By Aditya Prakash

A little background on Mehfil: Mehfil is a unique concert of Indian Classical Music and Dance featuring our very own talented student musicians at UCLA. This free concert will take place at Jan Popper Theater in Schoenberg on February 16th, 2010, from 6:30 PM to 8:30PM. In its fourth year, Mehfil has been put on annually by SAPA @ UCLA (South Asian Performing Arts).

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ADITYA PRAKASH performing at the 2009 Mehfil at the Freud Playhouse

The importance of Mehfil to UCLA students: Many students here at UCLA have learned an Indian Classical art form, but due to the academic stress from university life they do not have the time or motivation to keep in touch. With the opportunity this concert affords to perform the music they have studied, students are inspired to rekindle their interest in music and dance. Additionally, the concert gives students a chance to perform or showcase their talent. Other students who will be performing on Tuesday have been learning Indian Music through UCLA’s Ethnomusicology department.

The audition process: Since there are many students at UCLA who have training in Indian Classical Arts, auditions were held for the upcoming Mehfil event. The accepted participants were then required to compose a piece for the show. Some composed original pieces’ others created pieces inspired from an existing composition. What we found was that this process of creating music and dance not only brings out the creative spark in these artists, it allows them to use their musical minds in ways they may not be accustomed to.

What to expect at Mehfil: There will be many dancers collaborating with different styles of Classical Indian dance. One of the musical acts will be South Indian Classical vocal styles along with Flamenco and Turkish music played on the acoustic guitar along with tabla. This piece, along with many of the other acts, has been composed specifically for this concert.

What goes into producing Mehfil: The practice sessions to create these sort of pieces usually require hours of just experimenting and learning more about the other styles involved. Once a certain connection is made between the varying styles an attempt can be made to solidify the structure of the piece. If some musicians are lucky, they notice the points of similarity and contrast right away and can compose a piece very quickly. Otherwise, the process for composing a completely new piece in a short time is very demanding. This experience enriches the musician and dancer and gives them a sense of pride in their artistic ability.

Aditya Prakash is an organizer of this year’s Mehfil performance. When he’s not pursuing his studies at HASOM, he’s blogging at http://adityaprakashmusic.blogspot.com/

Monday, January 25th marked a milestone for the movie business. A mere six weeks after its debut, James Cameron’s sci-fi epic, Avatar, passed Titanic to become the biggest grossing film of all time.

And while many members of the film’s creative team—director James Cameron, actress Sigourney Weaver, film composer James Horner—are familiar names in the upper echelon of Hollywood’s elite, perhaps one of the unsung heroes of the film just may be Los Angeles ethnomusicologist Wanda Bryant.

On Saturday, January 25th, students from Tom Grasty’s UCLA “Internet Marketing & Publishing for Musicians” class sat down with Dr. Bryant to talk about her role on the film and what it was like to work side by side with James Horner, one of the industry’s most prolific and successful film composers.

By the time the interview concluded, it was evident that her knowledge and insight into myriad of cultural musical landscapes did more than simply help Horner shape the mesmerizing musical world of Avatar—they defined it.

So how did you get involved with Avatar? That’s probably the funniest story of the whole thing. In May of 2007, I decided it was time to clean out my junk e-mail folder. I started looking through just casually to make sure I wasn’t throwing anything important away. And one of the e-mails—I didn’t know this person—said ‘feature film consultation.’ And I thought, cynically, “Oh yeah right, they’re coming to me.”

But you opened the e-mail? Something piqued my curiosity. So, yes, I opened the e-mail, and I started reading. I didn’t recognize the sender’s name. But the e-mail said they were working on the new Jim Cameron film, and James Horner would like to work with an ethnomusicologist. Would I be interested? So I looked down at the bottom of the e-mail and I recognized the name of the production company—Lightstorm—so I thought, “This actually sounds legitimate.” And so I called the phone number, and within two minutes I was talking to Jon Landau, the producer of the film.

How long was that mail in your junk mail before you found it? Luckily not very long, maybe two days. Life lesson: Don’t just empty your junk e-mail folder without checking every single message.

So how does Hollywood find an ethnomusicologist, anyway? They found me through Cal Arts, where I teach the world music series. Cal Arts has a big world music presence. So they went to Cal Arts and said, “We want the ethnomusicologist who has the broadest background.” That was me. So Cal Arts gave them my e-mail address and it ended up in my junk e-mail folder.

And how long before you were actually working on the film? I think I read the email on a Tuesday. Friday I was in Santa Monica watching early footage of the film with James Horner.

And what was the first thing they showed you? A promo reel. It was really rudimentary at that point— just the motion capture images, and some of the early computer-generated images. But the one thing that really knocked me out was the little seeds that float down out of the trees. That was the first thing that was really true 3-D in the film that I saw. And it was like, “Wow, you can reach out and touch them like they were just going to land on your hand.” All of us were watching it in amazement, asking, “How did they do that?” It was obviously 3-D, but it was so much different than the 3-D we were used to seeing with spears and rocks coming at you out of the screen. This was just all encompassing. You just forgot that you were in a theatre.

Another thing that was all encompassing was the music. Talk a little bit about your contribution. Well, James Horner has an extensive background in world music. And after talking with him, I was actually very surprised that he wanted to consult with someone because he knew so much already. But they were looking for someone with a really broad knowledge of all different kinds of cultures.

A ‘broad-minded’ ethnomusicologist, so to speak? That’s right. Most ethnomusicologists tend to specialize in one small area— a genre of music or a specific geographical area. The producers didn’t want that. They wanted someone who could bring in really unusual sounds. James [Horner] told me he wanted “music that no one had ever heard before,” music that would not be easily recognized by the average movie-going audience. And in today’s world that’s difficult. We all know what a gamelan sounds like and we’ve all heard music from China. They were looking for a generalist with broad knowledge. I teach very specific seminars on geographical locations which has led me to delve more deeply into certain cultures, especially into minority musics, but I also teach a survey course, so I’ve got a really broad knowledge. Not to mention a very extensive CD collection. Ask me for unusual sounds and I can find them. In fact…

Bryant reaches into her bag and pulls out a CD.

I have few of those sounds right here. These are just a few of the examples that I took to him [Horner].

The first track on the CD begins. As Bryant speaks, she speaks over a series of tracks, forwarding them so that other tracks accentuate the music style she is referencing.

Some of the examples I brought in were from a woman named Susanne Rosenberg who does these beautiful Swedish cattle herding calls that are phenomenally gorgeous. I took in South African mining songs, girls’ greeting songs from Burundi, Bolivian aerophones, singing from Comoros Islands (between Madagascar and Mozambique), Värttinä, which is a Finnish female singing group, voices from the Naga culture in Northeast India.

So you have all these wonderful musical cues— how did the selection process work with James Horner? I would just play examples. I’d hit track one, and James would sit there with his eyes closed. After five or ten seconds he’d say, “No.” I’d go next track. “No…no….aww, I like that. I like that. What is that? Where’s that from? Save that one.”

James Horner’s been doing film music composition for a long time, not mention won a lot of awards in the process. How was he to work with? I got along beautifully with James. We’re very close in age; we have very similar kind of taste; and we have similar sense of humor. Let me tell you, long about 10:00 o’ clock at night, after you’ve been there since 8:00 am, if you don’t have a sense of humor, boy, you’re in big trouble. Yeah, some very long days but very eye opening.

And when did you involve the director, James Cameron? Through the process of elimination we came up with this CD I’m playing you, which contained 25 examples. We then gave the CD to James Cameron. He is one of those directors who really wants to be involved with the music. A lot of directors will just say, “Here’s the film, you go do it and come back to me when you’re done. But Cameron wants to be involved every step of the way. So we bounced ideas off him constantly.

And what was his selection process? From these 25 examples, he narrowed it down to six. He’d say things like, “That’s too weird, or that’s too recognizable, or no, that doesn’t fit.” Then based on those examples we started to talk about different song structures, ways of not using the exact recording, but using it as an inspiration to create something new.

More like something out of this world, really. Or from another world, right.

So how did you create those otherworldly sounds? We played around with different vocal timbers. So when I called singers in, I called them specifically for their vocal timbre and for their vocal agility. Because we were looking for some really unusual ornamentation, and the ability to sing microtonally, we wanted specific timbres, specific ranges, and things like that. James then blended them all.

Sort of like a global ‘mash up’? He didn’t want any one particular vocal timbre, because that tends to be a little bit more recognizable. Here’s an African singer— yeah obviously. Here’s a Chinese singer— heard that before. So when he hired the singers for the final sound track he had a chorus of people with African sounding voices; he had a chorus with very European sounding chorus; he had a very Asian sounding chorus. And then he blended them all together so there’s no one specific timbre that sounds like anything you hear normally.

But the voices came from somewhere. How’d you get them? For our demo recording sessions, I called the vocal coaches at Cal Arts, told them what I was looking for, and they recommended certain singers. Once in the recording studio, we played various recordings for them. Then I said, “Can you sing like that?” A couple of them turned pale, but we gave them about 10 minutes to work things out on their own. Then we said, “Ok, let’s hear what you got,” hit the Record button and they started doing all this interesting stuff.

And did that surprise you? That they were so improvisational? Not really. You know, a lot of studio musicians will come in and say, “Where’s my music? Where’s the notation?” So we went for kids who were really on the cutting edge and very open to unusual things like that. They loved playing around in the studio, they loved to improvise, and they were thrilled to be involved.

So are those the voices we hear in the film? No, those recordings were done very, very early in the process. What we recorded became the source of inspiration for Horner. Only a couple of pieces ended up in the film intact. Almost everything was manipulated in some fashion. Even the orchestra’s timbres were altered. And it’s not just James Horner [doing that] today. Most film composers today are playing around with their sounds.

Why do you think that is? A lot of it is because we’re at a point in history where there’s been so much that has been done. So many films have been scored; so many melodies have been written. James worries about this issue constantly. You run a real strong risk of plagiarizing, whether it’s someone else or your own stuff unthinkingly. So composers are now beginning to manipulate things because they know they can come up with an unusual, unique sound.

You spoke a moment ago about the integral role of bringing together seemingly disparate voices. Can you talk a little bit about the words? The words came from [USC professor] Paul Frommer and Jim Cameron. Paul Frommer’s the guy who created the language. So when we were singing words, we were singing Na’vi words. We were singing in that language. It’s really hard to sing because it has glottal stops and ejectives and really unusual ways of making sounds. So Paul actually taught the language to the singers. And Jim Cameron wrote the words. He wrote a poem for song lyrics and Paul translated them to Na’vi, then we sang them.

Wait a minute, back up—us? [laughs] I sang on a couple of little places, but luckily my voice was well-hidden behind the “real” singers!

If we can return to James Cameron’s involvement for a moment. Were you familiar with, or were you introduced to any philosophy Cameron may have incorporated into the story? For Cameron, it’s really an expression of trying to be in touch with the environment. That’s his whole thing. He doesn’t really have a political message in there that was intentional. It grew out of his respect for the environment. That was his philosophy, that we should all be that connected with the environment— and to show how greed can totally destroy something that is beautifully balanced.

You talked about how technology is such an integral force in creating the music we hear today. However, the Na’vi society is very primitive. How did you reconcile that? That’s a great question. We always wanted to keep the people grounded in their world, so what that meant is we had to understand the way they live. [With regard to the Na’vi] we thought about aboriginal cultures here on earth.

How do primitive societies create music? Well, to begin with there’s no metal working capabilities for most of them. So their gear, tools and weapons are constructed from natural elements in the environment. That means there aren’t going to be very complex instruments, nothing that would require metal or a long period of time to create. Vocal music is central to most aboriginal cultures, and so it is with the Na’vi.

So is that why you spent so much time developing a Na’vi vocal tradition? That’s correct. And my task was really researching vocal qualities and different kinds of song structures that would work with this kind of culture and would work in their environment.

Like vocal calls? Vocal calls are good because they carry a long distance in the forest. People can be a long distance apart and still hear each other. So that rooted the musical structure in the way this culture and the environment of Pandora works.

There are, however, some very distinctive instruments. The drums are particularly memorable. Drums are often one of the first instruments to come about in a culture. You can make them out of trees or almost anything you have. Drums work perfectly for the Na’vi because the language that Paul Frommer created has these really cool ejectives and glottal stops that translate perfectly into drumwork.

But the drums served another purpose, too, didn’t they? Ah, the drum signals, based on African talking drums. Such a neat concept. So I sketched out all these drum patterns and rhythms based on Na’vi words to be used as warning rhythms. This was one of the concepts that did not make it into the film, but was fleshed out for the book James Cameron’s Avatar, a tangential project on which I worked directly with writers Dirk Mathison and Maria Wilhelm, and Jim Cameron.

How did you go about creating the ‘Na’vi music’? Did it just happen? Was it something that you had planned before the fact? James and I definitely discussed song structures and modal possibilities. Do you know the concept of “music of the spheres” [from Pythagoras and Plato, concerning theoretical sounds created by the movements of bodies in the universe]? We transposed this to the moon of Pandora and the all-encompassing force that is Eywa, the Na’vi divine spirit. We recorded men singing this moving, oozing, flowing microtonal drone, representing Eywa’s spirit. Then over the top of that, the women have these beautiful, really high soprano cascading vocal lines that are sung in heterophony.

It sounds like so many of your initial ideas made it into the film. What there anything that didn’t make in? Actually, the majority of our work did not appear intact, but the essence of those sounds were utilized to create the lovely colors of Pandora. Partly because the film was initially very long, many scenes of Na’vi life (including music) had to be cut. The Na’vi culture emphasizes visual arts over music, especially woven things. Weaving is really big in their culture, [as well as] an important artistic expression for them. The Na’vi have big looms, which are tree size and that 5-7 people work on at time. We did record a weaving song, specifically at the request of Jim Cameron, but unfortunately, it got cut too. I knew when we were in trouble when I heard the movie was over 3 hours long. You can’t have a film that’s 3 hours long. It’s not commercially viable. And there were parts that, while crucial to the culture of the Na’vi, were not crucial to the plot of the film.

What kind of drums were used? There were numerous drawings and ideas for drums. And there was this one really cool one modeled after Taiko drumming. It’s a spherical set of drums that literally is in a ring, and each of the drums represents one of the planets in Pandora’s solar system. They’re all different sizes and are in the exact position in relation to the others. The drums are suspended high in the air from the trees, and there’s a guy who hangs in the middle and swings around and plays all these drums. Another set of drums was constructed with gigantic drum heads attached to the sides of trees, several feet in the air. The Na’vi swing back and forth on trapezes or swings between the trees and use the trapeze itself as the drum stick: “boom” on this side and “boom” on that side.

Speaking of ‘working,’ how does someone get a job as a music consultant on a feature film? Is there any training for that sort of job? Did you train for it? There was no relationship whatsoever to my dissertation, [except] that it taught me to do very thorough research and look in every corner. Don’t overlook something because you think it’s only tangentially related. If you think it has even a shred to do with what you are looking at, go look at it. It might take you to a whole different world.

Like the world of Avatar, perhaps? Exactly.

It sounds like a fantastic experience. Just the opportunity to get to work for those people, to get to go inside the film world, was such a delight! I’ve taught about music and film for so long, but this was the real thing.

Sounds as if jobs like this don’t come along that often for an ethnomusicologist? No question, composers probably have more of an opportunity.

Why do you think that is? Because composers can create something that reflects a particular culture. A composer can say, “Ok, we’re dealing with Native American tradition. I understand Native American tradition. I know the musical elements that make up their music. I can write something that replicates that sound.” As far as someone like me going out and saying, “Ok, I have an ethnomusicology degree. I am going be a film music consultant”—no, that’s not going to happen. The reality is that there really isn’t a job description for a film music consultant. It’s not one of those things that come along regularly enough that you can focus on it as being a career goal. It’s one of those things that if you are in the right place at the right time, it’s great. But don’t focus your curriculum on becoming a film music consultant.

But if you can do it, I guess there’s nothing like starting at the top, right? I’m still in shock to think that my name will forever be linked with probably what will be the biggest movie of all time. How bizarre is that? Pretty astonishing that a girl from Iowa who moved to California to study Peter, Paul and Mary, ended up on Pandora.

Any final thoughts? I guess if I had to sum up my role, I’d say I’m the muse. Because I’m not a composer, it was my job to bring the ideas. And what’s really gratifying now is when I listen to the soundtrack, I can say “A-ha! That’s where it came from!” I know where that sound originated, where the idea for that sound came from.

And now, so do we. Thank you for your time, Dr. Bryant.

Wanda Bryant earned her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA in 1995. Her dissertation, Virtual Music Communities, was the first in the field of ethnomusicology to utilize the internet as a research site. Her areas of interest include the music of China, Indonesia, and the Balkans; organology; and popular music culture. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Music Education from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and has taught at all grade levels, from kindergarten to graduate seminars. She currently teaches the World Music series at CalArts and is an adjunct assistant professor in the Performing and Communication Arts Department at Pasadena City College. She is a contributor to James Cameron’s Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, which is available at Amazon.com.

The students of “Ethnomusicology 188: Internet marketing & Publishing for Musicians” are: Joseph Buchanan, Ryan Guffey, Mia Kagaya, Ji-Won Kim, Lauren Michelle, Aditya Prakash, Parviz Rahmanpanah, Dan Shimizu and Carlos Toro.

This interview was conducted by: Joseph Buchanan, Mia Kagaya, Lauren Michelle and Parviz Rahmanpanah. Edited by Tom Grasty.

Last November Music Professor David Lefkowitz’s composition “Lincoln Echoes” premiered here with the UCLA Philharmonia and we have received the following articles and links reviewing the concert.

You can check the article at the KPCC (Southern California Public Radio) website, at: http://www.scpr.org/news/2009/11/25/lincoln-echoes/

And you can also hear an audio clip of the article at The California Report, at: http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R200912181630/c

Bess Lomax Hawes, a musician, folklorist and prominent anthropologist at CalState Northridge passed away in November 2009. She was 88.

Steeped in folk music from birth, she was the youngest child of John A. Lomax and Bess Bauman Brown. Born Jan. 21, 1921, in Austin, Texas, she was home-schooled by her mother, who also taught her to play piano. Her father and her brother, Alan Lomax, collected seminal field recordings of traditional songs that had been sung by cowboys, prisoners and slaves. After her mother died in 1931, the family moved to Washington, D.C., and Hawes assisted her father’s pioneering research compiling the folk song archive at the Library of Congress.

In 1952 Bess and her husband, an artist, moved to California and settled with their children in Topanga Canyon, immersing themselves in the bohemian community anchored by actor Will Geer. Besides performing in coffeehouses and at music festivals, Hawes taught guitar, banjo, mandolin and folk singing through UCLA Extension courses, at the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program and, starting in 1963, at San Fernando Valley State College. Bess taught at Idyllwild Arts from 1958 through the mid 1960s.

From Professor Juliana Gondek:

Baritone Doug Carpenter, a UCLA 2009 MM graduate in Voice Performance, is starring as Lancelot in the musical “Camelot” at the famed Pasadena Playhouse in January. Please see the flyer below:

Joseph Trapanese, a recent Music Department composition graduate–has been busier than usual lately in his film composition career. He sends us this info:

“I composed and produced the music for this web series which will soon be available on DVD as a feature film. Also proud to announce Sony has released my soundtrack on iTunes! Thanks to creators Jesse Warren and Mark Gantt for this great opportunity, I am thankful to have had the support of dozens of tremendous people on this project. The AP story about the project is at:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9385961

The trailer is available at Sony’s Crackle web site-
http://crackle.com/c/The_Bannen_Way

Listen (iTunes)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-bannen-way-soundtrack/id348430676

Behind the Scenes (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ8Qw95KPb4&feature=player_embedded

A REQUEST…. I’m up for a big award for this web series, but need your help!
The Streamy Awards are respected by the industry as the web’s equivalent to the Emmy Awards. Nominations are based primarily on popularity, and if you enjoy the music, please do vote! Here is all the info you need-

1. Click here- http://www.streamys.org/submit/public-submissions-people/
2. MAKE SURE TO SELECT “Best Original Music” in the drop down menu (the very bottom option of course!)
3. Enter-
Joseph Trapanese
The Bannen Way
http://www.crackle.com/c/The_Bannen_Way

That’s it! You will have helped tremendously- thank you!

——–
Other projects:

Ensemble Green concert this Saturday evening (1/9/10) at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music features “Three Pieces for Sextet”
I wrote this piece in 2004 for eighth blackbird and Yale’s Contemporary Music Workshop. I am honored it will be featured on Ensemble Green’s inaugural concert of 2010!
http://www.ensemblegreen.com/performances.php
http://www.pasadenaconservatory.org/

——–
And a few more from 2009….

-Orchestrated the season finale of Showtime’s DEXTER, the most-watched series episode ever for the network! (and 54% higher than last season’s finale, which I also worked on as orchestrator and… onscreen as the wedding trombone player!)

Dan Licht’s music for the series has become one of the most iconic and influential aspects of this popular series, and I have been proud to be a part of the music team since the third season! Other than the moving music for the shocking ending, Dan also created a new arrangement of the Blood Theme which I had been looking forward to working on ever since joining the music department of the show!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/percyjacksontheolympianslightningthief/

-I’m honored to have contributed orchestrations to Lisbeth Scott’s new album HOPE IS A THING-
“Waiting Room” and “Hallelujah” (though the whole album is fantastic!)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hope-is-a-thing/id335259844

-Was given the tremendous opportunity to orchestrate composer Mateo Messina’s Twelfth (!) Symphony, SYMPHONY OF THE SUPERHERO. Mateo raised over a hundred thousand dollars for the Seattle Children’s Hospital through it’s premiere this past November in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall! Later that month had the pleasure of traveling to Europe to conduct excerpts of the symphony with the Slovak National Symphony in a recording for Sony’s Extreme Music Library.
Video excerpt of session-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTe7RVq6bGk

-Took part in the 2009 ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop with Richard Bellis. Thanks to Mike, Jenn, Richard, and all of ASCAP for changing my life! What an incredible experience.
mp3 from session here-
http://www.joecomposer.com/ASCAP_FSW/ASCAP-FSW2009_Trapanese_StationChase.mp3

-In addition to writing music for many wonderful independent and student films, I composed the music for the independent documentary BEYOND LIMITS narrated by Michael Clarke Duncan. It is an inspiring story about a man with cerebral palsy who climbs Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise money for a new center for children with disabilities.
http://www.beyond-limits.com/

——–
And finally (timpani roll please…) —- a brand spankin’ new website!

http://www.joecomposer.com
“

Timothy Rice is ethnomusicology professor and director of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Professor Rice is founding co-editor of the 10-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and author of Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004), and May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (University of Chicago Press, 1994), which Wesleyan University professor Mark Slobin called “unparalleled in the literature in English on folk/post-folk systems of Europe.” Professor Rice, who took his first research trip to the Balkans in 1969, was honored by Bulgaria’s president in 2008 with a national medal (the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, second degree) for his “significant contributions to the scientific study of Bulgarian folklore and his popularization of Bulgarian culture in the United States of America.” Professor Rice spoke with students who were taking a Fall 2009 music-journalism course (Ethnomusicology 188, Lecture 3) at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Professor Rice talked about the athleticism of Bulgarian dance, the coincidences that led him to ethnomusicology, how the field has progressed in 50 years, music cognition, and (among other subjects) his love of Lil’ Mama’s song, “Lip gloss.” The interviewers were Joseph Buchanan, Christopher Robinson, Ji-Won Kim, and Jennifer Li.

Jennifer Li: You were an athlete in college, which got you interested in Bulgarian dance, which led to your passion for Bulgarian music. Can you talk about that?

Professor Rice: As a younger boy, I was a baseball player. Then in high school and college, I ran track – I was a sprinter. And one of the things I think is true is that I was attracted to the athleticism of these Balkan folk dances. They were in very fast tempo, so you had to move your legs quickly. And then some of them were somewhat athletic, with squats you would do. You’ve seen those Russian folk dances where they squat and kick their legs out and all that sort of stuff? They were dances like that. So it seemed to me like a transposition of whatever modest athleticism I had into the domain of dancing. Then, of course, dancing is a kind of musical art on some level, and I was a musician as well. Dancing was something I hadn’t really done much of or expertly until I got into college, and then I found this particular type of Balkan folk dancing, which seemed on some level to combine my previous experience as a musician and an athlete.

Jennifer Li: As an undergraduate, you majored in history at Yale. Did you discover your interest in Balkan music in the beginning or your later years there?

Professor Rice: It was in my junior and senior years. I had not thought I’d go into music as a profession, although I played music in high school and so on. All throughout my college career, I played music and I sang – I was a singer, and sang in various, semi-professional groups. From early in high school, I wanted to get a Ph.D. in something. And I didn’t know you could get a Ph.D. in music. I thought you could just be a player of music. That’s all I knew – that you could just be a musician. And I didn’t think that I probably was good enough to have a major career in music. I thought that – like my own teachers – I would end up teaching little children. And maybe playing casuals on the weekends. And I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in something – I just didn’t know what it was.

So it was a coincidence that I discovered – about one month before graduating from university – that there was this discipline called Ethnomusicology, where you could study the sort of thing that I was crazy about in college, which was Balkan dancing and Balkan music. Early in my college career, I majored in biochemistry. And the people at Yale university think that I graduate in biochemistry, so I still get newsletters from them – with little profiles of all the graduates, and they’re all the heads of medicine and pathology at these famous hospitals, and I thought I should send them a note saying, “Well, I’m director of the School of Music at UCLA.” (Class laughs.) I ended up majoring in history, partly because the biochemistry was going to be too demanding, and I had too much music to be playing in those years.

Christopher Robinson: Can you talk more about this coincidence that you stumbled upon ethnomusicology – and the circumstances surrounding that?

Professor Rice: Well, I was doing this Balkan folk dancing, which was this “town gown” organization at Yale – that is they were students, and people from the town. And one of the people who was folk-dancing with me had been going up to Wesleyan University, to study Mridangam, the south Indian drum, and he said, “Oh, Tim – you should go up to Wesleyan University and come to one of our South Indian evenings. We have pot-luck suppers, and we listen to South Indian music. I was just trying to get a degree at that point (laughs) – just trying to finish my studies, and I was terribly busy. And I said, “Well, I’m not interested in South Indian music.” I later became interested in South Indian music. But I never went up to Wesleyan, which had one of seven Ph.D. programs in Ethnomusicology at the time, unknown to me.

Then, some months later, he said, “Well, Tim – next year, they’re going to have a Greek man come and teach Greek clarinet and teach people to speak Greek, and take them to Greece for a field trip.” And I play clarinet, and I’d begun to play Balkan music on the clarinet, based on listening to the records that we were dancing to. And I said, “Now that’s interesting.” So one month before I graduated from university, I drove up to Wesleyan and met some of the faculty there, and they showed me this room somewhat like our Gamelan Room upstairs. I remember being dazzled by this Javanese gamelan, and then there was a whole, big stack of Ewe drums from Ghana, and I said – with my mouth hanging open – “What is this?” And they said, “This is ethnomusicology.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know what that is, but that’s what I want to do.” (Class laughs.) “Sign me up.” And they accepted me on the spot, to be a graduate student there.

Those were the good old days (class laughs) when you could just walk into a place and they’d accept you. It was the ‘60s, too, which helped. But they couldn’t give me a scholarship, and it was a private university, so it was way too expensive. And I went back to Seattle, where I’d gone to high school. I’d always intended to work for a couple of years after college. I was a bit burned out with academic work. And I did. And then it turned out that one of the seven graduate programs in ethnomusicology at the time was at the University of Washington in Seattle. So I went over there, eventually, and talked to the head of the program there, and he accepted me on the spot. The degree was an M.A. and Ph.D. in music, but ethnomusicology was one of the specialties.

I don’t know if I told this story, but I discovered folk dancing just by seeing a sign on a wall at Yale that said, “International Folk Dancing – No Partners Necessary. Sunday night on campus.” And I thought, “Well, I don’t have a partner. And maybe dancing would be fun.” So I went over there, and the rest for me is history. It’s just this astonishing set of coincidences in my life – I feel like whatever success I’ve had in my life has been largely due to accidents of various kinds. Happy accidents for the most part.

Joseph Buchanan: From being a history major, was there anything about the Balkan culture at that time – before you started dancing – that interested you?

Professor Rice: No. I had no interest in Eastern Europe, and no special interest in world cultures. It totally developed through my encounter through European dance culture, as it were. They called it “International Folk Dancing,” but it was primarily European – line dances from southern Europe, some couple dances from northern Europe, and some Israeli line dances. I didn’t know anything. Seeing this “International Folk Dancing – No Partners Necessary” – that was the big part of the attraction. “No partners necessary.”

Then I discovered that the reason was that – in our culture, when you think of dancing, you think of having to invite a girl, then you go to the dance. And Yale at the time was an all-boys school. There were no girls to go with. And then of course they were doing these line dances, so people just get up in the line, and you hold hands or sometimes you put hands on people’s shoulders next to you. There’s no order – it can be boy-boy, boy-girl, girl-girl. You don’t have to ask anyone to dance with you. And that turned out to be what the doctor ordered.

Ji-Won Kim: You mentioned you played music on the clarinet. Did you play by ear?

Professor Rice: The first struggle with the dancing was to learn the steps. And the steps were quite complicated. They were not only athletic and fast, they were a lot of variations. For example, a dance might start out with a somewhat simple pattern, and then the dance would have a whole set of variations in effect, from a musical point of view. You had to memorize all these variations. So it was a fairly steep learning curve with these dances. You have to remember that, “OK, after eight measures, I have to switch my feet and do something else – then eight more measures later, I have to do something else,” and so on.

After a year, I kind of got that and began listening to the music – I was just trying to get the beat, and get my feet and body going. And as I began to listen, I realized that probably half or more of the records featured a clarinet lead. And I played clarinet. So then I asked people in the group, “Does anyone here play a musical instrument – maybe we could form a little band to play this music?” And it turned out that there were two guitar players and two accordion players of all things. And accordion is also a prominent instrument in this kind of music. So we got together, and we took the music off the records. We transcribed it, in effect.

Ji-Won Kim: Can you talk about the scholarly work you did on Balkan music, and about your transcription work?

Professor Rice: I started in 1968. It turned out that the word “ethnomusicology” was invented and published for the first time in 1950, so the discipline was only 18 years old – I was older than the discipline when I started in it. (Class laughs.) It was exciting. We were kind of inventing ethnomusicology. And of course UCLA was very important in that invention. And my teacher (at Washington) got his M.A. and Ph.D. degree here at UCLA. I feel like I’m a grandson of UCLA in that way. But in those days, pretty much one of the big intellectual problems in the discipline was how to collect and gather and transcribe into notation traditional music. And of course there are enormous problems with that, because Western notation was not invented to transcribe world music – it was invented to help composers get their work out there, so we say in ethnomusicology that Western notation is prescriptive. It tries to prescribe what musicians should do. Whereas when you try to apply it to a world music, you transform it into a descriptive means, and it doesn’t work very well.

First, it wasn’t designed to be descriptive. And second of all, it wasn’t designed to handle all the subtleties of world music – like rhythmic things, like non-metrical music. Western notation really depends on the idea of measured music; having a beat in it. And Bulgarian music – half of it is non-metrical – so it’s ridiculous. And then if you get into things like a Middle Eastern tradition, with microtones and things like that, Western notation is built on a 12-tone equal-timbered system. Even if it’s not microtonal, Western notation doesn’t do a very good job of handling just non-tempered scales. For example, how do you represent that, as a Western listener, a note is just a little bit flat – that a third-degree of a scale seems a little bit flat. They don’t have a theory of it, and you don’t know what you’re hearing exactly – so what do you do? We did things like have a little arrow over the note that would point down on the note. So there’s a lot of transcription.

My master’s thesis and my Ph.D. dissertation were based on huge amounts of transcription. Nowadays in ethnomusicology, we don’t do that so much. We’ll consider anthropological questions about the meaning of the music, the symbolic value of music, the relationship between music and culture – these have come to dominate the intellectual landscape. So, we do some transcription to this day, but not so much.

Joseph Buchanan: Where do you see the field of ethnomusicology going from here? And how else has ethnomusicology progressed since the 1950s?

Professor Rice: Let’s start with the progress idea. Ethnomusicology in its beginnings had a fundamental split between what are called musicological approaches and anthropological approaches to music. I was raised – and UCLA represented – the musicological approach, where we collected the music, we wrote it down, we analyzed the music, we described its structures, and so on. There was another group of people who came out of the departments of anthropology – the most famous of whom was a man named Alan Merriam; also a man named John Blacking in England – and they were interested in asking questions about the meaning of music, how it was supported in terms of the politics and economics and social structures and all of that kind of thing.

The first big progress had happened by 1978 – so, maybe 10 years after I entered the field – and basically, these two approaches merged. I wrote in one of my articles that ethnomusicology came of age in around 1978.

Christopher Robinson: Was there some sort of catalyst for this?

Professor Rice: No, I don’t think so. It was a gradual thing – people thinking, “How are we going to bring these things together.” We realized that we were born of two parents, as it were. And the idea was, “How do we create a unique field – the union of the two approaches.” And people were working on the problem. And in the late ‘70s, we more or less figured it out. From the late ‘70s on, even people who were going to schools in ethnomusicology were asking and answering anthropological questions about the music. And what’s happened over the last 30 years is that there’s been a kind of efflorescence I would say of the kinds of themes and issues that we talk about. So Alan Merriam in 1964 laid out about 12 of these themes, and today, if you look at the web site of the Society for Ethnomusicology, I think there are 92 themes or issues that ethnomusicologists study, and these are things like, “How is music taught and learned? What’s the relationship between music and politics? How does music reinforce or challenge cultural notions, say, of gender, behavior and identity?” And on and on. So there’s been this efflorescence of questions about the field.

What’s going on currently? I think the most interesting thing is that these issues continue to arise. So I’ll give you two new issues and themes that are quite exciting. One is studying music in situations of war and violence. This has not typically been the case in the past. And the other general question – which is not unrelated – is the study of music in relation to things like medical pandemics such as the HIV/AIDS crisis around the world and so on. What’s the use of music in those kinds of crises?

In the past, music probably flourishes in places where there’s some stability, and music can be supported by a stable society of some kind, whether it be a government or local village or whatever it is. It’s hard to imagine music being made in very, very unstable conditions. But the world has become less stable in the last 40 years, than it was in 1968, and I think finally people are going into conditions of instability, war and violence and trying to look at what’s going on. Because we do know that song and music continues to be performed in those kinds of situations. And it becomes terribly important in those situations. So, finally, I would say that ethnomusicologists just in the past five years or so – maybe 10 to be generous – have strarted to study music in these problem areas, whether wracked by disease and other problmes or war and violence.

Where the field is going to go, I don’t know. My own hope – what I find lacking in the field, and I’ve been writing about this lately – is what I could simply call a comparative perspective. So, if you go back 100 years, let’s say, to the late 19th and early 20th century, the people then were called comparative musicologists. And they wanted to ask big questions about the nature of music. They wanted to know how it evolved. They assumed it evolved as a cultural phenomenon over time, from a primitive to the complex, for example. They wanted to try to explain why it was you could find a certain style of singing in Bulgaria and also Ethiopia and also in the Solomon islands. What did that mean? How could such a particular way of music turn up in three such different places?

In the ’50s and ‘60s, they basically said, “We don’t know enough to answer these questions. Many of the reports we have from these different places were sent to us by missionaries, by diplomats – the reports are flawed. We can’t really ask and answer these broadscale questions, so let’s just study in detail particular societies, and figure out how music works in those particular societies.” And we’ve been doing that for 40 years. My own view is that we need to return to comparison, now that we’ve had 40 years of professional study of individual cultures all over the world.

Surely, we have enough data to be able to begin to re-ask these big questions. Maybe not the same big questions that the comparative musicologists were answering, but if we want to say, “OK, what does music contribute to the construction of one’s sense of one’s self – one’s sense of one’s personal identity?” What does music contribute to that? And let’s look across the world now. We have many studies of this. And we generalize in some sense about how music works in that kind of way. What I find lacking in the field is an attempt to answer those kinds of questions. In the next 25 years, I’d like to see us asking those questions. In fact, in an upcoming issue of the journal Ethnomusicology, which is one of three principal journals in our field, I issue a call to do just that.

Ji-Won Kim: What music do you listen to casually – say on the way back home from UCLA?

Professor Rice: I only listen to Balkan music. (Class laughs.) I probably listen, broadly speaking, to three different kinds of music on my way home from school. One is Western classical music. I listen to what could be called alternative rock on KCRW. Some kind of pop-rock kind of stuff, which I enjoy keeping up with. And then I listen to various kinds of world music, like Latin music, Afro-pop music, Hawaiian music, things like that. And a kind of fourth category would be – from time to time, although not regularly – I listen to adult contemporary, the contemporary version of soul music. And sometimes some hip-hop – again, to keep up with what’s going on. Every once in a while, I try to listen through Rolling Stone’s top 50 records of the previous year, and see if there’s anything interesting. Usually there isn’t. (Class laughs.) My favorite a couple of years ago – it would have been 2007 or 2008 – was a song by Lil Mama, “Lip Gloss.” It’s a guilty pleasure. I just love that song. It was set in some kind of school environment. I basically liked the rhythm of it. They synthesize the sound of lockers slamming.

Christopher Robinson: I saw that you’ve studied and written about “music cognition.” How is that studied? What is your impact and interest in that field?

Professor Rice: If you ask someone like professor Roger Kendall of our department, his field is psychoacoustics. So he does what he’d call empirical scientific studies of how people perceive music. He’d give them little tests – “Here’s Music Sample A and Music Sample B, and what’s the difference between the two?” He does serious scientific work on music cognition.

My work flows from an ethnomusicological perspective. The first anthropological theory that had a big impact on people trained in musicology was something called cognitive anthropology. And cognitive anthropologists believe that culture is in the mind, and that the way to get into a person’s mind anthropologically was not to do these tests out in the field – like a psychologist would – but to talk to people, and elicit from them their terminology. How do they divide up the world? What do they think about the world? One of the things that anthropologists do is they do censuses when they go into a village. In the old days, they’d go from house to house and say, “Who lives in this house?” And people would say, “I do, and my mother does,” and so on. And they had this classification systems involving, say, a residence pattern in a culture. So, in our culture, we have what’s known as “neo-local” residents. When we get married, the new couple usually goes off and lives by itself in a new place – hence, “neo-local.” In many cultures, when the bride and groom get married, they go and live with the bridegroom’s father – that would be called “patri-local residence.” In some cultures, they go and live with the mother of the bride, and that would be called “matri-local residences.” So anthropologists care about stuff like that. It’s an objective, outsider, scientific approach. And the cognitive anthropologists said, “Well, why don’t we go ask the people what the rules are.”

This seemed like a new deal for anthropologists. So a guy went and studies that. And he discovered that the first rule is you go and live with the parents of the bride – so it’s “matri-local” in those terms. But only 30 percent live “matri-locally.” And what was that all about? Well, it was about economics. Could the parents of the bride afford to have them live there. And if they couldn’t live there, where could they live, etc. And that resulted in the result they got statistically.

For musicologists, taking that on board, when we go into many cultures of the world, they don’t have a theory of music. We have to impose our theory of music on them, and our categories on them as Western listeners. Now in some cultures, they have a local theory. In China, for example, there’s a local theory, because they have literacy and a long written tradition and they have notation. In India, there’s a 2,000-year history of theorizing about music. So we can learn from these native theories. But in most oral cultures, they don’t have music theories. So cognitive ethnomusicology, as it were, became about going out and eliciting the musical terminology and the musical theory of each local culture. So that was my kind of contribution.

I did in the case of Bulgaria. I went out there and asked people questions about their musical categories. One of my discoveries, for example, was in one region of Bulgaria – I wrote my doctoral thesis on this – they sing in what they called two-voice singing. So, two parts, but very close harmonies. Singing in seconds, almost continuously. It was very hard to hear that. And it’s hard to hear whether the first voice is going below the second or above, and precisely what’s going on. I ended up in one village, and these grandmothers were sitting there, and they said, “Young man, what kind of music are you interested in? What do you want us to sing for you?” And I said, “Well, I’m interested in your two-voiced singing.” And they said to me, “Well, here, we have three-voiced singing.” And that was the first time anyone had ever noticed that, just because I asked the question.

That was my mode. I was trying to elicit from them. I said, “Oh, three-voiced singing. Well, what do you call the voices?” And they told me. They said, “One voice cries out.” That turned out to be the melody voice. “One voice bellows straight.” Which meant they sang a kind of drone tone. “And one voice bellows crookedly.” Which kind of went up and down, and alternated between two notes. And in the literature, the voice that was bellowing straight had never been described. Because it didn’t need to be described – it was covered by the other two voices. One of the other two voices was always singing the drone tone. They were just so close together.

Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje is professor and chair of the Ethnomusicology Department at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Professor DjeDje is author of the 2008 book, Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures, which won the Alan Merriam Prize. The award, given by the Society for Ethnomusicology to “the most distinguished, published English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology,” was announced in November of 2009 – the latest honor for professor DjeDje, who has been on the UCLA faculty since 1979. The recipient of two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, professor DjeDje is also the author of Distribution of the One String Fiddle in West Africa, American Black Spiritual and Gospel Songs from Southeast Georgia: A Comparative Study, and Black Religious Music from Southeast Georgia (a recording with accompanying booklet). Professor DjeDje, who received her doctorate and master’s degree from the school’s Ethnomusicology Department, has conducted research throughout West Africa and the United States. She spoke with students who were taking a Fall 2009 music-journalism course (Ethnomusicology 188, Lecture 3) at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Professor DjeDje talked about the future of ethnomusicology, her past research, how her ‘60s activism helped propel her scholarly career, and other subjects. The interviewers were Joseph Buchanan, Christopher Robinson, Ji-Won Kim, Jennifer Li, and Jeehai Song.

Ji-Won Kim: Can you describe when you first discovered ethnomusicology – when you realized that this was something interesting?

Professor DjeDje: I suppose everyone has this epiphany for ethnomusicology, because we don’t grow up in our lives saying we’re going to become an ethnomusicologist. We may talk about becoming a doctor and lawyer and maybe even a journalist, because these professions are around us, but who wakes up in the morning and says, “I’m going to be an ethnomusicologist”? Even in high school, you don’t say that you’re going to be an ethnomusicologist. So it’s later in life. In my case, it was when I was a junior at Fisk University – a historically black school in Nashville, Tennessee. Even though Fisk was founded in 1866, as an only-black school, throughout its history, there was very little about African or African-American culture that was a part of the music curriculum. It was really a Western curriculum, like most schools. Even still today, at historically black schools, if you go to a Fisk for a Morehouse, it’s not very different from coming to UCLA in terms of what you study. So, when I was at Fisk, this was the time of the civil rights period. I’m a child of the ‘60s. I entered Fisk because it was supposed to be an excellent school for piano concert music – and I wanted to become a concert pianist.

Have you heard of Stokely Carmichael? He was the leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). He came to Fisk my freshman year, and we were all excited and going out to protest and march, and this and that. And the police were surrounding the university. I was so excited. I went into my dorm and called home, and said, “Daddy, daddy – I’m protesting! I’m protesting!” And he said, “Child – you better go into your room and get underneath your bed.” (Professor DjeDje and the class laugh.) Somebody was shot during that protesting. Even though we did it and were excited about it, it was sometimes dangerous. But as a result of him coming to Fisk during that freshman year, many of us thought that changes needed to occur within the curriculum. And so all of us began to agitate for change within the music curriculum.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were there. They are well-known for introducing the spiritual – an African-American art form – back in the 1870s. But basically that was it. They sang the spirituals, but there was nothing in the curriculum. As a result of our agitation, in my junior year, Fisk invited Darius Thieme to teach a course on African music. He was an ethnomusicologist – he did research in Nigeria, and studied there for two or three years before writing his dissertation. He was originally from the United States. He taught a course one quarter on African music, and then another quarter on music of the African diaspora. That just blew my mind. While growing up in a small town, and playing in a church, playing classical music, you’d snub your nose up at anything that was not classical. We privileged European classical music. And anything that was not that was not good. So to see all of that within the context of the university – they gave African music a certain amount of legitimacy that I had not experienced – and I asked him if this was something you could really study, and he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Where? How?” And he said, “Ethnomusicology.” And when I was serious about it, he said, “If you’re serious about it, then you need to go to UCLA, because they have the major program for ethnomusicologists.”

So in my senior year I applied, and I was also able to get a nice grant – a fellowship that paid for my training for five years. So, I came here. Actually, Fisk was ahead of its time. I think it was one of the only schools – except for UCLA – in the entire United States maybe teaching courses on African music and the music of the African diaspora. This was in 1967. At UCLA, the ethnomusicology department didn’t add courses on African-American music until about 1968. Fisk was ahead of its time.

Joseph Buchanan: So this experience gave you an appreciation and pride in your own music and Western African traditions?

Professor DjeDje: Definitely. And I suppose that most people who are not from the European tradition probably had pride to be able to go to a place like a UCLA or anywhere else in academe and study the music of their traditions. Bringing it to the academy – that wasn’t easy, I’m sure, at certain schools. UCLA was important because we had people like Mantle Hood. He received his M.A. here in composition. After finishing his M.A., he went to the Netherlands and studied with Jaap Kunst and received his Ph.D. focusing on the music of Indonesia. And then he came back here and began to develop courses on performance. He was a composer and was interested in figuring out ways to write music, and he needed to have the sounds and all the resources here. So he began to introduce various cultures, primarily from Asia – Indonesia; Thailand; China; Korea; Japan. This was the ‘50s and early ‘60s. And then starting in 1963, 1964 and 1965, he began to invite people from other parts of the world to speak here – from Africa and also Persia, the Philippines.

He became friends with a man by the name of J.H. Kwabena Nketia. He was invited here in 1962 to teach a course during the summer with the African Studies center. James S. Coleman, who was director of African Studies, invited Nketia to teach this course. That’s when Nketia and Hood established a relationship, even though they have met each other previously. But eventually, Hood was invited to the University of Ghana, to study the music there. After going to Ghana, Hood made the film, “Atumpan: The Talking Drums of Ghana,” and meeting some of those individuals, he decided to bring one of them back to teach African music at UCLA. Hood was a remarkable person. As someone with that kind of vision, he was able to get support from major foundations to bring in people. He caused UCLA to be a major player in terms of education. He had an interesting personality. Whenever he walked into a room, everyone knew he was there.

Joseph Buchanan: As you look back on the enthusiasm that went into building UCLA’s program, and you look at the current state of ethnomusicology – does the field still have that enthusiasm? Is there still a lot of work to be done, or has most of the groundwork been done already? What new can be added to the field?

Professor DjeDje: There’s a whole lot that can be done. It’s only a drop in the bucket of what we’ve accomplished. Now that ethnomusicology has become a part of the academy, it has begun to embrace some of the approaches and methods and theories of the academy, and that’s fine. But there are also individuals who are still trying to make cutting-edge changes. There are certain barriers that still probably need to be broken. We, here, because of our history of innovation, and always thinking differently, we’re probably in a good position to do that. I suppose the area where there needs to be interest in doing things is the creative area. To me, it’s almost as if we’ve gone full circle.

You had someone like a Hood who came in from composition, and probably became interested in all these new musics, these new sounds, because he wanted to integrate that into his work. That was important for him, but ethnomusicology has always been regarded as an academic tradition. In other words, you actually do research and write articles and books and eventually we began to make films, and that was accepted, but it’s been much more academic. And ethnomusicologists, here in the United States, have been pulled from anthropology, so the discipline has always had the culture focus, fusing ideas with anthropology. Ethnomusicologists study music and culture, so American ethnomusicology has had a focus on culture, whereas in other parts of the world, there has been a little more focus on music. The whole idea of studying music came from Europeans. People who were performers or composers were not always well-accepted within the discipline. The person who’s behind Africa Meets North America, Akin Euba – one of the reasons he did this is that, as a composer, he didn’t feel that he was accepted within academe or ethnomusicology. He’s a graduate of UCLA. His degree is in composition, similar to Hood. And whenever you talk to people about using composition as a way to explore issues related to the world, rather than just through the academy and writing, you hear, “Oh, yeah – that’s good. But does it really belong? What could you actually say? How would it contribute to our greater understanding of issue related to the field?”

Whenever Euba wrote proposals to present something on ethnomusicology, they were not always accepted. If they were accepted, they were not put during the days when you had the most people there. It may have been put on Sunday, the very last day, when there are very few people. I don’t think you do that intentionally, but as program chair, you look at what most people are interested in. So that’s when he decided to do his own thing. He came up with all these ideas of creative ethnomusicology, intercultural ethnomusicology, and this AMNA is a reflection of that interest.

This idea of creativity – looking at world music as a basis for being much more creative – those are areas that need to be broken now. We are interested in that. We just established a new undergraduate curriculum two years ago, and students can now emphasize either performance or composition. People can now emphasize a public ethnomusicology. That’s another area that was marginalized. People thought that if you go into ethnomusicology, you need to go into the academy. If you’re going to, say, arts administration or anything that had to do with the public, you might hear, “that’s OK, but that’s not real ethnomusicology.” There’d be a snub on that. Our undergraduate curriculum has made these major emphases, recognizing that these paths are just as important, and they need to be emphasized so that students who are interested in those areas are not discouraged because they’re not doing ethnomusicology – that they’re actually encouraged. Some of our students have gone into museum work. Some are going into archives. Some are going into government. And as the world gets smaller, with so many diverse people around, I think you need to have someone with a background in ethnomusicology to come up with new ways of working with people.

Jennifer Li: You were classically trained as a pianist. Have you ever trained as a classical violinist?

Professor DjeDje: No. The reason I became involved with the violin was because of my daughter. She was a violinist, and she started with the Suzuki method, when she was about five or six. Originally, she started with piano because I was playing piano and teaching her. Then, a teacher who came to her school introduced the violin. And his idea was to provide lessons for all the students at the school. She took lessons for that year. This was a private school, and they weren’t able to bring in the person again the next year, and there were not enough people willing to pay the lessons, so the program didn’t continue. She said, “I really want to play the violin.” Suzuki allows you to play the instrument early, rather than the traditional Western way of teaching violin, so I identified a violin teacher who was Suzuki-trained, and she took violin. That became my interest in the violin.

Noteworthy is the fact that playing the violin was something that she wanted to do but her friends questioned why she wanted to learn the violin, because her father is from West Africa. “Why aren’t you learning drumming,” they asked. “Why aren’t you dancing, or doing this” – the stereotype of following in the tradition of her father, and asking why she was studying this Western European instrument. And I said, “Wait a minute now – the violin is not only Western, it’s African; it’s global.” And I’d done all this research on the West African violin. That’s when I said, “Why don’t I make it much more available to the world about the violin.” I wanted to do a cross-cultural study, looking at the African violin as well as the African-American role in the violin here in North America. It dates all the way back to the 17th century.

Interestingly, Africans were the people who played the violin here in North America. Whites didn’t play the violin, because they saw it as work, and it was the Africans who did the work while the whites were there for the entertainment. Some of them, they taught their slaves violin, but they never did perform at these settings or balls for them. So the violin was probably the most dominant instrument in African-American culture, up until the early 20th century. During slavery, it was more popular than the banjo, which actually came from Africa. So, with all this history, it was important for my daughter – she felt comfortable – to have legitimacy in the eyes of her peers. She could say, “This is not necessarily Western. I am following my heritage by studying the violin.” So that’s how I became interested.

I’m not a violinist, except for the time that I was in Ghana and I was studying the violin. I was studying the gonje as part of my research, for about a year. But I’m a keyboardist. So those of you who play instruments, transferring the keyboard to the violin is not very easy.

Joseph Buchanan: Since your studies have taken you to West Africa, and you’re head of the Ethnomusicology Department, and with everything else you do, do you still have time for your classical piano playing?

Professor DjeDje: No. Not at all. When we had this (Africa Meets North America) conference here, it made me realize how much I miss playing the instrument. Being an academe, with scholarship, administration and teaching, it just does not allow me to do it. I haven’t been able to find a balance. This is one of the things I’m looking forward to when I retire – to devote my time to playing piano. Because, now there’s just so much more repertoire available that deal with Africa and African-American music.

I’m sure there were compositions before, but they were not acceptable. People wrote their compositions, but no one was interested in publishing them. So you didn’t know anything about it unless you contacted the person and said, “Send me your manuscript,” and maybe you’d pull together the manuscript so it’s legible, so you could perform it. But now, there’s just so much available. Publishers are publishing it. So it would be fascinating to go back and look at what’s there and learn it. Even just playing for myself, rather than playing for an audience – I look forward to doing that.

Joseph Buchanan: Since you had experience in the classical world as a young person, and experience as an ethnomusicologist in West African traditions, do you find that it takes the same or equal amount of formal training and dedication to learn a one-string African fiddle and classical piano?

Professor DjeDje: I think it’s dedication all around. To me, it’s the individual – if you’re really going to take something seriously, whether it’s a classical instrument or even a popular instrument, you have to be dedicated. I have a standard of excellence, and I sometimes am hard on myself because I’m trying to achieve excellence. And people who work with me may say, “She’s very demanding.” (Laughs.) But it’s not “demanding.” I believe that one should do their best, and the only way to do your best is to really be committed to doing that. So, yes, there’s this dedication.

When I studied the violin in Africa – to me, they began learning the instrument in a way that’s very informal. In the part of Africa where I did my research, there were families of musicians, and therefore, you’re born into this family. You’re expected to learn this instrument. When the child is born, they may even hear the playing of the instrument at their nursery, and when they’re introduced to the community. From when they’re about two or three years old, they’re given an instrument – even though they’re not playing it, they’re supposed to go through the motions. Eventually, they’re supposed to learn the repertoire, learn the language – this is required. So very early in their lives, this becomes something they’re supposed to do, like eating and drinking – which is different from what we do here. We separate the two. We get up and we eat and drink and do this, and then we do our instrument, either for work or pleasure. In that particular part of the world, it’s a part of who you are as a person within that community. So, yes, there’s dedication and a commitment if you really want to excel.

Jeehai Song: In Korea, there’s the same emphasis, where families stress the playing of instruments that way, so that the playing is a natural part of their day.

Professor DjeDje: It used to be that way in many parts of the world. When I was doing my research on music in early America, I came across a culture of family musicianship. The fiddle was a popular instrument – this was after slavery – and you had, by that time, blacks and whites performing in these sort of fiddle bands. And you had children of different generations in a family who are performing the instrument. Sometimes, they used it for pleasure. There was not TV. There was not any of these technological entertainments, so they entertained themselves by playing musical instruments. Sometimes, they’d play for the community – house parties or barn dance or perhaps there’s a major festival that takes place every year. So early in those families, children learned how to play instruments or learned how to perform the repertoire. So I think this is probably global.

Today, we separate musicianship as a profession and not as an experience, and we say, “that person is going to be a performer. He or she has the talent and dedication to be a performer.” A person who is very good with math and science will be pushed to become a scientist or to enter the medical world. Today, you don’t think about allowing the person to do both if they wanted to do both. There’s this separation. In another time, you could do both. Sometimes people in the sciences were excellent musicians, especially in terms of theory. I had a friend, when I started at Fisk University – I was a piano major and she was an exceptional pianist, and she was debating about whether she was going into math or piano. In the end, because of family pressure, she went into math. But out of all the people in my class, she was the best pianist. But she never did major in piano, because there was this separation.

Jeehai Song: In Ghana, where you did research, did you give advice on preserving their musical traditions?

Professor DjeDje: Whenever I go to a different part of the world, I try not to go in as if I’m the savior. I go in as someone who wants to learn. The people there are the authority and I want to learn, so I can share it with other people – so they’re pretty much using me as a mouthpiece to make other people more aware of what they’re doing. It’s the individuals there who need to take responsibility for preserving it and maintaining it in whatever way they want. But you find that whenever someone like me goes into it and begins to recognize a tradition’s importance, people do take on that responsibility.

A good example, is when I went back to Ghana in early 2000, and I interviewed the son of my fiddle teacher, and he told me that he had started an archive. I said, “really?” And he said, “Yes. All of these Europeans and people coming from the United States asking for this music – it must be important, so perhaps I need to be able to save it.” And I said, “how are you archiving it?” And for them, it’s the text, the song text. Because the song text actually date back to the 1700s, when Ghana was just coming into existence as a state, when the fiddlers had just entered their culture. And it was the song text for them that was very important – they thought it was easy to learn how to play the instrument. But once the texts were lost, and the people who performed them were lost, there was no way to recover it. So what he’d begun to do is interview some of the senior people in his community, the elders within the family, and he’d begun to ask them to sing songs that they don’t normally perform, and wrote them down. He was Western-educated himself. He said, “the young people may not be interested now, but at some point in time, they will be interested, and I’ll have the material for them.”

He lives in a very small village in northern Ghana, and he’s been writing down these song texts for the future. Whenever I record and document – I use tapes – I give copies back to them. I give copies to the university where I was, and I also deposit material in the ethnomusicology archive. In that way, the materials are preserved. But I think it’s really the responsibility of those individuals rather than me going in and saying, “yes, you need to do this.” To me, that’s one of the problems of the West, which is always going in and imposing their ways of doing things, and their values of things. And some people there believe it, and then the traditions of the native countries – that helped them to survive in their own way – they disappear.

Joseph Buchanan: You must have been upset by the theft of instruments at UCLA. Can you talk about that?

Professor DjeDje: I have a personal attachment to the instruments. I’m a graduate of UCLA, and I came back here in 1970. I was around when a lot of these instruments were purchased. So you knew some of the people who were responsible for purchasing them. It’s always an interesting association when you make contact with individuals who either make instruments for you or purchase them for you. You get to know them, you establish rapport, and there are special students here in the department, and faculty, who were involved in the process. It just brings back memories. There’s this nostalgia that I have. It’s like taking something from your home that’s always been there.

Christopher Robinson: Last week, we got Professor Rice here, and he talked about some of his guilty musical pleasures. What do you listen to for fun and entertainment?

Professor DjeDje: I like gospel. I love gospel music. All types of gospel. It calms me, gives me strength. Sometimes when I come to work, I like to listen to classical music – Western classical music. I love to hear the music of Chopin and Beethoven and some Bach, which takes me back to when I was a student. I still play that myself. When I’m going home, in the evening, I like to put on KJLH. I want to hear some R&B. I have a diverse musical palette.

Robert Fink is professor and chair of the Musicology department at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Professor Fink concentrates on music after 1965, with special interest in minimalism, popular music, post-modernism and the canon, and music and urban space. His 2005 book, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (University of California Press), was described by Richard Leppert as “the most important, and clearly the most culturally and theoretically informed, of any of the major studies on minimalism.” Professor Fink, who was a visiting professor of music at Yale in 2006, writes for such journals as American Music, which published his acclaimed 1998 essay, “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.” Professor Fink’s UCLA lecture course on “The History and Practice of Electronic Dance Music” was the first of its kind at a major university, and was named “Best College Pop Music Class” of 2002 by Spin magazine. Professor Fink spoke to students who were taking a Fall 2009 music-journalism course (Ethnomusicology 188, Lecture 3) at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He talked about once wanting to be Leonard Bernstein; Elvis Presley and pop music; the connection between Philip Glass and electronic dance music; Motown and African retentions in music; keeping up with the latest sounds; and his relationship to those he writes about. The interviewers were Joseph Buchanan, Chris Robinson, Ji-Won Kim, Jennifer Li, and Jeehai Song.

Christopher Robinson: How did you get interested in your subject? And how do you see whatever it is you consider to be your subject?

Professor Fink: The question of what is my subject – and what is “our subject,” me and my colleagues – is open at UCLA in a way that maybe it isn’t at other places. It certainly wasn’t necessarily when I started off as a musicologist, which wasn’t what I grew up wanting to be. I think you’ll find very few people who grew up thinking, “Oh, mom – I want to be a musicologist when I grow up.” In my generation, most people who end up as musicologists were attracted to music – and usually classical music because it probably would not have occurred to you in 1979, when I went to college, that if you were interested in popular music, the academic study of it at the university level was something you could do. Because it really wasn’t, especially if you had come up interested in music.

Now, there might have been some other people who were over in the Communications Department or in American Studies or in other places who realized, “Oh, music is a part of American Studies, and it’s a part of Media Studies.” But for those of us who were interested in music – really, the people who thought at a certain point, “Wow, I probably don’t have the temperament to be the concert pianist or conductor that I maybe hoped to be.” For me, it was actually conductor. I wanted to be Leonard Bernstein. I wanted to be the guy with the baton up in front of the orchestra. I was fascinated by classical music – especially orchestra music. I didn’t actually play an orchestral instrument, so it was completely love from afar. I had a stereo. I played it in my bedroom. I was just totally obsessed with big, romantic pieces. So, if that’s where you come from, when it becomes clear to you that, “Actually, I got 800 on my SAT verbal score, so that’s really what I’m good at” – that’s the kind of person who ends up suddenly realizing there’s this thing called “musicology.” I could continue to be associated with the music that I’m fascinated with and have been, and I can write and talk about it and maybe explain it to people, and perform it almost verbally, or perform it in a different way, even though I don’t have the connections or the skill or the athletic ability or the temperament to be a performing musician.

The pop music stuff came much later. And, so, in a way, my subject has changed over the course of my career. And I guess you could argue that my subject for a large part of my academic career has been the change of my subject. I’ve actually tried to theorize and talk about what it means to be somebody who spent most of his adolescence ignoring popular music. What it means then to become interested in it academically and fascinated by it when you’re 30. And what does your musicological training have to do with that. And how do you negotiate that. And then to turn around and go the next step farther and say, “What was it about that music that you used to think was the only music – how do you look at that stuff now that you realize it’s not and it’s no longer the be-all and end-all.”

Joseph Buchanan: Do you remember the light-bulb moment when you said, even though you were so involved with classical music, “Popular music is something I’d like to investigate more of”?

Professor Fink: Yeah. I can give you two stories. I can quite precisely tell you when I got back into popular music. It was about 1986. And it was because I went to two graduate programs – I went to the Eastman School of Music first, got a degree in music theory, kind of flipped out from there and left, and ended up at UC Berkeley, and my first year there, we were just a small entry class of three people. And I was very tight with one of the incoming students, who was obsessed with popular music. We hung out all the time, and if you were going to hang out with this person, you were going to listen to their music. And so I became an expert on basically the kind of stuff that she liked. We were watching MTV and whatever, but it was also British progressive rock, and a certain amount of esoteric stuff. So I began to listen to this stuff as part of a friendship with a fellow graduate student, because when I came in there, that was still not what I thought I’d be doing. So there is basically a gap – there’s 1979 to 1986, where I have to go back and re-excavate what was happening in pop music. I sort of knew it up until I went to college, because you marinade in it; like I know the way anybody would know what’s going on on the radio. Then I just shut off. And I turned back on in 1986.

When I first thought that, “Man, you could study this stuff?” That was a little more subtle. If you’ve read the “Elvis Everywhere” piece, you’ll see that I talk about this a little bit. I was not one of these what I call “amphibious musicologists” – the people who have two interests that have nothing to do with each other. I did sense there were people like this in the earlier part of my career. They were doing a very austere – like “I do Schoenberg atonal music,” and three people in the world care about this (class laughs), “and then I study ABBA” (more laughs). And things are designed to be completely separate and almost opposite. For me, it was a little different, because the classical music I ended up studying – I drifted, so where I ended up at the end of my doctoral dissertation and some of my early work was working on minimalist repetitive music. Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Back when I was doing that, there were still teachers who were pretty convinced that that wasn’t actually classical music at all – that, as one journalist actually said, “pop music for intellectuals.” I didn’t necessarily think of it that way, but it is true that I had already drifted a little bit away from the ideals that underpinned classical music ideology, because I was studying something way at the fringe. And then what happened was, you begin to notice – either because people blend the two styles, or because you get told about it, “hey, that sounds like this” – that certain aspects of electronic dance music, ambient and techno sound a lot like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. So it became clear, almost through chance encounters, that some of these popular musicians – especially in this really anti-canonical music of underground rave music – they knew who Philip Glass and Steve Reich were. They knew the same composers I knew, and they were very influenced by the sound. So I started getting into the music, and getting into ambient music.

I was still playing around the edges. A lot of people doing the ambient scene are kind of arty. But then as you try to follow that up, you begin to say, “Oh OK; there’s other stuff in there – I’m going to trace that stuff down.” And that was sort of the gateway drug if you will. Trying to think about that led me to the kind of thinking you saw in the “Elvis Everywhere” piece, where it’s like, “What am I doing to do with this stuff?” And then thinking that through, at a certain point, I ended up – in that Elvis piece, somebody literally said, “Well, the first version of that article didn’t really say anything really about Elvis, other than to use him as a kind of opening riff.” And someone critiqued that piece when I tried to publish it and said, “Well you talk a lot about what people should do, but you don’t do anything yourself.” So, then I put in the analysis. And that was one of the first times I actually wrote up an analysis of a piece of if you will canonical popular music: “Hound Dog.” I guess you could argue that that’s how it sort of all started. That was the way it slipped out of control.

Joseph Buchanan: When you went to UC Berkeley, were you a music major?

Professor Fink: That was my Ph.D. The degree was technically, “Music, History & Literature.” It was a doctoral degree. I did my undergraduate degree at Yale. And I was basically a music major. Yale doesn’t have performance degrees. So it was basically a bachelor of arts in music/liberal arts kind of degree.

Joseph Buchanan: And what was your instrument?

Professor Fink: They always ask that. (Class laughs.) Fair enough. I didn’t study performance in any organized way. I remember when I was a little kid, there was a record that I used to listen to – my parents must have brought it home – that was one of these kinds of stories for kids that has a moral. And it was about this kid who couldn’t pick what kind of instrument he wanted to play. And he kept getting bored, and changing to the next instrument, and he never got good at anything, and then he was all depressed. I was sort of like that kid. (Class laughs.)

The instrument that I spent the most time with was piano. So I was a keyboard player. I studied piano. I was never going to be a concert player. I got to the level where I could butcher my way through a Chopin piece – a hard one. I could play the easy one, and I could sort of bash my through a couple of impressive pieces. I was a very utility piano player. I was a good sight reader. So I did a lot during my graduate years supporting myself accompanying choruses and ballet classes. I was an accompanist kind of pianist. I did quite a bit of choral singing. That was a way to make money. So I sang tenor or even alto in Anglican church choirs, where it’s just men and boys. I had a pretty good falsetto voice. The Anglicans pay better. (Class laughs.) They do. The Episcopalians pay for their music, and so I had a lot of church gigs like that, like Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, when I was in graduate school. I’m a pretty trained choral singer, but not a soloist.

So I was always playing stuff and doing stuff where I wasn’t really the center of attention. I had these weird orchestral urges – like I played the bassoon for a while, in high school. But there was never an orchestra to be in – that’s a whole different set of issues. But I also played the viola for a while. Really, these instruments that are sort of not that gratifying. But the main instrument, and one that I continue to use throughout my career, is keyboard.

Jennifer Li: When you were growing up, what did you imagine doing for a profession?

Professor Fink: I’d never even heard of musicology. Honestly, I probably never thought of “musicology” as a word until I was well into graduate school. (As a boy), I don’t know that I ever seriously wanted to be an astronaut, though I’m of that generation actually that grew up with the moon landings and everything. I was actually fascinated with science as a kid. I believe it’s in the record that when you take the PSATs – the prepatory SATs – that they ask you what you think your college major will be. I put “chemistry.” I thought that was really cool. I like science and chemistry and stuff. Turns out I had very little aptitude for it. (Class laughs.) So when I went to college I thought that I’d be a history or English major. I was interested in what I now think in retrospect of as basically the Humanities.

I was going to double-major in English and music. Because of the way that Yale is structured, if I wanted to achieve many of my goals, I could really only do the music major because you were getting zero credit for any performance you did. So when I was an undergraduate, I had this idea that I wanted to be a conductor. Well, I needed to find groups to conduct, but there were no curricula outlet for that. There was a lot of musical theater going on. I was conducting the Yale Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and things like that, but there was no credit for that. So I dropped the English major.

It never occurred to me that I would be a businessman, or something like that. Both of my parents were business professionals. My dad’s an engineer. And my mother worked as an executive in a diet company. She was a high-power business executive. There’s not a lot of academics in my family. And at least in the generation growing up, there weren’t a lot of musicians. It turns out there are some if you go farther back. It is a family tradition in at least one side of my family. But I didn’t know about it until later. I knew that I didn’t want to do what my parents did. I wasn’t going to work for a corporation, and I wasn’t going to be an engineer. I liked school. I was really good at it. I was one of those people who were blessed in the modern world to be good at standardized testing. So I had good grades and I really liked school, so at a very early age I thought, “I’m either going to be a conductor or some kind of academic.” But it wasn’t until graduate school that I sort of figured out that one was sort of closer to the other than I thought.

Joseph Buchanan: Did your parents encourage you with your music studies?

Professor Fink: Yeah. Looked at one way, there’s a kind of family narrative that would work very perfectly. My mother was very into music. I think she always said she wished she had majored in music. But she actually majored in history. And I ended up doing music history. So I think my mother was very supportive. She had a moment where I told her I wasn’t going to be a lawyer, and that stressed her out a little bit. (Class laughs.) But on the other hand, she was the one who had the piano in the house. She took lessons. She still does. She’s in her 70s taking lessons trying to get better on the piano. So that was a lifetime love of hers. I can remember, she was cleaning the living room, and pulled something out of the piano bench, and it was a volume of Beethoven piano sonatas, and I guess I was old enough at that point, and she said, “You should get a record from the library and listen to these – they’re really good.” Next thing you know. So, yes, I do feel like I had authorization from my mother.

My dad is an interesting thing – he was more into jazz, in a very kind of ‘50s, post-bop way. There are legends in the family about him and my mother driving down to New York from Boston, which is where I’m from, to go to Birdland to see Charlie Parker. But he didn’t really bring that home. And I have a feeling that when he got married and had kids, it was like, “OK, that part of my life is over.” And so I didn’t get a strong sense from him that music was very important anymore. So my parents had a lot of easy listening music in the house. And we had Chicago. Beatles records. It wasn’t like I had the same kind of influence from both sides. My mother had this very romantic idea of classical music, and my dad – I only realized later – had been into a very different kind of music.

Christopher Robinson: What styles of pop music are you most interested in? And is there a separation from what you’re interested in for personal gratification and for academic purposes? Are they separate spheres, or do they overlap?

Professor Fink: They definitely overlap. Going back to that story I told you, I genuinely liked and was very fascinated by all this electronic dance music. It was a good time, if you look at the almost accidental timing, right around the time I began to realize that minimalism had a lot of links to this dance-music culture, it was the beginning of this big wave that would crest right around the turn of the century of North American interest in rave and techno and things like that. So I got interested in that. I have taught a class here on the history of electronic dance music. And my students all assume – and this is going to blow my cover, but I don’t care; let’s just put it out there – that, “He must totally be a raver. And he must have dropped ecstasy all over the place.” But it’s totally not true. I’ve been to some underground parties, but it’s not part of my lifestyle. I was too old by the time I actually got interested in it to be able to do that. But I really do like that music, and listen to it and collect it. Most of the music that I study is music that I like.

I don’t think there’s a situation where there’s some pop music that I’m studying that I really don’t like. That’s just not my style. Whether there’s some pop music that I really like that I can’t figure out how to study – that’s true of classical music. I think most musicologists have a broader range of music that they are fascinated with than what they study. There are lots of musicologists who study the Renaissance but who also like to sit down and play Brahms on the piano. Or there are people who actually study Brahms but when they go home and want to listen to classical music, they’re going to put on chant. There’s such a broad range. Often the way we get into classical music is through performance, and so there’s stuff that you love because it’s gratifying to perform. For instance, for me, I spent a lot of time as I said singing in Episcopalian church choir, singing old, English counterpoint music or 18th and 19th-century church music. I get a lot of pleasure from that. I actually sang in a lot of choirs at a pretty high level, and I love the sound of people like William Byrd and Josquin – it’s just sensuous and beautiful to sing. But I don’t have any desire to become a musicological expert on that music. And the questions that it throws up are not ones I want to deal with. And pop music – I’m always trying to see if I can find something to say.

There are repertoires that I really like – like country acoustic blues, like Delta Blues, things like that, that I can imagine teaching about and I really like. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be an expert on them and write on them. But a lot of the music I study is stuff that I really like. For instance, one of the places I ended up was the prequel to that dance-music class. I kept having to move backwards in time to explain what was going on. Well, you can’t understand House music unless you have some sense of Disco. Well, you can’t really understand Disco unless you understand Funk and probably Soul music. OK, what the heck is Funk and Soul? Well, you need to understand Boogie-Woogie. You end up: “Well, let’s begin in 1937 here.” (Class laughs.) So you end up at least having to go back to the Rhythm & Blues world and maybe even before. In a sense, you have to go back to African retentions in popular music. What I found is when I started to do that work I ran back into music that I really, really just love to death, which was Sixties soul and Motown. So, I actually spun out a whole class on that.

I guess it’s fair to say that if I find something that really fascinates me in pop music, I will probably try to find a way to deal with it – unless you get a little intimidated. Like I said, with the music I sang in those church choirs, the musical apparatus around, say, Josquin des Prez is humungous. You can’t just step in there as a dilettante and say, “Well, that’s a pretty piece. That note goes there.” And there are some parts of the popular music world where you really have to worry about being a poseur. One of the nice things about popular music from the perspective of musicology is that so much of it is so little studied. You can actually still find pieces of music that are as comfortably powerful to people as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – a piece about which I have written. But when you write about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, you basically step into something that is like – this is a Jewish thing – the Talmud. You have huge commentaries on commentaries on commentaries on Beethoven. There’s the piece, and then there’s the reception to the piece, then there’s people talking about it in the 19th century, and people talking about it in the late 19th century, the early 20th century, the middle 20th century, the ‘70s, the ‘90s, and then here comes Bob. Sometimes, you want to do that. But there are also pieces of music like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” album, which in some ways are as important, and there may be one or two layers, but it’s not as intense. You feel like you could get in there and really say something. Maybe I do feel that I’m more likely in the pop music world – if something really turns me on, to try to go for it. Whereas in classical music, I don’t know if I want to be in that conversation – it’s so long and it’s complicated. Many of the people are difficult people.

Ji-Won Kim: How do you update yourself with today’s music – do you use the Internet, the radio?

Professor Fink: That’s a good question. Not so much the radio. For a while, satellite radio was working really well for me. There were a couple of genres. Satellite radio is nice because you get quite tight and narrow channels, so you say, “What is alt-country?” Well, there’s a channel for that. One of the joys of being an academic and in a university setting is that you get clued into things by students. So, I find out about stuff because people bring it into me, and they’re like, “Wow, check this out. What can I say about this? Can I write my paper on that?” And I say, “No, but I can.” (Class laughs.) No, I would never do that. So, I learn things from students. But, yes, the Internet – I troll the web a lot, and social media does help. I’m on Facebook and the like. And my Facebook set of friends is a nerdy set. But there are people who are students who I’ve had contact with, who post, “Hey check this out – it’s a Lady Gaga video.” Or, “These guys are playing a club in New York – here’s some video that I shot.” So, in a way, that’s a very powerful benefit of being an academic.

I’ve (also) developed some techniques that work across the board, because a lot of what I’m interested in – discussion of so-called classical music – is the very contemporary fate of it. So I actually have a routine of going out and surfing a whole bunch of aggregator web sites, and I do a lot of general trying to keep tabs on stories about the arts and classical music and culture. Things like artsjournal.com, which is a web site that aggregates a lot of stories from all over the world, English-speaking stories – certainly from England, Europe, North America, about the arts. Not just music. There are a lot of stories on the web site like, “Honolulu symphony is running a deficit.” You get the news stories about the health or sickness of various classical music institutions, which I’m interested in. But you also get stories about the latest trends in various types of pop music or art music. So I spend time and energy trying to keep up with the world.

I don’t know that every musicologist does. There’s definitely a kind of gratification in being a musicologist – the hermit version – in saying, “The world is too much with us. I’m going back into a world when things were better.” Or, “I’m just not going to pay attention to all that.” And there have been moments when that’s very attractive. But one of my commitments as a scholar is to try to pay attention to what’s going on. Right now, what I’ve been working on over the last couple of months is actually about classical music. But it’s really about episodes in the contemporary world. It’s not about the history of classical music – it’s about saying, “What does Disney Hall mean in downtown L.A.? How did it get built? What does the structure say about how people think about classical music?” So, there is an aspect of sort of cultural journalism, though I’m not a journalist. And that was always a bad word when I was being trained as a musicologist. Especially with pop music journalists – the worst adjective you can use about any writing is “academic.” That’s the ultimate slap. And, of course, one of the big slurs in the academic world is to say, “that’s journalistic.” In a sense, we’re natural enemies.

One of my favorite pop-music conferences to go to is up in Seattle, at the Experience Music Project. And that’s a conference where you actually get people like myself, and Robert Christgau or Greil Marcus – the guys writing for the Stone, and what used to be the Village Voice. The big New York rock critics will come, and we’ll all sit in the same sessions. It’s fascinating to observe the other tribe. (Class laughs.) And see if you can be accepted to some extent. This question of what’s academic and what’s journalistic is a very interesting one. But I do think that some aspects of what I do have to do with the same nose for news about classical music or pop music that a journalist might have.

Jeehai Song: Do you have contact with the people you write about, and do they pay great attention to what you write?

Professor Fink: That’s a really good question, and the answer is: No, I don’t (have contact with them); that’s not my style of working. Probably you’d find of more of that kind of work with people who identify themselves as ethnomusicologists. Part of their scholar apparatus is to go do ethnographies – to investigate a scene or place and all the people in it. They actually have a certain amount of trouble, because it’s one thing if you go to a foreign culture where the United States is a hegemonic power – let’s be open about it – and you have money and they don’t. Ethnomusicologists are very conscious about this, and they’ve really thought it through very deeply, but they’re aware of the power differentials that underlie what they do.

If your subject is, say, Aretha Franklin, the power differential suddenly reverses. It’s quite unlikely that you’re going to get access to a lot of the famous popular musicians. So the kind of work where people do that is usually work on local scenes; work on underground, less famous people. But if you want to work musicologically, in the broader sense, like (with) Lady Gaga, it’s not very likely if I were to call up – whoever I have to call up – and say, “Hi, I’m a professor of musicology at the University of California.” I don’t think that I’d have any special access to her.

Then you have the other problem of what would see say, and would it actually be useful to the kind of arguments you want to make. So actually I don’t personally spend a lot of time worrying about contacting actual musicians. Memoirs are interesting. What people write is data. At least up until very recently, within musicology, all the composers were very conveniently dead. (Class laughs.) It was a fundamental reality that you’re doing history, so all you have is documents. Some of those documents are musical texts, like symphonies, but it’s documents, treatises, court records, books, memoirs. So you work with the documents. You figure out how to establish whether documents are, in a sense, lying or telling the truth. Musicologists have not tended to be the kind of people who go out and interview people. And even as we all move into the pop music world, and we deal with more and more contemporary stuff, I think that methodological distinction still exists. I think it’s a temperamental one. I would say I’m a relatively introverted person actually. You guys make me feel more at home. So the idea of going out and (doing what your instructor does) – traveling and taking trips and meeting new people and asking them questions and trying to get them to talk – I’d find that to be quite a difficult job. It’s not the way temperament has led me. It’s also why I probably wouldn’t be a good conductor, either. You’d have to be pretty extroverted to do that job. You’d have to be able to pull people into your vision. “Let’s start an orchestra. I can’t pay you but, hey, come do it!” (Class laughs.) That was always very hard for me.

Regarding whether the people care what musicologists write about them: They don’t, as far as I know. There are a few exceptions, but it’s usually on the fringes of the pop music world. I’ll lay that one out for you. Every once in a while, you’ll get someone who is reflexively amazed that anyone, say, at the University of California at Los Angeles is interested in what they do. They’re kind of like, “Well . . . ” Some pop musicians – and you can’t predict who, because sometimes it’s people who are very non-academic in their life – are validated in some way, or they find it bemusing. And they’re like, “Wow, that’s kind of cool.” Sometimes with dance musicians, when I did the dance-music class, I’d try to invite DJs in for the class. Not that I was going to interview them for my publication, but they’d come in and talk. Sometimes they were local people. Once or twice, it was actually someone who had gone to a UC. And they’re like, “The idea that I would be in front of a class at the University of California blows my mind.” So there was that sense of, “Wow, I thought by doing what I did, I was breaking irrevocably with my school.” Yes, that does happen. But I don’t think in general that hip-hop musicians are particularly worried about their place in history or what colleges think of them. They’re probably more worried about pop critics – people who might help them sell records. And many of them profess not to care about that.

And there’s a complicated relationship – if you work into the older stuff, like ‘60s music or even older than that, what you’re often times getting is survivors or friends of famous people who often times are interested in talking to reporters or journalists or writers – often times because they want to settle scores, or they’re interested in getting their idea out. Sometimes, the power differential pops up again – that they’re somebody who is a relative of a sideman who played with musician X who would really like it if someone would write a story about the sideman because the person they’re related to would become more famous. Not just that they want more money but that they’d be able to advocate for their family tradition – like, “I’d love you to write a story about Jimmy, because he was great, and he wrote all the horn charts for that guy, and nobody ever gave him the credit.” And that kind of stuff does happen. If it’s a biographical project, or a historical project, people do begin to realize that there are people who control the historical record and it might be interesting to give them data, to see if you can get it out there.

But the kind of critical stuff that I do – like the “Elvis Everywhere” piece – nobody wants to hear that. That’s me basically saying that the world is a post-modern kind of confusing place where you can’t really tell what’s important and everybody is sort of faking it one way or the other. So I’m hardly going to burnish anyone’s image with that work. And I’m pretty comfortable with that. I like a little critical detachment. What is that musicologists are doing? Are we doing music appreciation? That’s the implication – that my job as a musicologist is to sort of sell you music. “Music is good, good for you. Mozart makes you smarter and all that.” That’s a complicated question. And I guess that’s particularly complicated with pop music. Because probably most musicologists you’d meet today have gotten over the idea that – especially in my generation – their job is somehow to get everybody excited about the classical music they study. Maybe when you’re teaching in the classroom you want to show enthusiasm, but the idea is that we’re not necessarily just advocates for classical music, because “it’s better than other music and not enough people listen to it. And we need to educate the world.” That seems like kind of a culturally imperialistic thing now.

On the other hand, I think it’s still quite possible for people to have that advocacy idea towards some types of popular music that they like. Not everyone needs to listen to X. Or, the African diasporic tradition of popular music is so incredible – about historical oppression and struggle. You can get into an advocacy-like argument. I still think that that’s sort of an issue. It’s pretty easy to realize that it’s not that useful to show for, like, Wagner, since Hitler liked Wagner. Or Beethoven even. This suff is German music from a long time ago, and it’s not obvious that it’s necessarily important culturally just to say it’s great. Maybe you need to explain some sort of complicated historical thesis or make people think. On the other hand, if you’re talking about James Brown or Aretha Franklin, say, there is a kind of moment where people say – and I’ve read this kind of work – “you just need to listen to this stuff. It will transform your life.” It’s an unqualified positive advocacy. I feel that pull myself. There are moments when I want to say, “Check this out.” And that does drive your work, which is a good thing.

But why pop musicians shouldn’t necessarily care about what I write is that I can’t always guarantee that I’m going to say things that make them happy and that make more people want to listen to their music. I’m pretty comfortable being ignored by popular musicians. If I go to the concert, yeah I’ll put the lighter up and go back stage if I want to get a CD autograph, but that’s different. That’s personal. But as a writer and thinker, I want to be able to draw my own conclusion.

Joseph Buchanan: Have you done any writing on the African retention in popular music?

Professor Fink: Yes, I have. I’ve done a pretty extended piece that I’m trying to finish up. It’s more a music theory thing, which is one of the degrees that I had and moved on from. It’s dealing with the question of, “How do you talk about rhythm in popular music.” That is one of the really powerful places where people make complex arguments about African retention – the question of polyrhythm and how what you can call “the groove” works in Afro-diasporic music. In a way, this is an extension of that “Elvis Everywhere” piece where the question becomes, “Well, how, musicologically can you talk about this.” How have musicologists talked about this phenomenon in popular music? Is it possible to use some technical, analytical way to get at this, or can musicology do anything useful here?

One of the places where this comes down most intensively is rhythm. In the article, I spend time taking about a song by The Temptations, “Runaway Child, Running Wild.” I end up doing a historical reading of the song in terms of what it’s trying to say. It becomes a cultural reading of the song in its original context in 1968/1969. That involved me looking at actual statistics on runaways. I tried to figure out, “Was this an actual issue in the black community.” And, “Why was there suddenly a song about kids running away?” In the same way that James Brown did a song, “Don’t be a drop-out.”

The way I wanted to tell the story of the song was through its rhythm. There is a way of thinking about rhythm, where you radically separate European music – Euro-American music; white music, if you allow me – and popular music, Afro-diasporic music. And then you argue that they work in radically different ways. And in fact the first shot in the battle was fired by a white person in an offensive, problematic way. A scholar who I really respect, Leonard Meyer, who was a fundamentally import music theorist, very early in his career tried to ask, “Could you establish the value of various types of music analytically?” Could you talk about the structure of a piece and how it works, and then decide that some music is more valuable then others? His argument, which was quite provocative to a bunch of musicologists and people who study popular music, was that the best music is the music that acts out the most extreme delay of gratification. Music that makes you to wait longer. So Leonard Meyer allowed himself to say “what’s primitive about primitive music.” He didn’t say, “I mean the music of people in other parts of the world necessarily.” He’s talking primitive as an abstract category – that it gives what you want right away. Or even gives you what you want all the time. As opposed to a kind of music that sets up expectations and then makes you wait a long time. So the two extreme versions might be a Beethoven symphony, where – at least if you’re a musicologist – you can construct a reading of the symphony where the meaning of the first chord doesn’t fully become realized until the last chord. So that it’s like a story or a novel that you have to follow all the way through. And at any moment, you’re feeling a strong tension of expectations, which are then frustrated and frustrated and frustrated.

A classic Beethoven symphony, in the first movement, is tense and dark and in a minor key. And then towards the end of the first movement, it turns to the major, and you think, “that’s great.” But then it’s taken away, and the movement comes down to the minor. Then it’s 15 minutes later and you get to the same chord and it’s suddenly transformed into the minor and stays this time. You have something like a film.

Contrast that with, say, electronic dance music or funk, where it’s cyclical and the feelings you have are ebbing and flowing at the level of the individual bar or cycle. Leonard Meyer’s attitude is that, “OK. That music is kind of immature,” because it doesn’t act out the delayed gratification that you need to become an adult. So he’s linking music to these various mid-century Freudian ideas of how we mature. That we mature by repressing our id. And accepting the reality principle: You can’t have what you want when you want it. And you become a kind of grown-up. Meyer argues that this kind of music (that delays gratification) actually has value in society because it acts out that kind of way of being and thus helps us be more mature and adult. This just pissed the hell out of a lot of people who really liked jazz and also Afro-diasporic music and African music. They basically thought – I think not incorrectly – that it was denigrating all groove-based music as fundamentally regressive and immature. What it did, it spurred a bunch of people to just flip the punch card over, and the next generation of ethnomusicologists said, “No. Delayed gratification – that’s what the man wants you to do. That’s why our society is so uptight.” It became part of the critique of bourgeois society. There’s an attempt to develop ways of understanding how African diasporic music – the complex rhythmic practices that come out of Africa and the Caribbean and then get into popular music – how they can be better than Beethoven. “Beethoven is oppressive – it locks you into the job and the kids and all that stuff. Whereas this music is all about job and liberation and corrective energy and it frees you.”

What is maintained in that gesture is the radical separation of the two kinds of music. If you go back to where I started, I’m a guy who slipped over that boundary without even noticing it. Beethoven. Stravinsky. Minimalism. Ambient music. Rave. Techno. Disco. Funk. James Brown. So I got there without actually realizing that at a certain point, I had become a different person. The point of this piece I’m working on is to say, “This is not division to make.” It’s no more useful than the division I tried to chew through in that Elvis piece, between classical music and popular music as two completely different kinds of music, where you should do two completely different kinds of analytical tricks. What I end up doing with this long Temptations song – it’s nine minutes long – is attempting to analyze it and show that it actually does work with goal direction, expectation. So there are experiments at a place like Motown in working kind of like Beethoven. I’m not saying it’s as good as Beethoven. I’m not trying to play that game. But if you assume, “OK. Motown has African retention.” The drumming in, say, the Funk Brothers – those guys are playing stuff that you can go back and trace the rhythmic patterns back to Africa if you want. And at that moment, in 1968/1969, they’re actually amping up the African-ness of it. The conga drums are coming in. The style of Motown is actually getting more Afro-centric. Right at that moment. But the methods of the song, “Runaway Child,” is actually classic middle-class morality. That’s what struck me. “Runaway Child” is a song about a little kid who runs away from home, because his mom grounds him. Doing research, I found a few places in Jet magazine where this song is actually mentioned in terms of the turmoil of that period. And the sociological argument around that song is that there’s a huge wave of anxiety in the country at large, and in the black community too, around the Summer of Love. And the whole idea of the runaway changes right at that moment. So the whole narrative around running away – which had been in the black community, it seems, a goal-directed act.

A lot of stories about successful black men, especially, in places like Ebony – well, he grew up in a one-room shack in a place like Mississippi, with 14 children, and he ran away when he was 12. The moral of that story was that he ran away to better himself. That story starts collapsing after the Hippies show up. So now there’s this huge fear of kids running away to drop out. This song does have a real historical, culture component. But I wanted to show that you could analyze the rhythm the way people in classical music analyze pitches. You could show that it sets up expectations, and then it frustrates them. It actually plays around with the idea of primitive rhythm – just straight pounding rhythm – and tells a story, not so much with the lyrics, although they are there, but the way the rhythm works. What I was getting at is: Yes, there are African retentions clearly in popular music, but I was trying to destabilize the idea that, thus, that music comes from a completely different world view and works by a completely different set of principles where goal-directedness and narrative structure are just not part of it. That’s an argument that gets made – that African retentions in American popular music are pure blackness, which is imagined as having nothing to do with Euro-American art forms, and working on a completely different principle. And I don’t know that that’s actually relevant to something like Motown, which is clearly a fusion of different kinds of streams of American culture.

I point out that Berry Gordy, who ran Motown, was a highly goal-directed individual. And everything about Motown was about delayed gratification – the Gordy family was about hard work, and about absolute delay of gratification, and all the people in that company were straight as arrows and really working hard. So the idea that Motown would put out his music that was just about (instant gratification) – that’s inconceivable to me.

One in a series of UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music faculty profiles written by students in a Fall 2009 course (Ethnomusicology 188, Lecture 3) that focused on music journalism

By Joseph Buchanan

Institutions of higher learning stress the importance of primary sources in academic research. Primary sources (also known as original sources) differ from secondary sources, in that they provide more accurate and reliable first-hand testimony to particular historical events. It can be an artifact, a hand-written document, a recording, or a human source with direct personal knowledge of the events being described.

Professor Kenny Burrell, the renowned jazz guitarist, Grammy-award winning composer and director of Jazz Studies at UCLA, is a primary source. He is an innovative pioneer, educator and expert witness to the historical development of America’s original musical art form: jazz.

In a retrospective moment with me, Burrell shared an anecdote of an intriguing encounter he had with Billie Holiday. Playing the last set of a long tour in a New York club – it was late and he was tired – Burrell was going through the motions and thinking of all the needed rest he would catch up on after the show. After the set concluded and Burrell walked past the bar in the dimly lit smoke-filled room, he was suddenly confronted by Holiday, who said in her raspy voice, “If you ever have trouble playing the music with feeling, just think of my life and all the things that I’ve been through.”

The lesson has been instrumental in shaping Burrell’s musical philosophy – an impetus for the creed he often quotes: “Strive for honesty in playing what you feel.”

When I asked professor Burrell when his encounter was, and whether the two ever worked together, he responded in a sober voice. “She was about at the end,” he said, “It was late in her career; you know, she had a hard life – it’s well documented. But earlier in her career whenever she came to Detroit she would work with my group. Yeah, we worked together a lot.”

Few people can give such a first-hand account of what it was like to know and work with iconic jazz figures like Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane, Jimmy Smith, Benny Golson, Benny Goodman, Ray Charles, Oscar Peterson, Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock and countless other originators of jazz.

Professor Burrell is an intrinsic link to a lineage of legendary and visionary musicians – developers and architects of a musical style informed by and created out of the unique experiences of African-Americans, striving to thrive in a discriminatory and segregated society. Jazz is a music predicated on the art of improvisation, innovation and playing what you feel.

How did professor Burrell avoid the pitfalls – including drug abuse – that many jazz musicians like Holiday would succumb to in the inner-city?

Like his mentor Duke Ellington, professor Burrell had a supportive family and cast of well-wishers to steer him away from the dangers that awaited the fledgling musician.

Born and raised in Detroit – fertile ground for jazz musicians – and brought up in a musical family, professor Burrell was playing guitar by the age of twelve. Among a stellar group of musical cohorts – such as Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers, Yusef Lateef, and Elvin Jones – he honed his improvisational skills and unique sound. Shortly after completing his B.A. in music from Wayne State University, he recorded his first session with Gillespie, the jazz pioneer.

After a six-month tour with the Oscar Peterson Trio, Burrell moved to New York City in 1956, and began a recording and performance career that would catapult him as one of the most sought after jazz guitarists on the scene.

His extensive discography contains more than 100 solo recordings – possibly more than any other artist in recording history, with the exception of Ellington – and a few hundred more collaborative projects. One of the world’s most acclaimed and respected jazz artists, Professor Burrell has made an impact on the careers of many noted musicians.

“Kenny Burrell is a great musician and his music has helped to make me what I am today,” Stevie Wonder has said.

“Burrell is the grand master of jazz guitar,” Gillespie noted.

Others who’ve paid tribute to him include Jimi Hendrix (“Kenny Burrell, that’s the sound I’m looking for”), Pat Metheny (“Kenny Burrell is one of my favorite guitarists”) and George Benson (“There is no finer guitarist than Kenny Burrell”).

Burrell’s unique sound has been described as warm, round, and full. In the words of guitarist Russell Malone, “it’s not cloudy or moody … just pure sound … even though he plays an electric guitar, you can hear the natural acoustics qualities of the instrument.”

“What I strive for,” Burrell tells me, “is very close to the sound of the acoustic guitar, only louder.”

Dubbed the “Guitar Laureate,” Professor Burrell has received such awards as Jazz Educator of the Year by DownBeat magazine, Jazz Master by the National Endowment of Arts, a 1988 Grammy Award for his composition “Dear Ella” (which was performed by Dee Dee Bridgewater), and the Jackie Robinson Lifetime Achievement Award from the UCLA Black Alumni Association. On January 26, the Recording Academy will honor Burrell with a Grammy salute for his 40-year career – a tribute inspired, the academy says, by Burrell’s “profound impact on jazz.”

When asked about the secret to his successful career as a musician and professor he replies modestly with a quote that carries a lesson learned from his mother: “Just do good work and the rest will follow.”

Professor Burrell is a goodwill ambassador for jazz, and his effort to elevate its status to a classical art form is tireless. Stigmatized and marginalized as a musical genre in the early stages of its development, jazz is now part of the curriculum in universities worldwide.

In 1978, Burrell established the first regularly scheduled college course about the music, life, and philosophy of Duke Ellington, a class that has enabled him to “expose jazz as a high art-form, to younger generations, and preserve the legacy of a national treasure.” Ellingtonia is still one of the most popular classes on UCLA campus.

UCLA was at the forefront in bringing jazz to academia, and in 1996 created one of the first University Jazz Studies Programs in the country. Hired on as director of the program by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (Vice Chancellor for Graduate Studies), Professor Burrell has been at the helm since its inception. Holding to his motto of “keeping the music alive through education,” he has been the visionary behind numerous symposiums, seminars, concerts, and live musical events in an effort to educate the general public about jazz and history.

Responding to a question regarding his future vision for Jazz Studies at UCLA, Professor Burrell says, “We are continuing to expand with a more well-rounded program. We are also working on creating Graduate Studies in jazz. The support of the Herb Alpert Foundation and others such as the Friends of Jazz @ UCLA (of which he is the founder and Executive Director) is allowing us to complete our mission – which is to provide the best education possible for future jazz musicians.”

The most rewarding aspect of his role as an educator, he admits, is “seeing and hearing students develop into fine musicians and knowing I played some part in that, and also, receiving feedback from students that indicates they have been inspired to continue their quest to be successful.”

In a recent class interview with Herb Alpert, the legendary trumpeter, co-founder of A&M records and avid supporter of music and arts education, Professor Burrell made a surprise visit to the conference room, after which Mr. Alpert commented: “I tell you, you’re really lucky to have a guy like that. He’s not only a great musician who comes through a whole background of the obvious, he’s a good guy. And he is inspirational.”

At UCLA, students do appreciate the added benefit of having access to primary sources. Professor Burrell is a torch-bearer for musical inspiration and education. He continues to “do good work.”