Music: The Thesis Can Be Seen And Heard

The Thesis Can Be Seen And Heard

“The Thesis Can Be Seen and Heard”

The story of how I wrote one of the first master’s theses in the United States illustrated with tape-recorded music turned out to be the first piece I ever sold. A trade magazine, Tape Recording, paid $75 for the article and photos. My family friend Dr. Henry A. Davidson posed as my Colgate University thesis committee chairman, Professor John M. Longyear –”Dr. Long” in the article. What I didn’t mention in the story was that the thesis was rejected. I was short on music theory. Several years later, and now freelancing in Denmark, I wrote another thesis – on the Finnish sauna. Flew to New York for the defense, and it was accepted. In 1970, Colgate awarded me its first Master of Arts degree in Cultural Anthropology. It felt good.

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The Thesis Can be Seen and heard

. . . Here's the story of one of the first theses to be submitted on tape for a 

master's degree

                                       By FRADLEY GARNER

SOME graduate students just have to be different. Not content with a pedestrian thesis like, "An Evaluation of Methods of Teaching Chaucer to Eighth-Graders in South Orange Junior High School," or "An Inquiry Into the Causes of Suicide Among Hill Marias in India," they go bizarre and pick a subject like the relationship of American jazz to West African tribal music.

This subject (jazz and African music) is no figment of a primitive imagination. It's a fact.I, a candidate for a master's degree in cultural anthropology, wrote a thesis about it. And why not? I had developed a keen interest in the field of comparative musicology (a branch of anthropology) and I had been playing bass fiddle in jazz combos and dance bands since grammar school. Besides, the idea of a connection between jazz and African music was, still is, a hot controversy in and out of academic circles. Why not a live subject?

But it was more than a matter of timeliness and great interest. Each graduate student has a faculty committee who must approve the thesis subject before he can write a word. As a rule, the committee chairman simply says, "Here, Jones, we think you should write your thesis on `Causes of Suicide Among the Hill Marias.' Submit an outline in thirty days." Luckily, my committee was more democratic. They left it up to me. But they wanted to know exactly how I planned to handle it.

When you are dealing with the music of another culture area, you have to work with sound, not symbols. Notes can be transcribed on manuscript paper, that's true. But our five-line music staff and 18 standard key signatures are geared to a scale of tones divided into eight-note octaves. West African music, like the music of peoples in many other parts of the world, is no respecter of scale, even though it has been classified "pentatonic," a system of five whole-tones. What's more, the tones tend to waver, the singers and players glide from note to note and "bend" their voices. (Just like jazz.) Even trained musicologists get lost in quarter-tones and glissando signs, trying to notate this.

 West African music emphasizes rhythm unlike European-American music which stresses melody and harmony.

African rhythm often is so fantastically complex (a song may be built on three or four or more time

signatures operating simultaneously) that it defies classification under a single meter system like ours. One rhythm seems to predominate, then another. Nobody agrees where, which or when.

Music is timbre or tone-color—rich, dry, reedy, harsh, shrill, brassy—and it is dynamics—relative loudness and softness. These give West African music much of its color and vitality. They are just as important in jazz. Tonal and dynamic subtleties, instruments played to imitate human voices, flexible intervals are aural phenomena; they have to be heard.

So this was above all a study in sound. My committee knew it when we met to discuss the project.

Prof. Grant (musicologist): "You're aware, of course, of the difficulties involved in transcribing African music?"

Prof. Long (jazz authority): "And of faithfully transcribing jazz?"

Prof. Grant: "You'll have to use recordings. I don't think you can get authentic renditions of traditional tribal music. Some of the best is on cylinders in private collections. Many of the recordings from earlier expeditions are in libraries."

Prof. Long: "Same with the earlier recorded traditional jazz. Collectors' items scattered here and there."

A number of other questions. Then the 64-dollar one:

"You must have thought of these problems. How do you propose to solve them?"

I thought fast. "With a tape recorder."

A thesis was born. Tape was the father. And I happened to own a portable machine, the Revere T-100.

We made many trips, the Revere and I—to the homes of jazz collectors, who would never let me out of the door alive with their precious platters, but who in the interests of research were willing to let me tape their treasures in their living rooms; to university libraries, where under surveillance of music librarians I taped passages from early cylinder recordings and out-of-date record albums; to the Music Division of the New York Public Library, where they would let me into the listening room, but not the Revere ("Sorry, it's not our policy to allow tape recorders in here"); to live jam sessions, where I set up shop in dark booths or right in front of the bandstand, and taped some of the "swingingest" informal jazz I have ever heard (only one manager ordered me to pull out the plug or pull out).

About the only place we didn't go was Africa.

But others had. As recently as 1950, Arthur Alberts, a writer, and his wife made a six-month jeep-safari of the arc of land rising from the Gold Coast on the Guinea Gulf, north and west to the French Sudan and the Niger valley, down through Liberia to the South Atlantic shore. The jeep was equipped with a Magnecorder PT6-P, powered by a silent, efficient convertor system. Most of the recordings were made under the trees (in Upper Volta the mercury hit 130 degrees F., with almost no humidity), usually at night when, Albert says, "the musical pulse rises with a drop in temperature and the coming of moonlight."

Cutting down incidental background noise—from infants, dogs, chickens, jungle birds and insects, to the enthusiastic prattle of audiences at the tremendous magic of the black music box—was a constant problem. These sounds provide local color in three albums, "Tribal, Folk and Cafe Music of West Africa," produced by the Alberts shortly after their return to the United States. Arthur Alberts returned in July from another expedition, this time through the Congo. His booty: thousands more feet of tape. Results on LP or pre-recorded tape should be available to the public soon.

Two years ago Northwestern University anthropologist Alan Merriam and his wife, Barbara, safaried the Congo in an overloaded panel truck ("We'd hate to say how many sets of tires we went through"). The couple went from tribe to tribe, traveling the haphazard trails and roads of the Congo. and Ruanda, taping folk music and taking extensive field notes.

They worked with a generator-powered Magnecorder PT63AH with a three-input PT63P amplifier. Separate mixing controls regulated each mike input. (They packed three Electro-Voice 635's and one 6500 Despite a dual-dose of malaria, a touch of dysentery and other temporary incapacitation ("that's standard when you go snooping around the Congo"), they returned with a footlocker full of tape, from which they culled an LP, "Voice of the Congo" (Riverside Records LP 4002). Another disc is scheduled for release shortly.

Maybe we'll follow suit someday. But for the thesis, there was material. It was mostly a matter of cosmopolitan leg-work.

While the music was being taped, the writing moved ahead. Actually, the entire study might have been tape-recorded,* background and all, but the committee was not ready to accept that. They wanted something in black-and-white, too. My outline called for a lot of background material on the diffusion of African culture and music to the New World, requiring footnotes and references. This was put in writing.

The tape was edited to illustrate the music analysis in the manuscript. There was some commentary on tape as well, before and during the music. This called for a second recorder, and a friend happened to have one like mine. I dubbed from tape to tape, including in the final edited version passages from African recordings to illustrate certain points, and choruses from live and recorded jazz to show parallels.

A footnote in the manuscript might read, "T-18, 162'." This meant that what was being described in the text could be heard as the 18th musical example beginning on the 162nd foot of tape (the Revere T-100 has a time-footage indicator scale under take-up and feed reels so any selection on the tape can be indexed and located quickly). Each taped illustration was prefaced with a voice announcement: "Example 18. The following passages of Gold Coast Drums, record 1, band 3 from Alberts; and Lionel Hampton's vibraharp. solo in "I Got Rhythm," side 3, band 4, from Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert, illustrate multiple-meter or poly-rhythm. In Hampton's solo, it is heard as melodic cycles of three beats superimposed on a basic beat in four. This is described on page 62 in the text."

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*two students at Princeton University submitted theses entirely on tape.

Then while Hampton was playing, the voice might cut in to call attention to the phenomenon. It didn't improve the music, but it sharpened the analysis.

Even if the 50-or-so records and cylinders used to illustrate the study had been available, finding the right grooves on each, announcing and commenting on them as they were played would have been a staggering task. Only one person could attempt it—the author. On tape, anyone who could thread a Revere and turn a knob could hear it, at leisure.

The recorder and a 12-inch auxiliary speaker were turned over to the committee (temporarily) along with the tape and manuscript. They could listen to it, play it back, and argue about it all they wanted, in the privacy of their offices—out of presence of the author which, from his standpoint, had its disadvantages. There was no room for bluff.

The novelty of presentation scored a hit, not only with the committee, but with faculty from other departments who heard about it and came to hear it. Someone suggested the university library exhibit the manuscript, books, pictures, and tape with a machine so anyone could look and listen. Quite different from the run-of-the-mill thesis written, dutifully read, and laid to rest in the library archives!

Whether or not this turns out to be the grand-daddy of taped music theses is beside the point. The point is what a new dimension for theses, dissertations, college and high school term "papers" and studies of every nature has been opened by the tape recorder. Not only in music, but in all the oral arts: poetry and speech, for example. Or any field where you can go out—to the concert, lecture, town meeting, tavern, classroom, street corner, anywhere people are making sounds, and bring 'em back on tape.