6 x 9 trim. 14 illus. 3 figs. 13 musical examples. LC 98-43706

HARRIS M. BERGER is Assistant Professor of Music at Texas A & M University. A guitarist since the age of ten, he currently plays and sings with The Bee Dreams.

Metal, Rock, and Jazz

Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience

By Harris M. Berger

Wesleyan University Press

Copyright © 1999 Harris M. Berger
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8195-6376-7

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
1. An Introduction to Central Issues in Ethnomusicology and Folklore: Phenomenology and Practice Theory,
I. The Ethnography of Musical Practice,
2. Commercial Hard Rock in Cleveland, Ohio: Dia Pason and Max Panic,
3. Heavy Metal in Akron, Ohio: Winter's Bane and Sin-Eater,
4. Two Jazz Scenes in Northeast Ohio,
II. The Organization of Musical Experience and the Practice of Perception,
5. The Organization of Attention in Two Jazz Scenes,
6. The Organization of Attention in the Rock and Metal Scenes,
7. Tonality, Temporality, and the Intending Subject (1): Chris Ozimek and "Turn for the Worse",
8. Tonality, Temporality, and the Perceptual Subject (2): Dann Saladin and "The Final Silencing",
9. Conclusions: Perceptual Practice and Social Context,
III. Music, Experience, and Society: Death Metal and Deindustrialization in an American City,
10. Death Metal Perspectives: Affect, Purpose, and the Social Life of Music,
11. A Critical Dialogue on the Politics of the Metal Underground: Race, Class, and Consequence,
12. Conclusion: The Scope of Ethnomusicology,
Notes,
Glossary,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to Central Issues in Ethnomusicology and Folklore

Phenomenology and Practice Theory

* * *

We are forced, finally, by the nature of meaning itself as the construct of a reader always already situated within an interpretive context, to conduct empirical research into the identities of real readers, into the nature of the assumptions they bring to the texts, and into the character of the interpretations they produce. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance

This is a study of four music scenes in northeastern Ohio: the commercial hard rock scene of Cleveland, the death metal scene of Akron, the African American jazz scene of Cleveland's east side, and the European American jazz scene of Akron. The research for the study was conducted in 1992 and 1993 and involved fourteen months of participant/observation fieldwork and more than four hundred hours of interviews and live musical recordings. Part I presents a general ethnography of the musical life in the four scenes. Like most ethnographies, these chapters describe what I call the "medial level" of social life: everyday practices and typical contexts of music making, the overall sound of the music, and the main meanings of the music to the people who make it and listen to it. Throughout the study, the descriptive, ethnographic aim is yoked with a theoretic one. In Part I, I compare the four ethnographic portraits to reveal how seemingly natural musical activities (composition, rehearsal, performance) are at once deeply informed by social context and are actively achieved by the participants. The central concept here is the doubly constitutive nature of musical practice — that musical activity constitutes both the meaning of the music in the participant's experience and the music scene as a social group.

Part II tightens the focus to examine the participants' experiences of musical sound and speaks to questions of meaning, affect, and aesthetics. Chapters 5 and 6 show how musicians from the four scenes achieve the tasks of performance by foregrounding and backgrounding the various elements of their experience: reflective thought, affect, and perceptions of the musical sound, the other players, the audience, and their own bodies. By comparing across metal, rock, and jazz, we see how the musician's organization of attention is tied to musical goals and broader social projects specific to each scene. Chapters 7 and 8 further narrow the focus and explore how participants from the rock and metal scenes experience particular songs. Comparing traditional harmonic analyses of the songs with the participant's own descriptions, these chapters show that the tonality of a piece of music is not inherent in the sound but is an artifact of the listener's perceptual arrangement of that sound in the living present. Taken as a whole, Part II depicts perception as a kind of social practice, conduct both actively achieved by the practitioner and profoundly informed by his or her social context.

Part III shifts the focus again and explores the relationship between situated musical activity and large-scale political and economic conditions. Chapter 10 examines the musical uses, encompassing aesthetic projects, and broad social beliefs of death metal guitarist Dann Saladin. Chapter 11 presents a dialogue between Saladin and myself on the politics of death metal. Tacking between academic criticisms of metal and insider perspectives, the dialogue sheds new light on complex issues of race and class in American society.

Finally, building on the traditional insights of ethnomusicology, the Conclusion suggests how the notions of practice and experience can be used to understand the full range of social and musical life: from the micro-level constitution of musical meanings in perception, to the typical acts and routine situations of the everyday world, to the large-scale social and historical forces that inform music making.

The emphasis on practice and experience is part of a broad trend in the twentieth-century intellectual arena. Pursued from a range of scholarly traditions and with differing amounts of programmatic self-consciousness, this trend has been particularly important in my home disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology. The first half of this Introduction examines how this trend has played itself out at selected moments in these fields. My goal here is not to produce an exhaustive disciplinary history but to examine key achievements and point out ripe opportunities which currently exist for research organized around these concepts. The second half of this Introduction explores and synthesizes ideas from phenomenology and practice theory and suggests how such a synthesis can forward this larger trend. Although this study examines the lives of musicians playing specific styles of vernacular music in a specific locality, its findings provide new insights into the interpretation of musical experience and the role of expressive culture in society.

Folklore and the Problem of Study Object

An intellectual tradition whose history spans over two hundred and fifty years, folklore studies is a logical point of departure for those interested in popular music. Folklorists have long been concerned with the relationship between expressive culture and its social contexts, and in everyday life, jazz and rock are often casually referred to as types of "folk music." By examining how past folklorists have conceptualized the study object of their research, we can shed light on the broader theoretical issues that animate this study.

Folklore's historic geographic tradition presents an interesting starting place. The historic geographic method is an approach to literary history that uses documentary evidence to trace the diffusion of folklore across large tracts of space and time. For example, in his canonical "Folklore Methodology" ([1926] 1971), Kaarle Krohn presents exquisitely detailed ground rules for teasing out the historical relationships between archival texts. The thoroughness and reason of Krohn's method is astounding and far exceeds much of the diffusionist anthropology of the time. His intense focus on the literary artifact, however, draws attention away from the fact that "the text" is only useful here as a record of tales told and tales transmitted. While the historic geographic folklorist Carl Wilhelm Von Sydow (1948) depicted "tale migration" as an epiphenomenon of practices of tale telling and the contingencies of social history (migration, culture contact, social organization within a community), most of his contemporaries took the text as a thing-in-itself rather than as a problematic record of past practices and experiences. Here I shall use "textual empiricism" to refer to any scholarly approach that treats the text alone as its object of study. Such a treatment is more complex than it may first seem and entails the severing of a variety of critical links between the text, its constitution in experience, and its social production.

The dominant paradigm of pre-1960s folklore was collection, classification, and analysis, and this approach can be used to illustrate some of the difficulties of textual empiricism. Publishing decontextualized and unanalyzed collections of ballads or proverbs, writers like George Lyman Kittredge (1905, 1907, 1908, 1909) and Archer Taylor reflected the prevailing idea that the "text itself" was folklore's object of study. While this work has served as an invaluable primary source for countless research projects, the assumption underlying such collectivism was that meaning resides in the text and is uninfluenced by the event in which it emerges, the fieldwork process, and any larger social contexts. Research on generic classification employed similar perspectives. In Andre Jolles's classic Einfache Formen (1965), or Max Lüthi's phenomenology of German fairy tales (1948), characteristics inherent in the text are believed to locate it in a particular literary category. The same orientation underlies Stith Thompson's great motif index (1955). Dissecting texts into individual motif units and organizing those units into a massive system, Thompson assumes that the motif units are implied by the literary work itself and that the text is comprehensible in its autonomy. This approach is most pronounced in grand analytic projects like Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (1911) and Kittredge's Witchcraft in Old and New England (1929). These scholars mined ethnographies and folklore archives for descriptions of the beliefs and practices of cultural others and treated decontextualized items of folklore as the basic unit of analysis. While Frazer and Kittredge saw their texts as records of social activities, their treatment of custom as an isolatable unit of data severs the practice from the situated event and broader cultural milieu. Setting aside the biases inherent in the larger evolutionist project of these works, this kind of radical decontextualization distorts the meaning of the folklore and jeopardizes any theoretical conclusions to be drawn from it.

If textual empiricism separates the text from practices of production and experiences of meaning, a variety of folklorists in the pre-1960s period moved in more humanistic directions. While many of Franz Boas's publications focused on artifacts or texts (1955; 1966; 1970, 58–392), there was almost always a sense in his work that the textual evidence implicated human practices, and similar approaches can be seen in his students' studies of expressive culture (for example, Bunzel 1929; Benedict 1969; Reichard 1928). In a related vein, many scholars of folklore's literary tradition (Lomax and Lomax 1938; Korson 1938, 1943; Botkin 1944) surrounded their collected texts with descriptions of social context. Such text-context "sandwiches" vivified their studies and suggested the situated nature of meaning. For all the diversity of folklore scholarship before the 1960s, however, the problem of study object did not become the focus of theoretical debate until the development of performance studies. In foundational works such as Albert Lord's Singer of Tales (1960) or Dell Hymes's "Ethnography of Speaking" (1962) and later statements such as Towards New Perspectives (Paredes and Bauman 1972), we see both literary and anthropological attempts to interpret folklore texts as evidence of situated expressive practices. It was in this period that textualism versus contextualism became the central debate in folklore studies.

If the text is a record of a performance, and if the performance is the object of study, then, performance theory suggested, the text must expand to represent all the dimensions of the performative act. From this insight emerged research into the ethnopoetic study of verbal art (for example, Tedlock 1972; Bright 1979; Sherzer 1987; Woodbury 1987) and the folkloristic study of kinesics (Fine 1984). While these scholars substantially increased the scope and richness of folklore studies, their work treated the text as a representation of events in the objective world, as behaviors rather than actions or experiences. Such an approach detaches the text from the act of performance and the experience of meaning, and reestablishing those linkages in analysis produces problems of significance, intention, and method. Elizabeth C. Fine's The Folklore Text (1984), for example, augmented verbal transcriptions with schematic representations of the gestures that accompanied the performance. While Fine's transcripts are highly suggestive, it is not clear which of the transcribed gestures are significant or what they might mean. Similarly it is not clear which if any of the gestures were intended, when such intention emerged, or with what detail. Such problems bring us full circle to the process of transcription. Without addressing the problem of intention and significance, how does the transcribing scholar know what level of detail to notate? Are only gross movements of the limbs worth transcribing, or should facial expression and hand gesture be depicted as well? Similar inquiries can be made of the enriched texts produced by those from the ethnopoetics school. Scholars like Sherzer and Woodbury transcribe the pitch contours, pauses, and grammatical structure of oral poetry and use the transcriptions to search for structural relationships among those features. While such scholarship sheds light on previously ignored dimensions of expressive culture, similar questions emerge: What level of detail of pitch contour or prosody is worth transcribing? Do the structural relationships between the features have meaning? Are they intentional? Do they emerge in the participant's experiences? If so, how? How can we determine if the structural relationships are spurious correlations? If they are not, what is the significance of those correlations?

A different perspective on the problem of study object comes from looking at some specific programmatic statements in performance theory. Richard Bauman's 1989 essay "Performance" in the International Encyclopedia of Communications lays out three definitions of the word performance and offers crucial insights into the achievements and challenges of the performance school. Bauman's first definition equates performance with enactment (for example, the performance of a play as opposed to the script). Though this sense of the term is infrequently used as a formal definition of performance studies, the general orientation toward situated activity animates much of contemporary folklore scholarship. A second definition narrows the first to construe performance as a special mode of conduct — heightened, aesthetic action oriented toward an other in communication. Such a perspective is reminiscent of Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology (1967), seeking as it does to use structural features of interaction to reveal universal categories of expressive behavior. As a formal statement of theoretical orientation, however, the most widely employed is the third definition — performance as opposed to competence. Such a perspective finds its roots in Dell Hymes's "Ethnography of Speaking" (1962) and its fullest flower in Charles Briggs's Competence in Performance (1988). In designing his seminal program, Hymes modified Chomsky's vision of competence as an unconscious, synchronic system of grammatical rules to include knowledge of interactional norms and generic categories. Competence's diametric opposite, performance, is modified to include the application of past cultural knowledge to present contexts. Such modifications serve to humanize the purely formal systems of grammar that Chomsky envisioned as descriptions of the neurological basis of language.

But modifying competence and switching the emphasis to performance does not overcome the difficulties of these structuralist assumptions. Even in highly sophisticated studies like Briggs's, competence is seen as a synchronic system; as a result, change is difficult, if not impossible, to account for. Further, the system of competence is understood as subconscious and completely outside of the subject's experience. As a result, competence is divorced from the subject's meaningful action and the study object recedes into a realm that is, by definition, inaccessible to both the participant and the researcher. I have argued elsewhere that change and agency mutually implicate each other (Berger 1991), and here that connection is vital. If a person can neither experience nor change the underlying system of competence, then it is difficult to see linguistic behavior as the product of agency — the subject's active intervention in the world. Hymes's modifications of Chomsky's performance fail to convert it into practice or fully remove its antihumanism in the same way that Talcott Parsons's "action" fails to have any relationship to agency or responsibility (on Parsons, see Giddens 1993, 21–22). Like the posited objective reality in subjective idealism or the unconscious in Freud, the vision of competence as a priori inaccessible turns Chomskian linguistics — and any orientation that defines performance, however modified, in opposition to competence — into a kind of metaphysics. Throughout, I shall use "metaphysics" to refer to any theoretical orientation or philosophical approach that defines its study object as essentially inaccessible to the subject's experience. Understood in this way, most forms of phenomenology can be understood as attempts to overcome metaphysics.

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