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Ethnomusicology and Archaeomusicology with Dr. Mason Brown - Ep 59
572 Plays5 years ago
In this episode, we chat with Dr. Mason Brown, a guest assistant professor for Kathmandu University Department of Music and Affiliate Scholar for the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Asian Studies.
We delve into his early interests in ethnomusicology / Tibetan culture and get into the details of what ethnomusicology is.
Dr. Brown talks about music theory, pentatonic scales, and all the instruments he plays. We also talk about some evidence for the earliest musical instruments in the past and finish up with a discussion about the history of fiddle music.
Literature Recommendations
- Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology
- The official podcast of SEM, Ethnomusicology Today
- The journal of the International Council for Traditional Music (the European Ethnomusicology professional organization)
- Film by ethnomusicologist Anna Stirr and filmmaker Bhakta Syangtan--Singing A Great Dream: The Revolutionary Songs and Life of Khusiram Pakhrin
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXkM11kp_tg
Guest Contact
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mason.brown.90/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqe2uJD26i7-4kjVbUvC7KA
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
- Website: www.alifeinruins.com
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:31
Speaker
not so bad. Tula con repugné, viei-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e.
00:01:20
Speaker
Welcome to episode 59 of a life in ruins podcast. Re-investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover. And I'm joined by my co-host Connor Jonnan and David Howe. In this episode, we are chatting with Dr. Mason Brown, who is an assistant professor for Katmandu University Department of Music and affiliate scholar for the University of Colorado Boulder Center for Asian Studies. Dr. Brown, how are you doing this evening? And what was that instrument? And what was the name of that song you were just playing for us?
00:01:48
Speaker
I'm doing pretty well, thank you, and thanks for having me. That was an instrument called the gromyen, which is the Tibetan lute.
Tibetan Music and Cultural Ties
00:01:57
Speaker
Cool. And the song that I played and sang is a song from the place I did my field work for my PhD, a place called Mugri in Nepal. Excellent. And it's kind of a Himalayan valley within Nepal, right on the Tibetan border.
00:02:17
Speaker
that has, you know, very strong cultural linguistic ties to Tibet. That's awesome. That's really cool. Yeah. That song is in the Tibetan language. And it's a song about Nubri, a touche, which is a genre from Tu, Upper Tibet, about Nubri. It just says, at the top of the world, a happy valley arose, the happy valley of Nubri, the homeland of us youth. At the top is the ornamented heap mountain.
00:02:46
Speaker
the palace of the lords of the five families. At the bottom is the Golden Honey Mountain, the Golden Bee Mountain, the practice place of Guru Rinpoche. That's awesome. Yeah, so I was going to ask, sorry to interject there, what brought you to that side of the world? Were you always interested in it? Did you travel there or did you just really like that type of music? I'm a lifelong practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. My father got into that when I was a little kid, so I've always
00:03:16
Speaker
been interested in Tibetan culture as well as Japanese culture. Yeah, it was kind of a lifelong interest in it.
Defining Ethnomusicology
00:03:26
Speaker
And then when I decided to go to grad school much, much later in life than is normal, I thought that would be an interesting thing to study and learn about.
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah. So we got first introduced to you, Mason. You reached out to us like a year ago and the onset of COVID, I think like June or May. I mean, you'd, you'd listen to the podcast and you live in Boulder. So we had met up on Pearl street in one of the outside dining areas and got to talk cause you were interested in archeo musicology.
00:03:56
Speaker
And that's how I was introduced to you in your research in ethnomusicology and some of the topics that you study. So how did you become interested in the field of ethnomusicology? Well, I was interested in it all my life, although I didn't always know that that's what I was interested in. I was just interested in different types of traditional music from different cultures. You know, later I ended up reading
00:04:24
Speaker
learning what ethnomusicology was and reading about the history of musical instruments and things like that that really interested me. And it just was a natural thing, I think, for me to want to get a degree in. Yeah. And how do you define ethnomusicology for those who aren't familiar with the subject? So it's basically the study of music within all its cultural contexts and
00:04:49
Speaker
in basically any way or framework you can think of. So it's very interdisciplinary. So in Europe, in the 19th century, there was musicology, right? That was the study of Western heart music, the literate music of Europe. And at the same time, this colonization project is going on. Scholars are getting all these instruments from around the world and later on recordings.
00:05:19
Speaker
Some scholars were interested in that and studying those other musics from the cultural other.
American Folklore's Influence
00:05:28
Speaker
And that mostly meant studying instruments that were brought back to museums, right? And it was all in the service of their evolutionary theories, right? They wanted to show that how and why European music was superior to all these other musics and how it progressed from primitive to advanced.
00:05:47
Speaker
That was the point of comparative comparison, really. Interesting. So it's kind of like, what is it? Historical particularism versus like, you know, cultural evolution, but with music. Right. Yeah. And in the United States, it was ethnomusicology's beginnings, although they were, they basically came out of this comparative musicology, but in the United States, it was particularly connected with folklore. And by the mid 20th century,
00:06:17
Speaker
the American ethnomusicologists, especially the American eth- like, um, I think, I think Yap Kuntz coined the word ethnomusicology, but, um, people like Charles Seeger, who was the first president of the society for ethnomusicology, they adopted that in opposition to comparative musicology because they thought it was more, you're not comparing things, you're just really studying one certain musical tradition. And that was, uh, that's Bob Seeger's dad, right?
00:06:44
Speaker
Uh, PC. Yeah, that was bad. So it started off kind of just like you take an instrument back to Europe and you're like, Oh, let's try to play it and see what happens. What kind of meals do they use? Okay. That was very big interest.
00:07:03
Speaker
But it's also like, I think as things change and as you guys study it today, where music occurs and the context in which it occurs is also super important, right? It's not just instruments and things like that. It's, it's what it means to societies. Is that what like ethnomusicology like strives for is like context mixed in with music mixed in with instruments and to kind of understand societies.
Dr. Brown's Academic Journey
00:07:30
Speaker
Pretty much. And by the second half of the 20th century, there are kind of two approaches kind of congealed. One is more musicological, that's exemplified by Mantle Hood at UCLA, and then more anthropological, exemplified by Alan Miriam at Indiana, Wilmington. Indiana, one of the most influential ethnomusicology programs in the country is actually in the folklore.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yeah, I was I was telling my partner who goes to Indiana Bloomington that we're having someone that does you want. I was like, yeah, he does ethnomusicology. And she just started spitting facts at me about, oh, yeah, we have one of these. And I was like, how do you know about this? I've never heard about it before meeting Mason. And she's like, oh, our university is one of the top programs in the entire country. Like a lot of my friends do it in anthropology. And I was like, what? This sounds so cool. But Alan Mariam actually called it the anthropology of music. And I think that's
00:08:26
Speaker
basically what it is. But also, Mattel Hood was into what he called bi-musicality, like learning another musical language, right? Actually learning how to play and perform the music that you study. Interesting. That's no longer, I don't think, is a split anymore. I think in places like CU, it's both. It's pretty integrated that way.
00:08:48
Speaker
You know, you're a musicologist now, but your undergraduate was in religious studies and music at Naropa University. How did those two studies intersect? And then off of that, could you explain to the university how Naropa in Boulder is a little different than standard public universities? So for me, since you can't get an ethnomusicology undergrad at Naropa,
00:09:15
Speaker
doing a double major in religious studies and music, almost the same. Especially if you're like me and one of the main things you study in terms of musicology is religious or liturgical music, or in my case, the religious content that's in secular folk songs. Secular not really being a good word for Tibetan folk songs. So yeah, I found it
00:09:44
Speaker
prepared me very well to go into a PhD program in ethnomusicology. And Naropa is a unique place because it was founded in the 1970s by a Tibetan Buddhist lama, one of the first main lamas who came to the west and really got popular. It was founded as not a Buddhist university but very Buddhist influenced a university that would include contemplative
00:10:12
Speaker
education and develop the idea of contemplative education and also bring in wisdom traditions from around the world. And it's a very small school. It's just a small liberal arts school, really. It's got a reputation of being a little hippy dippy, but its psychology programs are very well respected. And in religious studies, I certainly found it pretty rigorous and it prepared me well for
00:10:43
Speaker
for grad school. From someone who lived right near Boulder most of his life, it's not really a surprise that during the 70s this would kind of emerge there if you know anything about Boulder and what people think of it and what people think occurs there. So what ultimately led you to continue further into higher education to get a PhD?
00:11:07
Speaker
Well, like I said, I did this later. I did my undergrad late as well. I never went to college. I went to Naropa for one summer in 1984, the year I graduated from high school. And it was then I realized, oh crap, I should have done better in high school because I would kind of like to go to this college. But I didn't have the wherewithal to pay for. I didn't even know how to go to college, you know.
00:11:33
Speaker
you know, my parents are very working class. I was just going to be an artist and a craftsman. So I didn't need to go to college. It was only later when I was in my around 40 that I broke my leg on a construction site. I thought again about going to college. Gotcha. So then I did. I started when I was, I started my undergrad when I was 43 and got my PhD at 52. Oh wow. Okay. So a non-trad for sure.
00:12:03
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah. We get a lot of listeners that ask, you know, is it like too late to start kind of stuff or like how to do it? So I'm, I'm glad to see like a legitimate success story come out of that.
00:12:12
Speaker
So we talked about, you kind of mentioned taking what they call a non-traditional route, which I don't think is a super good term because I think people learn and go to college in different kind of routes and everything like that. And I really actually enjoy seeing folks who take these different routes and seeing how they, how they get there. How was it actually going to school and getting a PhD kind of later in your life?
00:12:41
Speaker
I actually loved it. I think being older put me at an advantage really in a lot of ways. You know, I was studying religious studies and music and ethnomusicology and I had already been studying those things my whole life. And I was already, I was a mature musician. You know, I'd been a Buddhist priest, a Zen priest for 20 years. Wow. I just knew what I wanted to do. Like I wasn't like my younger colleagues.
00:13:10
Speaker
trying to decide what my major would be. Yeah, that's cool. It was a good experience for me. I was unlucky to come out of it at this particular time when there's no academic jobs.
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, whenever I meet like, you know, non-trad students or older students in classes, they always are definitely the more hardworking. And I can tell they're just like, I mean, I've sat with them too, because some of them are friends. Like when you see, you know, some kids come in late or just miss classes all the time, like,
00:13:42
Speaker
People like that are like you're there to learn and get your degree and all this like you said kids come in They don't know what they want to do yet and kind of like waste time sometimes So I think it is a good thing to like wait a bit I wish I had And gotten some other experience before I went to college because I was dumb and a kid when I went in and I really don't think I would have done as well College when I was 18
00:14:04
Speaker
for sure.
Music and Instrument Mastery
00:14:06
Speaker
I think that having life experience really gives you a different perspective on things and it's refreshing to hear that in classes. At 18, 19, 20, we're given the college spiel and we're trying to figure out who we are.
00:14:25
Speaker
It's super refreshing to have someone who's experienced life and seen things to really contribute to these discussions about what's going on. So I think it's fantastic. Yeah. So I hope that answers some audience questions because we do get that one often. I would recommend it. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm super grateful I went to community college first before going to undergrad because those grades at Nova
00:14:50
Speaker
Not so hot, not so hot. But once I figured out archeology and went to a program and I did much better, or else I would have probably just had less than a 3.0 and undergrad probably never would have been able to go to grad school and be in marketing and making money.
00:15:05
Speaker
Well, I'd like to nerd out about music. So let's wrap this session up and let's head on to the next one. Welcome back to segment two of episode 59 of a life and ruins podcast. We're here with Dr. Mason Brown, and we're here to talk about some music. So I grew up playing the cello in orchestra, and then I played piano and, you know, dabble with guitar and stuff. So with that, I can kind of mess around with other string instruments, but it seems like
00:15:31
Speaker
You have definitely messed around with other string instruments. So can you tell us about that? Cause they, it sounds awesome. Yeah. So, I mean, I started playing guitar when I was about five and took like classical guitar lessons and then took lessons all through elementary, junior high, high school. So by the time I was a teenager, I was like pretty good guitarist. But yeah, then I, then I got into banjo and I just kept adding other stringed instruments, a mandolin.
00:16:01
Speaker
Eventually, I got into viola da gamba. That's like a big standing cello-like thing, right? No, just like the violin family, which the cello is the base of the violin family. Viola da gamba, or vials, come in three sizes. Okay. And they're treble and bass. And so they're used to play that kind of consort music in the Renaissance in Baroque before the violins took over and the gamba went out of style.
00:16:30
Speaker
So yeah, the Viola de Gamba is a fretted instrument tuned in force. It's actually related to the guitar. It's not related to the violin. It's the violin family, not the violin family. Interesting. Yeah. And yeah, then I, you know, I got into other food, Japanese shamisen. Now I'm working on the fiddle and finally learning the fiddle like for the past couple of years. Nice. Do you find that it's,
00:16:56
Speaker
knowing one instrument or knowing other string instruments makes learning new instruments easier, or is it helpful at all? I think it is. I mean, you understand how they work, but it can also hold you up because you can not realize that it's actually different. Like if I'm playing the guitar or I'm playing the hud, it's a totally different technique. So you can just play the hud like a guitar for quite a while.
00:17:24
Speaker
and not really get good at playing rehood. Gotcha. Yeah, I guess like a ukulele is tuned different but it's fretted like a guitar so I always get confused when I'm doing that. And I mean the tunings is a hurdle too initially because most people that play stringed instruments are used to learning just one tuning. But I play in six different tunings on the guitar. Oh wow, okay. All the time. So I can understand different tunings quite easily because I've practiced it a lot.
Global Musical Traditions
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:54
Speaker
All these different instruments that you've mentioned, especially the ones that are more non-Western, so out there in Asia, did you pick these up through your Ethnomusicology, or I guess with your background, was this also part of your religious upbringing and being exposed to Tibetan culture at such an early age? It was a result of studying Ethnomusicology that I learned to drown in because I never
00:18:23
Speaker
held one in my hands until I went to Nepal. And then I took lessons, you know, during, I did a Fulbright, I had a Fulbright Haze to do my dissertation. I lived in Nepal for two and a half years. And took lessons on the drama. And on the Nepali Sarangi, you know, in grad school, I played a lot with the Japanese ensemble. So I learned how to play the shamisen, the Japanese loop.
00:18:53
Speaker
So yeah, going to ethnomusicology school definitely increased the number of stringed instruments I was playing. When I obviously hear a shamisen, it's a distinct sound. Obviously it's the music you would think of when you hear Japan, like that cherry blossoms falling from the sky kind of music. But the instrument makes that sound too, but there's obviously a level of
00:19:18
Speaker
like the language the instrument has, like you were talking about. So like in flamenco, you have the Phrygian minor or the Phrygian scale and then you have like our harmonic minor and you know that's flamenco. But I have no idea for like, you know, Asian music, but there's obviously a distinct sound to it. So could you speak to that? Because I know nothing about that. Yeah. Well, what you're talking about, I think, is the pentatonic scale.
00:19:44
Speaker
Okay. Because that's, if you think of shamisen music or various Chinese music or that Tibetan music I played, you're pretty much dealing with a pentatonic scale, which is a five note scale. So the usual and scales, you asked me if there were different scales for different musics. And like you gave the example of flamenco and yes, there are elaborate systems of scales.
00:20:11
Speaker
like in Hindustani music or Arabic music that have a lot more than just the scales. They have the conventions of how to play those scales, what time of day you can play them, how you structure an improvisation in the scale.
00:20:26
Speaker
So, but there are then a lot of commonalities. So basically, it comes from physics, right, that we have octaves. So, right, if you split the hertz of a frequency in half, it's, or is it you double it? I can't remember. You double it.
00:20:45
Speaker
Right? That's a D. And that's a D. That's an octave. So you can divide that in different ways. In Western music, we tend to divide it into 12 equals half steps. Right. So I'm not very good at playing a chromatic scale on this thing, but... Like that. Half step, half step, half step.
00:21:16
Speaker
But it's very common to divide that into seven unequal steps, whole steps and half steps. And that's called a diatonic scale, which is where we have our major scale. And so you notice in the major scale, there's a whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step.
00:21:43
Speaker
And so there's two places where there are half steps, right? If you skip over those and you go straight to the upper one, that's five. That's a pentatonic scale. So that's all. Yeah, so it sounds major if you start it here.
00:22:10
Speaker
Sounds minor if you started here. And it has modes just like the diatonic scale. But that pentatonic scale is really the most widely dispersed around the world, which is evidence that it's probably the oldest or one of the oldest scales, because it's everywhere.
Archaeological Musical Evidence
00:22:36
Speaker
that's so neat yeah you can and i feel like you can just doing that skill you can hear or relate that to japanese music or chinese music you can almost hear it's a stereotypical it's and it's the black keys on the piano right you can see this on the piano keyboard if you just play the black keys that's a pentatonic scale
00:22:59
Speaker
That just blew my mind. I never realized it was all just pentatonics on that instrument because it's such a distinct sound. Yeah. That's really cool. And then you can get into like, like the, actually the Tibetan tune I just played is hexatonic. It has six notes. So it, it sometimes plays one of those half steps. Okay. Which you could either consider hexatonic or you could consider it a passing tone in a pentatonic scale, like an extra tone in this pentatonic scale. Could you play a hexatonic for us?
00:23:28
Speaker
Well, it would be like one of those half steps you would play. So instead of playing. Gotcha. So there's only one big leap left in the scale.
00:23:50
Speaker
Okay. And yeah, you can kind of hear that being like, you know, Wild West music too, in like a sense to, yeah, it is all over the world. I mean, it's, it's very stereotypical in that kind of Japanese folk music, but also an Appalachian folk music. And lots of all folk music really has pentatonic scales with probably some exceptions if I can't, I don't know about it. Yeah. That's an exaggeration, but it really is like all over.
00:24:15
Speaker
So you mentioned that the pentatonic scale is most likely, just because it's so widespread, it's most likely the oldest. Where do we find, and this can be, if this is like completely off topic as we can change this question, where do we find the first evidence for music in the archaeological record and kind of our human story? Well, I mean, the oldest instrument, I believe, is a bone flute from Europe.
00:24:40
Speaker
that's 40 to 60,000 years old. And I'm not sure if that one plays a pentatonic scale. I think it might be more restricted than that. But there are certainly lots and lots of flutes found throughout prehistory that have pentatonic scales. And there are also lithophones that have those scales, or lithophones are stones that make a sound, right?
00:25:05
Speaker
Yeah. I think the oldest instrument I've ever been able to see is that mammoth bone drum set out of Ukraine. Oh, I think that's like 15 or 16,000 years. And it's like covered in ochre too. Like it's really weird, but they, they say it's a drum set and that's, that's pretty metal. If you're playing drums on mammoth, mammoth ivory, mammoth bones, basically just stone xylophones. You know what I mean? Yeah. There are,
00:25:35
Speaker
paleolithic sites in Europe where there are lithophones that are just stalactites and stalagmites that have been broken off at certain lengths to create different pitches. Just the fins of the stalactites have been broken off to create different pitches. Those tend to be in big chambers of caves with lots of paintings and places that
00:26:05
Speaker
a crowd of people could fit in. Like they're not in places that nobody can fit in, right? Yeah. So it tends to look like, you know, ceremonial use. Yeah. To be in there right under those paintings. So they're like big chimes or whatever they call them. Exactly. And you strike it with a mallet or either made of stone or wood. And there are those lithophones that are stationary.
00:26:33
Speaker
And then there are also ones that are smaller that you could have a set of stones that create some cluster of pitches, not necessarily a scale, but which is basically like a xylophone.
00:26:46
Speaker
That leads to my next question, and I know there's like an old set of lithophones in Africa that's like considered some of the oldest. I forget where it is, but I know that's like, you know, oldest known, like for sure that was a lithophone, but couldn't have, lithophones had been used like for much of like the paleolithic, just we wouldn't see them because a very sound is like percussion in a sense. Well, absolutely. And like, um, I was talking to you before we went on about this, uh,
00:27:15
Speaker
your sister podcast, the archaeology show, I think it's episode 47, that they have Marilyn Martirano. Yeah. She just discovered accidentally that some lithics in her collection made musical sounds. And then she reevaluated and she realized they actually were lithophones.
00:27:37
Speaker
and set her off looking at other collections, right, to see what other artifacts might not have been identified, because nobody's ever been thinking about that. They're grinding stones or something else. But like there are, there are ethnographic examples of them, like the Pueblo Bell, right, which is a hanging stone in the Cuba Bell, I think it's called, in the Pueblos. That is, they can be either modified or not,
00:28:07
Speaker
or slightly modified, but we hit it with another stone and it makes a nice tone. Yeah. Could we consider this the earliest hard rock music? It was rock music for sure. Wow. I mean, I, uh, I lived in Northern New Mexico for a long time and I, I was kind of an amateur archeologist. I, I read everything I could get on Southwestern archeology and I spent all kinds of time in those ruins.
00:28:37
Speaker
especially Bandelier, which was close to where I lived in Taos. And in Bandelier, there are these mesas that are made of this volcanic tooth that's very easy to dig caves into. So there's cliff dwellings. Used to have stone fronts, but now you're just left with the caves dug into the tooth. And they form really nice, beautiful little chambers. And I just discovered hanging out there that if you
00:29:07
Speaker
seeing a pitch if you start at the bottom and oh, you will find the frequency of that cave and the whole thing reverberates. Like almost enough to make dust fall, you know, from the ceiling. Wow. And I, and I wondered like people are living there for, I don't know, a couple hundred years, maybe they must have discovered that property, you know, if they didn't know about it already.
Origins of Music in Human History
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I mean, you can see it in just like modern examples when people get into a big canyon, you know, start yelling or things like that. Like we, we experiment with sound and we're cognizant of it and we enjoy yelling, usually obscenities or something like that and stuff like that. I mean, it's so striking when you're in there and you're singing, like if you're singing in there, you just have to hit the right pitch to activate that space. And it's,
00:30:03
Speaker
It's, it's amazing when it, when it happens. So I have a question for you that I've always kind of had as like a chicken or the egg scenario in my head, but obviously I like music. Do you think people began singing first or did like the invention of stone tools like lead people to percussion and like rhythm first? That's a great question. I don't think it can be answered. I mean, my just sure.
00:30:28
Speaker
off the cuff answer would be that singing probably came first because I think singing and speech are just intimately related. The reason we have music is because we have speech. I mean, they use the same kind of skills.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess animals also sing in a sense. So we probably were mimicking that. I just, I can't, I can't get this out of my head. Like, uh, you know how at the beginning of, uh, one of the, it's like, I think it's Tarzan where Phil Collins does all the music for it and they start like banging on stuff and it starts like beginning a song and coming into a song. That's all I can picture is like, uh, like a napping session where someone
00:31:12
Speaker
Yes, a bunch of Neanderthals wander onto a British tea set and begin to play the spoons. And with that, we'll be right back with episode 59 of Life Room's podcast. We'll be right back with Dr. Mason Brown.
00:31:24
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show. This is episode 59. Just kidding. This is the clowns from A Life in Ruins. And we are here with the very cool and very awesome Dr. Mason Brown. And in the break, we had talked about string instruments and bow technology and how they are kind of a, it's seemingly natural that you would use, you would get bow instruments when you have bow technology.
00:31:53
Speaker
And Mason pointed out to us that on Sesame Street in the 70s, Buffy St. Marie shows up and plays what looks like a small bow, a small arrow, or bow and arrow kind of thing, and makes this fantastic noise. And oh my gosh, it's... It's called a mouth bow. It's called a mouth bow. And it is catchy as hell. She's playing Cripple Creek on it.
00:32:20
Speaker
And I'll be damned if it ain't an instrument. If you want an idea for the size, it looks like a bow drill to make a fire. That's neat. Do you think it's possible that in prehistory we had had stuff like this? I think it's highly likely, and I imagine there's probably evidence for it out there somewhere that I don't know about, but I don't see how you could have archery bows and not have musical bows.
Cultural Contexts in Music
00:32:46
Speaker
And because one is, I mean, an archery bow is, can be a musical bow. You can play it just as a single string. You can change the length of the string to get different pitches out of it. A little one like Buffy St. Marie is using there is one end of it is inserted in the mouth and then the mouth becomes a resonating chamber for that string. And as she twang, twang, twangs on the string, she changes the shape of her mouth to change the pitch in the timbre.
00:33:17
Speaker
of the sound. That's cool. So kind of like a squawk box that Alice in Chains would use, but not. I guess it's the same kind of thing. I guess Peter Frampton uses it too.
00:33:28
Speaker
It's the same principle, shaping the sound with the cavity of the mouth. Like an elk call, because I'm a redneck, and that's everything I can relate to. As I've told Connor and David this, one of my great regrets in life is that I am musically illiterate. Music is just not my thing, never has been. I'm really bad at it. I got a D average in my guitar class. They put me in the bass section, so I only played one note.
00:33:56
Speaker
Usually on the E string, the entire recital. Sorry to hear that, man. Well, it's more than everybody. You knew you're a bad guitar player if you got put in bass. Me and the other three football idiots. You know an infinite amount about music. How many songs do you know just in your head?
00:34:16
Speaker
baby shark comes to mind. I mean, yeah, you we, this is socially constructed, right? Whether someone's a musician or not. In our society, yeah, you have to be a specialist. But in many societies, there is no such distinction. Or maybe some people are better at it and do it more, but everyone participates in music.
00:34:40
Speaker
in many societies. I guess like growing up around a lot of like Jewish people like at Temple and stuff you'd like sing to pray and stuff like that. I never knew what the words were but like I always was weirded out that everybody knew the words and could sing it because it's kind of just words you're singing. Yeah. And I imagine like a lot of tribal societies are like that as well. You're just singing words.
00:35:05
Speaker
And even if you're not performing the music, you understand it. And that's pretty universal. That's a human ability.
00:35:17
Speaker
And I think it's really interesting, at least in Western culture, that we kind of judge folks based on their understanding of music or understanding of scales, octaves, notes, and things like that. But I think it's super interesting to see folks that don't really
00:35:37
Speaker
maybe not understand the nuts and bolts of that stuff, but still be able to play music and express themselves in these, these super beautiful ways. And I think it's, it's kind of a shame that people, you know, that we kind of have the stigma that if you don't know, octaves and are classically trained, then that you're lesser of a musician. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not true. There are various music traditions around the world that have developed elaborate theories. The theory always comes after the practice, right? Yeah.
00:36:07
Speaker
But in most traditional cultures, or I don't know what the best word for them is, yeah, most people around the world who play music really don't have a well-articulated theory. Like the Tibetan people I work in with in Nepal, some of them are professional music teachers, so they do have music theory quite a bit of music theory.
00:36:33
Speaker
But then like people in the village who just, like I knew one guy who made his own drum yen, he just wanted one, so he made one. And then he learned to play the tunes that he knew on it without knowing any music theory. And that's more the typical way that vernacular music, so-called, passed on orally and orally, are
Fiddle Music and Cultural Influences
00:36:57
Speaker
done. You just learn it. Maybe you can't describe it in theoretical terms.
00:37:03
Speaker
I guess, speaking of learning music, I think we were going to talk about in this segment, your violin, learning what you're currently been working on. The fiddle. Yeah, so I've been playing Irish traditional music for quite a long time, but I played it on lots of other instruments, guitar, mandolin, even viola de gamba. But finally, about two and a half years ago, I started taking up the
00:37:31
Speaker
the violin and it's much harder than the other bowed instruments that I've played, which are played like a cello, Agamba. This is a much more ergonomic way to use a bow than this. In other words, when I hold the bow on the violin, it's very hard to tell whether it's perpendicular to the string or, I don't know, it's a totally different thing. So it's been quite a
00:38:02
Speaker
a hard journey. But I've also, and I've been thinking about this for a long time. So because I grew up in Southwest Michigan, which is a very, I guess, Appalachian part of Michigan. Like a lot of people came up there in the great migration to work in factories. So people around where I grew up in the rural area were mostly from Tennessee and Kentucky or their grandparents were.
00:38:31
Speaker
You know, we grew up with this idea that like bluegrass fiddle playing, well, that's just came over from our Scotch Irish ancestors, you know, fiddle music came from Ireland and it came over here and yeah, maybe it mixed with some other things here, but it's still basically the same. And it turns out, no, these traditions all kind of arose at the same time, which is basically in the late 18th and the 19th century when
00:38:59
Speaker
mass-produced violins became widely available. And ordinary people could have them. Before that, your typical farmer didn't just have a fiddle hanging on the wall. People who played fiddles, various types of fiddles, tended to be more professional, itinerant, maybe low-caste, gypsy people, for instance, Romany people. But when
00:39:28
Speaker
In the 19th century, there's this whole revolution of instrument manufacturing, and musical instruments become available to the masses. And especially in the middle class, you had to have a piano in your home. Your daughters had to learn piano. If you wanted to get your daughter married, piano was one of the things she had to learn. You had to buy sheet music for it.
00:39:57
Speaker
You know, the same thing happened with violins and all the other instruments. So, you know, even though, like, if you think of Irish music, there are melodies that go back hundreds of years before that. But the main melodies that we think of as the backbone of that tradition now, as this ethnomusicologist Alan Jabour put it, those are from the early 19th century, maybe the late 80s.
00:40:27
Speaker
And so that happened the same time in North America as it was happening in Scotland and Ireland. You know, and later these fiddle traditions arose all over the world in Greece, in Mexico, in India, as mass-produced violins spread everywhere, you know. So, you know, the point with that is that
00:40:52
Speaker
You know, when I was a kid and I heard bluegrass or old time, more accurately would be old time. Old time music is the fiddle music before bluegrass, right? Bluegrass is partly based on old time. It has a lot of tunes in common with Scottish and Irish traditions, but it has a lot that are very different and that are obviously American compositions and also don't even have the same style or rhythm. Very different style and rhythm.
00:41:22
Speaker
that's really very African. So the influence of African-American fiddle players on American fiddle music is now it's being recovered and studied and acknowledged. But for a long time, it was actually hidden and misrepresented. This music of a fiddle and banjo playing together, playing these what we now call Appalachian or old time tunes, was appropriated by whites from African-Americans
00:41:52
Speaker
in the middle of the 19th century through the minstrel shows, right? So minstrel shows were working class white musicians who were putting on an appropriation, kind of almost a parody of African-American music in blackface. So that spread this banjo and fiddle music all over the country. It was the most popular
00:42:20
Speaker
music in America, for whites and blacks. In fact, there were black minstrels cashing in on this phenomenon. Even they wore blackface. So it's just kind of a very fraught topic, but the result was
00:42:41
Speaker
For 100 years before that, no white person would have been caught dead playing banjo and fiddle together. That was strictly an African American thing. And then 100 years after that, everyone thinks it's totally white. And African Americans have moved on to create blues and jazz, which in turn were appropriated. It's like one thing after another, African Americans introduced to
00:43:10
Speaker
American music and then, or another interesting thing about the origins of American fiddle music, especially in the Upper South, I'm not talking about necessarily New England or other places, although it probably applies to some extent there too, is a Native American influence, which the ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Jabour theorized was, well, he thought there was evidence for that,
00:43:38
Speaker
influence in the fact that most, when you think of a fiddle tune, from Scotland or Ireland, it usually has two parts, which are often called strains. There will be an A part and a B part, and usually the A part is lower and the B part is higher. But in a high number of American fiddle tunes, it's the opposite. It has a descending contour.
00:44:05
Speaker
And if you guys have ever been to a powwow, you would have heard descending contours all day long because native American music favors descending contours in a lot of different styles and a lot of different places. In regards to like the chanting singing or to the flute? If you think of a powwow song, that's, that's a tune, right? It's sung with vocables, other words,
00:44:33
Speaker
words that are not necessarily lexical words, but just sounds. They can have other meanings and other associations. But it's basically like when you, if you sing an Irish dance tune, you'll sing it with lilting. That's vocables, right? And those powwow songs, you're singing a melody with vocables
00:45:02
Speaker
and it ends up lower than it started in pitch. So that's not unheard of in European music, but it's not very common. And why would it be so common in old time music just accidentally, or maybe was it because there's a lot of interchange and intermarriage between whites, blacks, and Native Americans in the Upper South?
00:45:28
Speaker
So this history of fiddle music and stuff is complicated and it's wild that it became this kind of sign or like this, I don't know how to describe it. It's a symbol of working class white folks today, but it has all these insane influences from different directions and things like that.
00:45:55
Speaker
And it is being reclaimed too by younger black musicians like Rhiannon Gibbons from the Carolinas. Oh yeah. She's fantastic. And a lot of younger black scholars who are writing about banjo and fiddle music and minstrelsy and stuff. So there's a lot of exciting stuff happening. If the stuff was being appropriated from, you know, African Americans from like, are you talking about like from the South or from the Appalachian areas? And like, where would they have gotten
00:46:25
Speaker
Like why were Irish instruments there to begin with? I guess, or were they African instruments as well? The fiddle, the violin, right? The fiddle is a colloquial word for a violin or any instrument played with a bow. It's actually a cognate, fiddle, veal, same word, right? The modern Italian violin that started to be manufactured in the late 18th century, that was the instrument that really quickly became
00:46:55
Speaker
replaced other older types of fiddles as the instrument for European dancing. And so in the plantation south, whenever the slaveholders had a party, they would need musicians to play fiddle for it, right? And those musicians were enslaved people, almost always.
00:47:17
Speaker
Did not know that. Sometimes they could have been indentured servants. They were white too, but definitely low class people, like upper class people didn't really do that. They, but, um, so I think, you know, the theory goes, they would have been required to play horn pipes and so forth. And, you know, enslaved people came from areas in Africa where there was well-established fiddle traditions.
00:47:45
Speaker
with various types of fiddles. And so they would have understood that instrument immediately. And they would have Africanized, they would have played the tunes that the dances that were required and played them in their own style, which is heavily imbued with polyrhythm. I did not know that.
00:48:05
Speaker
Like I knew rock and roll was definitely influenced by like Southern African-Americans, but I did not know like bluegrass was either. I mean, bluegrass is doubly influenced by it because right, it's, it's created by Bill Monroe and he's an old time musician, right? So he's already playing a tradition that has come to whites largely through minstrelsy, but also through just in Appalachia, just living in proximity.
Future of Ethnomusicology
00:48:33
Speaker
with African Americans too, so there's a lot of actual just interchange. But then Bill Monroe took that old time string band and he tried to make it like a swing band, like a jazz band. Every instrument would have its place. Every instrument would have its solo and it would solo on the chord changes, which that is not done in old time music at all. You just play the tune.
00:48:57
Speaker
we don't solo on chord changes, right? So that's, Bill Monroe took that straight from big band jazz, that improvisational part. So, right, he's dipped back into African American music again to create bluegrass.
00:49:14
Speaker
Wow. I mean, that's cool how these all things intertwine and mix. And it's got to be fun chasing and finding that through your research. And yeah, we wanted to thank you so much, Dr. Brown, for coming on to this podcast and talking with us. We really just had such a fantastic time talking about, I learned a ton. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on.
00:49:43
Speaker
Well, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed meeting you all. And like I said, I love your pod. Excellent. Thanks, man. We appreciate it. We'll be happy to have you on again because I have a million questions for you. Yeah, definitely. There's a part two in the future. And so before we end the show, Mason, what are a couple of sources that you would recommend for anyone interested in ethnomusicology or the topics that we talked about today? Well, I mean, you can just I mean, definitely the the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, which is just called Ethnomusicology.
00:50:14
Speaker
There's a European association, International Council for Traditional Music, that puts out a journal called The Yearbook for Traditional Music. SEM, the Society for Ethnomusicology, has a podcast called Ethnomusicology Today, where they interview individual scholars about their research. They don't necessarily do that that often, is the only thing I don't think about it, but there's definitely some back episodes there.
00:50:43
Speaker
Awesome. Gotcha. And there's also a journal of the International Council for Traditional Music that you told us about, the European Ethnomusicological Professional Organization, and a film by ethnomusicologist Anna Stuhr and filmmaker Bhakta Syangtan. Yes. Singing a Great Dream. That's a documentary film that Anna Stuhr and Bhakta Syangtan just recently came out with.
00:51:09
Speaker
called Singing a Great Dream, the Revolutionary Songs and Life of Kushidam Pakrin. And Kushidam Pakrin was a Nepali songwriter and was a Maoist in the Maoist Civil War that Nepal had between 1996 and 2006. And so he wrote songs and operas in support of the Maoist Revolution.
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:51:33
Speaker
And so it's a documentary using original footage of him and
00:51:39
Speaker
just telling his story. Okay. All right. Excellent. Yeah. And all these for our listeners and viewers, if you're watching the video version of this podcast on our archeology podcast, network.com or on our pod nets, a YouTube channel, all of the links to these sources will be in the description. Um, so we'll be able to click on those and check those out. Where can our listeners find you on social media or how can they contact you in any way? All right. In social media, I'm mainly just on Facebook. So it's just, okay.
00:52:08
Speaker
my name, Mason Brown. I also have a YouTube channel. I have an older YouTube channel that I had to abandon because I lost the ability to log into it. Oh no. And Google won't give it back. So yeah, I made a new one now just recently. Is it Mason Brown? Yeah.
00:52:28
Speaker
Excellent. And links for that also in the description. Yeah. And, uh, because we're nerds and because we like repeating things and having repeating segments in this, in the show, we got to ask you, so Dr. Brown, if given the chance again, would you still choose to find the right frequencies in ruins?
00:52:51
Speaker
Absolutely. Excellent. Excellent. All right. Well, we just interviewed Dr. Mason Brown. You can find him on Facebook and YouTube by Google his name, links in the description below. Guys, please be sure to rate and review the podcast. It's how we grow and it's how Apple recommends us and, you know, that whole thing. Just just do it. Thanks. And with that, we are out.
00:53:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. All right. I gotta do something music related. So on that note,
00:53:48
Speaker
Do you guys want to hear the joke about a staccato?
00:53:54
Speaker
sure sure never mind it's too short thank you all my flamenco teacher was telling me about guitar broke one time i forget what i asked but he's like you want to see a broke guitar and he just picked up his guitar and like flipped it how many times you told that joke all right
00:54:33
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.