One of the most important activities in which ethnomusicologists engage is the practice of fieldwork. Fieldwork can mean traveling abroad to a place where the locals look quite different from yourself, or it might mean locating musicians to work with in your own city or country. It might focus on music that you have never yet heard performed live, or it could focus on music that you have listened to your entire life. Because ethnomusicological study encompasses all the world’s music, you might study popular or classical music, or electronic music, or combinations of traditional and other sounds, or music online (which itself pushes out the boundary of what constitutes fieldwork). There is no question that fieldwork is one of the hardest things we do, and one of the most worthwhile. It is also something of a litmus test for ethnomusicologists; we ask each other questions like “where do you do your work?” all the time, and we aren’t talking about our day jobs.

In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the popular image of the fieldwork experience might have involved an older white male headed out to some place regarded by his friends and family as impossibly exotic, spending time there talking to the “natives,” usually through an interpreter, and presenting the results of his work to society matrons at home. This is a classic image of early anthropology, searingly lampooned by cartoonist Gary Larson (of “The Far Side” cartoon series); and yet, the image is not entirely accurate. In the following cartoon, Gary Larson presents the “natives” rushing to hide their VCR and other accoutrements of contemporary life before the visiting anthropologists on their personal fieldwork expedition find out that no place is uninfluenced by the outside world, wherever that may be.

The images in this cartoon are straight out of classic “exotic other” nightmares: the local people wearing bones in their hair, the near-caveman fashions, and the (male) anthropologists clad head-to-toe in khaki with glasses. Its generic rendering of the locals, working hard to maintain their “primitive” image, the (male) anthropologists looking exactly the same in regulation khaki, no matter where they go, and the clash between naïve anthropological expectations and reality reminds us that we all can be the subject of comedic rendering. Gary’s familiarity with anthropology gives him the perspective of an insider, and enables him to make these wonderful, cringe-worthy images that adorn the halls of both anthropology and ethnomusicology departments all over North America.

The persistent image of the early anthropologist is belied by the fact that women were some of the early fieldworkers as well, in both anthropology and ethnomusicology. Francis Densmore did significant fieldwork (and published many books) about musical culture in various Native American tribes, and one of her iconic images graces the covers of several important books. We are not all white, or male, or Christian, or American, and I have never yet seen an ethnomusicologist wearing head-to-toe khaki! Fieldwork by ethnomusicologists, then, is not restricted. Everyone and anyone can do fieldwork, for better or worse. My goal in this chapter is to help you consider doing it better rather than worse! In learning to do fieldwork well, some training, some examples of fieldwork, and some understanding of the past is in order.

There is no getting around the fact that some of the first fieldwork was done as part of a colonial or missionary effort. This is part of our collective legacy, and we accept the harsh reality that some of the first people in the field were paid to do their work by the same organizations and governments that were also paying people to exert violent control over local communities. This legacy and our awareness of it does not, however, mean that we can assume that everything we do now is ethical and right and appropriate for the communities in which we work. It is our job, as ethnomusicologists, to walk that fine line between pursuing fieldwork as a way to know more about a group of people and the music they play, and understanding that our very best intentions may be misinterpreted and even used against us or against others. As a very mild example, choosing a particular genre of music to study (and receiving a grant to do fieldwork, and writing about that musical genre and the people who listen to it) has the potential to promote one genre (and its enthusiasts) over another. That promotion could lower local appreciation of another genre, potentially leading to its disappearance or changing the status of the musicians who perform it. This is just one example, but it happens. By the fact of who we are, we necessarily have an impact on the people (and musical traditions) we work with. Ethnomusicologists do good works all the time, and they make mistakes all the time.[i]

Now let’s consider what constitutes fieldwork. If you’ve made it this far in school, you must have done research. It turns out that there is a continuum between doing research and doing fieldwork. You can spend years of your life combing through libraries, examining endless online resources, digging around in archives, reading newspaper articles from the 19^th century, and exploring texts or measuring instruments or analyzing recordings. Some of this can involve travel to a specific research site (an archive in the Netherlands, for example, or a musical instrument museum somewhere). Some of it can be done in one’s own hometown. This is one side of the continuum, and even if you’re doing this kind of work you still connect with other interested people to share resources and help you to focus your attention on what’s important. Even if the music you are working on is no longer performed, or if the main subject of your study has died (for example), you can still carry out important and effective work.[ii]

How Does One Do “Fieldwork”?

Today, fieldwork has one key issue tied to its success: face-to-face contact. One can (and often has to) supplement this contact with e-mail, phone calls, Skype, and other means of communication. Such necessary correctives were not available to the early ethnomusicologists, but now they can help to facilitate an essential two-way dialogue between the fieldworker and the musician, with the added benefit of the scholar often being a competent musician and the musician being a scholar within his or her own tradition. This kind of collaborative work is gaining credence and acceptance as one of the many “normal” ways to do fieldwork. Fieldwork is, however, often something of a grand finale to one’s years of graduate-level training in ethnomusicology (and anthropology), with multiple practice runs in advance of the Big One.

Another important tactic that many ethnomusicologists use for learning about music and musicians is called Participant/Observation. Described most famously and thoroughly by the anthropologist James Spradley[iii] and duplicated by hundreds of others, participant/observation in ethnomusicological terms refers to the physical, hands-on learning of a musical genre while observing the musicians who do it. It is simultaneously challenging and deeply fulfilling to do this kind of work in the field; not everyone does it, but participant/observation brings you right into the thick of performance practice, jam sessions, active lessons, and even something of the mindset of local musicians working to improve their skills. It also keeps you thoroughly occupied in practice when your teachers are busy.

A fieldwork situation encountered by many ethnomusicologists might run as follows: after spending several years in graduate school – and often in intensive language study – the budding ethnomusicologist applies for grants and might be lucky enough to receive one. Getting one’s things in order (putting everything in storage, buying equipment that you hope will last, arranging for a visa in the host country) can be, quite simply, a chaotic mess. A long flight or series of flights ensue, followed by too-slow recovery from jet lag and long waits at immigration/visa buildings, often at the edge of town or someplace hours away from the research site, and reachable only through hitching rides on the backs of local motorcycle drivers. This process can take several weeks. When the fieldworker has finally settled in, located a place to live, and located a teacher or teachers, things begin to fall into a rhythm.

Because musicians have normal lives to lead like everyone else, their lives cannot grind to a halt simply because a foreign fieldworker has come to stay for a year or two. So you, the fieldworker, make yourself useful in ways that are culturally appropriate. You might attend social events that do not always include music, help take children to school, carry equipment or instruments to gigs, translate things that might need translating (from a recording contract to the current English-language soap opera on television), and be generally available to your teacher. In making yourself indispensable, you enter into a relationship with your teacher that is mutually beneficial. You might get private lessons, or be part of group lessons, or you may receive no lessons at all from your primary teacher, working instead with an assistant or apprentice at a lower level. You may attend concerts as you make new friends, or travel to neighboring towns or villages as well. This is all fieldwork.

You may also have to go to “the field” somewhere in your own country, or even do research within your own family. For example, your great uncle or aunt might be one of the great singer/storytellers from his or her region in Latvia, or Cambodia, or Nigeria, or Virginia. This, too, is fieldwork. You are never just a receptacle; you have opinions and insights and questions, and one of your goals should be to build and nurture a relationship, or an array of relationships, that sustain you both, your whole life. If you are an inquisitive and helpful person, you honor not only the local teacher(s), but also the tradition that you are studying. Becoming a person of value is essential, and that doesn’t just mean that you pay money to everyone you meet (though occasionally it might feel like that).

The duration of fieldwork varies. Some ethnomusicologists view their fieldwork site as a kind of second home; they might spend an initial fieldwork period of a year or two, but return frequently to visit. Another might build relationships or even marry a local person, becoming connected to his or her fieldwork site through marriage and long-term friendships. Still others travel in short visits of a month or two, over and over, with each visit deepening and broadening their understanding of the place and its people. Each person conducts fieldwork somewhat differently from anyone else, because one cannot assume an identical field situation to occur in Gambia, Uruguay, and Burma. Furthermore, each fieldworker automatically generates a unique experience by being a unique person. One’s gender, race, class, religious and sexual orientation, age, upbringing, training, and language skills all play a role in determining the nature of one’s experience in the field. A master musician might also be located in one’s hometown; sometimes graduate schools invite and employ visiting artists as temporary faculty so that the graduate students can learn the basics of fieldwork right in their own “home” department.[iv]

Ethnomusicologists sometimes like to joke about their relative degree of hardship experienced in the field. The following conversation was overheard at a conference:

“Man! I saw so many spiders in the field!”

“Ohhhhh, me too! There was one that was this big!” (spreads out right hand)

“Mine were bigger. And they catch birds.” (raised eyebrow)

“Mine too. I always had to be careful when I walked into the kitchen because they’d come scuttling across the floor like this.” (walks fingers rapidly up his outstretched arm)

“You had a kitchen?” (triumphant smirk; bystanders laugh)

Surely the ethnomusicologist who had no kitchen won the contest of who suffered more! This kind of one-upmanship is not necessary to become an ethnomusicologist, but it does reveal a deeper necessity in ethnomusicology: doing fieldwork. Without the litmus test (or crash-test dummy moment, depending on how you feel about it) experience of fieldwork, something is considered lacking in one’s overall training. But do you have to conceptualize fieldwork as a one-dimensional hardship test? No. Not at all.

Ethnomusicologists carefully research the conditions of the place in which they plan to carry out fieldwork, and spend a great deal of time preparing. If the music that has caught your attention is performed in the palaces of Central Java, that requires one type of preparation. Whether the music is performed only in the Mississippi Delta, or Murmansk in Northwestern Russia, or Tierra del Fuego in southernmost South America, each place requires its own preparation. Passion for music is a must, of course, but stepping well outside one’s comfort zones – physical, emotional, linguistic, and musical – can also play an important role in successful fieldwork. What is the weather like? Can you eat the food? Can you speak the local language? Is the person you are (your age, your gender, your personality type, etc.) acceptable to local people? If not, what steps do you need to take?

Behaving, dressing, eating, and communicating appropriately is essential, even if you find these to be the hardest things you have ever done. Some people create a fieldworker persona for themselves – I did (several, in fact) – that can help pave the way toward being an effective scholar/musician in the field. You also need to recognize that the musician part of your personality may be at odds with the scholarly side. Coming home at 4 am after a fantastic night of music and camaraderie is not necessarily conducive to pounding out thirty pages of fieldnotes; I always went straight to sleep myself. However, I realized that if I (privately) wrote down very specific memory cues on every visit to the restroom during the evening, I could wake up the next morning and write for hours about what had happened. It worked for me and prevented me from being the obvious fieldworker in khaki. However, it might not work for you and the people you work with; each fieldworker finds his or her own method.

Paying for Fieldwork

It must be nice to get a pile of money and go off somewhere in the world (preferably a beautiful location with excellent food and glorious music) and live the easy life while someone else is paying for it. Speaking as a working ethnomusicologist, I think that’s a pretty nice image myself. It turns out that people have all kinds of ways of paying for their fieldwork time. One important way of paying for fieldwork is to write and receive a grant. In order to do this, you have to be an excellent writer, which means you have mastered the basics of writing (complete sentences, “normal” grammar and punctuation, good structural organization, and complete avoidance of the way you might have learned how to write text messages). In writing a grant, you isolate a need for the research (why it’s necessary), you figure out what it is that you want to learn (for example, about the connection between gender issues and music in Japan), decide on a particular approach (for example, live in northern Japan for a year), and plan for the results of your work (for example, writing about it) and what you will do with the results (for example, publish your results as a series of articles in various academic and popular journals).

Plenty of online resources can steer you to organizations that offer grants, including the American Folklife Center (http://www.loc.gov/folklife/other.html), the Society for Ethnomusicology list of funding sources (http://webdb.iu.edu/sem/scripts/links/linkentries.cfm?lcID=21), and the University of Washington Anthropology Department’s list of fellowships and funding sources for graduate students (http://depts.washington.edu/anthweb/programs/grad_fellowship.php). Other sources are out there, and sources change as money is newly accrued or dries up. These three websites, however, are from stable web resources and are updated periodically.

Grants are not the only way to fund one’s fieldwork, however. Ethnomusicologists conduct fieldwork in a variety of ways (see below, “Case Studies in Fieldwork”); it follows, then, that their sources of funding vary significantly. In many cases, the airplane ticket is the main cost of fieldwork. In my own case, I spent $2000 on airplane tickets (expensive) but $100 a month for my rental of a three-bedroom house (cheap), so once I had managed to arrive at my field site, it was quite inexpensive to live there. I had a grant of $18,000 (intended for one year) from the Institute of International Education (Fulbright), plus what little I had of my own money. I was able to stay in Indonesia for two years instead of just one. Shipping home my instruments proved to be another significant expense, but at that point I was down to using a credit card. As a teacher, sometimes the institution where you work can pay for the airfare only, and you have to pay for the rest of it through other means. You can offer language lessons (in English or some other language) in exchange for music lessons; you can work for a local company for money or traded services and goods; you can save your money for a couple of years and pay for the entire experience on your own. Most of us have to save up our money prior to doing fieldwork, and combine that with the money from a group of sources to pay for it.

Case Studies in Fieldwork

I asked a number of ethnomusicologists, including myself, to briefly talk about our fieldwork experiences, so that you can come to understand not only what it is that we do, but also the diversity of people, approaches, and areas in which we do our work. Keep in mind as you read these that there are as many approaches to fieldwork as there are ethnomusicologists, and that ethnomusicologists reading this may well frown and say: “Hey! My experience was different from all of these! Why didn’t Sean ask me to write for this?” Once you have read these case studies, where would you like to live and work? It is important to assess your own temperament; are you shy (but can pretend to be gregarious)? Are you willing to be laughed at or robbed or treated as an interloper? Are you willing to sit for hours at a time, listening to music? Can you write about music yet? But wait – I’m getting ahead of myself.

A Case Study: Fieldwork in Indonesia (Sean Williams)

I spent almost two years in the city of Bandung in the highlands of West Java, Indonesia. At the time, I was in my late 20s, and I am a white female from Berkeley, California. My music of choice was tembang Sunda, a kind of aristocratic sung poetry accompanied by zither (a stringed instrument) and bamboo flute. I rented my own house in a lower-middle class district near a large river, but I spent plenty of time at the elaborate and beautiful home of my singing teacher, Euis Komariah, who lived in another part of town. I had a little motorcycle for transportation, but I also used pedicabs (human-powered bicycle-type cabs) and walked. I studied the zither with several different teachers, primarily Rukruk Rukmana, who came to my house to give me lessons. My bamboo flute teacher was Burhan Sukarma, who now lives and works in the United States. Because studying this genre was my only focus, I spent perhaps four hours a day practicing the instruments and singing, at least an hour typing up my notes, and several more hours (if not the rest of the day) hanging out with musicians, talking about music. I also carefully read the entire local newspaper (the Pikiran Rakyat) every single day with the dictionary nearby, to improve my language skills.[v]

Because I had chosen an aristocratic genre, I spent time among aristocrats, politicians, singers, and the instrumentalists who accompanied them. My intention had been to study the zither and flute, not singing, but my gender (female) limited me at the time to studying either singing or dancing. I did both, but also studied the instruments privately “in the name of research.” Because my primary teacher was the matriarch of an important family of musicians and dancers, I also spent hours of each day with dancers, and ended up studying jaipongan, a kind of staged social dance, as well. Once I was hanging out with the dancers, it followed that I hung out with the musicians who accompanied dancing. So my social and musical contacts ran the gamut from the most aristocratic people to those whose employment was exclusively in the service of others. All my communication was in Bahasa Indonesia (the national language) or in Basa Sunda (the regional language).

I was often asked to perform at concerts, so I made it my business to practice what I was learning and to try to do right by my teachers. As a white person, I often was treated as a bizarre spectacle when I was invited onstage to sing or dance. Because humor is very important locally, I worked hard to keep my sense of humor at the forefront. My height (about five inches taller than many locals) and weight (considerably more) surely made my performances reminiscent of a dancing bear, and that had to be okay with me. I still blush when I think about it.

Bandung is a large, busy city; it is considered cool by Indonesian standards (60°F at night to 90° in the day). Sundanese food (the people that I worked with are called the Sundanese) is quite spicy and features fresh fruits and vegetables together with fried meats and fish. Almost all Sundanese are Muslim, with considerable diversity in terms of individual levels of engagement with Islam. I generally do not like very large cities, or spicy food, and I am not a Muslim. I hate perching on my knees to sing (especially since my hit-and-run car accident in Bali). Was it a recipe for disaster? Not at all! It was not so hard to adjust because I had prepared myself well; like learning a language, one gradually becomes more fluent in a culture and its special features over time. I was healthy; I was ill (the eighteen spider bites that sent me into a fever the day before I was supposed to translate for Mick Jagger on his visit to Jakarta marked a definite low point for me). People were kind and loving, just like at home; people were rude and bitter, just like at home. And leaving there was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

A Case Study: Fieldwork in Nigeria (Michael Veal)

Even though I was destined to write a book about the political dissident/bandleader Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, I never actually considered what I was doing “fieldwork” at the time. What I was doing was traveling to Nigeria as a musician, to be in the social and sonic company – in one way or another – of one of the musicians whom I most admired. I wanted to experience the atmosphere in which he created his music – to soak up the vibe, so to speak, the ambience. My concrete goal was to play saxophone in Fela’s horn section (as I had occasionally done with him in the U.S.), but as long as I could reach his famed “Afrika Shrine” – his nightclub on the outskirts of Lagos, I would be happy. There was no need for tape recorders, microphones or notepads. They would get in the way of the real experience, which I could record “on my DNA,” as I like to say. This trip was akin to a pilgrimage for me, and I wasn’t going to be easily deterred.

It was good that I had this attitude. I had read and heard enough about the corruption at Lagos’s notorious Murtala Mohammed Airport to know to travel light. So even though I hoped to play, I didn’t even risk bringing my saxophone with me. I knew Fela owned several saxophones and hopefully, I could borrow one of his. My caution turned out to be well founded; it was impossible for me to pass through the airport without complications. A mutual friend had asked me to bring Fela a piece of musical equipment – a small mixing board. Even though I would never have dared tell the authorities I was bringing the equipment for Fela, merely arriving in Lagos with what appeared to be a valuable piece of electronic equipment resulted in my being detained for about two hours, while the customs officers, all armed with AK47 rifles, grilled me with the kinds of irrelevant questions that made it obvious that they were really looking for a bribe (or “dash,” as it is called in Nigeria). Finally, one of the officers came pointed at the sound mixer and asked me bluntly: “Is it worth US$300 to you?” When I told him that I was carrying no cash, he sauntered away angrily. I briefly considered the possibility that these officers might not let me into the country at all. But my thoughts were interrupted when a female officer with a red beret approached me and informed me that I could leave, telling me “We don’t want you to have a bad impression of our country.”

Once I was back in the public area, I was met by my Nigerian hosts. After making our way into Lagos city, we arrived at their home around midnight. Lagos is a huge city, but with the heat, humidity and screens on the windows, it had an earthiness to it that reminded me of the rural American south. And for the most part, the people I began to meet displayed a level of welcoming and hospitality that is virtually unheard of in the United States these days.

It was time to get down to business. After twenty-four hours, I was getting antsy. By the very next night, my friends and I were walking through the Lagos suburb called Ikeja, toward Fela’s house. To get there, we had to pass through an area known as “Ikeja bus stop” which is the convergence of several main thoroughfares and bus routes. Even to a native New Yorker, this was a mass of human energy that seemed much more intense than a place like Times Square. The night air was thick with the sounds of shouted Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and other languages, not to mention pidgin English. There was a power blackout, which is not uncommon in Lagos. As a result the streetlights were out and the area was cloaked in darkness, save for the street vendors who had lit their stands with burning Sterno lighters. The whole scene was surreal, an area adrift within a sea of hundreds of flickering, candle-sized lights that looked like fallen stars in the night. It felt like a festival to me, even though it was really just people going about their nightly business. Maybe it felt surreal because – despite the human crush – the overall rhythm of the scene was much slower than in a place like New York. A moody, mid-tempo piece of Afrobeat music blared from speakers suspended in a shop window high above the street. It set the tone for the way I learned to move through Lagos in general – slowly and carefully. In the intense heat (most days it hit 100 degrees), there wasn’t much choice in any case.

You can imagine my shock and surprise a few minutes later, when in the middle of all of this, I heard someone yelling from a car that was slowly approaching from behind: “Michael! Michael!” I turned around and sure enough, it was a Nigerian friend I had recently made back in New York. Although he knew I would be coming to Lagos, I asked him how in the world he recognized me in the dark of night, from behind, on a street crowded with thousands of people. “I could tell by the way you were walking” was his reply. I thought that being African-American would be enough to guarantee me a small bit of anonymity among the other 100 million black people that made up the nation of Nigeria, but apparently no such luck!

We arrived at Fela’s communal house, still in the blackout. Everyone inside was moving about with the aid of candles. Fela came out to the sitting room shortly afterwards. His first words were: “When they told me it was the sax player from New York, I knew it had to be you, man! You got here just in time to hear my new tune. Where’s your horn?”

A Case Study: Multi-Sited Fieldwork in China and Among the Southeast Asian Chinese Diaspora (Mercedes DuJunco)

It often comes as a surprise to many people when they learn that I specialize in the music of China or when they hear me converse in fluent Mandarin or any of the two other Chinese dialects that I speak fluently. My typical Filipino facial features and brown skin color belie my Chinese cultural background, having been born and raised as the older of two daughters in a Filipino-Chinese household, and gone to an overseas Chinese school in Manila during my formative years.

During my initial two years in the Chaozhou region in the eastern part of Guangdong Province in South China, China’s economy had just taken off. Although changes were already visible, not least of which was the government-sanctioned re-emergence of the Chaozhou string ensemble music that I was focusing on, the full impact of the reforms had yet to reveal itself. It was clear that the region was on the cusp of some great transformations taking place that would affect every aspect of social and cultural life there; it was just a matter of time before one could see how things turn out. Thus, in order for me to depict how these changes would bear on Chaozhou music and musical life, fieldwork could not be a one-time or even a two-time thing; it would have to be carried out over an extended period, albeit intermittently. For the purpose of completing the Ph.D. degree, however, I had to be content with writing about the Chaozhou string ensemble music tradition to the extent that I had witnessed its renewed practice during those two years of fieldwork.

To provide historical depth to my monograph on Chaozhou string ensemble music, I returned to Chaozhou eight years later for a revisit. A lot of changes had expectedly taken place in the region and in the Chaozhou music scene in the interim. Amateur music clubs devoted to Chaozhou string ensemble music had mushroomed, and were much more plentiful than during my first visit. Back then, I had expected that given the government support, music clubs would immediately sprout everywhere after virtually disappearing as a result of the extremely repressive cultural policies, particularly during the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976). However, this was not the case. In fact, it had seemed that there was an even greater danger of the music tradition ceasing altogether in the 1990s, just when it was being revived, as performers of Chaozhou xianshi, as the music is called, became preoccupied with setting up private business enterprises, thus leaving them with no time to gather and play music together. But by 1999, many of these people had apparently returned to playing in the music clubs again and had even taken to setting up their own clubs. Many had apparently succeeded in business and had become relatively wealthy. They could then afford to take time off from work or perhaps retire, buy a whole set of their own instruments, and set up their own music clubs and play music together with their friends. In addition, in the course of doing business, many amateur musicians had been abroad, mostly to Hong Kong and places in Southeast Asia (Bangkok, Penang, Singapore, etc.). During these business trips, they got together with Chaozhou friends and business counterparts for long music sessions in various music clubs.

More interesting, however, was my inadvertent though rather belated discovery when I visited again the following year, that some of these amateur musicians have been moonlighting as liturgists and accompanying musicians in Chaozhou-style funeral rituals among members of Chaozhou Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Some have also taken to performing on the side as accompanying musicians for Chaozhou opera troupes which perform ritual operas abroad during the Hungry Ghost Festival, a death-themed festival widely celebrated among Chinese overseas during the seventh lunar month. My discovery of these latter two developments actually led to quite an epiphany on my part. It changed my whole perception of Chaozhou xianshi and its performers. In fact, it basically shattered many of my previous notions that were based on the conventional view of Chinese amateur musicians as adherents of Confucian values that abhor performing music for money. Faced with evidence to the contrary, I saw how things are actually more complicated than I had thought and the need for a lot more fieldwork if I were to make sense of the whole musical and cultural scenario that I had stumbled upon.

Armed with this realization, I began a new phase in my Chaozhou music field research which involved going to those places in Southeast Asia where many of my subjects go to perform xianshi in music clubs there and, for some, to play music for remuneration in the context of funeral rituals and ritual operas. Since 2001, I have made several trips to Bangkok, Hat Yai, and many other places in Thailand; to Penang and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia; and to Singapore. In addition, I began reading extensively and learning about Chinese popular religion and ritual, which are all new to me. In other words or, rather, in the words of anthropologist George Marcus, in his essay on “the emergence of a multi-sited ethnography”, I “follow[ed] the people,” “…the thing,” “…the plot, story, or allegory” (Marcus 1998:79-104).

My experience would have been the same (and probably more difficult) had I studied a musical tradition in another part of the world, because I would then have had to perhaps learn a new language and familiarize myself with a totally new set of customs and mores. With what I am doing now, I have simply built upon contacts and the linguistic, cultural, and musical knowledge and experience that I had gained through my previous fieldwork, adjusting to local conditions as I work among Chaozhou musicians in different Southeast Asian geographical settings. Any discomfort or difficulties involved however are all overridden by my satisfaction in knowing that ultimately, I have done all in my power to learn everything that I am aware of needing to learn, and writing an ethnography that would best convey all of that.

A Case Study: Fieldwork in Ireland (Tim Collins)

I have been conducting research in Irish traditional music for over ten years. This involves many hours of painstaking archival research, exploring old newspaper articles and other documents page by page, listening to and analyzing music and voice recordings, as well as studying the work of other scholars who have contributed to unraveling the complexities of Irish music, song and dance culture. What makes my work interesting, exciting and challenging is the fact that I am researching a cultural world of which I am a member. Let me explain: I am involved in Irish traditional music as a scholar and lecturer, as a musician (I play the concertina) and as a music teacher. I occupy what is known in ethnomusicology and anthropology as an emic or insider’s perspective on my research. Many of my informants either know me personally or know something about me, and likewise, I know many of my informants on a first name basis.

This emic position can be extremely rewarding. For instance, my informants are very accessible to me, as I meet many of them at formal and informal Irish music, song and dance events, such as music sessions, concerts and festivals. In reality, these occasions are very fruitful fieldwork opportunities, providing valuable information for me about my informants. This type of fieldwork includes observing and documenting the activities of these people – a technique known in the fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology as participant/observation. While in the field, I always carry a fieldwork diary, a portable voice recorder and a camera. These pieces of equipment are essential for my work, because they facilitate the immediate documentation of all my experiences with my informants, and thus minimizing the dependency on memory recall.

I also conduct formal interviews with many of my informants, and this fieldwork method requires many skills that improve with practice.

After many years, I have developed a routine that I find very successful. On the day of an interview, I always set aside two hours to do some preparation. Firstly, I list out some basic topics that I want to discuss with my informants. I then formulate some questions around these topics that I will put directly to the person or persons that I am interviewing. It is important to realize that informants quite often stray away from the questions being asked and as an interviewer; one needs to be comfortable with this. Some of the most rewarding material that I have uncovered during interviews has come about purely by accident. In other words, be prepared, but more importantly, be prepared to “go with the flow.” I always check my equipment in advance. This includes inspecting two voice recorders, a camera, a camcorder, a laptop computer and a portable scanner. People form sentimental attachment to old photographs, letters and other ephemera, and they rarely allow researchers to remove these for duplication. The scanner allows me to duplicate these treasures in the person’s home, thus overcoming what has been a problem for researchers in the past.

I always bring along a small token of appreciation with me, such as a cake, a box of chocolates, or a CD. It is important for me to acknowledge the generosity of the person who has allowed me into their home, and willingly given me access to their time, knowledge and personal belongings. I never arrive into a house loaded down with equipment. The sight of such equipment tends to make a person nervous, resulting in a poor interview. Most of my equipment, except for a small inconspicuous-looking voice recorder (no big microphones!) remains in my car. However, it is good practice to be prepared for all eventualities, as the following story will exemplify. I was interviewing an elderly lady about dance practices in her locality. In the course of our conversation, she mentioned a type of set[vi] that was danced locally when she was younger, citing that it was the dominant group dance in the locality up until the 1950s. Once she started explaining the various parts of the dance, it became clear to me that this set had never been documented before. Her family, (3 sons and two daughters, plus their spouses) were also present at the interview and they persuaded her to teach them the dance. Luckily, I had my video recorder in the car and I was able to document the dance on the same night. To me, this set is a valuable cultural artifact that has been saved from extinction, thanks to this elderly consult and thanks to modern technology!

It is also important to realize that there are ethical issues involved in doing fieldwork. It is incumbent on all researchers to analyze and represent the cultural practices, thoughts and opinions of their informants in a fair and accurate way. As previously mentioned, I am familiar with many of my informants. Therefore, as a researcher, I endeavor to compartmentalize all the preconceived ideas and biases that I have about my informants. We sometimes refer to this as distanciation. In a way, it is like removing my musician’s hat and putting on my researcher’s hat, and looking at the evidence that I am presented with in a similar way to that of a forensic scientist or a detective.

A Case Study: Fieldwork in South India (Yoshitaka Terada)

One LP record changed my life. In the early 1980s, I was listening to virtually all recordings related to South India that I could find in the University of Washington’ music library as part of my preparation for fieldwork. One day I stumbled on a recording of nagasvaram, a type of double-reed aerophone. I was struck with the energy of the sound I had never experienced before. The music sounded as if it had a mind of its own, going in all directions with gymnastic turns and jumps and that the musicians had hard time controlling it. On the jacket cover, there was a photograph of two musicians standing calmly in their playing positions with unusually long wind instruments. Excited about the discovery, I searched for information about the music. To my disappointment, however, very little was available although it was described as one of the most important ritual music traditions in South India.

In March 1986, I began my 18 months of fieldwork in South India with a very simple question: why has the musical tradition of religious importance been neglected by Indians and non-Indians alike? The city of Madras (now Chennai) in Tamil Nadu state was my residential base. When I arrived there, I had no contact with nagasvaram musicians. My academic advisor in India introduced me to a musician (A) who performed for his family on auspicious occasions. I studied with him for about eleven months, with an average of two lessons a week. Through him, I was introduced to the social world of musicians, including their family members, accompanists, and patrons. I also accompanied his ensemble’s tour outside of Madras in a jam-packed train.

I planned to study with my teacher (“A”) throughout my stay in India, but my fate had a different plan. The hospitalization of “A’s” son made it difficult for him to continue teaching me. After consulting with my advisor and much hesitation, I went to study with another teacher (“B”). By that time I had interviewed him twice and I was impressed by his knowledge. I studied with him for the remainder of my stay, with three lessons a week.

Although circumstances dictated with whom I studied, having two teachers of distinct caste affiliations turned out to be essential in formulating a main thesis of my study. “A” belongs to a caste group whose primary occupation was barbering. He was employed by a temple in his neighborhood and was in good demand for domestic functions. “B” was a member of the musician caste from Tanjavur, the presumed artistic center of nagasvaram music. Because of “B’s” solid reputation for personal integrity and excellence in teaching, discipleship with him immensely facilitated my fieldwork.

Many musicians I wanted to interview were attached to Hindu temples scattered in South India where they provide music at rituals and festivals. I was interested in finding out how musicians are related to each other artistically and through kinship. I also wanted to document local performing practices. Each month, I would take a night train from Madras to various regions such as Tanjavur and Madurai to interview musicians and document their performances.

I conducted interviews in Tamil as virtually no nagasvaram musicians knew English back then. I had studied the language for three years before coming to India, but on arriving there I found the communication with people very difficult, even more so with the musicians who had their own ways of speech and behaviors. Although I never achieved the level of fluency I desired, my Tamil became good enough after about a year of living there to start understanding their emotions and ethos. From my music lessons, I also learned the specialized vocabulary and expressions that comprised their lived world, which helped me immensely in interviewing musicians.

Although my competence in Tamil was limited especially in the early months of my stay, I did my interviews without an interpreter, so that the caste and other affiliation of the interpreter would not alter the content of information given during interviews. Sometimes, those who accompanied me acted as casual interpreters whenever I needed help. In such cases, I tried to contact the same musicians alone on later occasions. I began to notice their response was different, sometimes vastly, depending upon who accompanied me. They often wanted to make sure that members of dominant Brahman caste were absent when discussing caste-sensitive matters.

With permission, I recorded the interviews to complement my language skill and to save time from writing everything down on the spot. I was aware of the problems with recorded interviews, such as the distorted information or loss of candor. But, even considering such danger, recording interviews had an unexpected benefit for my project. It helped me to sort out the correlation between the type of information and the degree of musicians’ desire for anonymity. A few refused to be recorded at all while others allowed it on the condition that the recording would be strictly for my use. The majority of people graciously accepted the request, but often asked me to turn off my tape recorder whenever the information was considered too sensitive. Yet others gave me additional, and often the most valuable, information after the interview.

Once comfortable with me, the musicians had many fascinating stories to tell. For hours I listened with great enthusiasm and excitement to their stories of the musicians of the past: how they played music, how people appreciated the music, and how music has changed, including fascinating anecdotes about fierce rivalry between musicians and juicy gossips about drinking. Yet, I was moved above all by their dedication to the art and their music-centered lifestyles. I feel extremely fortunate to have met so many extraordinary musicians, including the two brothers on the record cover which triggered my fieldwork. While some were well-known and led a comfortable life, there were many others who were equally dedicated and talented but less fortunate in worldly matters.

Toward the end of my stay, I traveled for many hours on bumpy local bus to meet an old musician in a small village in Tanjavur district. He came from a famous lineage of musicians and was once considered a great player, but after a series of unfortunate events, he was living in destitute in this remote village, not given opportunity to capitalize on his talent. Physically handicapped and unwell, he could only play for ten minutes as a sample of his music. Even from this brief rendering, I could tell his musical imagination was brilliant, even sublime. After leaving India, I corresponded with him for some time to arrange a recording session on my next trip there so that his contribution will be at least recognized, but he passed away quietly before this became reality. I was struck by the unfairness of life then and I still vividly remember the day I spent with him with an overwhelming sense of sadness.

A Case Study: Fieldwork in Brazil (Suzel A. Reily)

I was born and raised in Brazil within an American Methodist missionary family. Even though I have dual citizenship, my primary loyalties are with Brazil. Without doubt, Brazilian popular music, or MPB, played a critical role in forging these feelings. I grew up during the military dictatorship (1964-1998), and throughout my teens I, like many of my friends, listened to (and learned to play and sing) the songs of Chico Buarque, Gerlado Vandré, Milton Nascimento, and other musicians associated with the protest song movement of the 1960s and 70s. I began my anthropological training at the University of São Paulo in the mid 1980s hoping to discover the ‘other Brazil,’ which my privileged background had distanced me from. I soon discovered that this had been a motivation for many of my peers in the program, and that we were just the next generation of social scientists hoping to contribute in some way toward the resolution of the country’s vast social problems.

I conducted my doctoral research in low-income neighborhoods of São Bernardo do Campo, the heartland of Brazil’s automobile industry in Greater São Paulo – it was where I had lived from the age of eleven. São Bernardo had a large percentage of migrants who had moved to the region following the land reforms of the 1960s, the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, amongst them. Migrants were pivotal in forging the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), that is, the Workers’ Party, that was born in São Bernardo. My project aimed to investigate the impact of rural musical traditions on political awareness amongst migrants.

I focused upon migrant communities from southern Minas Gerais, who maintained networks of mutual support through participatory forms of community musicking linked to folk Catholicism. More specifically, I studied the folia de reis, something of a mumming tradition in which a group of musicians roams from house to house during the Christmas season, bringing the blessings of the Three Kings to the families they visit in exchange for donations used to fund a communal festival on Kings’ Day, celebrated on the 6^th of January. In the big city, these festivals have become important events for bringing together each year the people from the same hometown.

My fieldwork was rather unconventional, since I stayed in my apartment in São Paulo, collecting data in something of a ‘homeopathic’ way, a little bit at a time over a period of around three years. Each community I worked with involved different research methods, in part because different opportunities presented themselves to me from one group to the next. Some folias handed me an instrument almost as soon as I met them; in other groups it felt inappropriate to participate in the musicking; still other were happy to teach me the musical parts and allow me to participate during rehearsals, whilst indicating that they would be less open to my participation during ritual journeys. Some foliões were delighted for me to record their performances; others restricted what could and couldn’t be recorded. This diversity contributed to my understanding of the social world of the folias de reis as ritual ensembles and as low-income migrants, and it ensured that I remained aware of the dynamic nature of social relations.

While my investigation took place practically at my doorstep, the social world I encountered was very different from the one I had grown up in. While some foliões (members of folias) lived in established working class areas, dominated by brick houses and paved streets, others resided in favelas (slums) in very precarious circumstances. Making ends meet was clearly part of the daily struggle for the vast majority of them. I had never thought of myself as ‘rich,’ but within this setting I gained a new understanding of what privilege means in Brazil. The sharing of music and the sharing of food went hand in hand within these communities, and reciprocal exchange underpinned their sense of morality. Even though I had many opportunities to reciprocate their generosity, our exchanges were never completely balanced. Though my debt remains unpaid and unpayable, fieldwork was unquestionably a life-changing experience. Just as my commitment to Brazil was sparked by music in my youth, it was through fieldwork that I came to see how music had also been implicated in forging Brazilian lower classes worldviews. However naïve and quaint the folia de reis and other such vernacular forms of religiosity may seem to an outsider, I truly believe that the moral codes that they embody have played a critical role in changing the political landscape of the country.

A Case Study: “Fieldwork” in Nineteenth-Century U.S.A. (Gillian Rodger)

When I began my training in ethnomusicology, I didn’t expect that I would end up working more than 150 years in the past. I was interested in working in Northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. I was born and raised in Australia and completed my undergraduate degree there, but I came to the U.S.A. for graduate school and I began to read American history in order to make sense of an unfamiliar culture. Why was the U.S. so different to my own country despite having certain similarities in size? I wrote my Masters’ thesis on Yiddish theater and film and learned a lot about how immigrant Americans forged new identities while remaining connected to the culture of their home country. But in many ways the culture of early- to mid-twentieth century America didn’t seem so foreign to me–I had grown up watching early movie musicals featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and I had listened to jazz of the same period as a teenager. I might not have ventured further back into the past had I not found an old photograph from the 1890s of a performer who had been active in vaudeville. The photo, of a woman dressed realistically in a male solder’s costume, contradicted almost everything I thought I know about Victorian-American culture, and it began my engagement with nineteenth-century culture.

The first question you might ask is “How do you do fieldwork in the past?” and, of course it is not literally possible to transport myself back in time to live in that culture. But in many ways I think the approaches I take are not so different from those of my colleagues. My aim is to find as much information as possible to be able to document a fully-functioning and complex culture. The questions I ask every document I find are “who do you represent?” and “who do you ignore?” Generally, the people who dominate newspaper reports–now and in the past–are the most important (the wealthy, the cultural leaders, the political leaders). The least important parts of the population are also visible in crime reports, in complaints about the poor, the indigent, or immigrant populations, but these people are not treated as individual people who are real. They are represented as a problem to be solved or contained. It is possible to gather a lot of information about important people, which is why they are so well represented in our history classes. But it is much harder to document individual people in the second group. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, and you can learn a lot about the least important members of society by reading newspapers, ordinances, arrest records, legal documents and reports from charities and reform societies, understanding that they cannot be read literally as unbiased fact.

Music is one of the few products marketed to the poorer populations that survives into the present. There is a surprising amount of music that survives from the past, but, like popular song today, performance often strayed from printed sheet music. Indeed performers did not rely on sheet music, but rather maintained their own private song books. The challenge of working on performance traditions that no longer exist is that it requires a great deal of imagination as well as the ability to find hundreds and even thousands of small clues from newspaper reviews, photographs, and archival materials, about how performers brought songs to life through performance. To my own surprise, I found myself using the knowledge of aural traditions gained through my training to make sense of past performance.

Like most ethnomusicologists, I have also not been able to draw firm lines between music and dance and even acrobatic performance and my research has now expanded to include a vast array of entertainment–from circus to operetta, from tightrope and acrobatic performances to ballet. In many ways, I think that I had an advantage working on American history. When I began my research I was very aware that I didn’t understand the United States, and I didn’t expect to find anything familiar in the past. I had never taken a class in American history or even American music, so I scrambled to find books on history that helped me make sense of what I was finding, and to my surprise there was very little there. Working slowly through the many, many facts I found allowed me to figure out where there were gaps in the historical narrative and to see who was missing. I have now lived in the United States for 20 years and studying the American past has also allowed me to better understand the America of the present, which is now my home.

Writing about Fieldwork

It is one thing to be in full experiential mode: playing or singing or dancing, taking notes, discussing the finer points of the performing arts and culture with local people, eating local food, swatting local insects, etc. It is another thing to render it all into words. No one can possibly capture the entirety of one’s fieldwork experience, in writing or in any other format. However, we all try, and we are all frustrated with the process. Writing up one’s fieldwork experience starts in the field, wherever that is; we take voluminous notes about everything from what a person said about a piece of music to what happened at a live performance or rehearsal to how one plays something on an instrument. Some of us work closely with local musicians to make sense of what we are learning, and we write all of that down. Many people make audio and video recordings as well. When we return from the field, especially the first time, we face a jumble of notes and recordings, friends and family for whom (comparatively) little has changed during our absence, and a forced re-entry into a life that we used to know. For those of us doing fieldwork in short bursts, or right there at home, there is no “away” or “re-entry.” In those cases, fieldwork is more of a continuous process of experiencing and documenting.

Writing about one’s fieldwork does not always result in a master’s thesis (part of an M.A. degree) or a doctoral dissertation (leading to the Ph.D.). Ethnomusicologists also write articles, CD liner notes, biographies, grant proposals, books of various kinds, blogs, reviews of books/CDs/DVDs, and even fiction. Writing, then, goes hand-in-hand with fieldwork, and it, too, is an important part of the work that ethnomusicologists do. In each case, we have to consider the potential audience and the needs of that audience. An academic audience – comprising ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, area studies scholars, and others – seeks new information and approaches about the world’s musics and contexts for music, and that is the primary audience for ethnomusicological writing. If you are a student, then your committee – or your teacher – wants to know not only about what you have learned during your fieldwork, but how you can tie that new knowledge into what has come before. This knowledge should also bring in important information from related fields, such as history, politics, and other performing arts.

Ethnomusicological writing, as well as the work, is inherently interdisciplinary; this means that your reliance on the “Music and….” framework of Chapter Three is essential. In order to know enough to write about, say, country music and patronage, you need to understand something of local and national economics. While for some of us, the need for more (and more) information can hang up a writing project for years, the reality of it is that you choose a topic that excites you, and in which you have already done some preliminary work. Knowing something about (and being excited by) both country music and patronage is going to push you closer to being able to write effectively about it.

Every diligent fieldworker knows so much more information than can actually be included in any piece of writing. The Irish writer Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, “Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned.” Does this make sense to you? It doesn’t mean that a person stops writing; it means that person has to just stop at some point, quit revising, and call it good. If you look closely at an academic book, you will often find a series of five- or ten-page essays, connected into chapters, and those chapters are strung together in book form. Can you write a five-page essay about something that is utterly fascinating to you? Of course you can; you’re in college. Could you string a whole group of those five page essays together into a 300-page book? Of course you could, if you had the right information shaped into a form that your readers (and you) could clearly understand.

What have you learned from this chapter? Chances are excellent that you were paying attention to this chapter (especially to the fun fieldwork vignettes), because fieldwork is such a crucial aspect of what we do! So you know that fieldwork can be quite challenging but very rewarding. It is inherently experiential, so you spend the majority of your time learning by doing. It is the one chance in your life for you to be completely involved in actively learning music full-time: playing, singing, listening, writing, discussing, thinking (as long as that is the method of fieldwork that you have chosen). It is a dream job like no other. You now have a sense of some of the nuts and bolts of fieldwork and its connection to ethnomusicology, anthropology and related fields; you know that it takes time and costs money. You have also gained an idea of some of the ethics involved in conducting fieldwork, and explored a handful of fieldwork experiences written by working ethnomusicologists.