Month: April 2013

May Day, again

Hooray, hooray
The first of May
Outside s—x
Begins today (anonymous)

On Wednesday I’ll be making my yearly trek to Trimble Park in Point Grey to attend the annual May Morning celebrations of the Vancouver Morris Dance Community, staged since 1990. I’ll have to get there at 5:30 AM to take in the first event – the ritual, disorganized stroll from the parking lot to the basketball court, the farthest distance from the homes along 9^th Avenue who complained decades ago about the “noise”. Philistines. Then its one round of morris dance after another, first the men’s team (Vancouver Morris Men), then the women’s team (Tiddly Cove Morris), witnessed by a small crowd of die-hard enthusiasts, some dressed in vaguely renaissance costume. The sun creeps up over Mount Seymour at about 6:00 AM. Sometimes the morris community marks the occasion with a cheer and a song. Other times they’re busy dancing so the sun appears without so much as a “hello”. At one point in the evening, rousing song May Day songs are performed, such as the Padstow May Day song and the Helston May Day song. When they fire up the Padstow song, one of the members appears in the costume of a Padstow Oss (horse) and prances around under the supervision of a jockey called “all-sorts”.

Tiddley Cove has been mandated to elect a May Queen from their midst. She is given only cursory attention; more often than not, she simply participates as a dancer. Over the years various high-profile members of both sides take turns being an announcer. Much to the credit of both teams, they each have two to five musicians providing live music. That may not appear to be momentous, but almost all ethnic folk dance associations use recorded music, often broadcast from a nearby boom box. I believe that the use of recorded dance accompaniment is near tragic, but most dance groups shrug the problem off. Apparently they are reluctant to pay for musical services, and yet the musicians of the morris communities around the world happily donate their services. Be that as it may, the dancing and singing wraps up about 6:30 AM, followed by a group breakfast in a local restaurant. Many of the dancers then go off to work, knowing that come 3 PM, they will be desperately fighting the urge to nap right there at their desk.

History

It has been over a decade since I retired from morris dancing, and it’s been many more years before that when I stopped producing the Trimble Park May Day events. I joined the morris community in 1986 after being “discovered” at EXPO 86 when I was an artist-in-residence portraying Will Kemp on the “streets” of the exposition playing the pipe-and-tabor, Kemp’s favourite instrument. I was unaware that it was also a highly prized musical accompaniment for morris dance. When I was invited to attend the practices, I realized that I would enjoy dancing as much as playing, thus beginning a very long and deeply satisfying association with morris dance in all its guises and seasonal celebrations.

Shortly after joining, I learned that crack-of-dawn May Day was the high point of the morris dance year. Morris teams in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and of course, England, would join together in the pre-dawn hours of May 1^st and “dance up the sun”, sometimes with a faithful audience of 100 or so, sometimes only “a man and his dog”. Why? It was then that I was introduced to the mythology of the morris dance that centred on the alleged pagan power of fertility that was kept alive by “the old morris dancers” long after they understood why there were going through the motions. It was only the new generation of morris dancers of the third revival (in company with the folk revival) who were a lethal combination of post-hippies and academics that allegedly uncovered the reasons, thanks to careful reading of The Golden Bough. It helped that the Western world was also just waking up to the call of the environmentalists and the back-to-earth movement.

Historicity

Our first foray into a May Morn was organized by one of the stalwarts of the VMM and took place in a park nearby Georgia Street near Stanley Park. Drivers studiously ignored us as they rushed to work. It occurred to me that I could use my concert programming skills to create an “authentic” May Morn event for the next May Day. I choose Trimble Park because it had the requisite hill top ambiance overlooking the city with a clear view of the rising sun. There was a small sense of irony that we were a group of English folk dancers far from England, looking down on British Columbia’s English Bay. I arranged for a full agenda, with a procession, Maypole, a May Queen, and May Day songs. I was especially proud of the Maypole that I had arranged to be on site the day before. It was to be the centrepiece of the morning celebrations. I eschewed the fake Maypole dancing with ribbons and skipping round dancers, and elected instead to have “nuts” or knots (i.e., wreaths) of flowers flowing from the top like a flag. The pole itself was carried in a ceremonial manner from the parking lot, accompanied by music and dancers, then hoisted up to the sky in a style reminiscent of the famous statue of the American Soldiers raising the American flag in Iwo Jima. True to form, the agenda needed to transparent in addition to being well organized.

The morris community was, for some unknown reason, cool on being so “organized”, preferring to participate in a casual manner with no agenda whatsoever except the plan to dance. Perhaps more important, some of them felt that I had made the dance subsidiary to the occasion. And they were right. The Morris dance had become just one component of a much larger event – the “theatre” of May Day. Some of the VMM complained that they were morris dancers, not branch members of an English Folklore Society, or worse, the Society for Creative Anachronism or some sort of LARP club. From my point of view, as an ethnomusicologist, I wanted to frame the dance in its cultural context. (The truth of either perspective can only be determined by some earnest ethnography who would interview all parties.)

Even given their reservations, I loved the opportunity to create such a magical time with its deep roots in nature. I had spent my teenage years climbing and hiking in Banff National Park so my reverence was well placed. But after a few years, the cracks began to appear in my enthusiasm. I suppose it began the morning I was interviewed by the police! I happened to be the last person in the parking lot before setting out for the dance area when a police car casually drove up to me and signalled for me to speak with them. They didn’t seem overly concerned, and were probably killing time before the end of their night shift. Nevertheless, they expressed concern about our intentions with the May Queen. I laughed and said it was just a bit of fun, but later I realized they were expressing concern because of the reputation of morris dance as a fertility custom, like other pagan rituals both real and imagined.

I had never fully realized how absurd that sounded, until I heard their puzzled and worried voices. I explained it away with academic rationalisations, as we had all done in countless explanations of the “meaning” of morris dance, but I suddenly realized how absurd the explanation was. Thoughts of the Merrie England movement and Cargo Cult crept into my morris thinking.

Fall-out

My ethnomusicology training and theorizing kicked in, so I began to investigate the alleged role of morris dance as a vestige of a fertility vestige. It didn’t take long to realize that academics who specialized in the study of morris dance scoffed at the theory, claiming it to be an enormous impediment to a proper accounting of morris dance. I found a more compatible explanation in Bakhtin’s theories of Misrule which aligned me with the great historians and theorists of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. At one point, I attended a living May Day ceremony in, of all places, New Westminster, a suburb city of Greater Vancouver, now produced by the School district. Like many May Day customs in Canada, the US, and the homeland, England were alive and well, there was absolutely no record of morris dance in their proceedings. This discovery was corroborated over and over again by the academic and historical literature.

Towards the end of my association with the May Morn productions, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the very creature I had created. I even suggested that the event should have no morris dance, just community singing and dancing in the light of May Day celebrations found not originating in the Merrie England, movement but the customs of small rural communities in England. That went over like a brick balloon. In the end, the controversy became grist for my Ph.D. dissertation – Rough Music, Rough Dance, Rough Play: Morris Dance and Misrule. And I withdrew from my role as May Morn producer.

Nowadays I feel whimsical when I watch morris teams and May Morn celebrations. I can’t shake the horrible feeling that the “hobby” mentality of morris dancers clashes with the serious responsibility of maintaining and transmitting a heritage custom and tradition. Regardless of these feelings, I view the members of the morris community as good friends, all of whom are valued members of society. In the end, the controversy seems to amount to nothing more than a difference of opinion, even though they can’t resist pulling out what I call the Fertility Card whenever they explain the basis of morris dance. As recently as last year’s May Morn they made the bogus claim when they were filmed and interviewed by a local television news team. Oh well.

Readings

Roy Wagner (1981) The Invention of Culture
David Lowenthal (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country
Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (1989) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia
Robert Cantwell (1993) Ethnomimesis: Folklore and the Representation of Culture
Stephen Eddy Snow (1993) Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical Role-Playing at Plimoth Plantation (with a foreward by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett)
Robert Ackerman (2002) The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists

World Music Studies

Karaoke versus Folk Singing

Post author By normans
Post date April 25, 2013
No Comments on Karaoke versus Folk Singing

The other morning I was walking down the main street of my neighbourhood, take-out coffee in hand, when I walked by my local karaoke store for the umpteenth time. I use the word “my” advisedly, because I’m not a karaoker. And I am not their target consumer, given that all the posters in the window where written in Chinese and Tagalog. The sight of the familiar little shop reminded me yet again of the huge interest in karaoke among East, Southeast and South Asians.

My walk-by this time was different however, because I suddenly began thinking about English traditional folk-singing.

Hootenannys and the musical cringe

During the mid-60s, folk music sat triumphantly on the top of the charts in North America and England. Although folk music’s popularity was fueled by the likes of Bob Dylan, it also democratized music-making by strongly advocating solo and group singing, no matter the skill level, from beginners to almost-professional.

There were two forms of participation at the local coffee shops and late-night folk clubs. People took turns at a microphone on the miniscule stage or, if they were intimidated by the bravery needed for solo performance, they could always join in the group sing-along featured in the choruses of each song. Today, most people understand the repeated chorus in a popular song form to be a representation of the theme of the song while the verses unfold the narrative. That is true, but it’s easy to forget that the word “chorus” also refers to a choir. No doubt both meanings are relevant, while the former definition has been long forgotten.

At the height of the impulse to sing out loud, a magazine called Sing Out was founded and their book with its circa one thousand lyrics, entitled Rise Up Singing, is still in print. Group singing can be seen in a television program called hootenanny, the term often used by folkies to describe the chorus sections. They were especially popular on university campuses. I have to admit that I cringe whenever I see archival footage of the episodes, as I did when hootenannies were big, but that tells you more about my generation than the culture of the event.

Vancouver had its folk-singing community and its folk clubs, in keeping with the times. Born-and-bred Vancouverites now in their 70s remember the Advanced Mattress Coffee House at 10^th and Alma. The even more iconic Inquisition Coffee House was featured in the wonderful movie American Boyfriends (1989), the sequel to My American Cousin (1985). The stories of both movies take place in Penticton and Vancouver, and in AB, several scenes were shot in The Inquisition in Vancouver at 726 Seymour Street, complete with checkerboard table cloths and dripping candles set in empty, straw-wrapped bottles of Chianti.

In a highly ill-thought-out response to the folk-music craze, and especially the phenomenon of the hootenanny, Columbia Records commissioned their top exec, Mitch Miller, to produce sing-along LPs under the general category called Mitch Miller and his Sing-Along Gang. His productions are some of the most exquisite forms of music kitsch known to mankind, right up there with Liberace, Lawrence Welk and Andre Rieu. The Silent Generation thought nothing of playing Mitch Miller’s LPs at their early 60s suburban barbeque parties. It is the likes of Mitch Miller that explains the birth of rock and roll. Picture an episode of Mad Men.

Social Isolation

The roots of folk music are found in the almost mythical stories about pre-industrial rural people and the urban working poor gathered together to sing lustily or longingly in pubs and kitchens , or at various massed hard labour where they needed to synchronize their combined physical efforts (e.g. , sea shanties). In addition, there is a mountain of proof of recreational singing in the form of thousands of printed ballads and song-sheets. One of the most eloquent descriptions of home-spun entertainment is found in Lark Rise to Candleford, by Flora Thompson where she describes life in rural England at the turn of the 19^th century. Her depiction of a sing-around at the local pub is one of the most endearing and largely factual narratives in English bucolic literature. These musical soundscapes were pedestaled by the New Left of the 60s as evidence of the “humanity” embodied in “the people”, as opposed to mass consumerism fueled by mass advertising and driven by the capital of the elite ruling classes.

Since those halcyon times of 60s protest songs and folk ballads, group sing-arounds in folk music clubs have largely disappeared, save a few niche organisations with dwindling membership. Today, die-hard folkies lament the end of public singing, either in folk song clubs, kitchens and pubs. They point to the advent of digital PM3 players to explain the collapse of community music-making and even community building.

They aren’t alone. Sometime after the end of the popular folk music era and its hootenanny craze we find the development of personal listening devices, beginning with the Walkman. Although the convenience of PLDs is undeniable, the advent of personal music players and their ear bud attachments, now called headphone culture, has had a curious blowback. Sociologists around the world are expressing concerns for young people who seem to be retreating into themselves, rather than expanding outwards as they come to occupy the mainstream of public culture. This trend towards emotional solipsism is creating such an alarm that it has spawned an academic discourse, led by the pioneer Michael Bull and before him, Robert Putnam. Writing in 2000 Putnam expressed outrage and sadness at the precipitous decline in the number of people participating in social groups (such as bowling leagues, his first discovery), to the detriment of the very foundation of collective will – democracy. The solitary life-style of the MP3 listener has been a constantly recurrent theme in the ethnographies compiled by my students, year after year.

When I discuss the collapse of pre-industrial age home entertainment in favour of the solitary pleasure of listening to music on PLDs, I then take a round of votes to learn who uses the musical skills (mainly piano), the core of their bachelor of music studies, in a recreational setting, either in the form of singing or instrumental music (e.g., parlour piano). No hands are raised, confirming the fears yet again.

Then it occurred to me that I should ask a second question after the gloomy response of the first one. “Who does karaoke here?” Half the classroom shot up their hands, almost all of them East Asian. This was followed by lots of excited chatter, with students spilling over each other’s descriptions of how much fun it is to go out with friends and sing all night! The other half of the class stares in disbelief.

Sing-arounds from two worlds

Karaoke, a Japanese fad from the 60s, ultimately extends back in time through 50’s crooning, enka, to traditional folk song, minyo, where singing around the kitchen fire and in the agricultural fields was as endemic as it was in England. Last year I ventured into a Western Karaoke bar (actually a Legion) and discovered a lot of serious-minded (i.e. non-ironic) white singers having a great time apparently on a weekly basis. At about the same time, I discovered the Huey Lewis-Gwyneth Paltrow exploration of Western karaoke in the film Duets (2000).

So, what are the differences between a sing-around in a folksong club and a karaoke bar? Forgetting the surface for a moment (i.e., the radically different style of the songs) the differences on first glance appear to be centred on memorisation and performativity. Folk-song circles are notorious for requiring all singers to have their lyrics memorized. The concern seems to be replicating an “authentic” performance where pre-industrial singers supposedly never used (and perhaps couldn’t read) sheet music. The great English pioneer revivalist, Ewan MacColl, had a hand in this style when he developed his unwritten code of behaviour in his Ballad and Blues folk song club, the first folk music club in England (which abandoned American blues in favour of English ballads.) I have to admit my support for this position, having seen groups of singers (like modern-day choirs, actually) staring intently at their music books instead of each other during a sing-around. Karaoke is solidly built on the idea that singers, and even their audiences, have easy access to the lyrics because they’re broadcast on a television monitor, sometimes with the 21^st century iteration of the bouncing ball pointing out the words at the moment of their place in the song. My impression is that some (many?) singers don’t even need to see the lyrics on the screen, but regardless, the convention removes the fear and listener barriers to understanding the words of the singer. Secondly, folk- singers in folk clubs today tend to take the stance of a serious even meditative story-teller, whereas karaokers are as effusive and flamboyant as their singing models. In other words, karaokers don’t appear to take themselves as seriously as folk-singers.

Conclusion

I want to see these two scenarios brought together. Then I’ll give it a shot.

Readings

Niall MacKinnon (1993) The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity

Michael Bull (2007) Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience

Robert D. Putnam (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Roelof Hortulanus, Anja Machielse and Ludwien Meeuwesen, authors (2006) Social Isolation in Modern Society

Noah Arceneaux and Anandam Kavoori , editors (2012) The Mobile Media Reader

Flora Thompson (1939/1973) Lark Rise to Candleford

Rob Drew (2011) Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody

Brian Raftery (2008) Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life

Teaching World Music Studies

A Radical New Classroom

As I prepare for my summer class, it occurred to me that I could radically re-organize the classroom experience for the students. But at what cost?

In the last few years I have worked inexorably towards an educational environment that moved steadily away from rote learning, and towards collaborative education. The most vivid example of this evolution is my assessment procedure (formally known as exams). Although assessments have been the scourge of every generation and age of student from time immemorial, they also seem to be a necessary evil.

Like democracy, the theory of the assessment is flawed, but it is currently the only effective means of measuring acquired knowledge. The results of an assessment (e.g., a degree) assure an employer that the potential employee really does have the necessary skills to complete the job. However, even this bald fact of life is under review as more and more employers are conducting their own assessments during their job interviews, having lost faith in the degree process. Be that as it may, I have abandoned that silent rite of passage – the hushed exam room with a ticking clock, pencils at the ready. I began with in-class assessments that could be written inside or outside of the classroom during exam times, then added an open-book policy, until I finally graduated to online exams.

The growing dilemma

With the evolution of my classroom and its procedures in mind, I was recently musing about a new classroom procedure that was radical even for me. Before I explain my latest thinking, I need to explain that my summer lectures are about three hours long, consisting of two weekly winter classes back-to-back. Three hours may seem like a vast amount of time to lecture and even more challenging, to sit through as a student, so I countered the potential for lapses in concentration by using a video and audio excerpts, and even music performances conducted by myself. I overcame the boredom factor, and encountered another problem. Now, with the bells and whistles cutting into actual lecture time, I did not have enough time to say everything I felt needed saying. I sometimes found myself having to finish up a previous lecture in the first few moments of the next lecture.

My content became even more challenged when I introduced an entire half hour of student presentations in each “week”. Suddenly I had even less time to talk, and yet the presentations turned out to be wildly successful. Students were anxious to share their experiences, either in World Music or Popular Music, using my guidelines and the media resources in the classroom. I was astounded at the variety of interests, so there was no turning back to the old days of lecture downloading/uploading.

I have managed to retrieve some of my missing lecture time by mounting the assessments online, instead of in the classroom, but I am still haunted by the specter of the modern needs of the Millennial generation. They are surrounded and engulfed in knowledge available at the fingertips. I think they need experiences to contextualize their place in that vast ocean of information.

Workshops

So with this in mind, I imagined the following scenario in which workshops would occupy the entire time of the second lecture. Here is a preliminary list of those workshops:

Class 1: Introduction and key concepts including ethnography
Workshop: Students pair off to conduct 5 minute ethnographies of each other, then present their findings to the class

Class 2: a personal sample of Word Music interests based on cultural diffusion
Workshop: Student learn dances to additive rhythms

Class 3: introduction to ethnomusicology and hybridity
Workshop: Students pair off to create pop fusions, then present their conclusions to the class

Class 4: Canada’s Intangible Cultural Heritage: the fiddle
Workshop: Students learn to jig, reel and “chair dance” (i.e., podorhythm)

Class 5: an introduction to Canada’s songcatchers
Workshop: Students conduct a sing around / karaoke (on a purely voluntary basis)

Class 6: Powwow cultural background
Workshop: Students listen to a First Nation guest speaker

Class 7: Powwow music and dance
Workshop: Students learn powwow steps

Class 8: Zen Buddhism and meditation
Workshop: Students participate in a Zen meditation exercise and ritual

Class 9: Zen Buddhism and music
Workshop: Students perform choral Zen music-making

Class 10: English country dance
Workshop: Students learn a country dance

Class 11: English morris dance
Workshop: Students learn a morris dance

Second thoughts

Obviously these workshops would be highly entertaining, but would they fulfill the mandate of the university and the educational needs of the students? I’m not certain. One obvious change is the greatly reduced amount of lecture time. Instead of the current 2 hours and 10 minutes (not including presentation) the lecture time would be 1 hour and 15 minutes – almost half. On the other hand, in the world lectures, 1.25 hours of lecture time is very generous, almost taxing the attention span of the modern audience. A puzzle, to be sure.

I can hear critics scoffing at my scenario. “It’s nothing more than edutainment.” “Learning-light, perfect for the student who is looking for a quick and easy 3 credits.” “Students will emerge from the course with a pocketful of stories and scant information about ethnomusicology.” “With classes like the one you are proposing, there’s no wonder that the baccalaureate degree is so severely devalued today.” “How is a student supposed to get gainful employment if they take courses that don’t give them facts and theories to use in their jobs.”

No doubt about it, my proposal would be monstrously out of place in most of East and South Asia. It would not even remotely prepare them for their graduation exams.

Full-time ethnomusicology faculty members can fulfill this urge to contextualize ethnomusicological theory by directing ethnic music ensembles. The ensembles are, for all intents and purposes, year-long workshops. And they have real-time value – 2 credits towards graduation.

In weak defence, I could say that my workshops offer greater variety than the four ensemble offerings currently available, even if my versions are somewhat facile and introductory in nature. They would be perfect for the student interested in ethnomusicology but who doesn’t have the time to participate in a year-long ethnic music ensemble. And they certainly contribute to the 21^st century’s concern with experiential and collaborative learning which could be applicable across the work-force.

But there’s no escaping the criticisms mentioned above, which is why I won’t be doing the workshops any time soon.

What do you think? Add a comment, below.

Readings

James A. Davis, editor (2012) The Music History Classroom

Thomas Rudolph and James Frankel (2009) YouTube in Music Education

Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, editors (1996) Senses of Place

Lucy Green, editor (2011) Learning, Teaching, and Musical Identity: Voices Across Cultures

Ted Solis, editor (2004) Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles

Performance World Music Studies

World Music week at UBC

Last week Professor Hesselink of the Ethnomusicology Department announced an exciting program for a World Music Week. It will feature four dynamic groups representing traditional China, Bali, Korea, and sub-Sahara Africa.

The week of special performances is a chance for the hard-working ensemble members to display their passionate commitment, wrested from their precious time normally spent on the usual demands of a typical university year. It’s also a great opportunity for the rest of the music student body and the university in general to see the excellent work being done on behalf of the Canadian multicultural landscape.

My position as a sessional instructor does not allow me to create and maintain a World Music ensemble for credit. But if it did, what would I chose to do?

Morris and Mummers

In a previous post, I nominated two candidates – a fife and drum corps, and a Canadian fiddle ensemble. Now I’d like to recommend another ensemble, also worth 2 credits and a world of exciting experiences to bring life to theory.

I would mount an ensemble devoted to morris dances and mummers plays. Their repertoire would come from deepest, darkest…England! Working class England, to be specific, both rural and urban. The group would be comprised of beginner dancers, which is the same mandate as the other ensembles. Like all the other World Music ensembles, the membership would be open to non-music students. Given that UBC has an enormous dance community with many clubs and special interest groups, I should imagine that the interest among those dancers would be massive, even if their immediate interests are in salsa, or a host of other genres. Dancers know only too well that when you gotta dance, you gotta dance.

The dancers would be accompanied by musos – one or more musicians who would be drawn from the violin community on condition that they convert their pristine technique to rough-and-ready, off-the-shoulder fiddling. More than one fiddle, including beginners, would be an asset. Penny Whistlers and tambourinists might be added to the mix. If an accordionist should come along, they will be treated like kings and/or queens. And perhaps the truly adventurous students would like to try their hand at pipe-and-tabor, taught by me.

Although it is tempting to invoke “come one, come all” to all music instrument players, from trombone to oboe, but I am leery of this catholic approach. Morris teams in England are famous for their motley morris musos, are comprised of tenor saxophones, sousaphones, guitars, and other assorted mis-matches but the motivations of the English teams to form such ensembles is rather different from mine. English morris teams and their musicians know the custom from the inside out, and are playing with it (I hope!); the UBC ensemble needs to become acquainted with the real thing, before they become “ironic”. Such irony is at the heart of the internet videos that feature morris dance hybrids, reminiscent of Monty Python.

The repertoire of dances would be drawn from the four major traditions and most important, each custom would be tied to its customary season. Naturally, appropriate costume would be rough-and-ready with a wide margin for self-expression. Finally, and most unusually, the ensemble would be open to all ethnicities and sexual orientation. The only requirement would be the physical ability (and passion) to dance vigorously. Musicians would be required to memorize their music, and everybody would have to be comfortable with being completely mobile, travelling all over the campus (and outside of campus) by foot. The ensemble would never, never perform in a recital hall to a sit-down audience (unless required to, by some sort of higher authority).

Learning Objectives

The university administration (and I suppose the students) need to be assured that they are having a learning experience, and not just a whole lot of fun. We know that the African, Balinese, Chinese and Korean ensembles promise new adventures in rhythm and metre, some of it expressed in dancing. The Chinese ensemble also provides an opportunity to gain an appreciation of the traditional music of the world’s current economic power-house and its massive diasporan communities, here in the Lower Mainland and elsewhere.

All four groups are also exercises in cooperative behaviour from cultures with agendas quite different from Western Art Music. The most obvious difference is the seeming lack of conductor, although directors of all the ensembles are present to keep the ensembles together. But they are inside the group, as lead players, reminiscent of many Early Music ensembles and a few rare and wonderful chamber choirs.

What would a morris and mummers team get out of the experience? Where do I begin? In no particular order…

The members of the ensembles would discover first-hand the original yearly seasonal customs common to Western culture (mainly from England), and practiced at home and around the world in profound (some say monstrous) transformations. Christmas and Easter, to name the two biggest high days, will take on new and revitalized meaning, stripped of their materialist cores.

Secondly the students would experience the essence of performance. The team would play ”on the street”, where the audience is happenstance. The morris or mummers would put out a “hat” (which would largely be symbolic) for the audience to vote with their spare change. Or their feet, walking away from the performance with disinterest. Each “presentation” is 20 to 30 minutes, and then repeated over and over again, until it’s time to go home.

Perhaps most important of all, the members of the ensemble would discover how central dance is to an appreciation of music, high or low. They would learn how right Friedrich Nietzsche was, when he said that “we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”

Readings

Steve Roud (2006) The English Year: A Month-to-Month Guide to the Nation’s Customs and Festivals from May Day to Mischief Night

Keith Chandler (1993) Ribbons, Bells and Squeaking Fiddles” The Social History of Morris Dancing in the English South Midlands, 1660-1900

Georgina Boyes (2010) The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (revised illustrated edition)

Paul Spencer (1985) Society and the Dance: the Social Anthropology of Process and Performance