Flujo del proceso de entrevista a profundidad

As already suggested, all kinds of music creation everywhere, including composition, improvisation, and performance, may have important things in common, but different societies have quite different views of just what constitutes musical creation. In many cases, there is the recognition that something already exists, in the most general sense of the word, and that the composer has the job of translating this “something” into acceptable musical sound. There is lots of variation. In Pima tradition, all songs exist already, somewhere in the cosmos, and it is the task of the composer to “untangle” them (Herzog 1936a: 333). In an Inuit song there’s the text “All songs have been exhausted. He picks up some of all and adds his own and makes a new song” (Merriam 1964:177), suggesting all songs already exist, and the singer creates by recombining material from them. In quite a different way traditional Western composers learn a basic body of music theory, comprising a kind of vocabulary and the rules for its use, and they draw on this for composing new music. Iranian musicians begin their careers by studying and memorizing the radif, a large body of music that they then use as inspiration for improvisation and composition, referring to it and avoiding going beyond its bounds.

In each culture the musician is “given” something and then has the job of adding something else, but there are many different kinds of

“given” and “added.”

It may be helpful to look at the balance between them. Innovation itself has received considerable attention from anthropologists, beginning with a classic work by Barnett (1953), but as a concept it is usually treated as helpful in understanding culture change. Historical musicologists deal constantly with innovation; just as Western musicians accord highest value to doing something “new,” music scholars typically concentrate on what is new in each period, style, and composer’s opus (see, e.g., Meyer 1967:pt. 2). The issues inherent in identifying what is new have not frequently been touched upon. In their verbal and behavioral responses to music, most other cultures

place less value on innovation than does the European-derived West.

Given the difficulty of distinguishing what is in fact new and what may be perceived as “new” in any society, it nevertheless seems that there are many societies in which musical innovation is very restricted. For them, in terms of practical music-making, this may be interpreted to mean that what is “given” accounts for a very large proportion of the universe of music, and what is “added” for little.

The older Anglo-American and many European folk music traditions fit the latter model. A song, once composed, remained intact, as indicated for instance by the broad similarity of tunes collected in places and at times far apart (Bronson 1959:72). People learned songs from their parents and friends and sang them, introducing minor variations and gradually developing variants that were still clearly recognizable as forms of the original. New songs might be composed, but they were cast in the rhythmic, melodic, and formal mold of songs already known. The repertory of songs—

kritis—of the classical tradition of South India has similar characteristics: New songs are composed using models developed before the nineteenth century, and each singer develops an easily recognizable personal version. There are lots of songs that are relatively alike, lots of variants of each. There’s more given than added. Still, something new has been made of something old.

Another illustration: It seems likely that in the better old days—

before 1850 perhaps—the musical forms of Blackfoot and Arapaho music were quite varied, but at that time new songs came into existence rather infrequently. By contrast, in more recent times the forms available for use, the “given” materials, have shrunk in scope, but at the same time the number of new songs constantly appearing has increased, particularly in the powwow repertory. In European art music of the nineteenth century it would seem that what is given, including the quantity of harmonic materials, modulatory techniques, and forms, is vast. Composers similarly take upon themselves a huge set of vocabulary-like elements and characteristics on which they draw over long periods. Innovation in the sense of departure from these given traits, seen on a worldwide basis, may not really be very great. In nineteenth-century music one can very quickly recognize styles and composers—a few notes or chords may suffice—testifying to the consistency of what is “given.” In each piece the proportion of this seems to me very great, and departure in the course of a piece seems less when viewed in intercultural comparison, even though we

extol the value of radical innovation to be found in each composition.

And the performer (as creator) is given a score, a blueprint much more detailed than that handed down in oral tradition or in earlier periods of Western music history when the available vocabulary was more compact.

It is not only the quantity but also the nature of what is “given” that varies among the world’s cultures. In some Native American societies, it may be simply all music that a composer has already heard. One is not given the components in separately packaged form. Elsewhere, the basic materials for composition may be separated from the music itself. In Western culture this is in part a practical theory of music that one is supposed to learn before being permitted to compose, a vocabulary of materials and analytically derived rules for its use. In the jazz community (see Berliner 1994), it includes audible materials that are not in themselves music but that composers abstract from music they have heard. Native American composers of Peyote songs appear informally to have learned rules for separating a song into its component phrases and then recombining them. In the art music culture of South India, the building blocks for improvising and composing include the nature of ragas and talas, and the exercises that juxtapose the two, etude-like pieces called varnams, which are said to contain the grammar of a raga. In Persian classical music it is the radif and its constituent components, traditional “old” material that musicians vary and combine and recombine innovatively; but musicians in all cultures are also given options of all sorts, such as optimum lengths and socially acceptable ways of combining large and small units. What is “given” to the creator of music is the building blocks and the rules of what may be done with them; innovation consists of how the options are exercised.

For any culture, ethnomusicologists would wish to know about ways in which music is created, and is conceived as being created—whether it is the result of inspiration, which musicians sometimes ascribe to influences of supernatural forces, or simply the result of hard, disciplined work. It’s such a central issue in the understanding of music, and of music in culture, that one might be surprised that it really received only tangential attention through most of the history of the field. This neglect, which characterized the history of our field before 1980, has a number of factors. Here are two. For one thing, we felt that as outsiders to a musical culture, we could probably not do more than to examine the music itself and try to draw conclusions on

how it had been created by analyzing transcriptions. Thus, when George Herzog suggested that there were basically three types of musical form—progressive, iterative, and reverting—he meant that there were basically three kinds of decision-making in compositional practice, at least when it came to overall structure. Whether two societies might come up with the same form type but mean entirely different things by it—that we couldn’t divine. Second, while music historians had for a long time delved into the creative process of composers by putting together musical, personal, and cultural components to shed light on such questions as why J. S. Bach so excelled at fugues, and what about French culture made Debussy write as he did, ethnomusicologists felt that the examination of culture via the study of outstanding and unique individuals was not in their purview.

The more recent history of our field shows more comprehensive attempts at explaining composition, relating the musical processes to social relations and factors; I’ll mention the works of Charry (2000) on West Africa, Bakan (1999) and Tenzer (2000) on Bali, Turino (1993) on Peru, and Browner (2000) on North American powwows as exemplars. These publications show us that, in their fieldwork, ethnomusicologists depend and have always depended on extensive study of one person at a time—their teacher, “key” informant, culture broker—and so they really aren’t all that far from the historian who is a Beethoven, Bach, or Schoenberg specialist. Both kinds of scholars have a deep interest in understanding the interface between inspiration and perspiration, between the composer as genius and as disciplined worker.

Two kinds of research, particularly—developed mainly after 1980—

were important in helping ethnomusicologists to make progress in their understanding of the ways music is created, the ways this creative work is seen in some of the world’s cultures, and how musical creativity is related to concept and values central to a culture.

They concern the analysis of improvisation, and the ethnomusicological study of Western art music. In one case, it’s a matter of watching as music unfolds; in the other, it’s more a matter of analyzing myths about how it comes into existence.