In Honor of Our Principal Teachers

et me begin by saying that I feel very honored to have been invited to deliver the Seeger lecture this year. With the honor goes a rather formidable task, for the previous lecturers in this distinguished series have found it possible to survey long careers of research and to synthesize in a number of ways their views of the field and their contributions. I don't believe I'm far enough along to try to do this in a lecture. But if there are some things I have learned, I think the most appropriate way for me to use the time you have kindly put at my disposal is to pay homage to some of the people from whom I learned them. My title may make you suspect that I wish to honor the professors with whom I studied, or perhaps artists who gave me music lessons, or again perhaps the authors of books which I found particularly influential. Each of these would no doubt be an appropriate thing for me to do, as it might be for the member of any field of study. But, more than members of other humanistic fields and social sciences, excepting perhaps only anthropology and folkloristics, we in ethnomusicology are distinguished by the fact that we continue, after our formal studies, and throughout our work, to depend for our findings upon teachers. Most of what we learn, most of our contributions to knowledge, come about from close association with individuals who represent, but who also personify, the musical cultures of the world. We may refer to them as informants, or perhaps consultants, and they interact with us in many ways. They give us formal lessons, they answer questions in interviews, or they provide long, informal lectures over tea and cookies or spicy dinners. They allow us to record their performances, and they can be persuaded to criticize contructively our own explanations of their musical systems. In fact, they are teachers of ethnomusicologists as individuals, but they are also the teachers, the sources, of the field. Intensive work over long periods with such individuals distinguishes ours from other kinds of music research. The quality of the work that has been produced rests to a large extent on such things as the ways in which we have selected our teachers, the degree to which they took us seriously, their conceptions of their own cultures, their veracity and their representativeness, and the quality of our interpretation of what they have taught us. I would like, therefore, to speak to you briefly about four men whom I consider in this particular respect to have been my principal

Computer security · Honor · Mathematics education · Operating system · Principal (computer security · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Psychology

• Performing in the Shadows

  Open Access•J Lawrence Witzleben•Yearbook for Traditional Music•2010

  Añadir item

• Variability, Change, and the Learning of Music

  Barbara Barnard Smith•Ethnomusicology•1987

  Añadir item

• Whose Ethnomusicology? Western Ethnomusicology and the Study of Asian Music

  J Lawrence Witzleben•Ethnomusicology•1997

  Añadir item

• Turning the Song

  Angela Glaros•Collaborative anthropologies•2013

  Añadir item

• Ethnomusicology and Music Education

  Open Access•Patricia Shehan Campbell•Research Studies in Music Education•2003

  Añadir item

• The Ethnomusicologist and the Transmission of Tradition

  Kay Kaufman Shelemay•Journal of Musicology•1996

  Añadir item

• The Individual in Musical Ethnography

  Jesse D Ruskin, Timothy Rice•Ethnomusicology•2012

  Añadir item