An Ethnomusicologist at Large

by Geoffrey Clarfield (October 2012)

A mere sixty years ago there were few ethnomusicologists in the world. You could probably fit most of them into one lecture hall although they hailed from a number of different countries. Now they number in the thousands.

Among the many ethnomusicologists who have been my teachers the purest example of this kind of musician was the late Jon Higgins, who after three years residence in Tamilnadu, southern India, was widely recognized as a master singer of the southern classical Carnatic musical style. I well remember being astounded by a recording he played at the end of his third year course, A Survey of Indian Classical Music. We listened with awe to a 33 rpm of classical Indian singing that he had recorded in Madras and that was no better or worse than any of the other Indian performers that we had studied for the last few months.

I was born in Toronto, Ontario Canada in a happy post war middle class family with two older siblings and was raised in a house in the suburbs of my city where my parents still reside. The soundscape of my upbringing during the fifties and sixties consisted of the popular and classical music on the radio (and radio jingles), a growing record collection played on the family record player, the music of television (just think of Bonanza) and Hollywood films (there were none others in the fifties and early sixties) the music classes of my primary, middle and high school years (which included the Indonesian Gamelan like Orf system), the Ashkenazic chants of the Conservative Synagogue liturgy, occasional concerts and the music presented to me at the Royal Conservatory of Toronto (and the National Opera) from the age of 5-13 where I was a student of classical singing.

It all culminated in an audition for a little known Broadway play that was moving from London England to New York called Oliver. I auditioned and got the part of one of the street urchins under the command of the pickpocket the Artful Dodger and Feigin the chief thief and pickpocket. Had I understood at the time that Feigin was Charles Dickens mean antisemitic caricature of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant to Victorian London (usually running away from Czarist pogroms) I would have turned it down. Either way the antisemitism was more or less sanitized out of this version. And, my parents nixed my going to New York. As they explained it to me, three years on Broadway, away from family and community, being taught by tutors and performing five nights a week was not the way to go. I cried for two days but got over it. It delayed my return to Manhattan by only 43 years where I now work and live, commuting to Toronto, as was originally planned.

I entered the music program at York University with the firm intention of studying ethnomusicology and world music and, learning to perform effectively in a non-western tradition. I had finally arrived in the world of ethnomusicology.

In my first years I knew that I wanted to understand music comparatively and so I soon took my intro music courses, world music survey, history of Western art music, south Indian drumming, sitar, anthropology, sociology, history and fine art and the many other things that music majors study in a fine arts department. I discovered the writings of Curt Sachs, Bruno Nettl, Herzog, Kunst and Hornbostel, and eventually took classes where we discussed the articles in the present and past issues of the journal, Ethnomusicology.

During that period I conducted both a library project and a field project. The library project explored the permissibility of music according to Islamic law. Somehow I had an intuition that this was to become an explosive issue in the future and it is now the central conflict effecting music in the contemporary Islamic world. I have recently written about this for the National Post and the American Thinker during the last few years as, not surprisingly, it has not become a major issue for ethnomusicologists, something that in and of itself remains to be explained.

We played festivals, nightclubs, restaurants and every gig that was offered among the Eastern Mediterranean immigrant communities of Toronto who had unconsciously reconstituted the urban bistro culture that existed in New York before and after WWII. We were given lots of food and ouzo and did a fair amount of playing music for belly dancers. I suspect that many of the belly dancers were their own kind of feminist, as I had some idea that the form of the music may have remained the same, but the motivations of the performers were changing.

Hanging out with the Gypsies was fun, but every now and then their scene got a little too wild and lascivious for my middle class upbringing. I avoided most of the drugs and I also learnt to avoid late night card games where loaded guns were put on the table. I also remember one Gypsy bouzouki player getting very drunk with me on ouzo and almost tearfully telling me that Gypsies do on occasion steal and that is why the Nazis sent them to the death camps. I pointed out that the punishment did not fit the crime. I am not sure he believed me.

The big Middle Eastern music scene was happening in New York at that time and although I did not visit the clubs there I did have one long distance conversation with Oud master Chick Ghaniman from whom I bought a fancy plastic oud pick. I also bought and listened to all the albums that came out of this scene especially the albums of John Berberian, a kind of Armenian oud wizard. And I listened to Spero Speros: who he was and where he is I would very much like to know!

Throughout the early seventies there was still a hint of the sixties in the air and so I found myself playing back up guitar for the singing Chassidic Hippy Rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach. He was larger than life and I enjoyed every minute playing for him. And he made me reexamine and take some interest in the musical history of my ancestors, my maternal grandfather having been a Klezmer.

I had a great job teaching guitar throughout and after the time I finished my BA. Between excessive and extensive reading, record buying and club going I continued playing with the Kismet Orchestra. At the same time I took private lessons with the Egyptian immigrant Kanun player George Sawa who explained to me the Maqam system. I am not a master of the maqam, but according to some I have acquitted myself admirably on a few occasions. But playing with Gypsies at Greek, Turkish and Macedonian and Arab clubs was not enough. I wanted a three-dimensional field experience so off to Morocco I went.

I self financed my trip to Morocco in 1976. I brought my oud and rented a room in a house in the old city of Marrakech from the American composer Richard Horowitz. I carried a tape recorder and still camera, practiced my French and got the basics of Moroccan Arabic, not quite conversational, but enough to get around. I met a number of musicians and did a fair amount of jamming as fusion was in the air but no one was calling it that. I spent many afternoons playing with Brahim el Belkani the now famous Gnawi instrumentalists and singer.

I was a regular visitor to the Jmal Fna, took a fair amount of photos there and made recordings in a number of venues. I had also read Westermarck and realized that much was invisible in Moroccan culture as they were and are obsessed with the Jinn or spirits. I visited a Muslim saints shrine day (Moussem) of Setti Fatma at the entrance to the Atlas Mountains and hiked in the high Tessaout with a French alpinist club. I will soon put the tapes and pictures on my web site.

I also saw the Marrakech folklore festival, which ran for two days and missed an opportunity to meet Ringo Star. At the time I asked myself, what do I have to offer him and what could I ask him for? The answer was nothing. I had read enough Paul Bowles to know that an expatriate in Morocco could easily disappear or get entangled in the enormous interpersonal conflict that is the constant of Moroccan life. And so, after a few months I realized either I stay the year or come home. I chose home.

The next two years were spent reading, watching films at avant-garde film houses, playing music and teaching guitar. In Morocco I had spent time with the last Jews of Fez and I ironically realized that my love of Middle Eastern music was similar to the music that I had heard in Synagogue growing up. Indeed the origins are the same and the systems are related. I only fully realized this when an Egyptian Jewish friend of mine, Aaron Skitri, who had moved to Toronto, a fine oud player who made his living teaching classical guitar and Baroque lute, was sitting in his apartment one day listening to Cantor Moshe Koussevitzky with the same joy and interest as he would have for a suite of classical Arabic songs. This two-year period was a rehearsal for what was to come.

I realized that Morocco was a modernizing, agricultural society, with a North African saint based Islamic worship system and although fascinating in and of itself, I wanted something more challenging. So my wife and I moved to a tiny village in the Negev desert of Israel with our newborn son and I would hitch out into the Western Sinai to start to understand the music of the Bedouin. It is now a center of terrorism and Al Qaeda activity. When I was there it was experiencing a rare quiet interregnum in its turbulent history since the giving of the ten commandmants. I spent a year doing fieldwork among the Bedouin there and once again had to use some of the more theoretical writings of Alan Lomax to make sense of the nature of musical and social change among these people. I presented the article based on my fieldwork at the Canadian Ethnology Conference in Montreal in 1984 and intend to put the whole thing on my web site along with the music, which I intend to digitize.

By that time it was impossible to avoid graduate school so I did my MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Toronto. I then started a doctoral program at McGill in Montreal. After two and a half years of courses in anthropology and ethnomusicology, a French exam, a proposal and money from a grant we were off to Kenya.

I spent 24 months among the Rendille, a group of Cushitic camel herding people at the desert borders of southern Ethiopia, recording their music, learning the basics of their language and culture and trying to figure out how they thought and felt about music and in particular a central repertoire called ginaan. I wrote up most of my doctorate but just before finishing put it aside, after having given a number of lectures in Nairobi on Rendille music. I also managed to get Rendille warriors into a multitrack recording studio in Nairobi to record ginaan and whose tapes I still have and will put online.

During a four-year period running a development project in a remote part of Tanzania my supervisor encouraged me to produce a film that showed the poverty and dignity of the ethnic groups we worked with. The result of this was the Facing Mount Hanang, which is a kind of ethnomusicological tour among the people around the mountain and where they express their concerns in Swahili. The sound engineers on this project eventually invited me to sit in on a recording session with Congolese refugee musicians in Dar es Salaam. The CD that emerged from this was positively reviewed in the Village Voice and the New York Times and I wrote up the experience a few years later. Those musicians became personal friends and their leader, Ndala Kasheba, became a regular dinner guest and house visitor before he passed away.

As someone who had gained long term experience of the dynamics of NGOs (non governmental organizations) when I met Anna and her colleagues I offered to develop a participatory strategic plan for the Association for Cultural Equity with her staff and stakeholders. We completed that plan by the beginning of 2009. In 2010 I was invited to join ACE where I have worked for the last three years.

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.

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