Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  It was Margaret Mead, again, who was most helpful at the beginning of the project, and who found a way for Alan to enter academia without ever formally becoming part of it. Mead had never hidden her disappointment with the unimaginative work done by many anthropologists who emerged after World War II, those she called the middle-management generation, and had made a point of watching out for those she thought had exceptional talent and interesting ideas—autodidacts and independent thinkers, people like Colin Turnbull, Ray Birdwhistell, and Lomax—lending them the credibility they needed to make a life as a researcher in the human sciences. She made them part of her salon, guests at her annual Christmas Eve dinners, and provided cover for them in the closely guarded world of the academy. Alan was one of the few successful applicants to the American Council of Learned Societies that year who was not a professor of some kind or another, and the ACLS staff encouraged him to complete his Ph.D. and get out of what they thought of as “the entertainment business.” They insisted that he at least be attached to a university, and Mead arranged for the grant to be administered through the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.

  He began his nine months of study by learning what he could about vocal qualities and communications theory. The ACLS suggested that he center his reading, consultation, and research in Philadelphia, where he might also take classes in the University of Pennsylvania’s anthropology department or with the several folklorists in the English department. But as he was now almost forty-five years old, he feared that formal study would slow down his work. When he arrived at Penn about a month late for the start of classes, his casual approach annoyed some of the professors, but then Penn’s folklore scholars’ chief interests were in classifying and ordering collections; they were not prepared for the sweeping study he was proposing. McEdward Leach, professor of English at Penn, recalled that at one point Alan asked who would be examining him for the Ph.D., and when they told him he pointed out that he had had more experience and had published more in folklore than any of them, which they knew to be true.

  Alan’s passion and urgency likewise did not sit well with most professors, and he had little interest in their kind of scholarly life. As he wrote to Jack Harrison of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation to explain why he had not matriculated as a graduate student, “I had come to feel strongly that big institutions often kill good research. Those long corridors, those administrative routines, those bloodless and vicious battles of grades and positions, the weariness of institutional lunches, especially the heavy and puritanical atmosphere that somehow pervades many places—all this combined to stifle the imagination and the impulse to work hard and the freedom to enjoy the work. I resolved to be as unbuttoned as possible during my brief stint of cooperative research and to make the standard of the job that everybody enjoys himself.” He eventually returned to New York City and schooled himself by reading ethnographies of the world’s people and asking anthropologists—most of whom had never written anything on music—to tell him about the musical practices of the groups they had studied. What he learned was that the social role of music was far more diverse than he or anyone else had ever expected.

  At Columbia’s anthropology department Alan encountered Conrad Arensberg, a highly respected if atypical anthropologist. Arensberg was open to thinking about human life in broad and general patterns, but at the same time was able to focus on the smallest behaviors. He was a gentleman whose manners and generosity stood out in the overheated competitiveness of university life. Sitting in the only Chinese restaurant close to Columbia University (where Arensberg ordered in Mandarin), their daily conversations revealed to Alan a hidden history of the study of bodily expression, some of which had begun at Columbia. In 1930 Franz Boas and the Russian anthropologist Julia Averkieva made films of Kwakiutl Indian ceremony and daily life, making them the first social scientists to use film to document dance, gesture, and body movement as part of human culture. Later, David Efron, a psychiatrist and a student of Boas’s, filmed gesture and social interaction on the streets of ethnic neighborhoods of New York City and on the campus of Columbia in the 1930s. At Harvard, Arensberg himself had studied gesture and motion in human conversations with Elliot D. Chappel, a pioneer in human interaction studies.

  When Alan showed him the maps of North American singing styles in his book, Arensberg pulled down from his shelves George Peter Murdock’s World Ethnographic Sample, the first attempt at creating a crosscultural set of data, coding 565 cultures by thirty variables so that they could be compared. Arensberg suggested that Alan might use this approach for what he had learned about folk songs.

  In May 1961, Alan returned to Philadelphia to attend Ray Birdwhistell’s seminar at Temple University. For years, Birdwhistell had been working on what he called kinesics, the study of human gesture and the many levels at which human communication operates. The outside participants in the seminar were Alan, the linguist Edith Trager, and Norman Markel, a psychologist who studied conversations. Before the first meeting could take place, however, Birdwhistell became ill, so for the next two weeks Alan worked with Edith Trager, who tutored him in linguistics. He was looking for some way to express an insight he had that the melody of songs followed the patterns of vocal tension in a culture. With the help of a chart developed by Edith’s husband, George Trager, and another linguist, Henry Lee Smith, that showed where vowels were formed in the mouth and throat, they began to trace the patterns of movement of vowels in songs. What they discovered was that different styles of singing clearly favored different vowels—from those produced high and in the front of the mouth (iy as in “feet”) to those that originated low and in the back (aw as in “law”) to those in between—and different patterns of movement characterized each style. The most typical example of each style’s vowel preference pattern seemed to be found in lullabies and in the parts of songs that were called nonsense—the “hey nonny nonnys” and the “fiddle di diddles.” This was not something that the singers or listeners were aware of, although they could quickly recognize a song style as familiar or unfamiliar to them. These patterns confirmed what Alan had heard in Italy and Spain: there was “a marked preference for high front (tense) vowels . . . in Mediterranean lands, where feminine premarital sexual intercourse was forbidden . . . and low back vowels . . . characterized the song styles of areas with more permissive sexual standards, such as northern Italy, northern Spain, and central and eastern Europe.” Edith Trager called the form of analysis they had developed “phonotactics.”

  When Birdwhistell recovered and returned to Temple University to direct his seminar, he devoted all ten meetings to his ideas on communication, which Alan found “both fundamental and a bit terrifying.” Birdwhistell taught by example, using his body to show what was impossible to describe adequately in words: the body, and especially the face, sent recurrent signals in interaction with other bodily signals, mostly at a low level of awareness. As one became aware of them and saw how humans interacted through these different levels of communication, they were at once vaguely familiar and shocking, as though watching Birdwhistell perform revealed something deep and hidden in oneself. The combinations of expressions he displayed might show a raised eyebrow, a downturned mouth, eyes blinking, the hairline moving forward, a foot lightly tapping in emphasis, the stomach pushing out very slightly—all these gestures together signifying a change from one state of being to another. Birdwhistell was not acting, and did not depend on words; his signals all took place rapidly, but he insisted that there was much more going on at different levels and moving in a dizzying pattern at even greater speed, with constant repetition of signals. This repetition—or what they called redundancy—revealed the stabilizers that carried messages such as, “We belong to the human race”; “We belong to the same culture”; “I am female and so are you”; “Neither of us is crazy”; “I am receiving—keep sending.” Birdwhistell had discovered these exchanges of signals by close analysis of films of conversation, where in slo
w motion bodies were seen to be moving like dancers in synchrony, and he found that these were the stable baselines that make language and other human messages possible. He had also worked out an elaborate system of analysis by which these gestures and facial expressions could be coded—that is, whereby qualities that were difficult to compare could be turned into quantities or numbers that enabled them to be easily contrasted.

  Kinesics was a revelation to Alan. He knew that song was more emotionally charged than speech, which accounted in part for its universality and its endurance. But he had been puzzled by the peculiar relationship between music and speech: music could be enjoyed without words, or even without knowing the language in which the song was sung. If signal redundancy was at the base of all human communication, perhaps it provided a clue to the meaning of music, since music seemed to be the most redundant of all behaviors of which humans are fully aware. Pitch and stress are far more pronounced and repetitive in music than speech, and both are related to the markers that in speech indicate friendliness or hostility, surprise, or simply routine communication. Pitch and stress are learned in early childhood when adults exaggerate when speaking to children. Music, in fact, seems to carry the greatest amount of information in its redundancy of pitch and stress, but even more so in its repetition of words and the use of voice color. In song, words are often distorted by the high repetition of pitch and stress. Speech using the amount of redundancy found in music can only be found in that of children, the mad, or lovers. When these ideas were added to Birdwhistell’s method of coding and treating bodily movement, Alan saw a way to rethink what he had spent his life learning: “For the first time I had encountered a system—not so much of social theory, as of how to analyze and organize the bits of cultural material which have been for so long part of my working experience.”

  What he had been learning resonated with his earliest exposure to folk music. It heightened his awareness of the differences between southern white and black singing. Most of the musicologists and folklorists who came before him had largely dismissed these differences as unimportant, and certainly not a legacy of older traditions of singing. Melville Herskovits’s Myth of the Negro Past had shown, however, that the loss of African culture among blacks in the United States was far less than had been assumed. Lomax’s father’s interests in folklore had likewise led him to see the importance of song in work and daily tasks, especially among African Americans. Work songs in Spain, Scotland, and Italy had made Alan further aware of the relationship between vocal tension, sexual restrictions, and socioeconomic development. Reading Freud, Marx, and Emile Durkheim on the relationship between forms of production and social organization and Darwin’s writings on emotion in animals and humans, gave him the means to bring together materialism, psychoanalysis, and social and cultural evolution as the foundations of a theory of song. In thinking about song style, he was fully aware of the links between singing, history, the social group, emotions, the physical motions of work, and the production of food. In several of his earliest formulations of the idea of song style, he wrote:

  The main function of musical style seems to be to reestablish for the individual the familial social and psychological climate into which he was born, raised, and seeks to express himself.... Song style is the formal elaboration of some instinctive and universally human mode of dramatizing or exteriorizing human feelings. Each song style is dominated by one or the other of these patterns.

  Musical style changes least of all human cultural characteristics. [It] is associated with the first and earliest distributions of mankind across the world.... It therefore stands for certain formative, aesthetic processes that operate in human society over long periods of time and in parallel with economic forces.

  Under the term song style one includes not only . . . the formal musical characteristics, but the tone of voice, the motor behavior, the social organization, the audience response and the inherent emotions that produce the musical whole.

  To begin his research on comparative musical styles, Alan sought the help of Robert M. Abramson, a well-known teacher of music at Juilliard. Together they worked up a system for characterizing and comparing music, but they soon found that differences in their personalities and work habits made it impossible for them to continue as colleagues. While visiting Wesleyan University in June 1961 to talk with David McAllester, one of the founders of ethnomusicology, Lomax met McAllester’s first graduate student, Victor Grauer, and the two spent several weeks together that summer listening to various musics of the world and discussing the most significant features that they might find to help focus the description of styles. What they were looking for was a way to compare different musics without resorting to the Western music notation system, which was not capable of describing other musics accurately. Alan decided in advance that whatever method of coding they developed, it should at least be a pleasure to work with, require no musical knowledge, and be explainable in commonsense terms, so that it “would not become an esoteric object in itself but would stay close to the level of listening and enjoying music of which all human beings are equally capable.” This meant, for example, that instead of using Western musicological terms such as “canon,” “antiphony,” and the like, he would use neutral description terms such as “overlap,” “alternation,” and “interlock.” And when he was forced to rely on musicological terminology (such as “unison” and “polyphony”), he would at least widen their meanings to be able to include a greater variety of the world’s musics.

  Over the rest of the summer Alan and Grauer listened to 2,527 recordings from 233 culture areas, coding each piece, refining their categories as they went along. Because Alan was especially interested in vocal qualities, they decided for the time being to focus on vocal music. Alan and his daughter went to Indiana University to find examples of music in their collections to fill in the missing samples he needed. They also spent ten days at Purdue University, whose experimental speech clinic helped them gather six hundred sonogram samples of vocal timbre.

  Alan continued to ferret out the qualities that could be found in all the song style families of the world—the social organization of the performing group; musical organization in terms of musical blend (such as unison, or multi-parted tonal and rhythmic organization, or solo singing); the degree of elaboration of the words; melodic elaboration in terms of length and number of segments and types of elaboration; dynamics; and vocal quality. He finally decided on thirty-seven qualitative measures of style. Each of the samples of song was listened to by two researchers, who then recorded their impressions on rating scales that ranged from 1 to 3 up to 1 to 13, depending on the number of degrees of variations they heard. The results were then compared statistically with the culture traits of the societies from which they came, and conclusions were reached about how a singing style was related to other features of the society. Margaret Mead suggested that the peaks and valleys on the statistical charts could be filled in with color so that their correlations could be viewed as profiles, and therefore be easier to understand by the average person not familiar with statistics.

  After his fellowship ran out Alan continued his work, attempting to learn from anyone who might conceivably help him. By this point his central question was how these patterns of aesthetic structure had been operating throughout history. “The special task of folklore,” he wrote, “was to examine and clarify the nature of these patterns, to show the role they have played in human evolution and to find out how they can be put to work for the benefit of mankind.” The science of folklore was on its way.

  In a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation, which he hoped would support the next stage of his research, Alan wrote:

  I have hit upon three ways of describing with a considerable degree of scientific control what goes on whenever a group of people come together to sing in any culture. [There is] a multiple factor coding system for the musical performance, itself, which surveys and rates the organization of the musical group, the structure of the r
hythm, the structure of the melody, the musical qualifiers and the vocal characterizers. This code system produces distinct profiles for musical culture areas such as the Indians of North America, Negro Africa, Western Europe, the Near East, Australia, Polynesia, etc. It also shows with considerable clarity what happens when cross-acculturation between any two music style families takes place. It is, I believe, the first successful attempt to describe musical performance in an overall sense.

  His Rockefeller proposal was turned into an article, “Song Structure and Social Structure,” that urged ethnomusicologists to abandon the study of music in strictly musical terms, and instead see it in context, as a form of human behavior. Recordings had made transcribing music to paper unnecessary and freed musical analysis from all the errors, limitations, and biases that the traditional Western musicological methods had introduced. The musics of other peoples should no longer be judged on the basis of our own standards of musical value. If formal music analysis was rejected, then what would remain would be the features of musical performance that were available to any “normal listener,” who could then describe any music in the world. What was offered in place of traditional musicology he called cantometrics (“a measure of song” or “song as measure”).

  Alan acknowledged that his system as developed to this point had some areas of “crudeness and ambiguity,” but still managed to elicit agreement from a number of listeners. Having examined large numbers of samples of songs from a given area, they found that the same patterns were repeated, so that it was determined that a sample of five to ten songs for each region would be sufficient. Once songs from a given area were coded by listeners, a profile of the preferred song style could be developed and used to compare various features of a musical style with other styles, and to correlate these profiles with other cultural behaviors and social forms. Alan’s article offered some preliminary examples of style profiles, which revealed that musical styles were fairly limited in their variety and patterning. The results were “revolutionary”: