In the afternoon of Sept. 27th, invited by the musicology department of Central Conservatory of Music, the well-known American ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger came to the Conservatory and gave a wonderful lecture which was special related to the fieldwork approaches in ethnomusicology. Prof. Seeger has started his ethnomusicological research since the 1970s. His earliest work focused on the Suyá Indians of Brazil. In 1987, he published his book Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People, which becomes a classical work about an ethnographic study of the music of an isolated group and its people in domain of ethnomusicology. His published articles generally related to issues of land and human rights for Brazilian Indians, issues of archiving and intellectual property, and ethnomusicological theory and method.
In Thursday's lecture, Prof. Seeger, took his work Why Suyá Sing as a case study, mainly raised some issues related to approaches that used in the fieldwork of ethnographic study. He hoped that the approaches he used and some of the generalizations may be helpful for the professors and students' future work. In the lecture, Prof. Seeger applied lively teaching pedagogy and presented rich original materials he collected over three decades. His study reflected some features of ethnomusicology study in the West from many aspects, especially the approaches used in anthropologic and ethnographic studies.
First of all, Prof. Seeger used a fruit metaphor to interpret how important a special angel is in academic research. He picked up a banana and called it "music." Then, through cutting the "music (banana)" from different angels, he showed several different states (shapes) of this "music" to listeners. By analyzing these different parts of "music," one can gain varied descriptions about "music." Prof. Seeger's vivid demonstration drew great interests from all listeners. In this way, he stressed special links between angel, approach and result in a research. He also pointed out that how to define "music" is the primary task for an ethnomusicologist. Then, he summarized: "It is good to consider the merits and shortcomings of different approaches, and to be clear about the specific theoretical questions one seeks to address in one's own research."
Second part was a short discussion of the ethnographic approach in the study of music. Prof. Seeger interpreted his motivation's influence on his approach and fieldwork project through explaining the process of choosing Suyá people and their music as the object of his study.
Then, Prof. Seeger introduced his research about Suyá Indians' music and their society in general. In his own research, Professor emphasized that the special mission of an ethnomusicologist is to explore the interrelation between music, society and cosmology. For example, he interpreted the connection between the dualistic features in Suyá's song style and structure and the dualistic system in their time, space and social group concepts.
In the next part, he raised the core subject in his research, "Why Suyá sing?" He argued that there are series profound significances beyond Suyá people's simple and straight answer—they sing only because of happiness—in Suyá's singing. These significances related to the order of society and universe, people's relations with powerful spirit beings, the connection between the present and the past, and establishment of their identity in relationship to other groups, etc. Through analyzing his own research on Suyá's music, Prof. Seeger highlighted again that the essential purpose of ethnomusicological study is to explore the profound significant of a music phenomenon beyond the obvious reason, in other words, to discover the significant and function of music making and preserving in a society and its special connection with its cultural and social context.
After the presentation, Prof. Seeger explained in details and further discussed several issues with professors and students according to students' questions, such as researcher (i.e. Prof. Seeger himself) and outside world's influences on Suyá society, different approaches in collecting original materials and special role of informer/introducer in academic research. In the end, Prof. Seeger emphasized again, "It is important to define music as wide as possible in order to understand the relationships between the sounds and the ideas in the society and people who made them."
