thomas’s theorem on, 43. See also purity authenticity police, 36n13, 291 authority: authenticity and legitimacy and, 19–24; and  kathak dance revival, 216, 220; in “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 543; on traditional Native American music, 301 autoexoticism, 633–35 Autonomy Law (1987), 360 avant-garde music, Finnish folk, 404–13, 415n7, n11. See also bossa nova; Tropicália movement Azizboev, Salohiddin, 271

Bacone College, Native music added to curriculum of, 447–48 Bahianos: alternative path of, 428–30; approach of, to revival, 419–20, 435–36; background of, 427–28; and emergence of Tropicália movement, 430–32; Nara Leão and, 418–20; as revivalists, 422 Baily, John, 330, 339, 374 Bakalama, 239–43, 244, 246–47 Bakhtin, Mikail, 59n4 ballet, Iranian national dance and, 627–28, 629, 635 Ballets Africains, 228, 232–33 Ballgame, Choctaw communal songs and dances as part of, 304–5 bans, musical: in Afghanistan, 382–83; ethnomusicalogical literature regarding, 373 Barbeau, Marius, 85–89, 90 Barbieri, Gato, 655 Barker, Simon, 149, 155n27 Bartók, Béla, 192 Bartók Ensemble, 184–85, 186, 188, 193 Bastin, Bruce, 104 bát âm orchestra, 175 Baumann, Max Peter: on categories of performing musicians, 449; continuum of, 16, 277, 292; on fusion processes, 476; on revival and cycles of change, 393; on syncretism model of music revivals, 450–51; on utopias of past and future, 294 bayadères, 208–10 BBC Radio  2, 500–501, 504, 505 Bealle, John, 108 Béart, Charles, 230 Beck, Jean-Baptiste, 87–89, 90 Beck, Ulrich, 473 von Becker, Reinhold, 397 Belfast Harp Festival, 604 du Bellay, Joachim, 74 Benga, Féral, 231 Benjamin, Sathima Bea: in Europe, 646, 651, 652; influences on, 649, 652; leaves for Europe, 649–50; music of, following departure from South Africa, 647, 654–56 Benjamin, Walter, 44 Berán, István, 197 Berkeley folk revival, 107–9

676   INDEX Bernardini, Jean-François, 29 Bethânia, Maria, 418–20, 427, 428, 431 Bhabha, Homi, 222 bharata natyam, 634 Bigenho, Michelle, 284 “Big Fish, Small Pond: Country Musicians and Their Markets” (Rosenberg), 98–99 Bigolo (Seck), 231 Biko, Steve, 660 Bilaniuk, Laada, 524 bilyi holos, 520, 522 Binkley, Thomas, 83 “bird calls,”  445 “Birth of Hawai‘i, The”: configuration of culture in, 539–44; embedded in Hawaiian culture, 530–31; grounded in Hawaiian Renaissance, 532–37; as Hawaiian mainstay, 544–46; history and making of, 537–39; significance of, 546–48 Bitka na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva), 330 Black Arisin’, 364, 368 Black Caribs, 350, 370n2 “Black History, Black Culture” (Soul Vibrations), 368 Blacking, John, 328 block flute, 443–45 blood heritage, 263–64 Blue Eagle, A. C., 447 bluegrass, 96, 100, 123, 129 Bluegrass: A History (Rosenberg), 99 Blue Notes, 646–47; in Europe, 651; formation of, 649; music and recordings of, 653, 656– 59; transformation and diaspora and, 652 Boal, Augusto, 426, 427, 431 Bohlman, Philip: on embeddedness, 167; on historicism, 327; and musical creativity continuum, 454; on new symbols in revival, 287; on revival and community, 426;  The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, 7 Borumand, Nur Ali, 283, 286, 288–91, 296n11 bossa nova: evolution from, to Tropicália, 422–25; Nara Leão and, 418–20 Boym, Svetlana, 13, 273, 274 braid, of Yulia Tymoshenko, 513 Brand, Dollar: education of, 648; in Europe, 649–50, 651, 652; and formation of Jazz Epistles, 649; influences on, 649, 652; music

of, following departure from South Africa, 646, 647, 654–56, 659–60; recordings of, 653. See also Ibrahim, Abdullah breakdown, of revivals, 28 Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, A (Harriot), 75fig., 76, 77fig., 79fig. Briggs, Charles, 7–8 Britain: Georgian singing in, 587–89; imperial rule in India, 207, 221–22. See also England; Scotland Britons, ancient, 76 broadcasting, Iranian classical music and, 279–80. See also BBC Radio 2; “Birth of Hawai‘i, The”; Radio Tehran Brocken, Michael, 500 Brotherhood of Breath, 659 Brown, LaDonna, 313, 314, 315–17 Brown, Michael, 21, 462 Browner, Tara, 443, 447, 455 Brunvand, Jan, 563 Bunting, Edward, 604 Burney, Charles, 78 Butt, John, 13 Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California (DeWitt), 107 California Choctaw Gathering, 311–12 Camara, Toumani, 242 Cambridge Folk Festival, 500–501 Camden, William, 78 Camp, Charles, 105, 106 Canada: instrumental folk music revival in, 128; and Native relations, 446; revival dialogue in, 109–10 Cantometrics, Lomax’s theory of, 35n2 Cape Breton, 118, 128 Cape Bretonish, 54 Carlos, Roberto, 431 Carthy, Martin, 479 Casamance, Senegal, 235, 237–48 de la Casas, Bartolomé, 76 caste, and  kathak dance revival, 214–15, 219–20 ca trù: etymology of, 165–66; historical ontologies of, 166–70; as intangible cultural heritage, 160, 161–63, 177; revivalist discourse on, 163–65; revival of, 160, 170–76

INDEX  677 Ca Trù Thái Há Ensemble, 171, 173, 175–76 Ca Trù Thăng Long Club, 174–75, 179n16 Ca Trù Thăng Long Theater, 174 Cazimero, Robert, 534, 543, 548n2 Cazimero, Roland, 534 cells, 104–5 Center for the Development of Human, Civil, and Autonomy Rights (CEDEHCA), 364 Center for the Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music, 281–82 CFA (come from away), 109–10 Chadwick, Helen, 587, 588 Chandra, Sheila, 590 change: acceptance for, 19; in art and cultural production, 141; and Brazilian popular music, 423, 424, 425, 429, 435; ca trù and, 175, 176; causes of, 21; and Choctaw and Chickasaw music revivals, 318; constructed through revival, 3–4; consumption and, 105; as core of modernity, 55; cycles of, 393; and development of revival organizations, 556; economic, in Hungary, 195–96; effected by Kathaks, 214–15; effected through revivals, 66, 69; and Garifuna revival, 365–66; to Indian policy, 301; and Iranian classical music, 279, 286; and Irish diaspora, 613, 614; and kathak dance revival, 206–7; in Korea, 136, 140; versus loss, 354; and Native flute, 453, 454, 459; of Newfoundland’s folk revival, 97; past and creation of cultural, 394, 395, 413; Pelimanni music and, 400, 409, 410; politics of, 101; revival and reconstruction as separate from, 223; of revivalists, 229; Slobin on, 450; survival through, 18; through transmission and dissemination, 25–26; traditional music revivals as responses to, 562–66; tradition and, 12, 28, 55–56, 297n24, 532; uncovering processes of, 47. See also cultural change; economic change Chang Sahun, 138 chant, revival of: following independence, 580–83; foreign involvement in, 574–75; internationalization of, 583–89; and musical transformations and cycles of renewal in Soviet era, 578–80; overview of, 575–76; revival and, 573–74; and revivalist trends

under Russian occupation, 576, 577–78; and transnational affinity groups, 589–93; transnational connections and, 593–95. See also church music, Croatian Charkh, 639–40 Charles, Terence, 367–68 Chateaubriand, François-René, 78 Chi Ch’unsang, 144 Chickasaw: and Choctaw communal songs and dances, 306–7; history of, 302–4; music and dance revivals of, 301–2, 312–18 Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe, 313–15, 316 Chickasaw Social Songs and Stomp Dances, 312 Chieftains, The, 611 “Chieu Phu Tay Ho,”  179n18 children: arts therapy for, 378–79, 387n3; assimilation of Native, 446; English folk music workshops and activities for, 502–3; and Native flute, 445 Choctaw: Chickasaw communal dance songs and, 313–15; history of, 302–4; music and dance revivals of, 301–2, 304–12, 317–18 Choctaw-Chickasaw Dance Songs, Volumes I and II, 309 Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee, 306–11 Choctaw Gathering, California, 311–12 Ch’oe Insŏ, 151 Ch’oe Sangil, 144 choirs: Anchiskhati Choir, 580; church, 576; community, 574; foreign, of Georgian polyphony, 583–89, 591; Georgian, 574, 577, 580, 592; Rustavi Choir, 582; Soviet, 578–79 Cho Kongnye, 144–45 Chŏng Chaeguk, 151 Chongmyo (Royal Ancestral Shrine), 149 Chongmyo cheryeak, 149–50 Ch’ŏngsŏnggok, 151–52 Chŏng Yŏnsu, 137 choral singing, Latvian, 470 choreophobia, 622, 626, 628, 629, 630, 640 Choron, Alexandre, 78 choro revival, 61–62, 66 choro roda, 62 Chosŏn wangjo kungjung yori, 141 Cho Ŭlsŏn, 144, 145 Ch’ŏyongmu, 150

678   INDEX chronotope, 59n4 Chu Hà, 171 church music, Croatian, 332. See also Georgian polyphony church revivals, 117 Cissé, Ousmane Noël, 234 Civil Rights movement, 300–301, 448–49 Clancy Brothers, 610–11 classicization: and cultural reclamation, 221; of Indian classical dance genres, 210–13, 220; of kathak dance, 215–19, 223 classification, redefined, 103 Clifford, James, 344 clothing: for Chickasaw communal dance, 315–16; of Choctaw communal dance, 310;  hula, 536 Cohen, John, 102 Cohen, Sara, 339 Coloff, John, 445 Comanche Flute Music Played by Doc Tate Nevaquaya, 449, 450, 454 comfort, music as, 329–30 Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (CCE), 561–62, 610 commemorative ceremonies, for 2004 tsunami victims, 379 commercialization: and English folk music, 491, 492–93, 506; globalization and, 471–72; hybridity and, 479; as necessary aspect of revival, 63–64; process of, 16–18; and transition to post-revival, 28, 453 Committee for the Revival of Georgian Church Singing, 577–78 commodification: and Iranian classical music, 283; as necessary aspect of revival, 63–64, 219; process of, 16–18 common interest groups. See special interest groups community/communities: defined, 554; dilemma posed by idea of, 104; and Georgian polyphony, 589–93; Internet special interest groups as, 565; and Irish diaspora, 614; revivalist, 66, 100. See also traditional dance music communities competitions: English folk music resurgence and, 504–6; Irish music and dance, 607, 610 “El Cóndor Pasa,”  142, 154n14

conga, 368 conservatories: Honarestan-e Ali-ya Musiqi conservatory, 278; Open Society Georgia Foundation, 580–81;  pelimanni revival and, 401; Tbilisi State Conservatoire, 578, 579, 580, 586; Uzbek, 252, 253, 255, 267, 269–71; Uzbek State Conservatory, 259–62; Vietnamese, 164. See also academia; education; transmission Consolidated Amusement trailer. See “Birth of Hawai‘i, The” constellations, 554 consumption, 105 contra war (1983-1987), 359–60 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, 143 Cook, Nicholas, 36n6 Cooke, Peter, 559 core revivalists, 65, 525 cosmopolitan cultural formations, 64–65 Cozad, Belo, 445 Cram Cook, Nilla, 629 Craven, David, 358 creative process: attributing innovation to, 421; as marker of authenticity, 23, 406, 412–13, 415n7; “musicking” as, 483; and reimagined/ reinvented tradition, 228, 408; rock fusions as, 483. See also creativity creativity: and American instrumental folk music revival, 116, 123; authenticity and, 23; continuum for musical, 454; discriminatory, 454, 455; Finnish music revival and, 410, 412–13; integrative, 454, 455; kathak dance and, 219; and Korean cultural heritage, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140–41, 144, 153n2; limitations on, 409; opportunities for, through transformation, 17; and pelimanni revival, 402; and post-revival turn, 29; preservation and, 152–53; rationalized, 454–55; revivalist activities prioritizing, 11; Reynolds on slowdown of, 668; and syncretism, 23; tensions surrounding, 19, 21, 28; tradition conveyed through, 547; ubiquitous, 454, 455. See also creative process Creoles: and dialogic space between Garifunas and, 363–69; Garifuna cultural rescue and, 353; Garifuna relations with, 351, 356,

INDEX  679 361–63; Garifuna’s history with, 350, 369; heritage of, 370n3 Croatian revival: and music as comfort and torture, 328–31; overview of, 325–26, 343–45; and postwar articulations of traditional music, 335–43; and post-war tradition-based popular music, 331–35; spiritual, 236–38 cross-cultural transmission, 26–27 Crumbo, Woody, 445, 447 Csoóri, Sándor, 188 Csűrős Banda, 198–99 cultural change: versus cultural loss, 354; effected through revivals, 3–4, 66–68, 69; emotional trauma of, 556; isolation from conditions causing, 20–21; kathak dance revival and, 206–7; as motivator of scholar-revivalists, 6; pelimanni revival and, 400–404; and preservation of Korean cultural heritage, 140; revivals as responses to, 562–66; traditions as springboards for, 56, 297n24; Wallace’s revitalization movement theory and, 567. See also change cultural exchange, kathak dance revival and, 221–22 cultural formations, cosmopolitan, 64–65 cultural grey-out, 551, 565 cultural heritage. See intangible cultural heritage culturalization, and Croatian revival, 338 cultural objectification, 621, 628, 629, 633, 640 cultural politics: and American folksong revivals, 102–3, 106; effects of, on American revival studies, 107–10; impact of, 107–10; as inherent in revivals, 101–2; mobilization of folklore in American, 95; music-dominated festivals as means for advancing, 99; of Soviet Union, 471 Cultural Property Preservation Law, 136 cultural society, Croatian, 336–38 cultures: and adoptive identity, 562–63, 567; as dynamic, 118–19 custom(s): Communist campaign against Uzbek, 267; and Garifuna cultural rescue, 355, 356; and Irish diaspora, 602, 606; and Ivana Kupala revival, 520; in posttsunami

Aceh, 376; preservation of Croatian, 327–28; revival of Croatian, 338. See also tradition(s) Cutting, Jennifer, 481 cyberspace-based special interest groups, 554 cycle(s): cultural history as, 119–20; in Finnish folk music, 393; of music-cultures, 393; of revival and Georgian polyphony, 576–83; revivals as, 28–29, 116–31, 533; time as, 301, 319n2 Dai Bozhe, 519–20 Đại Lâm Linh, 175–76 dainas, 470 dance halls, and Irish diaspora, 609–10 Dance House Festival, 194 Dance House Guild, 194–95 dance house movement, Hungarian: institutionalization of, 194–96; integration of activism and scholarship into, 192–94; interethnic and multistate character of, 187–89; intimate connection of, to dance, 184–87; as music and dance revival, 184; music revival fostered by, 196–200; overview of, 182–84 đàn đáy, 169 Daniélou, Alain, 286, 288 Daniel Sorano Theatre, 233 đào nương, 168 Đào Trọng Từ, 164 Dávila, Arlene, 544 Davis, Rosita, 356, 359 de Andrade, Mario, 423 death: and Irish diaspora, 601–2, 609; of language, 669–70; revival from, 43, 117 decapitation ceremony, Croatian, 327 decline, musical: in Aceh, 375–81; in Afghanistan, 382–85; conclusions on revivals following, 385–87; following human and natural disasters, 12; indicators of, 373; literature on revivals in societies suffering or recovering from, 373–75; in Sri Lanka, 381 decontextualization: dissemination through, 25; freedoms provided by, 394; malleability through, 434; preservation through, 4; revival as, 31, 44. See also recontextualization defiance, music as, 330

680   INDEX de Graça, Maria, 418–20 dehumanization, music as tool of, 330–31 de la Casas, Bartolomé, 76 de la Halle, Adam, 89 Đeletovci, 338–40 de Mello, Jack, 537 de Mello, Jon, 537–42, 546–48 demonstrations, of Korean students, 139, 147–48 Densmore, Frances, 446–47 Desmond, Jane C., 621 “Detroit Schottische,”  127 devadasis, 208–10 de Valera, Éamon, 608 development organizations, folk, 502–4 development(s): Garifuna-Creole integral, 366, 368, 369; invigorating Nicaraguan indigenous resurgence, 354–55, 361, 362 De Vos, George, 563 De Warren, Robert, 634 DeWitt, Mark F., 107 Diamond, Beverley, 443, 458 diaspora(s): as elective, 593; Internet and, 27; Iranian dance in, 630–40, 640; loss through, 601; South African jazz and, 652–54; tradition and transformation and, 19. See also Irish diaspora Diatta, Aline Sitoe, 241 “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland” (Kennedy and Carr), 603 Dillion, Quincy (“Quince”), 119 Diouf, Abdou, 238 disasters. See decline, musical discriminatory creativity, 454, 455 dissemination: of bossa nova, 424; changes in nature of, 24–27; of Choctaw communal dance songs, 309; of English folk music, 501–2; of fiddling, 126; of Georgian polyphony, 579; of  kathak dance, 211, 219, 220; methods and infrastructure for, 4; of revived art forms, 219; of runo-song, 398–99; of samba-song, 423; transformation and, 18; of Uzbek traditional music, 258; of Zimbabwean popular music, 473 Đỗ Bằng Đoàn, 167, 168 doers, shift from knowers to, 47–51

Dollar Brand Trio, 646–47, 652, 654. See also Brand, Dollar; Ibrahim, Abdullah Domingo, 437n12 dorageh, 286, 288 Dorson, Richard M., 6, 95 Đỗ Trọng Huề, 167, 168 do Vale, João, 426 Drayton, Michael, 75 Dryden, John, 80 du Bellay, Joachim, 74 Dubliners, The, 611 Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, 650, 654 Dulsori, 147 Dundes, Alan, 95, 98 Dungan, James, 560–61 Dung Linh, 175 Duprat, Rogério, 430 Durkeim, Emile, 556 Dvořák, Antonín, 447 Dyani, Johnny, 649, 651–53, 655–59 Dylan, Bob, 102, 106 early music: defined, 73; and postindustrial university, 81–83; restoration of, 78–80; revival of folk music and, 73, 84–89, 90 Early Music: defined, 73; and postindustrial university, 82–83; revival of, 73–74; use of term, 81–82 Early Music Movement, 287 Ecole Normale William Ponty, 228, 230–31 economic change: of Choctaws and Chickasaws, 318; impact of, Hungarian dance house movement, 195–96; and Senegalese cultural revival project, 237–38; in Ukraine, 512, 521 economic space, folk festivals as, 496–97, 499 Edinburgh Strathspey and Reel Society, 560 education: and Casamançais regionalism, 240, 241; development of Finnish folk music, 399, 401, 410, 415n9; and English folk music resurgence, 492, 502–6; fiddling in Shetland, 559; “grandparent,” 119–20; of Indian cultural reformers, 221; Iranian musical, 278, 282; music, in Afghanistan, 374, 383–84, 386; music in American, 69; promotion of Hawaiian culture through, 533, 534, 535; and

INDEX  681 rise of postindustrial university, 81–83. See also academia; conservatories; transmission Edwards, K. D., 450 “Eggs and Marrowbones,”  127 Eighth National Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Resolution 5 of, 162 “El Cóndor Pasa,”  142, 154n14 electric folk fusions, 471–72 electric folk revival, 468, 476, 477–80 Elizabeth I, Queen, 608 Ellington, Duke, 650, 651, 654, 656 embeddedness, 160, 167–68 Emmerson, George, 559, 560 Engels, Friedrich, 55 England: Irish immigrants in, 600; revival in, 467, 477–78 English folk music resurgence: competitions and folk development organizations and, 502–6; festivals and, 495–99; historical context of, 490–95; media and, 499–502; overview of, 489–90, 506–7 ensembles: Georgian polyphony, 578–79, 580, 583; and Iranian dance in diaspora, 635–38; pelimanni, 403–4, 414–15n6; primary, 575 environment of revival, 16–17 epic songs, Romantic nationalist transformation of Finnish, 396–400 “É proibido proibir” (Veloso), 431–32 Eriksen, Anne, 55–56, 297n14 Erkomaishvili, Anzor, 582, 586 Erkvanidze, Malkhaz, 579, 580, 584 Erwinsyah, Edy, 379 Escobar, Arturo, 351, 354 Estrada, Isabel, 358, 365 ethnicity: and adoptive cultural identity, 562–63, 567; authenticity and, 118; bolstering, as motivation for revival, 11; in Brazil, 427, 433; bridging, through Choctaw and Chickasaw dance, 311; Chetnik and Ustasha nationalistic movements and, 330; classification by, in Croatia, 340–41; and Croatian identity, 327; dance as constitutive of, 621; and development of Uzbek arranged folk music, 257–58; and emergence of Casamançais regionalism, 238–44, 246; and Garifuna cultural rescue, 357–61, 364–65, 368; in Hawai‘i, 548–49n9; and Hawaiian

identity, 531–32, 544; and Hawaiian Renaissance, 535, 545; and Hungarian dance house movement, 187–92; hybridity and, 480; Iranian dance and, 618, 623, 636; in Ivana Kupala, 522–23; Ivana Kupala and Ukrainian, 512, 514, 517, 519, 522–23, 524; and Latvian identity, 470; movement systems constitutive of, 621–22; music as emblem of, 562, 563; as person-oriented criterion for authenticity, 21; and Senegalese neo-traditional performance, 235; and Sinhala-Tamil conflict, 381. See also nationalism ethnic purity: as person-oriented criterion for authenticity, 21–22; restoration of, as motivation for revival, 11, 562, 563. See also racial purity ethnomusic, Croatian, 333–35 ethnomusicology: and alterations to Ukrainian tradition, 521; defined by Study Group for Applied Ethnomusicology of the International Council for Traditional Music, 373; and history of revival scholarship, 8; and Hungarian dance house movement, 191; and political significance of collected musical folklore, 523–26; and postindustrial university, 82; and theory of Cantometrics, 35n2; views on musical fusion processes in, 471–72 Europe: development of folk music in, 47–50; Dollar Brand and Bea Benjamin leave for, 649–50; South African exile to, 646–47; South African jazz in, 650–52; thick globalization and revival in, 467–68; traditional dance music communities in, 556–57. See also Britain; Croatian revival; Finland; Georgian polyphony; Hungarian dance house movement; Ireland; Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve) (Latvia) L’Exil d’Alboury (Ndao), 236 exile: of Edward Said, 644–46; and Irish diaspora, 600. See also South African jazz “expansive globalization,”  467 experimental improvisation, ancient music as departure for, 404–13 Eyerman, Ron, 17, 266

682   INDEX fakelore, 6, 95, 622 Farhat, Shahin, 286 Fauchet, Claude, 78 Fayaz, Mohammad Reza: on Borumand, 289, 290; on historical purity, 291; and influence of Western musicologists, 285–86; on return to fundamentals of purity, 284; on revival of Iranian classical music, 281 Fayzullayev, Boboqul, 275n6 Feintuch, Burt, 13, 24 Feis Ceoil, 607 festivals: American instrumental folk music, 129–30; BBC Radio 2’s involvement in, 500–501; Belfast Harp Festival, 604; Croatian folklore, 341–43; economic impact of, 496–99; English folk music resurgence and, 489–90, 495–99, 500–503, 505–6; Finnish folk, 395; Georgian polyphony, 578–79, 581, 582, 583, 585, 589; and Hungarian dance house movement, 185, 194; Irish music, 610, 611–12; Međunardona smotra folklora, 327, 330; in post-Soviet spaces, 512–13; and revival of ca trù, 175, 179n17; and shift from knowers to doers to marketers, 50; transmission through, 26. See also Cambridge Folk Festival; Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve) (Latvia); Kaustinen Folk Music Festival Feza, Mongezi, 649, 656–59 Fiddler Magazine, 129 fiddling. See American instrumental folk music revival; fiddling communities and associations; pelimanni music; Sligo fiddlers fiddling communities and associations: from eighteenth century on, 559–62; emergence of, on Internet, 552–55; and grassroots revitalization of traditional music and dance, 557–58, 567; Internet, as real communities, 565; and new steady state phase of cultural revitalization, 555–57 Filene, Benjamin, 8 Finland: ancient music as departure for experimental improvisation and personal expression, 404–13;  pelimanni music and rejuvenation of rural culture, 400–404; revivals in, 394–95, 413–14; Romantic

nationalist transformation of epic songs, 396–400 fishing rituals, Korean, 148 Fishman, Joshua, 669 Flatley, Michael, 612 fleadh cheoil, 561–62, 610 “Flop-Eared Mule” tune, 127 flute. See Native flute Flute Songs of the Kiowa and Comanche (Ware), 450 Fodor, Sándor “Neti,”  198 FolkArts England conference, 489 Folk Arts Panel, 449–50 folk clubs, 26, 492–93, 495 folk development organizations, 502–4 Folk Industry and AFO Conference, 489 Folk Industry and Association of Festival Organisers Conference, 505–6 folklife movement, 105 folklore: collection of Irish, 607; Croatian, 325, 335, 336, 341–43, 344; dance as form of, 624; development of academic, 564; and development of Uzbek arranged folk music, 257, 267; documentation of Korean, 137; ethnomusicology and political significance of collected musical, 523–26; fakelore and, 6, 8; Finnish, 399, 406; and Georgian polyphony, 574–75, 577, 580, 590; growth of public, 105; historical-reconstructional approach of Asian, 137; and Hungarian dance house movement, 189, 195; preservation of Vietnamese, 162; primary and secondary, 575; revival of, 101; and revival of folk music, 95–99, 101; scholar-revivalists and, 6, 118; scholarship on, 7, 19, 23; and theory of cultural evolution, 6; Ukrainian, 512, 519–20, 522; urban folk revivalism and, 563 folklorismus, 564 folk music: American, 448–49; authenticity and, 21; and change from tradition to heritage, 52–54; concept of, 47; consumption of American, 105; Croatian, 326, 333; defining, traditions, 16; development of, in Europe, 47–50; early music and, 84–89; English, 468, 478; ethnic purity associated with, 11; European, 47–48, 53–54, 73; Finnish

INDEX  683 avant-garde, 393, 395, 404–13, 415n7, n11; folklore and revival of, 95–99; Georgian, 577, 579, 586; and heritagization, 53–55; and Hungarian dance house movement, 184–85, 192, 195; Irish, 560–61; issues surrounding contemporary, 102; Korean, 141; landscape of, 51–52; Latvian, 469, 470, 480, 481, 482–83; mediaization of, 49; nineteenth-century collection of, 6; popularization of, 48; post-revival, 105–10; preservation of, 559; professionalization of, 50; rebranding contemporary interpretations of, 26; recontextualization in, archetype, 16–17; recording of Hungarian, 194; in regions of former Soviet Union, 474; and rejuvenation of rural culture, 400–404; resurgence in English, 28–29; revival of American, 94, 100–101, 563; revival of early music and, 73, 79–80, 84–89, 90; structural changes in, 51; as symbol of national identity, 474; transmission of, 25, 90; Vietnamese, 165. See also American instrumental folk music revival; arranged folk music (Uzbek); English folk music resurgence; traditional music Folk Music Department, Sibelius Academy, 395, 405–6, 410–11 Folk Music Movement (Finland), 395 “Folk Music Revival in Europe” (World of Music), 8 folk songs: Georgian, 576, 577, 578, 580, 582–83; popular versus local, 154n15; preservation of Korean, 143–45; Romantic nationalist use of Finnish narrative, 396–400; Sharp’s definition of, 490 Folksongs and Folk Revival (Guigné), 109 Folkworks, 503–4, 505–6 food, preservation of Korean court, 141 foodways, study of, 105 Ford, Henry, 557–58 Ford Foundation teaching program, 173–74 Forsyth, Megan, 54 Forte, Maximilian, 354–55 Foucher, Vincent, 230–31, 239 Frank, Robert, 102 free jazz movement, 647 Freeland, Jane, 360–61 freezing of cultural artifacts, 135, 140, 152, 602

Freire, Paulo, 358 French-Canadian folk songs, 85–89 Frente Única, 430–31 Frisbie, Charlotte, 102 functional harmony, 278, 576, 590 funeral songs, Korean, 140 fusion and fusion processes, 197–98, 471, 476; Baumann on, 476; bossa nova and, 423–24; of choro with jazz and rock, 66; colonialism and, 219, 222; Finnish music and, 405; and Hungarian dance house movement, 197–98; Iranian dance and, 631–632; and Ivana Kupala revival, 522; Latvian electric folk, 471, 475, 478, 479, 481; Laurent Aubert on, 456; and modern thick globalization, 468. See also hybridity; syncretism Fuzzy Mountain String Band, 121–22 Gaelic Athletic Association, 605–6 Gaelic League, 606–7 Gal Costa, 418–20, 437n12 Galeano, Eduardo, 358 Gambacc, 241 Garakanidze, Edisher, 579–80, 584, 587–89 Garfish Dance, 314, 317 Garifuna cultural rescue: Afrocreolization and culture loss and, 355–57; characteristics of, 352–55; and dialogic space between Creoles and Garifunas, 363–69; overview of, 350–52, 369–70; trajectory of, 357–63 Garifuna Power, 364, 365 Garmarna, 480 Gaultier, Juliette, 88fig. Gedutis, Susan, 606 gender: analysis of, in revival contexts, 511; kathak dance and, 208–10, 222. See also women Georgian Harmony Association, 589 Georgian polyphony: following independence, 580–83; foreign involvement in, 574–75; internationalization of, 583–89; and musical transformations and cycles of renewal in Soviet era, 578–80; overview of, 575–76; revival and, 573–74; and revivalist trends under Russian occupation, 576, 577–78; and transnational affinity groups, 589–93; transnational connections and, 593–95

684   INDEX Gertze, Johnny, 649 giáo phường, 169–70, 179n15 Gibbon, John Murray, 89 Gil, Gilberto, 418–20, 428–31, 432 Gilberto, João, 423, 437n6 Gilliland, Henry, 566 Gillis, Verna, 450 Ginsberg, Allen, 102 “Girl with the Blue Dress On,”  127 globalization: analysis of historical development of, 466–67; application of perspectives on, 477–82; combining perspectives on, 482; commercialization and, 471–72; defined, 466; effect of, on Indian performing arts, 206; and Hungarian dance house movement, 196–97; hybridity and, 479–82; hyperglobal perspective, 474–75; identity bolstering motives linked to, 11; and Latvian revival, 469–71; of local products, 46; post-revival and, 30; and revival in Europe, 467–68; of revivals and related movements, 62–63; sceptic perspective, 473–74; and shift from tradition to heritage, 54; “thick globalization,”  467–68, 483; “thin globalization,” 467; as threat to Vietnamese intangible cultural heritage, 162; transformationalist perspective, 475–77; understanding perspectives on, 472–73. See also Westernization Goertzen, Chris, 274n1, 556 Goldblatt, David, 466–67 Goldstein, Kenny, 100 Gonazalez, Clarence, 364 Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival (Allen), 109 Good News from Africa (Ibrahim), 656 Gorani, 583, 584fig. Gordela, 579 Gore, Georgiana, 622 Gottlunch, Carl Axel, 397 Gow, Niel, 560 Grabar, Oleg, 626 de Graça, Maria, 418–20 Grammy Awards, 459 Grančica, 338–40

Grand Apartheid, 648 Grande Liquidação, 437n13 grandparent education, 119–20 great boom, 100, 106 Green, Archie, 100 groundnut farming, 242 Guava Jam, 533–34 Guigné, Anna Kearney, 109 Guilbert, Yvette, 89 Gulashvili, Malkhaz, 593 Guran, 639fig., 640 Guss, David M., 621 Gwangwa, Jonas, 649 Hahn Man-young, 151 Hahoe mask dance drama, 138 Hainari, O. A., 406–7 hair, of Yulia Tymoshenko, 513 Hall, Stuart, 594 de la Halle, Adam, 89 Halmos, Béla, 183, 184–86, 187, 193 Hamba Kahle/Confluence, 655 hanbok, 141 Hannerz, Ulf, 594 Hanoi Ca Trù Club, 171, 179n16 Harkin, Michael, 350 harmony: functional, 278, 576, 590; link between modernity and, 266–67 harp societies, Irish, 561 Harriot, Thomas, 75fig., 76, 77fig., 80 Hassan, Marzuki, 376 hát ả đào, 164, 166–67, 170, 175, 177 hát ca công, 166–67, 178n4 hát chơi, 166–67 hát cô đầu, 166–67 hát cửa đình, 164, 166–67, 171–72, 174, 175, 177 hát cửa quyền, 166–67, 175 hát nhà tơ, 166–67 hát nhà trò, 167 hat nói, 170 hát thi, 167 Hawai‘i: ethnicities in, 548–49n9; self-determination of, 535, 548n5 Hawaiian, as ethnic group, 531–32 Hawaiian Renaissance, 531, 532–37, 541, 545–46 Haynes, Bruce, 84 Heap, Steve, 499–500

INDEX  685 Held, David, 466–67 Helsinki Peace Agreement (2005), 380–81 Henry, Edwin O., 561–62 Herat, Afghanistan, 382 Herder, Johann Gottfried von: on Baltic songs, 469;  romancero and, 84–85; romantic nationalism and, 6, 396, 604; term “folk” coined by, 21 heritage: American and European usage of, 59n5; authenticity of Croatian local, 341; Brazilian, 422; Canadian, 109; change from tradition to, 31, 51, 52–54; Chickasaw, 316–17; and cultural error, 14; cultural imperialism and, 574; endangered, 581; exalting ancient, 11; Finnish, 396, 397, 399; Georgian, 576, 577, 583; history and, 163; and Iranian dance in diaspora, 636; and Irish diaspora, 611; of maqom traditions, 258; modernity and, 56; music as, 55; Native flute and, 459, 460; preservation of, 331–32, 447; production of, 56; protection of, from exploitation, 21; restoration of Croatian folklore, 336–38, 340; and Senegalese neo-traditional performance, 231, 232; Uzbek national musical, 255, 256, 263–64. See also Choctaw-Chickasaw Heritage Committee; intangible cultural heritage heritagization, 53–55 Hernandez, Bharath, 354 Herzog, George, 96 Heywood, J., 491 Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB), 425 Highwoods Stringband, 109 Hill, Derek, 626 Hinton, Leanne, 669–70 Historic Cities Program, 385 historization, in revival production, 46 history: of African American musicians, 653; becoming part of, through revival, 69; of Berkeley folk scene, 108; of  Brazilian musical movements, 420–28, 433; of ca trù, 160, 163, 166, 168; cyclical patterns of cultural, 119–20; of early music revivals, 73–74, 89–90; of Garifunas and Creoles, 350, 352; of Hawai‘i, 531, 533; heritage and, 163; of Hungarian dance house movement,

184–87; of Hungarian folk music, 197; of Iranian classical music, 277–80; Iranian cultural, 623, 629; Irish diasporic, 604, 605, 607, 615; Jola, 240, 241; of kathak dance, 211–15, 217–18; musical and choreographic theatre and creation of seductive versions of, 229; of Native Americans in Oklahoma, 302–4, 446; reconfiguring identity and, 27; reinterpretation of, 4, 20; reissues and, 103; of scholars’ involvement in revival processes, 5–6; and South African jazz, 655–56, 662; of Upland South, 123; use of, 12–15, 44, 266; of Uzbek arranged folk and traditional music, 254–62, 273–74; veracity of, 286–91. See also past Hobsbawm, Eric, 7, 12, 35n1, 558 Hodjaeva, Ro’zibi, 272–73 holders, of culture, 137–39 Holladay, Stella, 124 Holland, Jerry, 118 Hollow Rock String Band, 120–22, 127 Hommes de la Danse, Les (Huet & Keita), 237 homogenization: effects of, 45–46; problems caused by, 54–55 Hsu, Francis L. K., 566 Huet, Michel, 237 hukai pō, 540 hula: position of, before Hawaiian Renaissance, 533; and reclamation of Hawaiian culture, 535–37; taught in Hawaiian universities, 534; in “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 530–31, 541 Human Cultural Properties, 137 humanness, music and, 330–31 Hungaraton series of Hungarian folk music, 197 Hungarian Academy of Science’s Musicology Institute, 194 Hungarian dance house movement: institutionalization of, 194–96; integration of activism and scholarship into, 192–94; interethnic and multistate character of, 187–89; intimate connection of, to dance, 184–87; as music and dance revival, 184; music revival fostered by, 196–200; overview of, 182–84 Hungarian Heritage House, 195, 199

686   INDEX Hương Thanh, 179n18 Hurricane Katrina, 374 hybridity: authenticity and, 22, 223; in Brazil, 297n18; and English folk music resurgence, 493; financial impact of musical, 481; globalization and, 468, 473; Iranian national dance and, 628; in kathak dance revival, 208, 222; and “new aesthetic,” 16; and sceptic criticism, 479–82. See also fusion and fusion processes; syncretism hyperglobal perspective of globalization, 474–75, 483 hypermedia, 475 Ibrahim, Abdullah, 646, 647, 652. See also Brand, Dollar identity: adoptive cultural, 562–63, 567; Bahiano, 428; bolstering, as motivation for revival, 11; Brazilian national, 422–23, 426; Chickasaw communal dance songs and, 316–17; Choctaw communal dance and, 311; and Croatian revival, 326; defining Native cultural, 301; destabilized by moments of crisis, 434; and development of Uzbek arranged folk music, 257–58; and dialogic space between Creoles and Garifunas, 363, 365–68; and emergence of Casamançais regionalism, 242–44, 247; folk music as symbol of national, 474; Garifuna, 350–51; Georgian polyphony and, 579; globalization as threat to, 470; Hawaiian, 531–32; and history of arranged folk versus traditional music in Uzbekistan, 254, 256; Indian, 207–8; Iranian dance and, 618; Ivana Kupala and ethnic, 524; kathak dance revival and, 222; Latvian, 470, 482–83; movement systems constitutive of, 621–22; music and, 355, 562; nature of gender, 511; negotiation of Irish, 603; preservation of Iranian, 284–85; reassertion of Choctaw and Chickasaw, 318–19; revival and reclaiming indigenous cultural, 300; of revival participants, 511; and shift in Uzbek nationalism, 262–64; and South African jazz, 645; of Soviet republics and later independent nations, 275n6 Iļģi, 469, 471, 475–82 Ilinskaja Pjatnica, 482

imagination: of Ireland, 598, 601, 602, 603, 604; and re-creation of ancient music, 404, 406; and representations of past, 11, 13–14, 409; in supplementing historical sources, 80, 409, 411; tradition as territory of, 24 improvisation: ancient music as departure for experimental, 404–13; in art therapy, 378–79; in  ca trù, 173–74, 176; creativity and, 23; in Early Music performances, 84; in Finnish music education, 415n9; in Georgian polyphony, 575, 579, 585, 592; and Hungarian dance house movement, 184; in Iranian classical music, 283; in Iranian dance, 619, 623, 624, 626–27, 633, 635, 636, 638; musicking and, 483; on Native flute, 452, 455, 458; in participatory music, 67; in South African jazz, 654, 655; Stravinsky on, 290 India. See kathak dance and revival Indian Flute Songs from Comanche Land, 450 Indianists, 447 Indian Removal Act (1830), 303 indigenous resurgence: Forte on, 354–55; of Hindu tradition, 208, 221; of Korean intangible cultural heritage, 136; and metaphor as means of understanding processes and dynamics, 63. See also Chickasaw; Choctaw; Garifuna cultural rescue; Native flute industrialization: of Finland, 400; and revival of early music, 74, 81–83 innovation: authenticity and, 23–24; and Brazilian modernism, 423;  ca trù and, 176, 177; causes of, 435; and Finnish ancient music, 404; of Finnish folk music, 394, 395, 413–14; and Hungarian dance house movement, 199; importance of, 267; influences appearing as, 17; introduced into folklore, 257; kathak dance and, 219, 220; Lönnrot and, 397; and Native flute, 454–55, 457, 458; preservation and, 8, 19, 292; protest bossa nova and, 425; resistance to, 12; revival and, 393, 421, 433; revival resulting in, 5; and study of participatory aspects of revivals, 68; tradition and transformation and, 18–19, 28; valued by Soviet institutions, 266

INDEX  687 institutionalization: of Early Music, 73–90; effects of, 45; of English folk and traditional music, 504; of Hungarian dance house movement, 194–96; of Indian classical dance genres, 210–11; of  kathak dance, 213, 215; as necessary aspect of revival, 63–64; process of, 16–18; transmission through, 27; of Uzbek traditional music, 255, 260–61 intangible cultural heritage:  ca trù as, 160, 161–65; global perspectives on, 142–43; Korean court music as, 149–52; Korean folk songs as, 143–45; Korean percussion bands as, 145–47; Korean shaman rituals as, 147–49; preservation of, 135; preservation of Korean, 136–42, 152–53. See also ca trù; Hungarian dance house movement integrative creativity, 454, 455 intentional fallacy, 118 interculturality, 351 International Center for Georgian Folk Song (ICGFS), 582–83 International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS), 504 International Council for Traditional Music, 140 internationalism, and Uzbek arranged folk music, 267–69 internationalization, of Georgian polyphony, 574, 583–89 International Music Conference (1961), 286 International Native American and World Flute Association, 452 International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony, 581–82 Internet: dissemination through, 27; emergence of fiddling and traditional dance music communities on, 552–55; English folk music resurgence and, 501–2; hypermedia and, 475; impact of, on revival, 551–52; and Irish music and dance revival, 614; special interest groups on, as communities, 565; traditional music organizations on, 556–57 interpretive archaeology, 12–13 invented tradition, 7–8, 35n1, 619 Iranian classical music: first revivalist movement in, 280–85; and historical veracity, 286–91; implications of revivalist

movements in, 294–95; influence of Western musicologists on, 285–86; musical modernizers in, 277–80; second revival movement in, 291–94 Iranian dance: and autoexoticism, 633–35; and choreophobia, 626–27; conceptual approaches to, 621–23; in diaspora, 630–31; first known performances of, outside Iran, 632–33; historical and cultural background of, 623–24; national dance, 627–30; new vision of, 638–40; regional folk dance, 624– 26; “revival” and “revivalists” in context of, 619–21; solo improvised dance, 626; and state folk dance ensemble model, 635–38 Iranian National Ballet, 629 Iran National Folklore Organization, 630 Ireland: characteristics of Irish music, 603–4; Georgian singing in, 587–89; history of emigration from, 600–601; as homeland, 599–600; images of, 602; isolation of, 599; revival in, 467, 604–8; traditional music revival activities in, 559, 560–61. See also Irish diaspora Irish diaspora: history of, 600–601; loss through, 601–2; overview of, 598–99, 614–16; and perceived life of homeland, 599–600; performance of Irishness in, 608–14; revival and, 604–8 Irish Melodies (Moore), 605 Irish tenor, 605 Istrian Peninsula, 333–35, 343 Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve) (Latvia): ethnomusicology and political significance of, 523–26; following Ukrainian independence, 517–19; government sponsorship of, 512–13; in Kharkiv, 521–23; in Kyiv, 519–21; political and social symbolism associated with, 514; as revival, 514–16, 526–27 Jabbour, Alan, 13, 68 Jackson, Bruce, 84 Jamal, 638–39 James, Simon, 474 Jamison, Andrew, 17, 266 Jamo Jamo Arts, 247 Japan, and Irish diaspora, 614

688   INDEX Järvelä, Mauno, 404 Jászberény Camp, 194 Jazz Epistles, 649, 653 Jeu de Robin et Marion (de la Halle), 89 Jiminez, Amanda, 366–67, 368–69 Jobin, Tom, 424 Johnson, Meredith, 313, 317 Jola, and emergence of Casamançais regionalism, 238–44, 246 jongleurs, 86 Jordania, Joseph, 587 Joutsenlahti, Leena, 406, 408–9 Jylhä, Konsta, 401, 403 Kabul, Afghanistan, 382, 383 Kalevala, 397, 399 Kañaalen, 241, 242, 244 Kanahele, George, 532–33, 535, 536, 545 Kane, Frank, 585, 586–87 Kanggangsullae, 144–45, 154n16 Kangnŭng tanoje, 147 Kangnyŏng mask dance drama, 138 Kang Sanggi, 137–38 Kanté, Facelli, 232 kantele players, 406–8 kaona, 539–40 Karomatov, Faizulla, 260, 261–62, 263 Kartomi, Margaret, 297n18 Kartuli Khoro, 577 Kashgar rubab, 261 Kastinen, Arja, 406–8, 409 Kathakas, 217–19 kathak dance and revival: characteristics of, 220–21, 222; classicization of, 215–19, 223; in context of Indian independence and nationalism, 207–11; cultural exchange and, 221–22; description and history of, 211–13; overview of, 205–7; roots and histories of, 213–15; social class and, 220 Kathaks: as authorities of  kathak dance, 216, 220; caste shift of, 214–15; identity shift of, 222; as story-tellers, 218 Katrina, Hurricane, 374 Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, 400–401 Kavkasia, 585–86 Keawe, Lia, 542 Keita, Fodéba, 228, 231–34, 237, 249n7

Kelemen, László, 193 Kéti, Zé, 426 Khaleqi, Ruhollah, 278 Kharkiv, Ukraine, Ivana Kupala in, 519, 521–23 Kiani, Majid, 279–80, 282, 296n11 Kihune, Heali‘i, 543 Kim, Chongho, 148 Kim, Yong Woo, 144–45 Kimble, Taylor, 123–24 Kim Kŭmhwa, 148 Kim Sŏkch’ul, 148, 149 Kim Sŏngjin, 151 Kim Taerye, 148 Kim Yŏlgyu, 147 King Arthur (Dryden), 80 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 43–44, 50, 620 klapa singing, 332, 345n2, 346n9 klezmer music, 54 Klymenko, Iryna, 525 knowers, shift of, to doers, 47–51 Koch-e-Kharabat school, 385 Kodály, Zoltán, 192 Kodoba family, 198 Kokil Music College, 384 Könczei, Csongor, 194, 199 Korea. See South Korea Koridze, Pilimon, 578 Koskoff, Ellen, 28 Koutsouba, Maria, 622 kulturno-umjetnička društva, 325, 335–41 kumpanjija, 327, 346n5 Kunanbaeva, Alma, 257, 267 Kupalo, 515–16, 520 Kurdish music, influence of, on Iranian classical music, 292–93 Kürti, László, 189 Kyhälä, Jouko, 412 Kyiv, Ukraine, Ivana Kupala in, 519–21 “Lady of the Lake,”  126 Laitinen, Heikki, 395, 402, 405–6, 408–12 Lajtha, László, 185, 192 Lake, Ma‘iki Aiu, 534 Lakhushdi, Georgia, 591, 592fig. Lakota flute songs, 445 Land League, 605

INDEX  689 Landowska, Wanda, 75, 79–80, 81 language revitalization, 669–70 Latvia: adaptation of performance techniques of Russian minorities in, 482; globalization and revival in, 469–71; hybridity and, 481 Law 961 (Korea), 136 Leão, Nara, 418–22, 426, 434–35 Lê Đức Mao, 168 Lee Hyegu, 155n34 legitimacy: authenticity and, 8, 28, 45, 223, 301, 394; authenticity and authority and, 19–24; and cultural change, 393; and emergence of Casamançais regionalism, 241; of English folk music, 507; of folk orchestral performance as academic pursuit, 270; in Georgian polyphony, 592; hybridity and, 16; Iranian dance and, 628, 629; of kathak dance, 214, 219, 222; of post-colonial elites, 229; and promotion of revival materials, 26; of protest bossa nova, 420; recognition of past as source of, 12; in revival, 4 Lengyel, László “Türei,”  198–99 Lê Thị Bạch Vân, 172, 174 Leupp, Francis, 447 Levin, Theodore, 253–54, 271, 273 Levy, Bertram, 120–21, 125–26 Liedes, Anna-Kaisa, 411 Lieurance, Thurlow, 447 Lindberg, Ulf, 20 Linich, Carl, 585–86 Linton, Ralph, 5, 558, 563 List, George, 96 literacy: of Canadian jongleurs, 86; fetishization of musical, 259; of Gascogne peasants, 79; importance of musical, 255; nostalgia and, 90; Soviet valorization of, 262; at University of Tehran, 282; Uzbek musical, 269–72; Western notation and notions of musical, 254. See also notation Living Human Treasures, 19, 142 Living Hungarian Folk Music, 197 Livingston, Tamara: on authenticity, 284, 287; on authenticity and tradition, 453; on core revivalists, 525; on ideologies in North America and Western Europe, 9; on popular culture component of revivals, 451; on preservation and innovation, 292; on

purpose of revival, 393; on revival, 280; on revival and modernity, 283; and revival as activism, 10; on revival breakdown, 28; on revivalists, 274n1, 288; on revival musics, 608; theoretical model of, 8, 61–66, 101–2, 660–61; on tradition, 446 Lloyd, A. L., 477 localness, 545 Locke, Kevin, 443, 445, 450, 453–54, 455 Lomax, Alan, 35n2, 329, 551 Lönnrot, Elias, 397–99, 404 Lopez, Frank, 351 Lord, Albert, 23, 406 loss: following war and natural disasters, 331, 339; of Garifuna culture and identity, 350, 351, 355–57, 369; grandparent education and, 119–20; of Iranian identity, 293; of Iranian musical tradition, 284; of Korean cultural heritage, 136, 137; of Latvian identity, 470; nostalgia and, 274; in South African jazz, 658–59, 661; through diaspora, 598, 600–602; of Ukrainian tradition, 521; of Vietnamese cultural identity, 162, 165. See also Croatian revival; decline, musical; Garifuna cultural rescue; natural disasters; war love, as theme in Native flute songs, 457–58 love flute, 445 Lowenthal, David, 13, 163 Lundberg, Dan, 476 Lysloff, Rene T. A., 552 Määtälä, Viljo, 400 MacColl, Ewan, 477 Mackinnon, Niall, 13 Mahalli Dancers, 630 majlesi, 626. See also solo improvised dance, Iranian Muktupāvels, Māris, 471 Malm, Krister, 414–15n6 Manding Mousso, la Révolte de la Femme Mandingue (Camara), 242 Mané, Fodé, 247 Marcus, Greil, 95, 106 Markaz-e Hefz o Eshāeh-ye Musiqi-ye Irani, 281–82, 285, 294 marketers, shift of doers to, 47–51

690   INDEX Martin, György, 185, 186, 192–93 Martins, Carlos Estevam, 425 Marušić, Dario, 334 Marx, Karl, 10, 55 Maryna, 515–16 Masekela, Hugh, 649 Mather, Cotton, 117 MBalia, 243 Mbaye, Alioune, 231 McAllester, David, 443, 452 McGregor, Chris: on conscious South Africanism, 644; education of, 648; influences on, 649, 652; on life outside of South Africa, 650; music and recordings of, 653, 656–59. See also Blue Notes McGregor, Maxine, 650, 651 Medaglia, Júlio, 430 media: English folk music resurgence and, 499–502; and evolution of musical movements, 434; and growth of bossa nova, 424; growth of Brazilian, 437n8. See also “Birth of Hawai‘i, The” mediaization, of Swedish folk music scene, 49–50 mediated intimacies, 512 medieval music. See early music Međunarodna smotra folklora, 327, 330, 342–43 Meeker, Lauren, 165 Meftahi, Ida, 628 Meili, Max, 83 Melnyk, Taras, 525 Melucci, Alberto, 328 Memorial University of Newfoundland, 96–97, 110 Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA), 97 memory, and South African jazz, 661–62 Merriam, Alan P., 96 metaphor, 44, 63, 117 metonymy, 44 Meusare-sare (Working together), 377–78 Meyer, Paul, 650 Mezőség, 187, 189 Middle Ages: included in antiquity, 74; use of term, 76–78 Mills, Joan, 590

mindscapes, musical, 52–53, 56 Ministry of Development and Reconstruction (Croatian), 336 minstrel shows, and Irish diaspora, 608–9 Miskitu, 360 mobility, revival and transnational, 246–48 modernity: authenticity and, 287; effect of, on Indian performing arts, 206; and Iranian classical music, 277–80; motion of, 55; revivals as reaction against and product of, 283; tradition and, 55–56, 265–68, 279, 284, 297nn14,24 Moholo, Louis, 649, 651–52, 657–59 Moiseyev Dance Company, 635 Mo Manhwa, 137 Montaigne, Michel de, 76, 79 Moon, Peter, 534 Moore, Thomas, 605 Moray, Jim, 494 motrebs, 623, 627 Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de Casamance (MFDC), 238–39, 244 Moyake, Nick, 649, 651 Muminova, Mehrihon, 264 Munaf, Sherina, 376 Munro, Ailie, 560 Muravskyi Shliakh, 522 musical literacy, Uzbek, 269–72 musical mindscapes, 52–53, 56 music camps, Irish, 612 “musicking,” 483 “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory” (Livingston), 60, 61–66, 101, 660–61. See also revival model of Tamara Livingston Musikologie, 82, 90 Musikwissenschaft, 82–83, 90 musiqi-ya ’elmi, 279 Musique ancienne (Landowska), 81 “Muxamassi Nasrulloi,”  271 Muzsikás, 197, 198 MySpace, 501 Nadel, Siegfried, 573 Naficy, Hamid, 637–38 Najafi, Najmeh, 633–34 Nakai, R. Carlos, 443, 451–52, 453, 455 naming, 101

INDEX  691 narodnjaci, 332–33, 334fig., 346n3 National Academy of Ballet, 629–30 National Ballet, Senegalese, 234–35 national dance, Iranian, 624, 627–30 National Gugak Center, 149, 150, 151 National Indian Youth Council, 448–49 nationalism: and compilation of epic poetry, 11, 395, 396–97; and development of Uzbek arranged folk music, 257–58; and Georgian polyphony, 577, 579, 582; globalization and, 474; and history of arranged folk versus traditional music in Uzbekistan, 255–56; and Hungarian dance house movement, 187–89; and Iranian classical music, 279–80, 284–85, 293–94; kathak dance revival in context of Indian, 207–11; Latvian, 482; as motivation for revival, 11, 393, 394–96, 401, 413; nostalgia and, 273–74; and Senegalese neo-traditional performance, 233–37, 244; shift in Uzbek, 262–64; and Uzbek folk orchestras as agents for international understanding, 269. See also ethnicity; patriotic songs, Croatian; patriotism, and English folk music resurgence National Literary Society, 606 National Strategy for Music Education (Afghanistan), 383, 384 National Theatre, Senegalese, 233, 235–37 Native American Music Awards, 453 Native Americans: Civil Rights movement and, 300–301; constraints placed on, 300; music and dance revivals of, 301–2; as parallel to medieval antiquity, 75–76, 79, 80; suppression and assimilation of, 446–47. See also Chickasaw; Choctaw Native flute: non-Native involvement with, 459–62; overview of, 442–43; during postrevival period, 453–59; during prerevival period, 446–49; during revival period, 449–53; traditional, to  1879, 443–45 Native flute circles, 456–57 natural disasters: ethnographic research on, 374; as motivation for revival, 12. See also decline, musical nautch girls, 209–10 Nazemi, Abdollah, 630 Nazeri, Shahram, 293, 294

Ndao, Cheikh Aliou, 236 Neal, Mary, 491 Ned, Buster, 305–11, 313–15, 318 “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu,”  329 Negra, 368–69 Nelipolviset, 406 neoclassical movement, 36n6 Nettl, Bruno, 82, 533, 562 Neuenfeldt, Karl, 451, 452 Nevaquaya, “Doc Tate,”  448, 449–50, 452, 454–55, 456 Newcastle University, 504 New Criticism, 118 Newfoundland, 96–97, 109–10 New Living Village Music recordings, 197 New Lost City Ramblers, 121, 335 New Music Manifesto, 430 new steady state, 7, 28, 555–56, 593, 594 New St. George, 480, 481 New World, as parallel to medieval antiquity, 75–76, 79, 80 New Zealand, Irish immigrants in, 600–601 Nghệ Thuật Ca Trù, 171–72 Ngọc Đại, 175 Ngô Linh Ngọc, 171 NGOs, 377–78 Nguyễn Lê, 179n18 Nguyễn Mạnh Tiến, 171, 179n18 Nguyễn Thị Chúc, 173 Nguyễn Thị Phúc, 170 Nguyễn Thúy Hòa, 166fig.,171, 175–76 Nguyễn Văn Khuê, 166fig., 171, 175, 176 Nguyễn Văn Mùi, 166fig., 171 Nguyễn Văn Ngọc, 170 Nguyễn Xuân Diện, 168, 169 Nguyễn Xuân Khoát, 170–71 Nicaragua. See Garifuna cultural rescue Nicaraguan Afro-Garifuna Organization (OAGANIC), 361–62 Nieminen, Rauno, 405, 407fig., 412 99 Georgian Songs (Garakanidze), 587–88 nongak, 145–46, 154n19 non-government organizations, 377–78 Nordstrom, Byron J., 556 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 346n5 Norwegian traditional music, 556–57

692   INDEX nostalgia: and “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 544; and Iranian classical music, 284; and Iranian dance in diaspora, 630; and mobilization of past, 13; patriotic Vietnamese, 163; and preservation of Korean cultural heritage, 136; and revival in post-Soviet spaces, 511–12; and study of medieval antiquity, 73, 75, 80, 89–90; and Uzbek arranged folk and traditional music, 273–74 notation: publication of, as dissemination, 25–26; and Uzbek musical literacy, 269–72. See also literacy Nova Bossa Velha, Velha Bossa Nova, 418 Novák, Ferenc, 186 Ntshoko, Makay, 649 Nyanyian Tsunami (Tsunami Song), 376–77 O amor, o sorriso e a flor, 437n6 Obando Sancho, Victor, 353 objectification: and Iranian classical music, 283; as necessary aspect of revival, 219; production of, 45 object-oriented criteria for authenticity, 6, 20, 326, 491 Obnavljamo baštinu project, 336, 337fig., 340 obnova, 326, 343, 345n1 Observer Effect, 124 Okamura, Jonathan, 545 Old Fiddlers Association, 557 Old-Time Herald, 109, 129 old-time music, American, 96, 102, 108–9, 123, 129–30, 557, 563 Old-Time Music and Dance (Bealle), 108 Old Time News, 129 Olson, Laura, 257, 471–72 omasta päästä, 408 “On Building and Developing a Progressive Vietnamese Culture Rich in National Character” (Vietnamese Communist Party), 162 O’Neil, Francis, 560–61 Orfeu, 437n10 Orientalism, 207–8, 223–24n2, 622–23, 629 origin fallacy, 118 orphans: in Afghanistan, 384; arts therapy for, 378–79, 387n3 Ortega, Daniel, 358

Os Mutantes, 430, 431–32 O’Toole, Fintan, 615 Out of Place (Said), 644 outsiders: ethnic, 22; and Georgian polyphony, 574–75, 590, 593; and Hawaiian culture, 547–48; legitimacy and, 394; as revivalists, 15–16, 107, 619; role of, in revivalist projects, 343–44 “Over the Waterfall,”  127–28 ox decapitation ceremony, Croatian, 327 O’zbek Halq Musiqasi, 258–59 Pachanga, 239 Pacheco, Johnny, 239 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, 278 Pak Pyŏngch’ŏn, 148 Palacio, Andy, 359 parallel traditions, 622 Pareles, Jon, 669 Pars National Ballet, 630 Park, Mikyung, 148 Park Chung Hee, 136 Parker, Logan, 305 Parry, C. Hubert H., 491 participation: in  choro revival, 62; consideration for, 60–61; face-to-face, 64; motivation for revival, 65; observation and, 116–31; significance of, 66–68 participatory music, significance of, 66–68 Pashofa Dance, 313 past: ancient, in “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 540–41; appropriation of, to reshape cultural environment, 29; borrowing from, 394; Croatian revival and appropriation of, 344–45; as danger to future of music culture, 668–69; Georgian polyphony as restoration of, 590; illusion of continuity between present and, 229; mobilization of, 12–15; movement to present from, 119; nationalism and connection to, 263–64; presence of, 287; and present in Croatian folklore, 335; reconstruction and validation of, in Hawaiian Renaissance, 541; representations of, 11; revival as drawing upon, 5; transferring musical elements from, 4; and understanding of revival, 43–44. See also history; nostalgia Past in Music, The(Ethnomusicology Forum), 13

INDEX  693 patriotic songs, Croatian, 326–27, 329 patriotism, and English folk music resurgence, 491. See also nationalism Pávai, István, 193 Payne, Richard W. “Doc,”  444, 448, 449, 456 Peacock, Kenneth, 109–10 “Peekaboo Waltz,”  127 pelimanni music, 400–404, 413 percussion bands, preservation of Korean, 145–47 performance: and academic status, 270; Chickasaw cultural identity through, 316–17; of Choctaw communal dance songs, 309–10; and English folk music resurgence, 492–93, 495–99; goals of, in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, 267–68; hybridity and, 480–81; of Irishness in diaspora, 608–14; of Istrian ethnomusic, 334–35; as means of discovery for new audiences, 501; new teaching contexts’ impact on, 173–74; pelimanni revival and amateur, 401–2; as representation of music, 49–50; revival of, as medium of post-colonial elites, 229; shift from participatory to presentational, 16–17; transmission through, 26. See also Senegalese neo-traditional performance “performance approach,”  98–99 Pernambuco, Brazil, 428–29 Perraton, Jonathan, 466–67 personal expression, ancient music as departure for, 404–13 person-oriented criteria for authenticity, 20–22, 394 Petrie, George, 561 Petrosiants, Ashot, 257, 261, 270 Pham Duy, 170 Phạm Thị Huệ, 174, 175, 179n15 Phó Đình Kỳ, 171 Pickens, Bienum, 307 Picts, 76 Pilzer, Joshua, 339 place-based special interest groups, 554 Plains flute, 443–45 Plan Australia, 378, 387n3 poetry: Iranian classical music and, 293–94; and Iranian dance in diaspora, 633; Vietnamese, 170

politics: authenticity and, 20; and Casamançais regionalism, 246; Choctaw and Chickasaw self-determination and, 303; and English folk music resurgence, 494; Georgian, 580–81; Hawaiian assimilation, 535; and Hungarian dance house movement, 190–91, 195; and kathak dance revival, 214; Kaustinen Folk Music Festival funding and, 401; as motivation for revival, 11–12, 418–22, 424–29, 433; and protest song movements, 23; of “revivalist” in United States, 109; and revival performance in Senegal, 230–37; and South African jazz, 653, 655, 657, 659–60; Tamil artistic revival and, 381; Tropicália movement and, 431; Ukrainian, 512. See also cultural politics “Politics of Culture: Folk Critique and Transformation in the State of Hungary, The” (Taylor), 188 polyphony. See Georgian polyphony Pomazan, Yefrozynia, 515, 516fig. “Pongjiga,” 145 Popular Center for Culture (CPC), 425–26 popular music, Croatian post-war tradition-based, 331–35. See also bossa nova; protest bossa nova; Tropicália movement post-colonial regimes. See also kathak dance and revival; Senegalese neo-traditional performance post-colonial regimes, revival of performance as medium of, 229, 233–37 postfolkore, 468, 469 post-processual archaeology, 12–13 post-revival, 28–30;  ca trù and, 176; choro revival and, 66; conceptualization of, 9; defined, 4; Finnish revival activities in, 395; folk music and, 105–6; and Georgian polyphony, 574, 593–95; globalization and, 466, 472, 474–76; and Hawaiian culture, 545; innovation and, 23–24; Iranian, 295; and Iranian classical music, 294–95; and Korean folk culture, 152; Native flute and, 442, 453–62; and new steady state phase of cultural revitalization, 555–58; and notion of continuum, 16; recent studies, 107–10; stage following, 666; understanding development of, culture, 566

694   INDEX posttraumatic stress disorder, 378, 386, 387n3 present: dissatisfaction with, as motivation for revival, 3–4, 10–11; and past in Croatian folklore, 335 preservation: Bernardini on, 29; of customs, 327–28; in diaspora, 19; and global perspectives on intangible cultural heritage, 142–43; of heritage, 331–32; innovation and, 8, 19, 292; of intangible cultural heritage, 135; of Korean court music, 149–52; of Korean folk songs, 143–45; of Korean intangible cultural heritage, 136–42, 152–53; of Korean percussion bands, 145–47; of Korean shaman rituals, 147–49; tension between conservation and, 28; through decontextualization and recontextualization, 4, 44 primary ensembles, 575 process-oriented criteria for authenticity, 20, 22–23, 394 production(s): artistic, as nonviolent resistance, 426; authenticity of, 46–47; emphasis on, 45; meaning of, 43; social networks in artistic, 421 product-oriented criteria for authenticity, 20 professionalization: of English folk music, 493, 497, 498–99, 501, 505, 506; and Finnish folk music, 395, 403, 406; of folk music, 53–54; of Georgian folk polyphony, 578–79; of Hungarian dance house groups, 197–98; as necessary aspect of revival, 63–64; process of, 16–18; of Roma musicians, 341; of Senegalese neo-traditional performance, 237; and shift from knowers to doers to marketers, 50 Program for the Socialization of Peace and Reintegration of Aceh, 380 promotion: changes in nature of, 24–27; of Korean intangible cultural heritage, 139–40; methods and infrastructure for, 4 Proper Distribution, 501–2 protest bossa nova, 419–20, 422, 425–31 psychosocial homeostasis, 566 Public Enlightenment movement (Finland), 394–95, 413 Pukwana, Dudu, 649, 652, 657–59 p’ungmul, 145–46 punk bands, Irish and Irish-diaspora, 613

punta, 363–64, 365, 366, 367 punta rock, 364 Purcell, Henry, 80 purity: of Chickasaw communal songs and dances, 315; of Croatian traditional music, 343; and first revivalist movement in Iranian classical music, 281, 283–85; and historical veracity, 286–91; of Indian performing arts, 208–10; of kathak dance, 206, 219; and Native flute, 449, 459; and rejection of revivalist artists, 620. See also authenticity; ethnic purity Qahremani, Esma’il Khan, 289, 296n11 qarbzadegi, 278 Quách Thị Hồ, 170, 171 quản giáp, 168 Quitzow, Sulgwynn, 108 racial purity, 287–88, 297n18. See also ethnic purity radif: authority of, 285, 288, 297n13; Borumand and, 289, 296n11; increased attention to, 282–83; Nazeri on, 294; second revival movement as reaction against, 295; Shahnazi and, 296n12 Radio Tehran, 279–80 Rădulescu, Speranţa, 191 Rafly, 376, 379 Raimbergenov, Abdulhamid, 384 Rajabi, Yunus, 258–59, 271, 275n6 Ramazani, Nesta, 628–29 Ramnarine, Tina, 400 Ramos, Vernon, 363, 365 Rao, Maya, 217 Rashid, Ali Mohammad, 286 Ras Lila, 214 Ratil, Iozef, 577 rationalized creativity, 454–55 ratôh taloe, 377 re-, 666–68 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, 142 “Reconstructing Heritage” project, 336, 337fig., 340 recontextualization: authenticity balanced by processes of, 591; brings new demands, 394; change through, 28; of Chickasaw

INDEX  695 communal songs and dances, 313; of Choctaw communal songs and dances, 306; documentation and explication of, processes, 9, 67; effects of, 394; of English folk music, 506–7; of Hawaiian traditions, 533; inherent processes of, 63; legitimization and, 4; of primary folklore, 574; of repertories, 301; in revival, 4; of South African jazz, 661; transformation and, 15–19; transmission and dissemination and, 24–25. See also decontextualization recordings. See audio recordings Red Clay Ramblers, 121, 122 Red Power Movement, 300–301 Red River Blues (Bastin), 104 Reed, Henry, 119, 124–27 re-enactment, 14, 17–18, 668–69 Reflections, 654 regalia: for Chickasaw communal dance, 315–16; of Choctaw communal dance, 310; hula, 536 Regional Dance Group, 364 regulated creativity, 454, 455 reissues, 103 Reizniece, Ilga, 470, 471, 481–82, 483 religion: application of “revival” in, 117; and Iranian classical music, 293; Iranian dance and, 624; Ivana Kupala and, 514–15;  kathak dance and, 217 renaissance: of English folk arts, 489; in fiddling, 128; of Georgian polyphony, 574; of Indian dance, 212; in Iranian classical music, 291–94; of  klapa movement, 332; process of cultural, 223; of Qajar music, 281; use of term, 76–78. See also Hawaiian Renaissance repertory: Chickasaw, 315, 316, 318; Choctaw, 302, 304, 307, 308–9, 311, 314; discontinuation and renewal of, 301; of English folk music, 490–91; of Henry Reed, 126–27; of Hollow Rock String Band, 122; integration of cultural artifacts into, 119; memory and, 662; putting away and putting to sleep, 319n1; recontextualization of, 301, 318; of Southern oldtime fiddling, 116, 121, 122–23, 129; of Taylor Kimball, 124 Repo, Teppo, 405, 408 representations: audio recordings as, 49–50, 103; meaning and function of, 43

Resolution 5 of Eighth National Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party, 162 restoration: and antiquarian nostalgia, 73, 78–81, 90; in Croatia, 331, 336; of ethnic purity, 11; following disasters, 372–73, 377–78; of Georgian polyphony, 574, 577–78, 589–90; as important cultural phenomenon, 4; of integrity of present practices, 12; and kathak dance revival, 207–11; in Korea, 149–50; revivals as, 8, 61, 63; in South African jazz, 646, 660–61 resurgence: in English folk arts, 28–29, 489– 90, 494–95, 499–500, 507; and Garifuna cultural rescue, 352–55; of interest in Southeastern Indian cultures, 313; of Iranian national consciousness, 294; of regionalism, 247; versus revival, 493–94 reverse language shift, 669 revitalization: of Croatian tunes, 333; Garifuna, 350–52, 355; in Hawai‘i, 533; of Irish music, 607; of language, 669–70; revival and, 566; of Scottish traditional music, 560; through formation and organizations, 557–58 revitalization movements: Harkin on, 350; Internet and, 552; Nevaquaya on, 449; studies of, 229; Wallace’s theory of, 6–7, 99, 288, 331, 393, 555–56, 566, 567, 593 revival: as activism, 10–12, 350–70, 393–414, 418–36; authenticity, authority, and legitimacy and, 19–24; characteristics of, 3–4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 222–23, 510–11; contention regarding, as label, 4–5, 63, 302; as current in creation and dissolution of musical movements, 421; defined, 3, 61; as fluid, 229; meanings of, 116–19; and mobilization of past and selective use of history, 12–15; as paradigm, 101–2; past and understanding of, 43–44; processes and issues in, 3–4; as process that stretches space, 246–48; purpose of, 61; recontextualization and transformation and, 15–19; as response to social and cultural change, 562–66; versus resurgence, 493–94; scholarship on, 5–8; separating, from other musical processes, 103–4; transmission, dissemination, and promotion and, 24–27; in twenty-first century, 9–10

696   INDEX revivalists: core revivalists, 65, 525; in Iranian dance context, 619–21; legitimacy and authenticity and, 19, 274n1; and recontextualization and transformation, 15–16; as transmitters, 25 revival model of Tamara Livingston, 61–66, 660–61. See also Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory” (Livingston) revival scholarship, 5–8 Reynolds, Simon, 668 Rezvani, Medjid, 629 Rhodes, Willard, 445 Ricardo, Sérgio, 429, 431 rice farming, 140, 242 Ritual to Confucius, 149 Ritual to Invoke Native Land Consciousness, 139, 148 Riverdance, 612–13 Roberston, James Stewart, 560 Robinson, Mary, 613 Robles, Alomia, 154n14 “Rocking the Babies to Sleep,”  126–27 romancero, 84–86 Romancero du Canada (Barbeau), 85–86 Romania, and ethnic-national identification of Hungarian dance house movement, 188–89 romantic nationalism: Finnish, 394–400, 409, 413; Irish responses to, 604–5; as motivator of scholar-revivalists, 6 Ronström, Owe: on authenticity, 24; on early revivalists, 23; on improvisation in European folk revivals, 452; on mobilization of past, 13; on revival, 5, 10, 283; on shifts, 4, 15; on tradition and modernity, 279, 297n24 Rosenberg, Neil: on invented traditions, 35n1; on revival, 116–17; on revival and antiquarian studies, 78; on revival and class, 220, 291 Rose Revolution (2003), 581 Round Midnight at the Café Montmartre, 654 Royal Ancestral Shrine (Chongmyo), 149 Rubi, Mahrisal, 379 Ruguma, 364 runo-singing, 396–99, 400, 414n3 rural culture, pelimanni music and rejuvenation of, 400–404

Russian Empire, Georgian polyphony and revivalist trends under, 576, 577–78. See also Soviet Union Saakashvili, Mikheil, 581, 582 Safvate, Dariouche, 281, 288–89 Saha, Hannu, 405, 409, 410 Said, Edward, 223–24n2, 644–46 Sakhioba, 580, 581fig. salvage ethnography, 354 samba de morro, 424 samba-song, 423, 424 Sambola, Kensy, 361–62 Sambou, Saliou, 239, 240 Sampson, Adam, 307, 308, 309, 311 samullori, 146 SamulNori, 146–47, 148 Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), 357–60 Sanskritization, of  kathak dance, 216, 220 Sára, Ferenc, 198 Sarmast, Ahmed, 374, 383–84 scenarios, 646, 662 sceptic perspective of globalization, 473–74, 477–82 Schneider, Marius, 573 scholars: American instrumental folk music revival and, 122–29, 130; authenticity and, 19–20, 22, 102, 394, 622; Finnish, 399, 400, 405–6; folklore, 23, 99–100; Georgian, 574, 575, 580; and Hungarian dance house movement, 192–94; and identification of traditional musical elements, 4; intellectual trends spurring, 6; involvement of, in revival process, 5–8, 130–31; legitimacy and, 19; and meaning of revival, 619; Ukrainian, 521. See also scholarship scholarship: on British folk music between 1950s and 1970s, 492; future directions for, 60–61, 68; Georgian, 576, 578, 580; increase in revival, 60; on Ivana Kupala, 525–26; and journey of Neil Rosenberg, 94–110; legitimacy and, 19, 63–64; of medieval antiquity, 74–81; and postindustrial university, 81–83; regarding runo-songs, 396–97; revival, 5–8. See also scholars Schools’ Folklore Scheme, 607

INDEX  697 Schools’ Manuscript Collection, 607 Scotland: Irish immigrants in, 600; revival in, 467; traditional music revival activities in, 559–60 Sebestyén, Márta, 197, 198 Sebő, Ferenc: education of, 193; on founders of Heritage House, 195; and Hungarian dance house movement, 184–86, 200; and national character of Hungarian dance house movement, 187 Seck, Assane, 231 secondary ensembles, 575 second folk revival, English, 492–93 Sédar Senghor, Léopold, 228–29, 231–34 Segal, Lewis, 640 self-determination, Hawaiian, 535, 548n5 Senegalese National Ballet, 234–35 Senegalese National Theatre, 233, 235–37 Senegalese neo-traditional performance: development of, during colonial period, 230–33; and emergence of Casamançais regionalism, 237–46; as revival genre, 228–29; role of, in cultural revival and nationalist politics, 233–37; transnational mobility and, 246–48 set dancing, 606 Shah, Reza, 277–78, 279, 285 Shahnazi, Ali Akbar, 296n12 shaman rituals: and population migration, 153n4; preservation of Korean, 147–49 Sharp, Cecil, 490–92 Shashmaqom, 273, 275n6 Shashmaqom vol. 1-6, 258–59 Shateri, 638 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman, 75 Shetland fiddlers, 54, 559 Shetlandising, 54 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 581 Sheyda Ensemble, 292 shifts: decontextualization and recontextualization as, 4; revival processes as, 15–16, 45–46 Shimmen, Phil, 537, 538 Shklovsky, Viktor, 666 Shooting Roots, 502–3 Show Opinião, 246–47, 419, 420, 428

Shrewsbury Folk Festival, 498 Sibelius Academy, Folk Music Department, 395, 405–6, 410–11 Sidmouth International Festival, 500 Simon, Paul, 154n14 Singer of Tales (Lord), 406 Sinhala-Tamil ethnic conflict, 381 Sizaret, Frederic, 378 Skandinieki, 469, 470, 476 Skinner, J. Scott, 560 Škoro, Miroslav, 346n7 Sligo fiddlers, 609 Slobin, Mark: on affinity and belonging, 590; on context, 447; on kernel group in preservation and change, 450; on klezmer music, 54; on perspectives on globalization, 476; on proliferation of traditional music styles, 568; on revival, 4, 5, 285, 563–64; Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, 7; on term “revival,” 63, 446; on transnational transmission, 594 Small, Christopher, 105, 483 Smith, Anthony D., 562, 564 Smith, Harry, 100 social class: and development of Uzbek arranged folk music, 257; Iranian classical music revival and, 290–91; and  kathak dance revival, 219–20; and origin of kathak dance, 214–15; and protest bossa nova, 425; relationship between revivals and, 64–65; and Senegalese neo-traditional performance, 236–37; in South Korea, 153n3 social networks: in artistic production, 421; fiddling and traditional dance music communities and, 565; and Irish music and dance revival, 614; and musical movements, 434. See also Internet Sodiqov, Faruq, 268, 270 Sofyan, Teungku, 377 Sog’diana Folk Orchestra, 268–69, 275n10 Sŏkchŏn taeje, 149–50 solace, music as, 329–30, 373, 386, 661 solo improvised dance, Iranian, 623, 624, 626 Sonar Senghor, Maurice: as director of Daniel Sorano Theatre, 233; on L’Exile d’Alboury, 236; and National Ballet, 234, 235; supports Keita, 232

698   INDEX Sonevytsky, Maria, 523 songmasters, 574, 582, 584, 586, 592–93 Sosiura, Volodymyr, 528n3 Sotsialistycha Kultura, 515, 516fig. Soug, 639 South African jazz: of Chris McGregor and Blue Notes, 656–59; cultural and historical context of, 647–50; diaspora, transformation, and remembrance and, 652–54; of Dollar Brand and Bea Benjamin, 654–56; in Europe and United States, 650–52; overview of, 644–47, 660–62 South Korea: court music, 149–52; folk songs, 143–45; as model for preservation and revival, 142; percussion bands, 145–47; preservation of intangible cultural heritage of, 136–42, 152–53; shaman rituals, 147–49; social class in, 153n3 Soviet Union: Georgian polyphony and revivalist trends under, 578–80; and Latvian musical authenticity, 471; revivals in post-Soviet spaces, 511–14. See also Ukraine; Uzbekistan space, revival as process stretching, 246–48 special interest groups, 552–53, 554, 565, 589–93 Speed, John, 76 spelemannslag, 556–57 spiritual revival, Croatian, 236–38 Sprat, Thomas, 78 Sri Lanka, revival in, 381, 385–86 Stainer, C., 83 Stainer, J. F. R., 83 standardization: effects of, 45; of Georgian polyphony, 579, 588; of radif, 283; of Uzbek traditional music, 258–59, 275n6 Stanton, Gary, 126 State Conservatory: Tbilisi State Conservatoire, 578, 579, 586; Uzbek, 259–62 Stekert, Ellen, 16, 100–101 Stephenson, Ian, 504 stickball, 304–5 “Stony Point,”  123–24 Storey, John, 491 strategic inauthenticity, 24 strathspey and reel societies, 560 Stravinsky, Igor, 287, 290, 573 student demonstrations, Korean, 139, 147–48

student movement, American, 448–49 Study Group for Applied Ethnomusicology of the International Council for Traditional Music, 373–74 Study of Folklore (Dundes), 95 Study of Folk Music in the Modern World, The (Bohlman), 7 stylization, 335, 341, 343, 344 Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Slobin), 7 Sufism, 638 Sunday Manoa, The, 533–34 Suny, Ronald Grigor, 258 Swanton, John R., 320n9 Swing, Pamela, 559 syncretism: Baumann’s model of purism versus, 16, 23, 277, 334, 449, 450–51, 476; in colonial context, 222; of Finnish contemporary folk music, 413. See also fusion and fusion processes; hybridity synecdoche, 44 Szászcsávás Band, 198 Szék, Transylvania, 185, 186 Taech’wait’a, 150–51 Taegŭm chŏngak, 151 “Tajaga Damée” (Watch Over the Peace), 380 Taj Al-Saltana, 626–27 Talai, Dariush, 282, 284 Tālibān, 382–83 tamburitza, 332, 345n2, 346n9 Tamil-Sinhala ethnic conflict, 381 Tanabe Hisao, 150, 155n30 táncház movement, 128. See also Hungarian dance house movement Táncháztalálkozó, 194 Taruskin, Richard, 287, 291, 406 Tashkent State Conservatory, 260 Tate, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’, 317 tavayafs, 208–10 Taylor, Diana, 646, 662 Taylor, Mary, 188, 194, 195 Taylor, Timothy, 24 Tbilisi State Conservatoire, 578, 579, 586 teceijas singing style, 471, 483 Temple Act (1911), 136 termination legislation, 303, 319n20

INDEX  699 “territories of difference,”  353 terrorism, South African laws against, 648 “Texas,” 124–25 Thái Hà Ensemble, 166fig. Thanh Lâm, 175 Théâtre Africain. See Ballets Africains “thick globalization,”  467–68, 483 “thin globalization,”  467 Thionck Essyl, Senegal, 239–41 Thomas, Judy, 313, 317 Thomas, William, 43 Thompson, Bobbie, 120–21 Thompson, Marko Perković, 332 Thompson, Tommy, 120–22, 126 Timár, Sándor, 184, 185 time: cultural transmission through, 119; as cyclical, 301, 319n2; enactment of cultural processes through, 130; and geographical displacement, 19; heritage and, 56; history as change over, 104–5; rebellion against modern idea of, 14; revival as process stretching, 32; revival’s change over, 246, 248; tradition and, 52 Titon, Jeff, 105, 449–50 Topelius, Zacharis Sr., 397, 399 Topic Records, 493 torture, music as, 330 Touré, Sékou, 232–33, 249n7 traditional dance music communities: from eighteenth century on, 559–62; emergence of, on Internet, 552–55; in Europe, 556–57; and grassroots revitalization of traditional music and dance, 557–58; Internet, as real communities, 565 traditional music: Afghan, 384–85, 386; and agents of revival, 46–47; authenticity and, 17; Brazilian, 419, 431; creative process and, 23; Croatian, 325–26, 327, 333, 334, 335–43, 345; decline of, 29; development of, theories, 27; English, 503–4; festivalization of, 50, 495; fiddle, 552, 556, 557; Finnish, 404, 411; Hawaiian, 533; heritage and, 52–53; heritagization and, 53–54; Hungarian, 187, 191, 192, 195; Iranian, 279–80, 282, 283, 629; Irish, 602, 609, 610; Korean, 139, 146, 151, 152; Latvian, 470, 472; mindscape of, 51–52; Native-American, 301, 311, 459; Norwegian,

556; organization of, revival activities from eighteenth century on, 559–62; revival and, 43–44; and shift from knowers to doers to marketers, 47–51; shifts and, 45–46; Slobin on revival of, 568; social and cultural change and revivals of, 562–66; South African, 652, 659, 660; Ukrainian, 523; Vietnamese, 164. See also folk music; Uzbek traditional music tradition(s): alterations to Ukrainian, 521; and “The Birth of Hawai‘i,” 544; change to heritage from, 31, 51, 52–54; continuity with, 17–18; and Croatian revival, 326, 336, 341, 344–45; defined, 443; evolution of Croatian, 325; Feintuch on, 24; Hawaiian Renaissance and, 534–35; Hobsbawm on, 12; invented, 7–8, 35n1, 619; in Iranian dance, 619; Kanahele on revival of, 532–33; legitimacy and, 19; Livingston on, 446, 453; manipulation of, 512; modernity and, 55–56, 279, 284, 297nn14,24; modernization of ancient Uzbek, 265–68; nationalism and, 263–64; ownership of, 21, 54; parallel, 622; preservation of, 327–28; reinterpretation and reinvention of, 563–64; and revival of Senegalese choreography, 228–29; revival versus, 117–18; as springboards for cultural change, 56, 297n24. See also custom(s) Tran, Nhung Tuyet, 169–70 Transcription Center, 651, 664n5 transformation: of bluegrass music, 96; in Brazilian popular music, 421–22, 429, 435–36; ca trù and, 161; and change to tradition, 28; and Choctaw and Chickasaw music revivals, 302, 318; in Croatia, 344; in Finnish folk music, 393, 396–400, 412; following revival, 5, 8; and Georgian polyphony, 577, 578–80, 594; globalization and, 466, 472; and Hungarian dance house movement, 184, 189; of kathak dance, 216, 222; and Korean folk culture, 148– 49; and new steady state phase of cultural revitalization, 555; recontextualization and, 4, 15–19, 574; revivals as, 31, 44, 45, 532; of Senegalese neo-traditional performance, 229; and South African jazz, 652–54; South African jazz and, 652–54 transformationalist perspective of globalization, 475–79, 480, 482, 483

700   INDEX Transforming Tradition (Rosenberg), 8, 100–101 translation, revival as act of, 25, 44 transmission: authenticity and, 22–23; of ca trù, 169, 173–74, 179n15; changes in nature of, 24–27; of Choctaw music, 309; cross-cultural, 26–27; of fiddle music, 554, 559; following war and natural disasters, 374; of Georgian polyphony, 578, 582, 594; and “grandparent education,” 119; of Hungarian dance house movement, 187, 193; of instrumental folk music, 123–29; of Iranian classical music, 285, 289; Ivana Kupala and gendered networks of, 524, 525; and Ivana Kupala revival, 524; of kathak dance, 215; of Latvian music, 470; methods and infrastructure for, 4; pelimanni revival and, 403; Slobin on transnational, 594; of South African jazz, 648, 662; of Uzbek traditional music, 272 Trần Văn Khê, 170, 171 Tropicália, 437n13 Tropicália é proibido proibir, 437n13 Tropicália movement: albums sampling, 437n13; emergence of, 430–32, 433; evolution from bossa nova to, 422–25; impetus for, 420 “True Picture of a Pict, A” (Hariot), 77fig. Tsotigh, Terry, 462 tsunami: effects of  2004, on Aceh, 375–76; effects of 2004, on Sri Lanka, 381; revivals following, 385–86 Tsurtsumia, Rusudan, 580, 593–94 Tuđman, Franjo, 326, 327 Tupí, 76 Turino, Thomas, 64–65, 67, 473 Turkiston People’s Conservatory, 260 Turner, Rick, 660 Tymoshenko, Yulia, 513, 528n2 Ubiet, Nyak Ina Raseuki, 380 ubiquitous creativity, 454, 455 Új Pátria Final Hours series, 199 Ukraine: relationship to Soviet past in, 512–13; Russian presence in, 522–23. See also Ivana Kupala, St. John’s Eve (Midsummer’s Eve) (Latvia) Ukrainian language, 524

Umikashvili, Petre, 594 UNESCO: dissemination through, 27; Garifuna cultural rescue and, 353; and Georgian polyphony, 581–82, 583; Hungarian dance house movement’s inscription into, 183; as mechanism for revival, 162; and music as heritage, 55; and preservation of Korean cultural heritage, 142; Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, 573; and recognition of intangible cultural heritage, 177; Urgent Safeguarding List, 160, 161, 173 United States: bossa nova in, 424; Dollar Brand and Bea Benjamin in, 654–55; fiddle revival in, 128; Iranian dance in, 632, 633, 635–37; and Irish diaspora, 608–9, 614–15; and Native American relations, 303, 446; old-time fiddling revival in, 68, 555, 556, 557, 566, 567; “old-time” music in, 123; postsecondary institutions in, 82; revival dialogue in, 109; South African jazz in, 650–52 universalism, and Uzbek arranged folk music, 267–69 Universal Silence, 655–56 university, early music and postindustrial, 81–83 University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 534 University of Oklahoma, Native flute concert at, 461fig., 462 University of the Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN), 361–62 Unsan pyŏlshindae, 147 UPE (record label), 475 Upland South, 123 urbanization: of Finland, 400, 413; of Korea, 136, 153n3 Urgent Safeguarding List, 160, 161, 173 Uzbekistan: history of arranged folk versus traditional music in, 254–56; post-Soviet situation in, 262–72; sound of arranged folk versus traditional music in, 253–54; state-revived traditions in, 252–53. See also arranged folk music (Uzbek); Uzbek traditional music Uzbek State Conservatory, 259–62 Uzbek traditional music: codification and standardization of, 258–59; commonalities

INDEX  701 of, with arranged folk music, 272–73; history of, 254–56; and maintenance of ethno-national identities, 275n6; during post-Soviet era, 262–72; promulgation of, in Uzbekistan, 252; sound of, 253–54; State Conservatory as flagship institution for, 259–62 Väisänen, Armas Otto, 405, 409 Varga, István “Kicsi Csipás,”  198 Varga, Zsuzsanna, 198 vaudeville, and Irish diaspora, 608–9 Vaziri, Ali Naqi, 278–80, 283, 296n4 Veloso, Caetano, 418–20, 428, 429, 431–32, 433, 437n12 vendors, at folk festivals, 496–97, 499 Very Urgent, 657 Vidal, Henri, 231 Vidyarthi, Reba, 217 Vietnam. See ca trù Vietnamese Communist Party, 162, 164, 171 Village Harmony, 586 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 423 Villanen, Juho, 405 “Virginians’ Manner of Dancing at their Religious Festivals, The” (Harriot), 79fig. Vizeli, Balázs, 198 von Becker, Reinhold, 397 vučarenje, 338 Wade, Abdoulaye, 238, 246 wakes, Irish and American, 602 Wallace, Anthony: on importation, 15; on purpose of revival, 393; revitalization movement theory of, 6–7, 99, 288, 331, 393, 555–56, 563, 566, 567, 593; and revival as activism, 10 Wapp, Edward, 445, 454, 455 war: baggage of, 332; music as comfort and torture in, 328–31. See also Aceh, Indonesia; Croatian revival; decline, musical; Sri Lanka, revival in Watson, Cheryl, 363 Westerholm, Heidi, 415n9 Westerholm, Pekka, 411–12 Westernization: and Georgian polyphony, 579, 584; of Iranian national dance, 627–28; and Korean folk culture, 139; and Latvian

revival, 469–70; of Western music, 561. See also globalization Western music: availability of, 280; and Iranian classical music, 278–79, 280, 285–86 White Deer, Gary, 313–14, 315, 318 Wilenz, Sean, 106 Wilgus, D. K., 98 William Ponty School, 228, 230–31 Williams, Raymond, 345 Wilson, Dorothy, 366 “wolf assembly,”  338 Wollenberg, Charles, 107–8 women: in Afghanistan, 382, 383; in Casamançais performances, 242; Chickasaw dance regalia for, 315–16; in Choctaw communal dance songs, 309–10; and classicization of kathak dance, 216–17; disenfranchisement of hereditary, 210; image of Ukrainian, 513; and Iranian classical music, 293; Ivana Kupala and reconceptualization of, 517; and Native flute, 445, 452–53; and origin of kathak dance, 213, 214; and purity of Indian performing arts, 208–10; and transmission of Ivana Kupala, 523, 524, 525; and Uzbek traditional music, 261 Worcestre, William, 74 World of Music journal, 8 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 447 Xahuri. See Brand, Dollar; Ibrahim, Abdullah “Xẩm Huê Tình”, 173–74, 179n18 Ye Yonghae, 137–38, 152 Yi Pohyŏng, 138–39 Yi Sanggyu, 155n33 “Yongch’ŏn’gŏm,” 145 Youngblood, Mary, 452–53, 455 Young Folk Award, 505 Youth Folk Song Centers, 582 Yu Sangyun, 137 Zakrzhevskaya, X., 266 Zé, Tom, 437n13 Zemtsovsky, Izaly, 257, 267, 573 Zerkula, János, 198 Zerkula Emlék Zenekár, 198 Ziyeeva, Malika, 261, 263, 272 Zlatni dukati, 326