Filming Music and Looking at Music Films

Abstract

This is a revised version of the introductory and conclusive part of the Charles Seeger Memorial Lecture, presented 7 November 1987 at the Thirty-Second Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, at the Rackham School for Graduate Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The main part of the Lecture was the American Premiere of the film Yootzing and Yodelling, and the World Premiere of Head Voice, Chest Voice. Parts of the additional text printed in small letters have been read in an earlier version at the 1st International Workshop on Visual Anthropology, organized in Marseille, 1-4 June 1987 by the Institut Mediterraneen de Recherche et de Creation, under the auspices of the "Commission on Visual Anthropology" of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. I M y aim here is not to discuss the history, trends, problems, and scholarly status of film in ethnomusicology, nor the implications, for our discipline, of theoretical and practical work carried out in visual anthropology. Steven Feld, who kindly introduced me today, did this already 11 years ago, and his article in our journal remains the largest and most important reflection on visual communication in ethnomusicology (Feld 1976). These last years, my main concern has been making films rather than writing about them. So I consider that the two films which I will present to you this evening should not illustrate a written text read from this rostrum, but be the main point of the lecture. Let me introduce, and afterwards conclude, the film-lecture with a few spoken words about my personal experiences in making and in showing films. There are many different ways to film music, depending on the type of music and the main focus of the filmmaker. For myself, I follow one rule: to respect the music and the musician. This means to me: to film a music piece, and to edit it, in its entirety.-to keep music performance free from voice-over narration, and to translate song texts with subtitles.

Introduction: Screened Music, Trans-contextualisation and Ethnomusicological Approaches

“…(2006,6) Practitioner-scholars, participant-observers and self-reflexive work in general can, therefore, provide vital insights. The use of film in ethnomusicology dates back to before the 1950s (Feld 1976, 296), and broader issues of representation have been discussed for some decades now (ibid; Zemp 1988). In this volume, John Baily and Holly Wissler both write about ethnographic filmmaking.…”

Field to Media: applied ecomusicology in the Anthropocene

“…Field to Media is not new when it comes to the basic idea of employing digital technologies in the field. Ethnographic film and photography are commonplace, as are audio recordings, especially in ethnomusicology (see, for example, Baily 1989; Feld 2003; Gubner 2018; Harbert 2018; Zemp 1988). However, in the case of ethnographic video, at least, media production has tended to be completed in serial fashion: the ethnographer conducts fieldwork and then documents it on film.…”

Between Film and the World: Roma Ways of Seeing and Perceiving Persons

“…Having participated in three previous wakes, I thought the best way to grasp the “emotional contour” (Wolf 2001) of the funeral ceremonies was to shoot long and uninterrupted video sequences. This would allow me to not only record the music uninterruptedly, a fundamental aspect for ethnomusicology video making (Feld 1976; Zemp 1988), but also to understand how music fosters the emotions of participants.…”