Sheehy 1992

A Few Notions about Philosophy and Strategy in Applied Ethnomusicology
Author(s): Daniel Sheehy

Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, No. 3, Special Issue: Music and the Public Interest
(Autumn, 1992), pp. 323-336
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
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VOL. 36, No. 3 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FALL 1992
A Few Notions about Philosophy and

Strategy in Applied Ethnomusicology
DANIEL SHEEHY NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS
n recent years, applied ethnomusicology has been promoted

option (though usually from an "if you've got the job, I've got
point of view). It has been praised as an avenue to benefit humani
that the academy has not. It has been talked about in terms of
responsibility to "pay back" those whose music and lives we study
our livings from. It has been defined by the kinds of activities that
from it, such as recordings, festivals, exhibits, and so forth
ethnomusicology is all of these things, but it is something even m
If ethnomusicology is an approach to the study of the music of t
peoples, then applied ethnomusicology is an approach to the a
the study of the music of the world's peoples. It is a larger frame o
a state of mind, something more fundamental that informs all on
as an ethnomusicologist.
I believe that all ethnomusicologists have at one time or an
applied ethnomusicologists. What ethnomusicologist has never
his or her way to act for the benefit of an informant or a communi
studied? Are teaching and writing not ways of applying ethnomu
knowledge? Much of this occurs, however, in an ad hoc fashion as
reciprocating friendships and fulfilling the professional expe
academic careers or as something unavoidable, rather than as a res
approach to the field.
Applied ethnomusicology as a conscious practice is much gr
this. It begins with a sense of purpose, a purpose larger t
advancement of knowledge about the music of the world'
purpose that answers the next question, To what end?; a purpose
This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the 1989 annual meeting of th

Ethnomusicology, in Cambridge, MA.
? 1992 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
323
324 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1992
our action into concrete lines of strategy that are not preconceived or
predetermined by an absolute idea of what these actions should be. A body
of intellectual thought about the guiding sense of social purpose and
strategic methods in applied ethnomusicology has developed particularly
over the past sixty years in the United States. On the part of its practitioners,
applied ethnomusicology is perhaps most observable as an implacable
tendency first to see opportunities for a better life for others through the use
of music knowledge, and then immediately to begin devising cultural
strategies to achieve those ends.
To give a full consideration of applied ethnomusicology, four areas must
be broached: purpose, strategy, techniques, and evaluation. Here I want to
offer a few notions about the first two of these-major motivating philo-
sophical purposes and some of the strategies of action developed in
"applied" ethnomusicology in the twentieth-century United States. In doing
this, I hope to suggest that a fuller consideration of and involvement with
applied thought is of potentially great benefit-and perhaps even indispens-
able-to the discipline of ethnomusicology at large.
A Sense of Purpose
The results of applied work depend directly on the guiding purpose and
the quality of thought behind it. Purposes vary greatly from the general to
the specific, and potentially from the good to the bad. Mentioned in recent
years in connection with the use of traditional music are population control
(Hood 1971:353-57), community organization (Catlin 1988), fostering uni-
fied political and social action in the Caribbean (Bilby 1989), and lowering
the suicide rate among Southeast Asian immigrants in Chicago (Feintuch
1988:5). In the 1930s and 40s, much in the minds of American folk music
specialists was the alarming use of folk music by totalitarian states such as
Nazi Germany for the purpose of instilling unquestioning obedience to the
state (Williams 1975:223, Hirsch 1988:47). This example has been used by
some scholars to illustrate the "dangers" of applied work (Merriam 1964:43).
Fears of the misuse of folklore as seen in Nazi Germany did not daunt
American applied ethnomusicologists of the time, however. For them, the
issue was not whether or not folk music should be used in cultivating a sense
of national purpose, but rather whether the purpose and vision for that
cultivation were worthy. This is an important distinction, one that has
become blurred in recent discussions about applied work.
Unfortunately for those of us today who are interested in the subject of
applied ethnomusicology, the intellectual histories of ethnomusicology,
particularly in the context of the United States, virtually exclude thought
about the guiding philosophies and many endeavors in applied work. Public
Philosophy and Strategy in Applied Ethnomusicology 325
projects and their documentation involving American-based musical tradi-

tions, particularly those that predate the invention of the term ethnomusicology,
are not difficult to find, directed and authored by scholars with names both
unfamiliar and familiar to ethnomusicology textbooks-John Lomax, Robert
Winslow Gordon, Benjamin Botkin, Charles Seeger, and Alan Lomax, for
example.
There are several reasons for this oversight. First, part of the responsi-
bility rests on the shoulders of we (ethnomusicologists) who have been a
part of the explosion of activity in applied work over the past fifteen years,
but who have neglected to share our outlook, insights, and experiences with
the field at large. Another reason is that until recent decades, the comparative
method was favored in American ethnomusicology, and attention was
focused more on exotic music of foreign cultures than on music in the United
States. Perhaps the major reason, though, is that ethnomusicology took
shape in the 1950s and early 60s during a time marked by a societal swing
of the pendulum away from applied work. In the politics of ideas in the
United States during that period, applied work lost out to the ideal of "pure
research" in the institutional value systems of universities and funders
(Williams 1975:227). The notion of "pure research" reigned supreme, and
applied work was not thought to have the desired "objective" quality of the
hard sciences. Also, applied work, often in the position of defending the
inherent aesthetic worth of the creations of the "common man," had been
associated with left-leaning politics in the minds of many, not an enviable
position to be in during the Cold War. Consequently, the scope of
achievement rewarded by the academy was profoundly affected by an
approach that was more tactical and political than intellectual (ibid:225)
(and, perhaps ironically, more subjective than objective). Thus, out of a
concern for professionalization, or the adherence to certain standards of
"proper" endeavor for the purpose of ensconcing scholarly disciplines in the
academy, applied work was neglected, limited by the values and scope of
endeavor of the host institution. The history of ethnomusicological en-
deavor, however, is greater than a history of ethnomusicology as an
academic discipline (for a similar statement regarding folklore, see Hirsch
1988).
Looking back over the literature in search of expressions of applied
thought and applied efforts with American traditional music, it is remarkable
that the works of some notable American ethnomusicological scholars and
folklore scholars working with music have notmade their way into the earlier
discourse that defined the discipline. Alan Merriam in The Anthropology of
Music predicted that the future would hold greater importance and activity
in applied ethnomusicology, but he mentioned none of the impressive
applied work that had occurred since the turn of the century (1964). Bruno
Nettl in Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology and in The Study of

Ethnomusicology made only brief mention of the subject, with no reference
to the points of view of American applied scholars (1964, 1988). Mantle Hood
in The Ethnomusicologistdoes not mention applied work per se, though his
"Communications" chapter does mention the usefulness of knowledge of the
"universe of music" in treating larger social problems, and gives examples
of his own efforts in maintaining the knowledge and practice of making
large-size gongs in Java (1971).
But not to include knowledge of applied musical work in the history of
ethnomusicology "blinds us to the complex threads of issues and thought
[that came] before [us]" concerning audience, role in life, the future of
American cultures, and the place of tradition in modern life (Hirsch 1988:48).
Merriam was right in his prediction about the future importance of applied
ethnomusicology, and that future is now. It is urgent that these important
contributions to our intellectual history be made available.
Here I will sketch out a preliminary notion of what I am referring to by
mentioning a few of applied ethnomusicology's pioneers and philosophers.
John Lomax lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United
States, when the persistent vestiges of colonial attitudes ignored, berated, or
denied cultural achievements of "common" Americans. Lomax, influenced
by the ideas of Walt Whitman and other American writers who "celebrated
the bite and originality of the American spirit" (Lomax and Berrett 1986:xxxv),
believed in the inherent aesthetic worth of the cowboy songs and poems he
had heard as a boy in West Texas and set out to remedy what he saw as a
major injustice. One result of his search for America's voices was his book
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, first published in 1910. Its very
existence made the point to scholars that the material was worthy of
publication. At the same time, the book aimed to "feed back song lore into
the stream of oral tradition" and thus was "small and unobtrusive enough to
be carried in a saddlebag or a chuckwagon box ... on cow camp and cattle
trail, not to say bunkhouse, barroom, and mining camp" (ibid:xi). Lomax's
extensive later work collecting and directing the Archive of Folk Song at the
Library of Congress was not done merely for the sake of collecting, but to
change the historically-conditioned, often social class-based negative Ameri-
can attitudes toward traditional music and musicians. These attitudes in turn
caused those musicians and their cultural compatriots to think less of that
part of themselves that was their own heritage, a heritage into which
generations of their forebears had poured their creative genius.
Benjamin Botkin was a literary scholar who sympathized with John
Lomax's point of view that Americans had created a worthy body of folk
song. As the director of the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, he was more
interested in collecting the "Clementine" than the "Lady Claire," more
interested in American creations than the Old World survivals previously in

vogue among scholars (Hirsch 1988:54). He challenged the antiquarian
notion accepted at the time that folklore in the United States was dying out,
the victim of rapid social change. He saw it as alive, dynamic, and full of
creative potential. He also challenged academic notions that scholarship
should be "pure" and only for the benefit of other scholars. The implication
was that he saw applied work as important not merely for the purpose of
remedying specific problems or "manipulating people's destinies" (these are
Merriam's words 30 years later [1964:43]), but rather as having to do with the
accountability of the entire profession and a responsibility to repay the
people from whose culture scholars had borrowed to use for their own
purposes.
Botkin and other New Deal folklorists did not use the terms "applied
or "public sector" during that time. The distinction they made was that the
saw their work as a public, not a private, function. Botkin, though h
collected primarily from secondary sources, worked to show both that the
"applied" purpose could provide a richer, socially involved setting for
research, giving greater importance to cultural context (an improvemen
over the tendency of the era toward taxonomic studies), and that dissem
nation in the public setting could produce more informed action on the part
of the public (and perhaps even better feedback to the scholar).
Botkin felt that he had a duty to disseminate as well as collect and that
applied work was a link between research and democratic values (Hirsch
1988:49-50). As director of the Federal Writers Project, he encouraged th
publication of song collections such as Robert Winslow Gordon's Folkson
ofAmerica (1938) and Arthur Palmer Hudson's Folk Tunesfrom Mississip
(1937). The latter, by the way, was edited by George Herzog, who employed
a musical classification system rather than a literary one, implying aestheti
worthiness of the tunes (ibid.:25). Herzog, according to Halpert, "did no
forget that folk songs are for the people" (Halpert 1938:84). For Botkin
central to the socially active approach was "applied folklore," a broad
program generally applied to music and literary forms to assist in th
encouragement of a pluralistic nationalism, working contrary to the wave o
totalitarianism seen sweeping Europe at the time.
Charles Seeger held beliefs parallel to those of Botkin. He joined Botkin
in calling for a "cultural strategy .. [of] theory and interpretation, a
philosophy and a vision about the function of folklore in a democrati
society" (Hirsch 1988:49). They both felt that cultural pluralism, rather than
totalitarianism, was the proper, democratic form of nationalism that could
foster a "new form of national integration that was inclusive, not exclusive
and democratic, not coercive" (ibid.). In keeping with this purpose, Seeg
was interested in the strategies for the revival of American folk music and
the optimum roles of the professional folk music specialist. In his article
"Folk Music in the Schools of a Highly Industrialized Society," he pointed out
the inevitability of culture change in a rapidly changing society, and how that
change "will eventually be reflected in the inheritance, cultivation, and
transmission of such traditions as those of folk music" (1977:330). He
examined the revival of folk singing activity in Europe and the United States
with an eye toward understanding the dynamics of the process and saw it
as a popular, oral tradition response to a people experiencing culture loss
and bombardment by music made for them rather than by them. He
consequently used his observations to condemn the practice favored in the
public schools at the time of teaching folk music through written, not oral
methods. He also examined the roles and potential of the folklorist and the
revivalist musician popularizer in encouraging "maximum continuity be-
tween the best known of the past and the best conceivable for the
future... [in the] equation between what people will accept from their
ancestors (either directly as survival or indirectly as revival) and what they
will create for themselves and their children" (ibid.:333). He suggested
greater cooperation between the two, writing "If the folklorist can identify
some old traditions as in a state of survival-well and good. The revivalist
may use them as the base and add to them. But if, as is so often the case,
the hybrid substitutes hold sway, these must be the bases of the operation
of revival" (ibid.).
Alan Lomax is the major living link between the heady ideas of the New
Deal era and the present. Most ethnomusicologists today know him as the
tireless inventor of cantometrics. For him, however, cantometrics was a
means rather than an end, part of a plan to foster a language of communi-
cation about music that would be relatively free of cultural bias and would
promote equitable status for music among people of different cultures and
different social classes-not a language that only scholars could understand,
but one that was accessible to all (Lomax 1988). Over his long, impressive
career, Alan Lomax has clearly articulated some of the most important tenets
underlying applied ethnomusicology today. He mentions these in the
following excerpts from the report Four Symposia on Folklore (Thompson
1953): "What we are interested in seems to me not whether one tune or one
version or one story continues, but whether this way of people's expressing
themselves continues" (ibid.:223). "[F]olklore has for a very long time
been... a way of projecting their dreams and hopes and aspirations,
sometimes in relation to political and economic events and sometimes
merely in relation to the problems of living in a particular culture" (ibid.). "[In
the U.S.] artistic matters are highly competitive. You can't get in the door in
America unless you have a great big strong fist ... because culture is owned
and operated for a profit [and publishers make no profit on folk material]"
(ibid.). "There are tremendous forces in operation... in our country, that
say, 'We are going to control all the cultural techniques for our benefit, and
we are just not going to let anybody else in the door. They are going to sing
"Yes, Sir, That's My Baby," every single person is going to sing it, because
every single time they sing it it means a penny in our pockets.' And the result
is that the mountaineers and the Cajuns and the Negroes along the
Mississippi Valley and everybody are more or less forced to sing "Yes, Sir,
That's My Baby.' It's just a matter of hitting them in the head with it every
morning when they get up and turn on the radio, and every time they sit
down in the afternoon they get 'Yes, Sir, That's My Baby.' Now I resent that.
I think there should be more cultural independence, and so actually when
I sing my songs I try to sing at least fifty per cent of them that I know all the
musicians my audience will consider rather plain and maybe a little harsh
and ugly, because I know that these songs were very important for certain
groups in our background.... I don't consider myself a reviver so much as
a stander-in-between, getting my shoulder just a little bit in between the
powerful cultural instruments which want to have everything in their own
hands so that they can use it for their own profits and the ordinary people
who want to sing and express themselves in their own ways" (ibid.:235-6).
In that same symposium, Lomax appealed to folklorists to make opportuni-
ties for the folk, rather than the folklorist/interpreters, to have the forum, "to
find the best folk singers and storytellers that we can find and get them heard
everywhere" (ibid.:224). The meaning of these words, particularly concern-
ing equity for the music of "small" cultures in the electronic media and
bringing tradition bearers to America's stages, has been a major force in the
shaping of the folk revival in the 1960s and in the thinking of applied
ethnomusicologists today. His sense of purpose reverberates in every facet
of his career in radio, television, record and film production, cantometrics,
and computer software.
Many other important thinkers could be mentioned here as having a
similar state of mind, including Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Zora Neal Hurston,
Vance Randolph, Bess Lomax Hawes, and Ralph Rinzler, to name a few. My
purpose in mentioning these few progenitors of thought in applied
ethnomusicology is to make two points: that there is a tradition and record
of applied thought and purpose that should be included in the history of
American ethnomusicology, and that there has been an evolving sense of
strategy and techniques for action that has flowed from this thought and that
demands our attention as ethnomusicologists.
Strategies
By strategies, I mean the ways to solve a particular problem. (The
third of the four main areas of applied ethnomusicology to consider-
techniques-are the means.) John Lomax lamented the devaluation of
cowboy songs by the literati and upper class Americans. One of his college
professors had so belittled the cowboy poems and song texts he had
collected as a youth that out of shame he burned his entire collection later
that night behind the dormitory. His later response was to bestow upon the
cowboy songs he had collected the prestige of publication, complete with
an introductory letter by former President Theodore Roosevelt testifying to
the aesthetic superiority of the songs to the music hall pop music of the day
and regretting the fact that cowboys were "becoming ashamed to sing" them
because of their perceived inferiority to music hall songs (Roosevelt 1910:ix-
x). At the same time, they were published in a format that was "user friendly"
for the cowboys. Benjamin Botkin saw folk music as alive and part of an
ongoing creative process. Through the publication and widespread dissemi-
nation of folk songs, he sought to enrich that ongoing creative process by
increasing the availability of the folk songs that he and his colleagues had
collected. He was also one of the first to suggest a philosophical approach
to the problem, in promoting a socially engaged approach to the discipline
of folklore.
Charles Seeger knew that as society changed, changes in that society's
folk music were inevitable. But at the same time, he saw that the rapid
industrialization of his time was provoking rapid, destructive changes that
uprooted not only individuals but whole communities from well-known,
well-tried ways of living, often moving them bodily into novel improvisa-
tions of crowded slums and noisy mills and mines, whose products in turn
have eaten at the root of the way of life of those who were left behind"
(1977:330). He felt that such change threatened valuable oral traditions at the
deepest level and was detrimental to the quality of life and the people's
ability to cope with their environment. As one solution, through writing and
speaking he agitated for changes in the educational system to give greater
importance to oral tradition in the teaching of folk music. On another front,
he made suggestions for a unified, coordinated approach to encouraging the
practice of music in oral tradition.
Alan Lomax saw commercial media that exploited and flattened "small
cultures" and had no use for their profitless cultural assets. As he said more
recently, "The medium is not the message; whose culture is getting on the
air, that's what the message is" (quoted in Pareles 1989). His response was
to find ways to get the traditional music of "smaller" cultural groups on the
radio, on television, and in record stores.
There are potentially more responses, more strategies, than there are
problems. Most strategies tried to date that are aimed at affecting the
community of origin of a given music, however, may be viewed as having
at least one of four basic qualities: (1) developing new "frames" for musical
performance, (2) "feeding back" musical models to the communities that
created them, (3) providing community members access to strategic models

and conservation techniques, and (4) developing broad, structural solutions
to broad problems.
Sociologist Erving Goffman has thoroughly articulated the notion of
culturally-determined "frames" that give meaning to events (1974). The same
action in one situational frame may not have the same meaning nor
implications for the actor or viewer as in another frame. Many applied
projects involve the creation of new frames that give new meaning to pre-
existing types of events. For example, taking a German-Russian hammer
dulcimer player who plays for weekend dances in Scottsbluff, Nebraska and
placing him on a stage in Carnegie Hall with a New York audience creates
a new relationship between the dulcimer player and the audience, affected
both by the connotations of the physical setting and the socio-cultural
relationships between the musician and the audience. These relationships
convey meaning to both the musician and the audience, the particular
meaning varying with the type of relationship.
Folklorist John Szwed suggested a paradigm that is useful in examining
the nature of the socio-cultural relationships between musician and audi-
ence (1979).
Audience
OWN OTHERS
Art Source
OWN A B
OTHERS C D
With regard to ethnicity, there are four b

performance of music from one's own ethnic b
of that same ethnic background, (2) performance
ethnic source of the music for people who are f
performance of music from one's own ethnic b
notfrom that background, and (4) performance of
ethnic background for an audience not associated
the music. The referential "frames" of Szwed's par
to ethnicity. Other frames could be used to loo
tional culture, regional, generational, whatever
The applied ethnomusicologist may determine that the dulcimer player

suffers from a "prophet in his own land" syndrome and that he and the
tradition at large may benefit by recognition from outside the community.
The Carnegie Hall performance would involve a relationship of the third
variety, the musician performing German-Russian "Dutch Hop" for non-
German-Russian New Yorkers. This new juxtaposition of musician and
audience and musician and performance venue carrying great cachet can be
used for the strategic purpose of strengthening the musician's sense of self
worth and sending a message to the community of Scottsbluff that their local
dulcimer player has something of special value that is worth taking special
notice of. In another scenario, the ethnomusicologist may feel that there is
enthusiasm among young German-Russians throughout the inland West for
their own traditional music, but in most towns all that is available are a few
recordings. The response may be a tour by our dulcimer player to those
towns, aimed specifically at young German-Russian audiences, with the
purpose of connecting them with the best available model in their tradition.
The performer-audience relationship is of Szwed's first variety, and holds
special meaning for both parties.
There are more complex possibilities for these relationships that have
yet to be explored to any great extent. For example, the dulcimer player may
be put in a situation of performing with non-German-Russian musicians,
perhaps performing for a mixed audience of cultural insiders and outsiders.
Does our musician's attitude, approach or aesthetic framework change when
performing with musicians who do not share a similar cultural grounding?
How does the presence of non-German-Russians in the audience affect the
German-Russians, and vice versa? Does an enthusiastic response on the part
of the non-German-Russians "validate" the inherent worth of the musical
tradition and performer in the minds of the German-Russians present? Does
the presence of the German-Russians in the audience enhance the outside
audience's understanding of culturally-determined appropriate interactio
between performer and listener? The effects of these relationships may var
greatly and should be examined closely when constructing a frame of
performance.
It is, of course, always important to keep in mind that the musician and
form of music may be affected beyond the realm of perception of worth by
the transition from the primary frame of the ordinary context to the new
frame with a different set of rules and conventions (Goffman 1974:21-2).
Commenting on this concern, Bess Lomax Hawes wrote "On bad days, we
tend to think of framing as the ultimate co-option of the innocent by a society
that is determined to make a buck out of everything that it touches, turning
every act into a packageable and saleable commodity. On good days, we
hope that we are providing a smaller cultures with a defense mechanism
whereby they can protect their art forms and carry them into the future"
(1980:89). Through careful consideration of the needs, techniques, and
effects of framing, hopefully there will be more good days than bad days.
As to the second strategy, "feeding back" cultural models to the cultural
community that created them, Alan Lomax articulated this strategy in Folk
Song Style and Culture. "Unfortunately the major result of this scholarly effort
has usually been the publication of books and articles in European languages
which, like a good deal of research, have often been of more benefit to the
researchers than to the people whose lives they closely concerned. Now,
however, cultural feedback, through the use of field recordings published
as discs and broadcast, and films projected and televised, has become an
easy matter. Every culture has a mature and ripened heritage of speaking and
singing styles that can immediately find a place on records, radio, film, and
television. An 'underdeveloped' people feels a renewed sense of signifi-
cance when its own artists, communicating in genuine style, appear on the
powerful and prestigious mass media or begin to use them for their own
purposes. Experience teaches that such direct feedback of genuine, uncensored
native art to its roots acts upon a culture like water, sunlight, and fertilizer
on a barren garden; it begins to bloom and grow again" (1968:9). Lomax
went on to say how the recognition of style structures and differences
through the use of cantometrics would be of use in administrating systems
of cultural feedback and in social planning.
The implication of "feedback" is that cultural expression is aimed back
in the direction from which it came, the original group. This leads very
directly into the distinction between "inreach" activities versus "outreach"
activities-those aimed at feedback to the source community of the cultural
form, and those aimed at a broad, usually external, audience, respectively.
In the dramatic increase of activity in applied folklore work over the past
decade, inreach has attained a prominence greater than earlier in the
century. Inreach and outreach are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A
concert for a mixed audience could be both, or an outreach tactic such as
the Russian-German dulcimer concert in Carnegie Hall may be done as part
of an inreach strategy, to draw attention to the music back home in
Scottsbluff. Any of the four major types of strategies we are discussing may
be inreach, outreach, or both.
The third strategy is the dissemination of knowledge about cultural
strategy itself among a wider public, spreading the issues, models, and
techniques out among the populace. Alan Lomax has equated the possession
of knowledge of one's own culture to an arming mechanism against cultural
aggression, allowing people to better protect themselves by knowing what
their "ancestors [achieved] in human adaptation and creation" (1987). What
I am referring to is in this same spirit and goes a step further to place the
acquisition and manipulation of that knowledge in people's hands as well.

An example is the book Preserving Traditional Arts: A Toolkit for Native
American Communities (Dyal 1985), published by the American Indian
Studies Center at UCLA under the direction of Charlotte Heth, and distributed
free of charge to over 1,000 tribal groups and individuals throughout the
United States. It contains succinct instruction in techniques for the documen-
tation of culture through photography, video and sound recording, preser-
vation techniques for objects, ideas on the production of public-oriented
products like slide/tape programs and video documentaries, and models of
ways to disseminate them. Another example is the Smithsonian Institution's
recent program of an intensive two-week immersion in cultural conservation
issues, techniques, and resources for non-academically trained cultural
activists. Yet another is Mantle Hood's call in The Ethnomusicologist for
ethnomusicologists to ensure that carriers of traditions they study also have
the opportunity to become ethnomusicologists of their culture as well
(1971:375).
Finally, the fourth major strategy, devising broad structural means to
work toward desired ends, is one that transcends and includes all the others.
One form is the creation of institutions that forward these goals; examples
are the Office of Folklife Programs in the Smithsonian Institution, the
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and the Folk Arts
Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, created in the mid 1970s.
In the past fourteen years, fifty of the total fifty-six states and special
jurisdictions (the District of Columbia and five island nations in the
Caribbean and Pacific) acquired their own programs of support for people
and communities interested in encouraging the practice and appreciation of
traditional forms of aesthetic expression. More recently, cities such as Los
Angeles, Oakland, Miami, and the New York borough, Queens, and
numerous private organizations have followed suit. Another form of this
strategy, one that up to now has been practiced almost exclusively by lone
individuals, is social and political action to affect broad societal policies-
economic, social, and political-that directly affect the lives of the people
they want to assist. Appalachian cultural activist David Whisnant (1988:244)
has characterized the politics of most earlier cultural intervenors as "genteel
liberalism" at best and calls for a "tougher politics" on the part of cultural
conservationists.
Conclusion
The applied approach embodied in these purposes and strategi

many challenges for us as ethnomusicologists. It challenges us to
nicate to a diversity of other people in ways they can understa
diverse musics, the systems of value that support them, and the peo
make them. It calls for intensive research in areas that are critical to these
strategies, such as the dynamics of culture change, particularly the reasons
why many people in a changing environment often "pay little attention to
the pain or cost [of opting to retain and practice tradition] or the complex
social circumstances in which [those decisions] were made" (ibid.:234). It
challenges us to see beyond the "institutional blinders" that limit our view
of important issues for research and that close our minds to ways of applying
our special knowledge. It challenges us to think bigger and better about our
reciprocity with the people we study, a reciprocity beyond short term
remuneration for services rendered by informants. It challenges us to work
cooperatively with specialists in areas such as folklore, theatrical presenta-
tion, media production, and political action. It challenges each of us to
examine our roles and responsibilities as ethnomusicologists in an environ-
ment much larger than the university, though most of the opportunities for
training the university offers will always be of importance to applied
ethnomusicology. It challenges us to consider the larger importance and
consequences of each and every ethnomusicological task, be it research,
teaching, fieldwork, publishing, producing films, mounting festivals, or
whatever. By viewing all ethnomusicological endeavor, academic and
otherwise, as strategy guided by a sense of social purpose, we can expand
the potential of ethnomusicological skills and minimize counter-productive
perceptions of barriers between academic and applied work.
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A Few Notions about Philosophy and Strategy in Applied Ethnomusicology

Author(s): Daniel Sheehy

A Few Notions about Philosophy and

DANIEL SHEEHY NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

n recent years, applied ethnomusicology has been promoted

This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the 1989 annual meeting of th

? 1992 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

projects and their documentation involving American-based musical tradi-

Nettl in Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology and in The Study of

interested in American creations than the Old World survivals previously in

created them, (3) providing community members access to strategic models

With regard to ethnicity, there are four b

The applied ethnomusicologist may determine that the dulcimer player

acquisition and manipulation of that knowledge in people's hands as well.

The applied approach embodied in these purposes and strategi

Gordon, Robert Winslow

Hawes, Bess Lomax

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