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176-602: Alan Lomax ( / ˈ l oʊ m æ k s / ; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist , best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist , archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both

352-509: A cricket match with Mrs. Hazen's School of Pelham Manor, N.Y., that has been described by some as "the first interscholastic girls sporting event in American history." In 1935, Gertrude Stein gave a series of talks across the country that included a visit to Choate on January 12 and 13. In the audience was stenographer, Dudley Fitts , a critic, translator, and longtime teacher of Greek and Latin at Choate. Stein's public speaking style

528-802: A "victim of witch-hunting ," insisting that he was in the UK only to work on his Columbia Project. Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music , an anthology issued on newly invented LP records. He spent seven months in Spain, where, in addition to recording three thousand items from most of the regions of Spain, he made copious notes and took hundreds of photos of "not only singers and musicians but anything that interested him – empty streets, old buildings, and country roads", bringing to these photos, "a concern for form and composition that went beyond

704-523: A $ 6 million arts center (nearly $ 50 million in 2024 dollars), which opened in 1972. Seymour St. John's final major achievement was bringing Rosemary Hall back to Wallingford in 1971. To accommodate Rosemary Hall's 230 students, Choate spent an additional $ 3 million to build what was essentially "a new campus" in Wallingford. The two schools appointed a common president in 1973 and formally merged in 1978. In 1931, John F. Kennedy entered Choate as

880-428: A 1994 book, May it Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music , Timothy Rice uses enlightenment philosophy to substantiate his opinion that fieldwork cannot be used as fact. The philosophy he works with involves theorizing over the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. In order to ground those debates in ethnomusicology, he equates musicology to objectivity and musical experience to subjectivity. Rice uses

1056-463: A Jewish woman, dubbed the "red flame" for her labor organizing activities among the textile workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and threatened with deportation as an alleged "Communist agitator". Lomax had been charged with disturbing the peace and fined $ 25. Berkman, however, had been cleared of all accusations against her and was not deported. Nor had Lomax's Harvard academic record been affected in any way by his activities in her defense. Nevertheless,

1232-678: A career as a blues musician, first in Memphis and later in Chicago. As part of this work, Lomax traveled through Michigan and Wisconsin in 1938 to record and document the traditional music of that region. Over four hundred recordings from this collection are now available at the Library of Congress. "He traveled in a 1935 Plymouth sedan, toting a Presto instantaneous disc recorder and a movie camera. And when he returned nearly three months later, having driven thousands of miles on barely paved roads, it

1408-481: A college student's personal letter, he recommended that potential students of ethnomusicology undertake substantial musical training in the field, a competency that he described as " bi-musicality ." This, he explained, is a measure intended to combat ethnocentrism and transcend problematic Western analytical conventions. Seeger also sought to transcend comparative practices by focusing on the music and how it impacted those in contact with it. Similar to Hood, Seeger valued

1584-420: A combination of a standardized, scientific approach and a more free-form analytical approach because the most fruitful work he has done has come from combining those two rather than separating them, as was the trend among his contemporaries. Even Merriam's once progressive notion of a balanced approach came into question as time passed. Specifically, the idea that ethnomusicology is or can be at all factual. In

1760-587: A commercial sponsor. The show ran for only twenty-one weeks before it was suddenly canceled in February 1941. On hearing the news, Woody Guthrie wrote Lomax from California, "Too honest again, I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it can't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change." Lomax himself wrote that in all his work he had tried to capture "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character, as

1936-542: A condescending way, treating it as something quaint or exotic." Nettl recalls an angry young man from Nigeria who asked the researcher how he could rationalize the study of other cultures' music. Nettl couldn't come up with an easy answer, and posits that ethnomusicologists need to be careful to respect the cultures they study and avoid treating valuable pieces of culture and music as just one of many artifacts they study. Choate Rosemary Hall Choate Rosemary Hall , informally shortened to Choate ( / tʃ oʊ t / ),

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2112-588: A contract from Atlantic Records to re-record some of the American musicians first recorded in the 1940s, using improved equipment, Collins accompanied him. Their folk song collecting trip to the Southern states, known colloquially as the Southern Journey , lasted from July to November 1959 and resulted in many hours of recordings, featuring performers such as Almeda Riddle , Hobart Smith , Wade Ward , Charlie Higgins and Bessie Jones and culminated in

2288-650: A copy of the Spanish World Library LP, Miles Davis and Evans were "struck by the beauty of pieces such as the ' Saeta ', recorded in Seville, and a panpiper's tune ('Alborada de Vigo') from Galicia, and worked them into the 1960 album Sketches of Spain . " For the Scottish, English, and Irish volumes, he worked with the BBC and folklorists Peter Douglas Kennedy , Scots poet Hamish Henderson , and with

2464-610: A demonstration of his program along with talks by Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Pan American Union , and the president of the American Museum of Natural History , at a global conference in Mexico of a thousand broadcasters CBS had sponsored to launch its worldwide programming initiative. Mrs. Roosevelt invited Lomax to Hyde Park . Despite its success and high visibility, Back Where I Come From never picked up

2640-566: A fieldworker decides to use to conduct research, fieldworkers are expected to "show respect for their material and for the people with whom they work." As Nettl explains, ethnomusicology is a field that heavily relies on both the collection of data and the development of strong personal relationships, which often cannot be quantified by statistical data. He summarizes Bronisław Malinowski 's classification of anthropological data (or, as Nettl applies it, ethnomusicological data) by outlining it as three types of information: 1) texts, 2) structures, and 3)

2816-717: A former professor of English at Texas A&M University and a celebrated authority on Texas folklore and cowboy songs, had worked as an administrator, and later Secretary of the Alumni Society, of the University of Texas . Due to childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, Lomax had mostly been home schooled in elementary school. In Dallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys (a tiny prep school that later became St. Mark's School of Texas ). Lomax excelled at Terrill and then transferred to

2992-553: A function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development." On December 8, 1941, as "Assistant in Charge at the Library of Congress", he sent telegrams to fieldworkers in ten different localities across the United States, asking them to collect reactions of ordinary Americans to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by the United States. A second series of interviews, called "Dear Mr. President",

3168-436: A fusion between musicology and cultural anthropology. He focused on the scientific study of music and the interpretation of the cultural phenomena within. However, he called for a broader view that emphasizes "music as an emotional expression." This notion is highly similar to that of Merriam's 1960 extension of ethnomusicology, which views it as "the study of music in culture," that emphasized its pivotal role in human nature and

3344-576: A genius", though Goldschmidt remembers Lomax exploding one night while studying: "Damn it! The hardest thing I've had to learn is that I'm not a genius." At the University of Texas Lomax read Nietzsche and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the school paper, The Daily Texan but resigned when it refused to publish an editorial he had written on birth control. At this time he also he began collecting "race" records and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs, at

3520-634: A highly eclectic program, such as gamelan music; Django Reinhardt ; klezmer music; Sidney Bechet ; Wild Bill Davison ; jazzy pop songs by Maxine Sullivan and Jo Stafford ; readings of the poetry of Carl Sandburg ; hillbilly music with electric guitars; and Finnish brass bands. He also was a key participant in the V.D. Radio Project in 1949, creating a number of "ballad dramas" featuring country and gospel superstars, including Roy Acuff , Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams , and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (among others), that aimed to convince men and women suffering from syphilis to seek treatment. In December 1949

3696-427: A known whole according to a definite plan, whereas synthesis starts with small elements and combines them into one entity by tailoring the process to the musical material. Herndon also debated on the subjectivity and objectivity necessary for a proper analysis of a musical system. Kolinski, among those scholars critiqued by Herndon's push for a synthetic approach, defended the benefits of analysis, arguing in response for

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3872-591: A lecture hall, and common spaces. Choate's Fed Challenge team was the 2009 national champion and has won the New England District Championship in 12 of the past 13 years. In the 2012 American Mathematics Competitions (AMC) 12-A, Choate's team finished first in the nation, with the highest combined score of all 2631 participating schools. In 2012, Choate became the first among its peer preparatory schools to require that all faculty and students own an iPad. The fall term that year saw

4048-491: A lot of unhappiness for the two of us because he loved Harvard and wanted me to be a great success there." Lomax transferred to the University of Texas the following year. Lomax left Harvard, after having spent his sophomore year there, to join John A. Lomax and John Lomax, Jr. in collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress and to assist his father in writing his books. In withdrawing him (in addition to not being able to afford

4224-523: A majority of seniors voted against the invitation and certain students threatened to walk out. The New York Times reported that the school's student body "ha[s] been known to trend decidedly blue." In October 2016, following one alumna's public disclosure of sexual abuse in the Boston Globe , Choate retained Covington & Burling LLP to conduct an investigation and write a report on historical occurrences of sexual misconduct. In April 2017,

4400-639: A majority stake in the school and established its independence from the Choate family. Following the merger with Choate, the Greenwich campus was transferred to Daycroft School , which closed in 1991. In 1896, William and Mary Choate established a boys' school in Wallingford. They hired Mark Pitman (1830–1905), the principal of Woolsey School in New Haven, Connecticut, as its first headmaster. The school began with six boys, with an average age of 10. There

4576-586: A model. Perhaps the first of these objective systems was the development of the cent as a definitive unit of pitch by phonetician and mathematician Alexander J. Ellis (1885). Ellis made notable contributions to the foundations of comparative musicology and ultimately ethnomusicology with the creation of the cents system; in fact, the ethnomusicologist Hornbostel "declared Ellis the 'true founder of comparative scientific musicology.'" Prior to this invention, pitches were described by using measurements of frequency , or vibrations per second. However, this method

4752-568: A musical and performative lens. Seeger's analysis exemplifies the inherent complexity of ethical practices in ethnomusicological fieldwork, implicating the importance for the continual development of effective fieldwork in the study of ethnomusicology. In his 2005 paper "Come Back and See Me Next Tuesday," Nettl asks whether ethnomusicologists can, or even should practice a unified field methodology as opposed to each scholar developing their own individual approach. Nettl considers several factors when sampling music from different cultures. The first thing

4928-415: A musical and performative lens. Seeger's analysis exemplifies the inherent complexity of ethical practices in ethnomusicological fieldwork, implicating the importance for the continual development of effective fieldwork in the study of ethnomusicology. In recent decades, ethnomusicologists have paid greater attention to ensuring that their fieldwork is both ethically conducted and provides a holistic sense of

5104-428: A myriad of factors, many of which exist beyond the researcher's comprehension, that prevent a precise and accurate representation of what one has experienced in the field. As Nettl notices, there is a current trend in ethnomusicology to no longer even attempt to capture a whole system or culture, but to focus on a very specific niche and try to explain it thoroughly. Nettl's question, however, still remains: should there be

5280-425: A native ensemble, or inclusion in a myriad of social customs. In the past, local musical transcription was required to study music globally, due to the lack of technology such as phonographs or videographing technology. Similarly, Alan Merriam defined ethnomusicology as "music as culture," and stated four goals of ethnomusicology: to help protect and explain non-Western music, to save "folk" music before it disappears in

5456-663: A newspaper printed a story, "Red Convictions Scare 'Travelers ' " , that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists. The article mentioned Alan Lomax as one of the sponsors of the dinner, along with C. B. Baldwin , campaign manager for Henry A. Wallace in 1948; music critic Olin Downes of The New York Times ; and W.E.B. Du Bois , all of whom it accused of being members of Communist front groups. The following June, Red Channels ,

Alan Lomax - Misplaced Pages Continue

5632-407: A pamphlet edited by former F.B.I. agents which became the basis for the entertainment industry blacklist of the 1950s, listed Lomax as an artist or broadcast journalist sympathetic to Communism. (Others listed included Aaron Copland , Leonard Bernstein , Yip Harburg , Lena Horne , Langston Hughes , Burl Ives , Dorothy Parker , Pete Seeger , and Josh White .) That summer, Congress was debating

5808-410: A product of Western thinking, proclaiming that "ethnomusicology as western culture knows it is actually a western phenomenon." Later, in 1992, Jeff Todd Titon simply described ethnomusicology as the study of "people making music". While there still is not a unified, authoritative definition for ethnomusicology, a number of constants appear in the definitions frequently adopted by leading scholars in

5984-648: A prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 1980s, Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution 's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork , which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late 70s, Lomax completed the long-deferred memoir The Land Where the Blues Began (1993), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage , segregation , and forced labor in

6160-659: A psychologist and philosopher, founded the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, which became one of the first archives dedicated to the systematic collection and preservation of non-Western music. This archive enabled researchers to record and analyze diverse musical forms with scientific precision, marking a significant advancement in the field. Hornbostel, a student of Stumpf, expanded on this scientific approach by developing comparative musicology methods that emphasized objective analysis of elements such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre across musical traditions. His work promoted

6336-440: A researcher's field work will always be personal because a field researcher in ethnomusicology, unlike a field researcher in a hard science, is inherently a participant in the group they are researching just by being there. To illustrate the disparity between those subjective, participatory experiences that ethnomusicological fieldworkers have and what typically gets published as ethnomusicological literature, Barz and Cooley point out

6512-433: A third form (9th grade) student, following his older brother Joe Jr. , who was a star athlete at the school. Jack Kennedy—sickly, underweight, and nicknamed Rat Face by his schoolfellows—spent his first two years at Choate in his brother's shadow, and compensated for it with rebellious behavior that attracted a coterie. He named his group The Muckers Club, which had thirteen members—Kennedy and twelve disciples. Among these

6688-461: A unified definition of ethnomusicology within the field itself. Attitudes and foci of ethnomusicologists have evolved since initial studies in the area of comparative musicology in the early 1900s. For example, in 1956, Willard Rhodes provided his perspective on the definition of ethnomusicology, stating that it is a theoretical and empirical study amalgamating both musicology and anthropology. Then, in 1983, Bruno Nettl characterized ethnomusicology as

6864-429: A uniform method for going about this type of fieldwork? Alan Merriam addresses issues that he found with ethnomusicological fieldwork in the third chapter of his 1964 book, The Anthropology of Music . One of his most pressing concerns is that, as of 1964 when he was writing, there had been insufficient discussion among ethnomusicologists about how to conduct proper fieldwork. That aside, Merriam proceeds to characterize

7040-466: A unique place in Stein's corpus as a social text that carries the marks of its particular occasion ... direct address to her audience (around sixty boys, as well as faculty and some former students)." Stein's two-day stay at Choate was her first self-acknowledged exposure to a private school. In her 1937, Everybody's Autobiography , Stein wrote, "It was the first time I had ever seen such a school. When I

7216-470: A virtual community. Heightened awareness of the need to approach fieldwork in an ethical manner arose in the 1970s in response to a similar movement within the field of anthropology. Mark Slobin writes in detail about the application of ethics to fieldwork. Several potential ethical problems that arise during fieldwork relate to the rights of the music performers. To respect the rights of performers, fieldwork often includes attaining complete permission from

Alan Lomax - Misplaced Pages Continue

7392-573: A wide range of traditional musicians from all over Britain and Ireland, as well as Lomax himself. In 1957, Lomax hosted a folk music show on BBC's Home Service titled A Ballad Hunter and organized a skiffle group, Alan Lomax and the Ramblers (who included Ewan MacColl , Peggy Seeger , and Shirley Collins ), which appeared on British television. His ballad opera Big Rock Candy Mountain premiered December 1955 at Joan Littlewood 's Theatre Workshop and featured Ramblin' Jack Elliot . In Scotland, Lomax

7568-592: A wide scope of musical genres, repertories, and styles, some scholars have favored an all-encompassing "objective" approach, while others argue for "native" or "subjective" methodologies tailored to the musical subject. Those in favor of "objective" analytical methods hold that certain perceptual or cognitive universals or laws exist in music, making it possible to construct an analytical framework or set of categories applicable across cultures. Proponents of "native" analysis argue that all analytical approaches inherently incorporate value judgments and that, to understand music it

7744-650: Is a private , co-educational , college-preparatory boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut , United States. Founded in 1890, it took its present name and began a co-educational system with the 1978 merger of The Choate School for boys and Rosemary Hall for girls. It is part of the Eight Schools Association and the Ten Schools Admission Organization . Choate Rosemary Hall was formed in 1978 through

7920-1359: Is a member of the Founders League , and competes against schools in the New England and the Mid-Atlantic regions. The athletic directors of Choate and the other members of the Eight Schools Association compose the Eight Schools Athletic Council, which organizes sports events and tournaments among ESA schools. Choate offers teams at the varsity, JV, and thirds (freshman) levels. There are 32 different sports and 81 teams in interscholastic competition. Intramural programs include aerobics, dance, senior weight training, yoga, winter running, rock climbing, fitness and conditioning, and senior volleyball. Since 1922, Choate's athletic rivalry has been Deerfield Academy . From 2007 to 2016, Choate won New England championships in football, boys and girls ice hockey, girls' soccer, boys' golf, boys' crew, and in girls' swimming, volleyball, and water polo. In that same period, Choate won Founders League championships in boys' and girls' squash, in boys' cross country, golf, softball, and tennis, and in girls' volleyball. In 1893, Rosemary Hall were host to

8096-516: Is also worth seeing who a community recommends as informants. People may direct a fieldworker to the best musicians, or they may suggest many "simply good" musicians. This attitude is reflective of the culture's values. As technology advanced, researchers graduated from depending on wax cylinders and the phonograph to digital recordings and video cameras, allowing recordings to become more accurate representations of music studied. These technological advances have helped ethnomusicologists be more mobile in

8272-723: Is credited with being an inspiration for the School of Scottish Studies , founded in 1951, the year of his first visit there. Lomax and Diego Carpitella 's survey of Italian folk music for the Columbia World Library , conducted in 1953 and 1954, with the cooperation of the BBC and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, helped capture a snapshot of a multitude of important traditional folk styles shortly before they disappeared. The pair amassed one of

8448-539: Is crucial to construct an analysis within cultural context. This debate is well exemplified by a series of articles between Mieczyslaw Kolinski and Marcia Herndon in the mid-1970s; these authors differed strongly on the style, nature, implementation, and advantages of analytical and synthetic models including their own. Herndon, backing "native categories" and inductive thinking, distinguishes between analysis and synthesis as two different methods for examining music. By her definition, analysis seeks to break down parts of

8624-680: Is for nature, ideas remarkably similar to those forcefully articulated by Alan Lomax many years before. From 1942 to 1979, Lomax repeatedly was investigated and interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but nothing incriminating was discovered, and the investigation was abandoned. Scholar and jazz pianist Ted Gioia uncovered and published extracts from Alan Lomax's 800-page FBI files. The investigation appears to have started when an anonymous informant reported overhearing Lomax's father telling guests in 1941 about what he considered his son's communist sympathies. Looking for leads,

8800-530: Is located on a 268-acre site in the northeast quadrant of the campus. It has been described as "the first teaching, research and residential environmental center in U.S. secondary education." In February 2015, the school opened the Lanphier Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, a 35,000-square foot campus hub for information technology, applied mathematics, and robotics. The center, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli , contains laboratories, classrooms,

8976-588: Is some correlation between musical traits or approaches and the traits of the music's native culture. Cantometrics involved qualitative scoring based on several characteristics of a song, comparatively seeking commonalities between cultures and geographic regions. Mieczyslaw Kolinski measured the exact distance between the initial and final tones in melodic patterns. Kolinski refuted the early scholarly opposition of European and non-European kinds of music, choosing instead to focus on much-neglected similarities between them, what he saw as markers of "basic similarities in

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9152-418: Is that in order to discover the best representation of any culture, it is important to be able to "discern between ordinary experience and ideal," all while considering the fact that "the 'ideal' musician may also know and do things completely outside the ken of the rest." Another factor is the process of selecting teachers, which depends on what the fieldworker wishes to accomplish. Regardless of whatever method

9328-459: Is to commit ourselves to the principles of political, social, and economic justice. (2003 [1972]: 286) In 2001, in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, UNESCO's Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity declared the safeguarding of languages and intangible culture on a par with protection of individual human rights and as essential for human survival as biodiversity

9504-579: The American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax , and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song , of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs. After 1942, when Congress terminated

9680-952: The BBC Home Service as part of the war effort. During the 1950s, after she and Lomax divorced, she conducted lengthy interviews for Lomax with folk music personalities, including Vera Ward Hall and the Reverend Gary Davis . Lomax also did important field work with Elizabeth Barnicle and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida and the Bahamas (1935); with John Wesley Work III and Lewis Jones in Mississippi (1941 and 42); with folksingers Robin Roberts and Jean Ritchie in Ireland (1950); with his second wife Antoinette Marchand in

9856-661: The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv at the Berlin school of comparative musicology , which was founded by Carl Stumpf , his student Erich M. von Hornbostel , and medical doctor Otto Abraham. Stumpf and Hornbostel studied and preserved these recordings in the Berlin Archiv, setting the foundation for contemporary ethnomusicology. But, the "armchair analysis" methods of Stumpf and Hornbostel required very little participation in fieldwork themselves, instead using

10032-540: The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut for a year, graduating eighth in his class at age 15 in 1930. Owing to his mother's declining health, however, rather than going to Harvard University as his father had wished, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin. A roommate, future anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt , recalled Lomax as "frighteningly smart, probably classifiable as

10208-818: The Golden Gate Quartet . The individual programs reached ten million students in 200,000 U.S. classrooms and were also broadcast in Canada, Hawaii, and Alaska, but both Lomax and his father felt that the concept of the shows, which portrayed folk music as mere raw material for orchestral music, was deeply flawed and failed to do justice to vernacular culture. In 1940, under Lomax's supervision, RCA made two groundbreaking suites of commercial folk music recordings: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Lead Belly's The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs . Though they did not sell especially well when released, Lomax's biographer John Szwed calls these "some of

10384-427: The Library of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings. A pioneering oral historian, Lomax recorded substantial interviews with many folk and jazz musicians, including Woody Guthrie , Lead Belly , Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz pioneers, and Big Bill Broonzy . On one of his trips in 1941, he went to Clarksdale, Mississippi, hoping to record

10560-1020: The McCarran Act , which required the registration and fingerprinting of all "subversives" in the United States, restrictions of their right to travel, and detention in case of "emergencies", while the House Un-American Activities Committee was broadening its hearings. Feeling sure that the Act would pass and realizing that his career in broadcasting was in jeopardy, Lomax, who was newly divorced and already had an agreement with Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records to record in Europe, hastened to renew his passport, cancel his speaking engagements, and plan for his departure, telling his agent he hoped to return in January "if things cleared up". He set sail on September 24, 1950, on board

10736-562: The Pre-Socratics with University of Texas professor Albert P. Brogan. He also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects. Lomax, now 17, therefore took a break from studying to join his father's folk song collecting field trips for the Library of Congress , co-authoring American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). His first field collecting without his father

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10912-717: The Selah Jubilee Singers and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger , Mike Seeger (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs (a rock and roll group). The occasion marked the first time rock and roll and bluegrass were performed on the Carnegie Hall Stage. "The time has come for Americans not to be ashamed of what we go for, musically, from primitive ballads to rock 'n' roll songs", Lomax told

11088-671: The Southern District of New York from 1878 to 1881, before resigning to enter private practice. He was a national authority on railroad, bankruptcy, and corporation law. His brother Joseph Hodges Choate , another noted lawyer, served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom . In 1890, Mary Atwater Choate founded Rosemary Hall at the Atwater House on Rosemary Farm in Wallingford. Although Mary Choate initially envisioned that Rosemary Hall would train girls in

11264-559: The University of Illinois , defines fieldwork as "direct inspection [of music, culture, etc] at the source," and states that "It is in the importance of fieldwork that anthropology and ethnomusicology are closest: It is a 'hallmark' of both fields, something like a union card." However, he mentions that ethnomusicological fieldwork differs from anthropological fieldwork because the former requires more "practical" information about "recording, filming, video-taping, [and] special problems of text-gathering." The experience of an ethnomusicologist in

11440-491: The "cultural grey-out" must be checked or there would soon be "no place worth visiting and no place worth staying" (1972). Compare Gell-Mann: Just as it is crazy to squander in a few decades much of the rich biological diversity that has evolved over billions of years, so is it equally crazy to permit the disappearance of much of human cultural diversity, which has evolved in a somewhat analogous way over many tens of thousands of years...The erosion of local cultural patterns around

11616-431: The "domestic arts," the school's first headmistress Caroline Ruutz-Rees (1865–1954) adopted the mission of a contemporary boys' school, emphasizing academics and athletics. In 1936, Time reported that Rosemary Hall girls "work[ed] so hard [in the classroom] that when they get to Smith or Vassar it is often with a sigh of relief." In 1900, Ruutz-Rees moved Rosemary Hall to Greenwich, Connecticut . She acquired

11792-442: The 1940s and 1950s explored musics of all the world's peoples. Lomax recognized that folklore (like all forms of creativity) occurs at the local and not the national level and flourishes not in isolation but in fruitful interplay with other cultures. He was dismayed that mass communications appeared to be crushing local cultural expressions and languages. In 1950 he echoed anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), who believed

11968-457: The 1950s, Jaap Kunst wrote about fieldwork for the purpose of recording and transcribing sound. Kunst lists various "phonogram-archives," collections of recorded sound. They include the archives founded by Stumpf. A pioneering study in fieldwork was conducted by David McAllester of Navajo music , particularly the music of the Enemy Way ceremony. In it, McAllester details the procedures of

12144-559: The 1950s. The new term aimed to emphasize a descriptive, culture-sensitive approach that respected each musical tradition on its own terms. Over time, the scope of ethnomusicology broadened to encompass the study of music from all cultural contexts, including Western traditions. This shift reflects a more human-centric approach, where music is seen not only as an art form but as a social and cultural phenomenon deeply connected to identity, tradition, and daily life. Folklorists , who began preserving and studying folklore music in Europe and

12320-404: The 1970s in response to a similar movement within the field of anthropology. Mark Slobin writes in detail about the application of ethics to fieldwork. Several potential ethical problems that arise during fieldwork relate to the rights of the music performers. To respect the rights of performers, fieldwork often includes attaining complete permission from the group or individual who is performing

12496-520: The 1977 Voyager Spacecraft to represent the music of the earth. Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson , Louis Armstrong , and Chuck Berry ; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; Azerbaijani mugham performed by two balaban players, a Sicilian sulfur miner 's lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of

12672-583: The American South. Lomax's greatest legacy is in preserving and publishing recordings of musicians in many folk and blues traditions around the US and Europe. Among the artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson , protest singer Woody Guthrie , folk artist Pete Seeger , country musician Burl Ives , Scottish Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil , and country blues singers Lead Belly and Muddy Waters , among many others. "Alan scraped by

12848-705: The Caribbean (1961); with Shirley Collins in Great Britain and the Southeastern U.S. (1959); with Joan Halifax in Morocco; and with his daughter. All those who assisted and worked with him were accurately credited on the resultant Library of Congress and other recordings, as well as in his many books, films, and publications. From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of

13024-833: The Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska ; in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more. Sagan later wrote that it was Lomax "who was a persistent and vigorous advocate for including ethnic music even at the expense of Western classical music. He brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections because Azerbaijanis play bagpipe-sounding instruments [balaban] and Peruvians play panpipes and such exquisite pieces had been recorded by ethnomusicologists known to Lomax." Alan Lomax died in Safety Harbor, Florida on July 19, 2002 at

13200-536: The FBI seized on the fact that, at the age of 17 in 1932 while attending Harvard University for a year, Lomax had been arrested in Boston, Massachusetts in connection with a political demonstration. In 1942 the FBI sent agents to interview students at Harvard's freshman dormitory about Lomax's participation in a demonstration that had occurred at Harvard ten years earlier in support of the immigration rights of one Edith Berkman,

13376-608: The Great Wall at Ju Yong Guan , and in ensemble with the Concert Band of Beijing Children's Palace . Choate orchestras have also performed at Lincoln Center in New York, Carnegie Hall , and the Guggenheim Museum . The school's student-operated radio station, WWEB , was FCC-licensed and founded in 1969. The Senior Project Program provides on- or off-campus internships in academic research, visual art, and

13552-536: The Irish folklorist Séamus Ennis , recording among others, Margaret Barry and the songs in Irish of Elizabeth Cronin ; Scots ballad singer Jeannie Robertson ; and Harry Cox of Norfolk, England, and interviewing some of these performers at length about their lives. In 1953 a young David Attenborough commissioned Lomax to host six 20-minute episodes of the BBC TV series The Song Hunter , which featured performances by

13728-468: The Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, Caribbean region, Italy, Spain, and United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture. In March 2004, the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which "brings

13904-624: The Library's Archive of American Folk Song. At the time, Lomax was preparing for a field trip to the Mississippi Delta on behalf of the Library, where he made landmark recordings of Muddy Waters, Son House , and David "Honeyboy" Edwards , among others. McLeish wrote to Hoover, defending Lomax: "I have studied the findings of these reports very carefully. I do not find positive evidence that Mr. Lomax has been engaged in subversive activities and I am therefore taking no disciplinary action toward him." Nevertheless, according to Gioia: Yet what

14080-527: The Musical Scales of Various Nations." Ellis’s approach provided a basis for the objective analysis of musical systems across different cultures, allowing for cross-cultural comparison and reducing subjective biases. The institutionalization of comparative musicology, a precursor to ethnomusicology, was largely driven by the efforts of early 20th-century scholars like Carl Stumpf and Erich M. von Hornbostel. As Dieter Christensen (1991) explains, Stumpf,

14256-791: The NEA and various State governments to master folk and traditional artists. In 1983, Lomax founded The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) . It is housed at the Fine Arts Campus of Hunter College in New York City and is the custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive. The Association's mission is to "facilitate cultural equity" and practice "cultural feedback" and "preserve, publish, repatriate and freely disseminate" its collections. Though Alan Lomax's appeals to anthropology conferences and repeated letters to UNESCO fell on deaf ears,

14432-485: The US in the 19th century, are considered the precursors of the field prior to the Second World War . Oskar Kolberg is regarded as one of the earliest European ethnomusicologists as he first began collecting Polish folk songs in 1839 (Nettl 2010, 33). The International Musical Society in Berlin in 1899 acted as one of the first centers for ethnomusicology. As the study of music across cultures developed in

14608-458: The University of Pennsylvania. Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Harold Goodman , then a student at the University of Texas, in February 1937. They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, Anne (later known as Anna). Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi. Elizabeth also wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over

14784-575: The White House in December 2009 and the school's symphony orchestra toured Europe in 2010 and 2011, giving concerts in ten countries. The festival and chamber choruses performed at St. Patrick's Day mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in 2011. Choate orchestras and choral groups toured East Asia in 2000, 2005, 2007, and 2014. The June 2014 tour comprised concerts in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Macau, at

14960-517: The acknowledgment of musical facts and laws. As a result of the above debate and ongoing ones like it, ethnomusicology has yet to establish any standard method or methods of analysis. This is not to say that scholars have not attempted to establish universal or "objective" analytical systems. Bruno Nettl acknowledges the lack of a singular comparative model for ethnomusicological study, but describes methods by Mieczyslaw Kolinski, Béla Bartók , and Erich von Hornbostel as notable attempts to provide such

15136-477: The age of 87. The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice. Folklore can show us that this dream is age-old and common to all mankind. It asks that we recognize the cultural rights of weaker peoples in sharing this dream. And it can make their adjustment to a world society an easier and more creative process. The stuff of folklore—the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of

15312-431: The amateur field collector whose knowledge of its aims has been severely restricted. Such collectors operate under the assumption that the important point is simply to gather music sound, and that this sound–often taken without discrimination and without thought, for example, to problems of sampling–can then simply be turned over to the laboratory worker to do something about it." In the same work, Merriam states that "what

15488-600: The annual (since 1967) Smithsonian Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (for which Lomax served as a consultant), in national and regional initiatives by public folklorists and local activists in helping communities gain recognition for their oral traditions and lifeways both in their home communities and in the world at large; and in the National Heritage Awards, concerts, and fellowships given by

15664-424: The anthropological approach generally study music to learn about people and culture. Those who practice the musicological approach study people and cultures to learn about music. Charles Seeger differentiated between the two approaches, describing the anthropology of music as studying the way that music is a "part of culture and social life", while musical anthropology "studies social life as a performance," examining

15840-542: The audience. According to Izzy Young , the audience booed when he told them to lay down their prejudices and listen to rock 'n' roll. In Young's opinion, "Lomax put on what is probably the turning point in American folk music...At that concert, the point he was trying to make was that Negro and white music were mixing, and rock and roll was that thing." Alan Lomax had met 20-year-old English folk singer Shirley Collins while living in London. The two were romantically involved and lived together for some years. When Lomax obtained

16016-614: The beginning of full integration of the tablet's capabilities into the syllabus. Choate's director of academic technology discussed Choate's iPad program in an August 2012 article in US News . During the 2023–24 school year, Choate reported that it enrolled 861 students, employed 120.4 full-time equivalent teaching staff, and had a student-teacher ratio of 7.0. In the 2023–24 school year, Choate charged boarding students $ 67,380 and day students $ 51,880, plus other mandatory and optional fees. Choate offers need-based financial aid . 34% of

16192-420: The board of trustees agreed to trim the size of the student body to 821. Choate's acceptance rate declined from 60% in 1991 to 23% in 2016. Choate also embarked on a series of large-scale fundraising campaigns, raising over $ 100 million from 1995 to 2000; $ 220 million from 2006 to 2011; and $ 334 million from 2023 to 2024. In 2008, Karl Rove was invited to deliver the commencement address but withdrew after

16368-519: The bureau continued trying vainly to show that in 1932 Lomax had either distributed communist literature or made public speeches in support of the Communist Party. According to Ted Gioia: Lomax must have felt it necessary to address the suspicions. He gave a sworn statement to an FBI agent on April 3, 1942, denying both of these charges. He also explained his arrest while at Harvard as the result of police overreaction. He was, he claimed, 15 at

16544-458: The case." He described McAllester's work as "[relating] music to culture and culture to music in terms of the value system of the Navaho [ sic ]." As of 1956, the time that Merriam published his review, the idea of such work "occurred to ethnomusicologists with surprising infrequency." In his work The Anthropology of Music , published in 1964, Merriam wrote that "ethnomusicology has suffered from

16720-402: The ceremony, as well as the music itself. Aside from Enemy Way music, McAllester sought Navajo cultural values based on analysis of attitudes toward music. To his interviewees, McAllester gave a questionnaire, which includes these items: The ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam reviewed McAllester's work, calling it "strange to speak of a work published in 1954 as 'pioneering,' but this is precisely

16896-419: The community or culture under study. As the demographic makeup of ethnomusicologists conducting research grows more diverse, the field has placed a renewed emphasis on a respectful approach to fieldwork that avoids stereotyping or assumptions about a particular culture. Rather than using European music as a baseline against which music from all other cultures is compared, researchers in the field often aim to place

17072-683: The curriculum, which has requirements in community service and in contemporary global studies. All disciplines except English have honors courses. The Choate signature programs include the Advanced Robotics Program, Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, Arts Concentration, Capstone, Environmental Immersion Program, JFK Program in Government and Public Service, Science Research Program, and the Global Education Program. The Choate chamber orchestra performed at

17248-421: The difference between field research and field notes. While field research attempts to find the reality, field notes document a reality. The issue, according to Barz and Cooley, is that field notes, which capture the personal experience of the researcher, are often omitted from whatever final writing that researcher publishes. Heightened awareness of the need to approach fieldwork in an ethical manner arose in

17424-401: The disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it livable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need. The only way to halt this degradation of man's culture

17600-487: The discipline. The importance of fieldwork in the field of ethnomusicology has required the development of effective methods to pursue fieldwork. In the 19th century until the mid-20th century, European scholars ( folklorists , ethnographers , and some early ethnomusicologists) who were motivated to preserve disappearing music cultures (from both in and outside of Europe), collected transcriptions or audio recordings on wax cylinders . Many such recordings were then stored at

17776-692: The discovery of Fred McDowell . Recordings from this trip were issued under the title Sounds of the South and some were also featured in the Coen brothers' 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? . Lomax wished to marry Collins but when the recording trip was over, she returned to England and married Austin John Marshall . In an interview in The Guardian newspaper, Collins expressed irritation that The Land Where The Blues Began , Lomax's 1993 account of

17952-490: The effects culture has on music, and about the impact music has on culture. The great diversity of types of music found across the world has necessitated an interdisciplinary approach to ethnomusicological study. Analytical and research methods have changed over time, as ethnomusicology has continued solidifying its disciplinary identity, and as scholars have become increasingly aware of issues involved in cultural study (see Theoretical Issues and Debates ). Among these issues are

18128-532: The entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home." With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to advocate for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included

18304-553: The ethnographic to the artistic". He drew a parallel between photography and field recording: Recording folk songs works like a candid cameraman. I hold the mike, use my hand for shading volume. It's a big problem in Spain because there is so much emotional excitement, noise all around. Empathy is most important in field work. It's necessary to put your hand on the artist while he sings. They have to react to you. Even if they're mad at you, it's better than nothing. When Columbia Records producer George Avakian gave jazz arranger Gil Evans

18480-406: The ethnomusicologist does in the field is determined by his own formulation of method, taken in its broadest sense." Fieldwork can have multiple areas of inquiry, and Merriam lists six of these: Bruno Nettl describes early 20th-century fieldwork as extraction of music, which is analyzed elsewhere. Between 1920 and 1960, however, fieldworkers wished to map entire musical systems, and resided longer in

18656-459: The fact that musicology is primarily a human centric endeavour. Merriam's 1964 work redefined ethnomusicology and highlighted its importance in cultural anthropology in understanding music within different socio-cultural communities. He distinguished and showcased its distinct nature from that of comparative musicology by emphasizing the influence of social and cultural factors on music and how human centric it is. Hood's 1971 perspective, emphasized

18832-404: The field is his/her data; experience, texts (e.g. tales, myths, proverbs), structures (e.g. social organization), and "imponderabilia of everyday life" all contribute to an ethnomusicologist's study. He also notes how ethnomusicological fieldwork "principally involves interaction with other humans" and is primarily about "day-to-day personal relationships," and this shows the more "personal" side of

19008-535: The field work process. Emblematic of his ethical theories is a 1983 piece that describes the fundamental complexities of fieldwork through his relationship with the Suyá Indians of Brazil. To avoid ethnocentrism in his research, Seeger does not explore how singing has come to exist within Suyá culture, instead explaining how singing creates culture presently, and how aspects of Suyá social life can be seen through both

19184-514: The field, but have also let some ethnomusicologists shift back to the "armchair analysis" of Stumpf and Hornbostel. Since video recordings are now considered cultural texts, ethnomusicologists can conduct fieldwork by recording music performances and creating documentaries of the people behind the music, which can be accurately studied outside of the field. Additionally, the invention of the internet and forms of online communication could allow ethnomusicologists to develop new methods of fieldwork within

19360-492: The field. After the 1950s, some not only observed, but also participated in musical cultures. Mantle Hood wrote about this practice as well. Hood had learned from musicians in Indonesia about the intervals of sléndro scales, as well as how to play the rebab. He was interested in the characteristics of Indonesian music, as well as "social and economic valuations" of music. By the 1980s, participant-observer methodology became

19536-419: The field. It is agreed upon that ethnomusicologists look at music from beyond a purely theoretical, sonic, or historical perspective. Instead, these scholars look at music within culture, music as culture, and music as a reflection of culture. In other words, ethnomusicology was developed as the study of all music as a human social and cultural phenomenon. Rhodes, in 1956, had described ethnomusicology as

19712-458: The fieldwork of other scholars. This differentiates Stumpf and Hornbostel from their present-day contemporaries, who now use their fieldwork experience as a main component in their research. Ethnomusicology's transition from "armchair analysis" to fieldwork reflected ethnomusicologists trying to distance themselves from the field of comparative musicology in the period following World War II . Fieldwork emphasized face-to-face interaction to gather

19888-433: The first concept albums". In 1940, Lomax and his close friend Nicholas Ray wrote and produced the 15-minute program Back Where I Came From , which aired three nights per week on CBS and featured folk tales, proverbs, prose, and sermons, as well as songs, organized thematically. Its racially integrated cast included Burl Ives, Lead Belly, Josh White, Sonny Terry , and Brownie McGhee . In February 1941, Lomax spoke and gave

20064-786: The following year and divorced in 1967. In 1962, Lomax and singer and Civil Rights Activist Guy Carawan , music director at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, produced the album, Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia, 1961–62 , on Vanguard Records for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . Lomax was a consultant to Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record sent into space on

20240-450: The group or individual who is performing the music, as well as being sensitive to the rights and obligations related to the music in the context of the host society. Another ethical dilemma of ethnomusicological fieldwork is the inherent ethnocentrism (more commonly, eurocentrism) of ethnomusicology. Anthony Seeger has done seminal work on the notion of ethics within fieldwork, emphasizing the need to avoid ethnocentric remarks during or after

20416-622: The human landscape, that we have learned to dismiss this pollution of the human environment as inevitable, and even sensible, since it is wrongly assumed that the weak and unfit among musics and cultures are eliminated in this way...Not only is such a doctrine anti-human; it is very bad science. It is false Darwinism applied to culture – especially to its expressive systems, such as music language, and art. Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative, even though they may symbolize technologies of different levels...With

20592-517: The importance of cultural and linguistic diversity have been affirmed by many contemporary scholars, including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann who concluded his recent book, The Quark and the Jaguar , with a discussion of these very same issues, insisting on the importance of "cultural DNA" (1994: 338–343). His cautions about "universal popular culture" (1994: 342) sound remarkably like Alan's warning in his "Appeal for Cultural Equity" that

20768-402: The inevitable arguments that may arise in the future on the nature of ethnomusicological research. In addition, many ethnomusicological studies share common methodological approaches encapsulated in ethnographic fieldwork . Scholars of ethnomusicology often conduct their primary fieldwork among those who make the music, learning languages and the music itself. Ethnomusicologists also take on

20944-481: The journey, barely mentioned her. "All it said was, 'Shirley Collins was along for the trip'. It made me hopping mad. I wasn't just 'along for the trip'. I was part of the recording process, I made notes, I drafted contracts, I was involved in every part". Collins addressed the perceived omission in her memoir, America Over the Water , published in 2004. Lomax married Antoinette Marchand on August 26, 1961. They separated

21120-415: The late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars began applying scientific methods to analyze musical structures systematically. While ethnomusicology had not yet emerged as a formal discipline, foundational work in this period established techniques that would later influence the field. One key figure, Alexander J. Ellis, introduced methods for measuring musical pitch and scale structures in his 1885 paper, "On

21296-780: The majority of Bartók's source material. In 1935, the journal American Anthropologist published an article titled "Plains Ghost Dance and Great Basin Music," authored by George Herzog. Herzog was an assistant to Hornbostel and Stumpf. Herzog draws from material "available to [him]" and "in the literature," including transcriptions by James Mooney for the Bureau of American Ethnology ; Natalie Curtis , and Alice C. Fletcher . Herzog analyzes structure and melodic contour of Ghost Dance songs. He notes that Ghost Dance music's "paired patterns" occur in many Native American tribes' music, and they may have migrated from tribe to tribe. Writing later in

21472-536: The merger of two sister schools founded by Mary and William Choate in the 1890s. The Choates spent their summers in Mary's hometown of Wallingford, Connecticut. Mary, an alumna of Miss Porter's School , was the great-granddaughter of Caleb Atwater (1741–1832), a Connecticut merchant who supplied the American forces during the Revolutionary War. William Gardner Choate (1830–1921) was a federal judge with

21648-496: The modern world seems to have caught up to his vision. In an article first published in the 2009 Louisiana Folklore Miscellany , Barry Jean Ancelet , folklorist and chair of the Modern Languages Department at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, wrote: Every time [Lomax] called me over a span of about ten years, he never failed to ask if we were teaching Cajun French in the schools yet. His notions about

21824-429: The modern world, to study music as a means of communication to further world understanding, and to provide an avenue for wider exploration and reflection for those who are interested in primitive studies. This approach emphasizes the cultural impact of music and how music can be used to further understand humanity. The two approaches to ethnomusicology bring unique perspectives to the field, providing knowledge both about

22000-662: The modern-day Choate campus, including Hill House, West Wing, the Gymnasium, Memorial House, the Chapel, the Library, the Winter Exercise Building, and Archbold Infirmary, which was the nation's largest school infirmary. In the decade following the First World War , Choate sent 412 of its 618 graduates to Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, according to a 1928 edition of the school newspaper. George St. John

22176-752: The most accurate impression and meaning of music from the creators of the music, in contrast with "armchair analysis" that disconnected the ethnomusicologist from the individual or group of performers. Stumpf and Hornbostel were not the only scholars to use "armchair" analysis. Other scholars analyzed recordings and transcriptions that they did not make. For instance, in his work Hungarian Folk Music , Béla Bartók analyzes various traits of Hungarian folk songs. While drawing from recordings made by himself, Bartók also relies on transcriptions by other musicians; among them are Vikar Béla  [ Béla Vikar ; Vikar Béla ] , Zoltán Kodály , and Lászo Lajtha . These transcriptions came in recorded and printed format, and form

22352-524: The most representative folk song collections of any culture. From Lomax's Spanish and Italian recordings emerged one of the first theories explaining the types of folk singing that predominate in particular areas, a theory that incorporates work style, the environment, and the degrees of social and sexual freedom. Upon his return to New York in 1959, Lomax produced a concert, Folksong '59 , in Carnegie Hall , featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood ;

22528-400: The music of Robert Johnson . When he arrived, he was told by locals that Johnson had died but that another local man, Muddy Waters , might be willing to record his music for Lomax. Using recording equipment that filled the trunk of his car, Lomax recorded Waters' music; it is said that hearing Lomax's recording was the motivation that Waters needed to leave his farm job in Mississippi to pursue

22704-510: The music of a certain society in the context only of the culture under study, without comparing it to European models. In this way, the field aims to avoid an "us vs. them" approach to music. Nettl and other scholars hope to avoid the perception of the "ugly ethnomusicologist," which carries with it the same negative connotations as the "ugly American" traveler. Many scholars, from Ravi Shankar to V. Kofi Agawu, have criticized ethnomusicology for, as Nettl puts it, "dealing with non-European music in

22880-402: The music, as well as being sensitive to the rights and obligations related to the music in the context of the host society. Another ethical dilemma of ethnomusicological fieldwork is the inherent ethnocentrism (more commonly, eurocentrism) of ethnomusicology. Anthony Seeger, Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, has done seminal work on the notion of ethics within fieldwork, emphasizing

23056-673: The musical experience of a whole culture, according to Rice's logic, is not possible. Another argument against the objectivity and standardization of fieldwork comes from Gregory Barz and Tim Cooley in the second chapter of their book, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology . In this chapter, entitled "Confronting the Field(Note): In and Out of the Field," they claim that

23232-476: The nature of ethnomusicological fieldwork as being primarily concerned with the collection of facts. He describes ethnomusicology as both a field and a laboratory discipline. In these accounts of the nature of ethnomusicology, it seems to be closely related to a science. Because of that, one might argue that a standardized, agreed-upon field method would be beneficial to ethnomusicologists. Despite that apparent viewpoint, Merriam conclusively claims that there should be

23408-481: The need to avoid ethnocentric remarks during or after the field work process. Emblematic of his ethical theories is a 1983 piece that describes the fundamental complexities of fieldwork through his relationship with the Suyá Indians of Brazil. To avoid ethnocentrism in his research, Seeger does not explore how singing has come to exist within Suyá culture, instead explaining how singing creates culture presently, and how aspects of Suyá social life can be seen through both

23584-438: The non-ponderable aspects of everyday life. The third type of information, Nettl claims is the most important because it captures the ambiguity of experience that cannot be captured well through writing. He cites another attempt made by Morris Friedrich , an anthropologist, to classify field data into fourteen different categories in order to demonstrate the complexity that information gathered through fieldwork contains. There are

23760-544: The norm, at least in the North American tradition of ethnomusicology. Aside from this history of fieldwork, Nettl writes about informants: the people whom fieldworkers research and interview. Informants do not contain the entirety of a musical culture, and need not represent the ideal of the culture. According to Nettl, there is a bell-shaped curve of musical ability. In a community, the majority are "simply good" at their music. They are of greatest interest. However, it

23936-560: The people can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, "You are my brother." As a member of the Popular Front and People's Songs in the 1940s, Alan Lomax promoted what was then known as "One World" and today is called multiculturalism. In the late forties he produced a series of concerts at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall that presented flamenco guitar and calypso, along with country blues, Appalachian music , Andean music, and jazz. His radio shows of

24112-431: The performance component of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicologists following the anthropological approach included scholars such as Steven Feld and Alan Merriam . The anthropological ethnomusicologists stress the importance of field work and using participant observation . This can include a variety of distinct fieldwork practices, including personal exposure to a performance tradition or musical technique, participation in

24288-697: The performing arts. Other specialized programs include American Studies, creative writing, economics, FBLA, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, religion, debate, and the Fed Challenge. The 2011–12 academic year saw the introduction of an Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies Program (AMES). Choate's Office of Global Studies supports study-abroad and other international initiatives. One-third of Choate students participate in programs in China, France, Japan, Spain, and Jordan. The Kohler Environmental Center, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects , opened in 2012 and

24464-463: The philosophical attitudes that Martin Heidegger , Hans-Georg Gadamer , and Paul Ricoeur take towards objectivity and subjectivity to state that human perception of the world is inherently subjective because the only way in which humans can interpret what goes on around them is through symbols. Human preconceptions of those symbols will always influence the ways in which an individual might process

24640-541: The police; accordingly, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families accused Choate of violating its mandatory reporter obligations. Following publication of the report, two former headmasters resigned from the Choate board of trustees. Choate's curriculum includes elective and interdisciplinary courses, from astronomy and architecture to printmaking and post-modernism to digital video and development economics. There are more than 300 courses in

24816-422: The probe failed to find in terms of prosecutable evidence, it made up for in speculation about his character. An FBI report dated July 23, 1943, describes Lomax as possessing "an erratic, artistic temperament" and a "bohemian attitude". It says: "He has a tendency to neglect his work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces excellent results." The file quotes one informant who said that "Lomax

24992-595: The psycho-physical constitution of mankind." Kolinski also employed his method to test, and disprove, Erich von Hornbostel's hypothesis that European music generally had ascending melodic lines, while non-European music featured descending melodic lines. Adopting a more anthropological analytical approach, Steven Feld conducted descriptive ethnographic studies regarding "sound as a cultural system." Specifically, his studies of Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea use sociomusical methods to draw conclusions about its culture. Bruno Nettl, Emeritus Professor of Musicology at

25168-547: The risk of expulsion. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sister Bess , age 10, was sent to live with an aunt. Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his family's resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his second year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course in Plato and

25344-561: The role of a participant observer in learning to perform in a musical tradition, a practice Mantle Hood termed "bi-musicality". Musical fieldworkers also collect recordings and contextual information about the music of interest. Thus, ethnomusicological studies do not rely on printed or manuscript sources as the primary source of epistemic authority, but rather, the focus is on qualitative practice-based research methods. When ethnomusicology first emerged in Western academic circles, its focus

25520-979: The role of the ethnologist should be that of advocate for primitive man (as indigenous people were then called), when he urged folklorists to similarly advocate for the folk. Some, such as Richard Dorson , objected that scholars shouldn't act as cultural arbiters, but Lomax believed it was unethical to stand idly by as the magnificent variety of the world's cultures and languages was "grayed out" by centralized commercial entertainment and educational systems. Although he acknowledged potential problems with intervention, he urged that folklorists with their special training actively assist communities in safeguarding and revitalizing their own local traditions. Similar ideas had been put into practice by Benjamin Botkin , Harold W. Thompson, and Louis C. Jones, who believed that folklore studied by folklorists should be returned to its home communities to enable it to thrive anew. They have been realized in

25696-414: The school published Covington's investigation report, which acknowledged repeated instances of sexual misconduct against dozens of students from the 1960s through the 2010s (most of the incidents reportedly took place in the 1980s); the report implicated at least 12 former faculty and staff members. The school admitted that although it had been aware of some misconduct, it had not reported any misconduct to

25872-458: The school was hit hard by financial difficulties in the 1970s. It responded by adding even more students, growing from 843 students in 1973 to 926 in 1978 and 1,021 by 1994. The school's finances eventually stabilized. In 1989, Choate opened a second I. M. Pei building, the science center. Starting in the 1990s, Choate adopted a policy of shrinking the student body, growing its financial resources, and being more selective in admissions. In 1994,

26048-437: The significance of direct engagement and performance of the intended music to be studied as a means of ethnomusicological research, having the realization that studying it academically was necessary but so was the direct act of performance. This came into direct opposition to some of his peers of the past. Hood addressed this by stressing the need to unlearn Western musical conventions when studying non-Western traditions showcasing

26224-418: The social sciences and humanities. Though some ethnomusicologists primarily conduct historical studies, the majority are involved in long-term participant observation. Therefore, ethnomusicological work can be characterized as featuring a substantial, intensive ethnographic component. Two approaches to ethnomusicological studies are common: the anthropological and the musicological . Ethnomusicologists using

26400-466: The steamer RMS  Mauretania . Sure enough, in October, FBI agents were interviewing Lomax's friends and acquaintances. Lomax never told his family exactly why he went to Europe, only that he was developing a library of world folk music for Columbia. Nor did he allow anyone to say he was forced to leave. In a letter to the editor of a British newspaper, Lomax took a writer to task for describing him as

26576-796: The student body are on financial aid. 53% of Choate's 271 financial aid families make under $ 150,000 a year, and the school states that the average aid grant is 80% of tuition. The school commits to meet 100% of an admitted student's demonstrated financial need. Choate no longer publicizes the exact size of its financial endowment . However, in its Internal Revenue Service filings for the 2021–22 school year, Choate reported total assets of $ 781.5 million, net assets of $ 689.8 million, investment holdings of $ 485.6 million, and cash holdings of $ 41.7 million. Choate also reported $ 76.1 million in program service expenses and $ 13.8 million in grants (primarily student financial aid ). Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim chaplains serve Choate's campus ministry. Choate

26752-624: The study of music, later scholars recognized the need to balance objectivity with cultural interpretation. Although Hornbostel and Stumpf emphasized a scientific approach, subsequent ethnomusicologists integrated these methods with ethnographic practices to ensure that cultural contexts were not overshadowed by purely empirical analysis. This integration helped shape ethnomusicology into an interdisciplinary field that values both precision and cultural understanding. Ethnomusicologists often apply theories and methods from cultural anthropology , cultural studies and sociology as well as other disciplines in

26928-422: The study of music. Thus, in the process of developing the study of music and people, the field of ethnomusicology combines perspectives from a wide variety of disciplines such as folklore, psychology, cultural anthropology, linguistics , comparative musicology, music theory , and history. This disciplinary variety has resulted in several distinct definitions of ethnomusicology. As follows, there has not often been

27104-512: The time – he was actually 17 and a college student – and he said he had intended to participate in a peaceful demonstration. Lomax said he and his colleagues agreed to stop their protest when police asked them to, but that he was grabbed by a couple of policemen as he was walking away. "That is pretty much the story there, except that it distressed my father very, very much", Lomax told the FBI. "I had to defend my righteous position, and he couldn't understand me and I couldn't understand him. It has made

27280-515: The time, Choate was losing money and had only 51 students. With support from shareholders, St. John bought out the Choate family and incorporated the school as a for-profit corporation; the school reorganized as a non-profit in 1938. St. John believed that expanding enrollment would improve the school's financial resources and allow him to offer more amenities to his students. Enrollment jumped from 51 students in 1908 to 230 in 1918, 452 in 1928, and roughly 600 by 1947. George St. John built most of

27456-481: The treatment of Western music in relation to music from "other," non-Western cultures and the cultural implications embedded in analytical methodologies. Kofi Agawu (see 2000s) noted that scholarship on African music seems to emphasize difference further by continually developing new systems of analysis; he proposes the use of Western notation to instead highlight similarity and bring African music into mainstream Western music scholarship. In seeking to analyze such

27632-550: The tuition), the elder Lomax had probably wanted to separate his son from new political associates that he considered undesirable. But Alan had also not been happy there and probably also wanted to be nearer his bereaved father and young sister, Bess , and to return to the close friends he had made during his first year at the University of Texas. In June 1942 the FBI approached the Librarian of Congress, Archibald McLeish , in an attempt to have Lomax fired as Assistant in Charge of

27808-417: The use of standardized transcription and recording techniques, which allowed for detailed comparisons of music from different cultural contexts. According to Christensen, Hornbostel’s methodologies were instrumental in formalizing comparative musicology as a recognized academic discipline, laying the groundwork for what would later evolve into ethnomusicology. While these scientific methods introduced rigor to

27984-513: The variations in scales across the locations, he concludes that "there is no practical way of arriving at the real pitch of a musical scale , when it cannot be heard as played by a native musician" and even then, "we only obtain that particular musician's tuning of the scale." Ellis's study is also an early example of comparative musicological fieldwork (see Fieldwork ). Alan Lomax's method of cantometrics employed analysis of songs to model human behavior in different cultures. He posited that there

28160-419: The way "music is part of the very construction and interpretation of social and conceptual relationships and processes." Charles Seeger and Mantle Hood were two ethnomusicologists that adopted the musicological approach. Hood started one of the first American university programs dedicated to ethnomusicology, often stressing that his students must learn how to play the music they studied. Further, prompted by

28336-551: The whole time, and left with no money," said Don Fleming, director of Lomax's Association for Culture Equity. "He did it out of the passion he had for it, and found ways to fund projects that were closest to his heart". Lomax was born in Austin, Texas in 1915, the third of four children born to Bess Brown and pioneering folklorist and author John A. Lomax . Two of his siblings also developed significant careers studying folklore: Bess Lomax Hawes and John Lomax Jr. The elder Lomax,

28512-568: The world around them. Applying that theory to music and ethnomusicology, Rice brings back the terms of musicology and musical experience. Because one's experience of music is simply an interpretation of preconceived symbols, one cannot claim musical experience as factual. Thus, systematizing fieldwork like one would a scientific field is a futile endeavor. Instead, Rice asserts that any attempt to engage with someone else's musical experience, which cannot be truly understood by anyone except that person, must be confined to individual analysis. Characterizing

28688-431: The world is not, however, entirely or even principally the result of contact with the universalizing effect of scientific enlightenment. Popular culture is in most cases far more effective at erasing distinctions between one place or society and another. Blue jeans, fast food, rock music, and American television serials have been sweeping the world for years. (1994: 338–343) and Lomax: carcasses of dead or dying cultures on

28864-578: The world, but rather "artifices" created by humans and their "organized preferences," and they differed in various locations. In his article in the Journal of the Society of Arts and Sciences , he mentions different countries such as India, Japan, and China, and notes how the pitch systems varied "not only [in] the absolute pitch of each note, but also necessarily the intervals between them." From his experiences with interviewing native musicians and observing

29040-621: Was Kennedy's lifelong friend Kirk LeMoyne "Lem" Billings , who kept an apartment in the White House during JFK's presidency. Kennedy graduated from Choate in 1935. In senior class polling for the yearbook (of which he was business manager), he was voted 'Most Likely to Succeed'. It has been suggested that the oft-remembered quote from Kennedy's inauguration may have originated from a common refrain from Choate headmaster, George St. John's chapel talks: "The youth who loves his alma mater will always ask not 'What can she do for me?' but 'What can I do for her?'" Following Seymour St. John's retirement,

29216-545: Was a very peculiar individual, that he seemed to be very absent-minded and that he paid practically no attention to his personal appearance." This same source adds that he suspected Lomax's peculiarity and poor grooming habits came from associating with the " hillbillies " who provided him with folk tunes. Ethnomusicology Stated broadly, ethnomusicology may be described as a holistic investigation of music in its cultural contexts. The term ethnomusicology itself can be broken down as such: 'ethno' = people, and 'musicology' =

29392-503: Was brought up in East Oakland[,] we all went to public school ... The boys from twelve to sixteen listened[,] really listened[,] to everything I had to say ... I had been much struck by the Choate school literary magazine which did have extraordinary good writing in it." In 1944, future playwright, Edward Albee transferred from Valley Forge Military Academy to Choate. Admissions director Frank Wheeler remarked presciently, "I have

29568-668: Was done with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in the summer of 1935. He returned to the University of Texas that fall and was awarded a BA in Philosophy, summa cum laude, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa in May 1936. Lack of money prevented him from immediately attending graduate school at the University of Chicago, as he desired, but he later corresponded with and pursued graduate studies with Melville J. Herskovits at Columbia University and with Ray Birdwhistell at

29744-487: Was extemporary, and Fitts made a stenographic transcript. After an exchange of letters, Stein authorized Fitts to oversee publication of her talk in The Choate Literary Magazine . Stein's essay appeared in the February 1935 issue of The Lit with the title "How Writing Is Written." It has many times since been anthologized and given academic treatment, with the Choate text unaltered. It "occupies

29920-715: Was no formal relationship at the time with Rosemary Hall, but there were coeducational audiences for plays and recitals and Mary Choate hosted dances at the Homestead. From 1908 to 1973, control over the Choate School passed from the Choate family to the St. John family. Under the St. Johns, Choate became one of the largest boarding schools in New England. In 1908, George St. John (h. 1908–47), an Episcopal priest who had previously taught at Hackley School , The Hill School , and Adirondack-Florida School , became headmaster. At

30096-538: Was not reliable, "since the same interval has a different reading each time it occurs across the whole pitch spectrum ." On the other hand, the cents system allowed any interval to have a fixed numerical representation, regardless of its specific pitch level. Ellis used his system, which divided the octave into 1200 cents (100 cents in each Western semitone ), as a means of analyzing and comparing scale systems of different types of music. He had recognized that global pitch and scale systems were not naturally occurring in

30272-516: Was primarily on non-Western music. This early approach often neglected European and Western musical traditions, creating a contrast with the field of conventional musicology, which centered on Western art music. Initially known as "comparative musicology," the field set Western music as a standard to which other musical traditions were compared. This approach led to criticism for imposing Western biases on non-Western music, which prompted scholars to shift from "comparative musicology" to "ethnomusicology" in

30448-690: Was recorded in January and February 1942. While serving in the United States Army in World War II, Lomax produced and hosted numerous radio programs in connection with the war effort. The 1944 "ballad opera", The Martins and the Coys , broadcast in Britain (but not the USA) by the BBC , featuring Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer , Sonny Terry , Pete Seeger, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith , among others,

30624-471: Was released on Rounder Records in 2000. In the late 1940s, Lomax produced a series of commercial folk music albums for Decca Records and organized a series of concerts at New York's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall , featuring blues, calypso , and flamenco music. He also hosted a radio show, Your Ballad Man , in 1949 that was broadcast nationwide on the Mutual Radio Network and featured

30800-495: Was succeeded in 1947 by his son Seymour '31 (h. 1947–73). Under Seymour St. John, Choate admitted its first black student in 1959, increased the share of international students to 15% of the student body, lifted the Sunday chapel attendance requirement, and temporarily abolished A-F grades. An ambitious builder, Seymour St. John invested heavily in improving accommodations for students and faculty. He also hired I. M. Pei to build

30976-721: Was with a cache of 250 discs and 8 reels of film, documents of the incredible range of ethnic diversity, expressive traditions, and occupational folklife in Michigan." In late 1939, Lomax hosted two series on CBS's nationally broadcast American School of the Air , called American Folk Song and Wellsprings of Music , both music appreciation courses that aired daily in the schools and were supposed to highlight links between American folk and classical orchestral music. As host, Lomax sang and presented other performers, including Burl Ives , Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger , Josh White , and

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