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Write-up – Fieldwork
Jon Fernquest, MUS678B Dr.Fairfield,

On Fieldwork (1989) by Jackson, addresses practical questions about the process of doing
fieldwork in folklore studies. This would include “folk music,” making it relevant for
ethnomusicological fieldwork. This book provides a wealth of practical tips and insights which are
gleaned and presented here for future use in the field.

The author poses some provoking practical questions like, what if an informant sings a song you
don’t like? Do you edit it out of the corpus and not include it? What exactly is the nature of the filter
that fieldworkers use to include items of music in their final corpus for analysis? Or again, what about
songs that are not original or “authentic” in some sense? Songs that someone learned from the radio or
the “jukebox,” for instance? But isn’t the reworking of musical material in various ways, such as
improvisations on jazz standards in jazz, fairly common in all music? What about how the informant
responds to your presentation of self? Are there ways to self-reflectively adjust the way you present
yourself to your research subjects to become more effective as a fieldworker? How does one encourage
conversation?

He also suggests that learning about failed fieldwork would also be informative and useful. This
includes fieldwork that did not work out as planned, such as searches for traditions that don’t actually
exist or errors in planning or strategy. He notes that fieldwork involves “other people” which makes it
“one of the most intensely personal kinds of scholarly research.” The author notes that fieldworkers can
tell you a lot about the context of the study, but can they ever really know how their own presence as a
fieldworker in that context altered that context? Thus, being there, with one’s own embodied presence
in the field is important:

“The only way the student can appreciate the kind of information found in the materials being
studied in class is by engaging in the experience of producing this information.”

Involvement in collecting folklore material such as “folk music” serves as an essential rite of passage
for scholars in this field.

He addresses the question of “why do fieldwork,” suggesting some typical reasons to do

fieldwork, citing first fulfilling some educational requirement, which although it sounds dull and
maybe even kind of a stupid reason, is in fact the original motive for doing ethnomusicological
fieldwork, a necessary apprenticeship before one can hang out a shingle and claim that one is a
ethnomusicologist. The second is preservation of something in danger of being lost which is called
“salvage folklore.” The third is “I like this thing I am studying” which is almost universally true for
folklorists since it is a sort of a labor of love. He notes this makes it easier to interact with other people
when they they know that you love their music, that you are studying. The informant is excited about
the subject and so are you the researcher, so you can share your enthusiasms. This is in contrast to
something that no one likes, for instance “homicide” in criminology. An informant might reasonably
ask why one was studying such a morbid and depressing subject (which I personally experience all the
time). This also raises the issue of giving back to those you are studying. Does your study provide them
with any benefit, is a good question to ask. The number of students studying Hawaiians has led to an
overload of budding fieldworkers entering Hawaiian communities to the point where this has become
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cumbersome and an issue. Hawaiian communities thus now control research access to their
communities.

The author notes that there are three phases to fieldwork: planning, collecting and analyzing.
Observation usually means watching from the outside, but “participant observation” means that one is
watching from the inside being involved in the events. This could entail working in an office or factory
or living in a community or participating in some activity (drinking, fishing, picnicking). He also points
out that because these are human subjects being researched there are ethical questions. The researcher
might unintentionally do something that endangered informants in some way, so there is a bureaucracy
within universities nowadays that monitors human subject research called the Internal Review Board
(IRB) that researchers must get project approval from before they go into the field. If one witnesses a
crime being committed and then includes it a publicly available report, human subjects might be
endangered. This can be rather easy in some countries. In Thailand, an offhand comment about
monarchy could constitute a major crime. Dr. Lee likes to use an example from the 1990s when a
Stanford researcher witnessed mass forced abortions by the Chinese state and made this information
publicly available thus endangering his research subjects. He ended getting kicked out of his PhD
program. This is the sort of incident that led to IRB bureaucracies to monitor the research of students
and faculty. Related to this, the author talks about a balance between involvement and detachment. For
instance, personal romantic relationships could be considered unethical, but undoubtedly do happen.

One year is cited as a natural unit of time for a study for most communities and this can be
repeated. He also points out that folklorists rarely attempt to understand whole communities. They
study “individuals, genres, processes.” Folklore fieldwork is said to be a little less immersive than
anthropological fieldwork and it is said to involve both observation and interviewing.

Interviewing is said to be the quickest way to get information such as personal history which is a
point pretty much proved out by reporters and journalists who rely on quick interviews, not having the
time for time-consuming participant observation. However, interview is not good for many sorts of
information such as that of a more intimate kind that is best approached with a long-term commitment
as a participant observer. As the author observes, “interviews and questionnaires intrude as a foreign
element into the setting.” One can contrast the unnatural act of interviewing a friend which can be quite
uncomfortable to do. If one interacts naturally with people overtime and gains their trust, one can get a
deeper understanding of a situation. Participant observation is, however, time-consuming.

As for recording performances, a lot of what one records will be in a highly structured context
such as a wedding, one of the most important contexts for informal musical performance, or a
performance at a festival. Recordings should be supplemented with interviews.

Next, the author moves to the subject of rapport in fieldwork or cultivating a friendly relationship
with those you are studying. Interviews turn the subject into an object, with the audio recorder
heightening this effect. So, one really has to work on rapport in interviews to overcome this. An
anecdote is given about a plan to make a book of interviews with famous friends, but it was not
possible. The awkwardness of interviewing one’s own friend necessitated stepping outside the
friendship which was not possible. Strangers paradoxically have an advantage in interviewing which
the author calls “stranger value.” People will tell things to outsiders that they will not tell intimate
insiders. Friends are also careful to offend, whereas a stranger can get away with asking potentially
embarrassing or offensive things, if done appropriately with rapport. Why people even talk to you at all
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is largely a function of rapport. There are things that kill rapport immediately such as inappropriate
sexual advances, joking negatively about other people or sneering at another’s religion or making
negative comments in general. Getting too drunk, getting caught lying, ruin rapport. Having a well-
known celebrity or VIP with you that everyone knows can, of course, open doors and build rapport.
Also a sort of “turning the other cheek” or reverse psychology attitude, can prove useful, if the person
being interviewed shows hostility towards you. An anecdote is used to convey this technique, in which
a nurse is of cornered by a woman who is a known psychopathic murderer in a mental hospital. The
nurse quickly blurts out “You want to kiss me, how nice,” which save the nurse’s life.

CHECKLIST BEFORE SETTING OFF FOR FIELDWORK

The chapter “Fieldwork” by Helen Myers in the Handbook of Ethnomusicology (1992) is a very
practical chapter that consists largely of a checklist of rather mundane things to do before setting off for
fieldwork in a remote place, thus only a few items mentioned of a higher order nature are included
here.

The importance of being well-organized and keeping lists and logs of everything one does
everyday while doing fieldwork research is stressed (38-41). It would be interesting to see some
practical case studies of how people actually stay organized in the field and how this organization later
helps them write their dissertation and articles (one wonders how our teacher Ben went about it).
Another useful thing to know is that some researchers have shared their interview questionnaires in
their publications, so these real-life examples might be a good place to start making one’s own (37). A
nice feasibility check-list is also provided to help one assess whether your envisioned project is doable
or not (26-7).

EMIC VS. ETIC: FROM TRANSCRIPTION TO MUSICAL ANALYSIS

“Ethnomusicology and the Emic-Etic Issue” (1993) by Alvarez-Pereyre and Arom starts out with
a highly abstract discussion of the notions “emic” and “etic” without much background for the
neophyte. This is sorely needed since the heyday of this topic was the 1990s. The anthropological
definitions of “emic” as “seeing things from the point of view of the subject within a different culture”
and “etic” as “seeing things from the outside observer’s perspective,” is a familiar enough one.
However, this discussion assumes a much more sophisticated usage of the term from the so-called
“tagnemics” theory of linguist Kenneth Pike (Note: Tagnemics is associated with the Summer Institute
of Linguistics (SIL) organization, the training organization for the Wycliffe bible translators’
international operations, which for instance constitutes the linguistics department at Payap University
in Thailand, that specializes in linguistic fieldwork, so tagnemics does have a very practical orientation
towards the practical linguistic problems of translation and language preservation that is apparently
applicable to music as well).

The practical aims of the article soon become apparent, namely to provided a framework for
systematically thinking about and tackling the problem of music transcription. We have been doing this
all semester long as we have tried to grapple with transcribing music of increasing sophistication.

The article only sketches the outline of a system which I will try to convey here, but what is
really needed are some fully worked out examples. This could constitute the beginnings of a much-
needed textbook for ethnomusicological transcription and musical analysis.
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The author finds that linguistic models are “immanent in the work of many ethnomusicologists,”
thus linguistics, especially that of the Kenneth Pike tagnemics type, may prove useful. By forming a
method for transcription and musical analysis that runs parallel, in an analogous fashion to linguistics,
one may be able to systematize the process, the reasoning goes:

“The first step is always a preliminary transcription, the initial phase in the cultural approach to
Pike's physical continuum, in which the student will seek regularities on levels or planes of
whose existence he has no prior knowledge... apparently simple material may well hide a
complex form of order. Whatever the case, the problem is to discover the criteria of
distinctiveness which prevail in the material under study” (17)

A concrete example is given of this “progression from etics to emics,” from generalized analysis to
delineating what is culturally relevant for music within this analysis:

“...two authors working on musical scales, one in New Guinea, the other in Africa, discover
after a preliminary transcription that, in the former case, pitch is meaningless in itself (only
intervals are relevant... while in the latter, only the order of the degrees is meaningful… not the
size of the intervals” (17).

Another example is given how quarter tones were found to be culturally meaningful as basic emic
units:

“lt was still to be established whether quarter tones were actual scale tones or fluctuations. On
the basis that quarter tones were frequent in the data and clearly distinguishable from an
adjacent tone with which they could at times be suspected of fluctuating, and on the basis that
quarter tones are sung in unison by a group without deviation by any participant, it was
concluded that quarter tones had an identity separate from that of semitones and formed
boundaries for the phonemic interval of a quarter tone” (17).

The same process has occurred in our transcription assignments when we have had to decide
what basic emic units to transcribe, for instance a drum sound at a particular pitch. Other things might
be left out as not being culturally meaningful, such as the overall oscillating tempo of the drumming,
sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down or a stray sound that sounds like a cat but could be a
musical instrument. Some things may be culturally meaningful, such as the overtones produced in
throat singing, yet infeasible to fully transcribe without deeper analysis and thought about what the
basic emic units are. This was the case with Inuit throat singing which held the features of
voiced/unvoiced and exhalation/inhalation to be culturally significant for this Inuit music, whereas in
most other musics they are not significant features.

The procedure behind making the progression from etic to emic is summarized:

"The first step is to make an etic transcription by ear.... Then tables are drawn up to show the
distribution of the intervals of the song by song. Detailed analysis proceeds on the basis of these
tables. The first aim is to determine whether the distribution of each type of interval (major with
respect to minor intervals, conjoint intervals with respect to all the others) is predictable. A view
of interval features is then obtained by showing the relationship between each type of interval
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and the environments in which it occurs. Finally, the emic interval system is validated on the
basis of the criteria of similarity” (18).

The author sketches how musical analysis would proceed in a manner analogous to linguistic analysis.

"The musical equivalent of a phoneme in language is the minimal melodic signal, defined by
the fact that its pitch contrasts with that of all other signals of the same type which together
constitute a scalar system or musical scale" (20)

Segmentation divides a musical utterance or phrase into morphemes or minimal meaningful units. A
paradigm is defined as “all the units which can be substituted for one another in the same
context.” If one has ever taken Latin or Sanskrit one has memorized dozens of grammatical paradigms
with different cases of a word substitutable for a word in a certain place in the sentence giving different
meanings to the sentence. The definitions continue: “commutation is the test by which it can be shown
that the substitution of one element for another results in a difference on the plane of content.” The
syntagmatic, not addressed here, is the grouping of words or morphemes into clauses or phrases, units
with successively higher levels of parentheses around them, which provide a hierarchical (parse) tree
structure to a sentence.

All of this is part of so-called “semiotics,” of which Saussure was the founder. The Canadian
ethnomusicologist Nattiez cited in this paper does “musical semiology” or the “semiotics of music,” all
worth looking into during summer reading, but beyond the scope of this short write-up. In the final
analysis, my main criticism is that more examples of how this system works are needed, and less
abstract definitions.