Lomax, Alan. Selected writings, P.

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As a rst guess, then, one may view the function of song style as a reinforcement of those norms of social interaction which are adaptive. I shall dene the good, in behavioral terms, as the structure of adaptive interaction norms. The beautiful, then, will be dened as the appropriate, matching communication structure which reinforces these adaptive norms. The good and the beautiful, in this view, are two sides of the same coin, both to be discovered in the structure of observed behavior in culture. This hypothesis must then be tested cross-culturally and within a scalar, evolutionary framework on a number of song structures. Esthetics will, in this approach, become a study of the suitable in its dynamic relationship to the development of man. The special province of folklore will then become social esthetics: only in traditional tales, songs, dance, and design patterns does there exist such dependable evidence of the activity of man in choosing symbolic systems suitable to his economic and social condition.

(...)

Once painting lived on the body, sculpture was something which was used and handled, architecture was the result of cooperative labor, and literature was recited or danced. In civilization, all these arts have become representational and a dirty problem for the behavioral sciences. On the contrary, song and dance are acts that may be recorded anywhere as performed, and then studied as events which structure the relations of human actors in cultural context. Such structures may be compared to more everyday behaviors. From the pairs of song performance and social interaction, a series of stable, symbolic functions can be established. All communication rests upon the redundancy principle and may be rated by the degree of redundancy. Speech and song are produced by the same organs., conform to the same linguistic regularities (grammar, vocabulary, etc.) and use the same given communication modespitch, stress, duration, speed, timbre, segmentation, meter, melody, volume, register, social ordering,

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etc. All these features are treated far more repetitively and formally in song than in speech. Indeed, song, where redundancy appears at all or most levels simultaneously, may be both recognized and dened as the most redundant form of vocal communication. The high redundancy level of song has many consequences. Song is essentially louder and more arresting than speech. It shouts across social space and across human time as well, since its formal patterns are both emphatic and easy to remember. In song, groups of people easily phonate together and in coordinationa very rare speech event which adds to the social weight of the statement. Song, like other forms of folklore, establishes and maintains group consensus about a multitude of human concerns across time. This highly redundant form of phonation most often appears in ritual contextsfunerals and weddings, religious, initiation, and political ceremonies, and the like, where the continuity of a culture is reinforced or reinstated for the entire communityor in situations where formal interpersonal relations prevail, such as work, courtship, and dancing. Song thus seems to function principally as a way of organizing group behavior and group response in public situations. It seems to be a group, rather than a o, communication. The serenade alerts the neighbors to a young mans sexual interest in a young woman. The sung soliloquy, except in the case of very young children, always seems to be drawn from the public musical tradition. This private singing probably serves to alleviate the pain of

isolation by reminding the singer of his most pleasant, or anxiety-lled, or everyday social relationships. In terms of cantometric measurement, at least, sung performance varies less by function than by culture area. In simple culture one usually nds only one or two basic performance models which are employed again and again for many functional categories. These interaction models for the singing group seem to mirror the norms of interpersonal behavior that are basic in a culture region. Song transmits this normative information efciently because of its multi-level redundancy and formality. Thus, three essential symbol functions reach their peak in song: speed, total recall, and summation. A familiar melody or fragment thereof heard out of context can recapture the whole of a culture pattern. Most of this information in song goes on the air from a good recording. Thus the potential of an archive of eld recordings as a body of objective data about the social process is potentially unsurpassed. The problem of cantometric research was to begin to locate the channels in song recorded performance which transmitted information about social

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norms. Cantometric research began with some guesses about where indicators of cultural structure were located in song performance: A. About social orderingin the social organization of the performing group. B. About information owin the information rate of the performance. C. About important role modelsin the vocal stance employed.

Cantometrics is a system for rating a song performance in a series of qualitative judgments; one day it may be a way of using song as an indicator of social and psychological pattern in a culture. Cantometrics takes into account the phenomena described by European music notationmelody, rhythm, harmony, interval size, etcbut it looks beyond these European basics at many other factors present in and (as far as we could tell by intensive listening) generic to the song style of other areas. These factors include the size and social structure of the music- making group; the location and role of leadership in the music-making group; the type and the degree of integration in the musicmaking group; the type and the degree of melodic, rhythmic, and vocal embellishment in a sung performance; and the qualities of the singing voice normally effected by the chosen singers in a culture. Since these features of a performance are judged by our system in a summary fashion, we also looked at the purely musical traits at a similar level. For example, rhythm was rated, not in terms of the precise meter that occurred in a selection, but in terms of levels of increasing complexityfrom the simple one-beat rhythm, often found among Amerindians, to the free, almost meterless rhythms common to much Oriental singing. In addition, however, we looked at the type of rhythmic organization of both the singing and instrumental groups, here again rating the sample in terms of increasing levels of integration, from simple unison to complex counterpoint. Thus our rating system, for rhythm, quickly summarizes in four judgments much of the information that would be obtainable from painstaking notation and analysis of hundreds of examples by normal methods of music notation. Cantometrics does not depend, except at one or two levels, upon formal musical analysis, but is limited, I believe, to those features of a sung performance which are available and important to a normal listener anywhere. Using the cantometrics system, a trained observer can make the same series of dened observations about any song that he hears, whether recorded or live.

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THE CODING SHEET The cantometric coding book now ready for publication runs to more than fty pages and thus can be only summarized here. Therefore, in what follows, each rating scale, which is fully dened in the coding book, is explained in the briefest terms. An exception is Line 1, with which this article is particularly concerned. Unless otherwise stated, Point 1 in each line stands for the nonoccurrence of a trait, and the line itself, reading from left to right, is a scale from nonoccurrence to maximal occurrence of a trait. Figure 1 [not included] reproduces a sample cantometric coding sheet, coded for a lament recorded by Margaret Mead and Theodore Schwartz in Manus, New Guinea. A line-by-line explanation of the coding system follows. (1) Organization of the Vocal Group, rated in terms of increasing group dominance and integration. This line asks the question: Is the performance a solo by a leader (L) with a passive audience (N) and the resultant situation that of the leader completely dominating the group (L over N), or is the group (N) in some way active in relation to the leader (L)? Point 2 indicates complete leader dominance (e.g., Orient, Western Europe). Points 3 and 4 represent other solo singing situations (e.g., Southern Spain). Points 5 and 6 denote simple unison singing in which leader and group sing the same material in the same way and in concert (e.g., Amerindian and many other primitive peoples). In 5 (L/ N), the leader is dominant more than 50 percent of the time, whereas the reverse relationship prevails in 6 (N/L). Point 7 represents the situation in which both L and N are active in singing the same melodic material, but one part slightly trails the other and often adds small melodic or rhythmic variations (e.g., Oriental choruses, Watusi). Point 8 (L+N) is noted when L sings a phrase and then N separately repeats it. Point 9 (N+N) is indicated when N sings a phrase and another part of the chorus (N) repeats it. Points 10, 11, and 12 denote what we term interlocked relationships, i.e., when a part of a singing group overlaps another or performs a supportive function for the other (e.g., Negro Africa). L (N, in 10, indicates an interlocked relationship between L and N in which L is dominant; N (L, in 11, indicates a similar relationship with N dominant; N (N, in 12, denotes a similar relationship between two groups. Point 13 (W) indicates complete interlocking (e.g., Pygmy hocketing style, European contrapuntal choir). (2) Relation of Orchestra to Singers. Point 1 denotes absence of orchestra or accompaniment. Point 2 indicates a simple accompanying relation by one to three instruments; Point 3, the same with a larger orchestra; Point 4, the same with a dominant big orchestra. Point 5 indicates a big orchestra alone. Points 8 and 9 denote the trailing relationship with a small and a big orchestra; Points 12 and 13, the interlocked relationship with a small and a large orchestra. (3) Organization of the Orchestra, rated in terms of increasing group dominance from left to right, as in Line 1. (4) Type of Vocal Organization. Point 1: no singer. Point 2: monophony. Point 3: unison singing. Point 4: heterophony. Point 5: polyphony, i.e., any consistent use of part singing, no matter how simple. (5) Tonal Blend: Voices. This line rates voice blending in the chorus from none to homogeneous to well integrated. (6) Rhythmic Blend: Voice. This line rates the rhythmic integration of the chorus in ve degrees, from poorly to well integrated. (7) Type of Orchestral Organization. Rated as in Line 4. (8) Tonal Blend: Orchestra. Rated as in Line 5. (9) Rhythmic Blend: Orchestra. Rated as in Line 6.

(10)Words to Nonsense. This line rates the relative importance of meaningful words as against nonsense syllables (including vocal segregates) in a sung text. Point 1: words important and dominant. Point 2: words less important. Point 3: words with some nonsense. Point 4: nonsense more important than words. Point 5: nonsense only. (11) Over-all Rhythm of the Vocal Part, rated in increasing degrees of metrical complexity. Point 3: one-beat rhythm. Point 5 and 6: simple meters such as 2/4 or 3/4. Points 8 and 9: complex meters such as 7/8. Point 11: irregular meter. Point 13: no consistent meter. (12) Linking Rhythm of the Vocal Group, rated in terms of increasingly complex integration. Point 3: unison. Point 5: heterophony. Point 7: accompanying rhythm. Point 9: polyrhythm. Point 11: polymeter. Point 13: rhythmic counterpoint. (13) Over-all Rhythm of the Orchestra. Rated as in Line 11. (14) Linking Rhythm of the Orchestra. Rated as in Line 12. (15) Melodic Shape. Point 1: arched. Point 2: terraced. Point 3: undulating. Point 4: descending. (16)Melodic Form, rated from through-composed (1), through ve increasingly simple types of strophe (2 to 6) and ve increasingly simple types of litany (7 to 12), to Point 13, which represents the special type of litany typical of much Pygmy singing. (17) Phrase Length. The length of the basic musical ideas which make up a melody is rated in ve points, from extremely long to extremely short phrases. Complex strophes are generally composed of long phrases, litanies of short phrases. (18) Number of Phrases in a Melody, rated from left to right in eight degrees, from eight or more phrases to one or two in each melodic section. (19) Position of the Final, rated in ve degrees from left to right, from the nal on the lowest note to the nal on the highest note of the scale used in a given tune. (20) Over-all Range, rated in ve degrees, from a second to two octaves or more. (21) Average Width of Intervals, rated in ve degrees, from dominance of narrow intervals (microtones) to dominance of wide intervals (fourths and fths). (22) Type of Polyphony, rated in six degrees of increasing complexity from none to counterpoint. (23) Embellishment. The degree of melodic ornamentation is rated in ve degrees from left to right, from highly ornamented to virtual absence of ornament. (24) Tempo, rated in six degrees, from very slow to very fast. Point 9, the center point (walking pace), has about sixteen beats per minute. Point 13 was not used. (25) Volume of Singing, rated in ve degrees, from very soft to very loud. (26) Rubato: Voice. The degree of rubato (rhythmic freedom) which affects the overall vocal rhythm (Line 11) is rated in four degrees from left to right, from very great to none. (27) Rubato: Orchestra. Rated as in Line 26. (28) Glissando (voice gliding between notes), rated in four degrees from left to right, from maximum to none. (29) Melisma (two or more notes per syllable), rated in three degrees, from great to none. (30) Tremulo (voice quavering), rated in three degrees, from great to none. (31) Glottal Shake. Rated as in Line 30. (32) Register(s) most commonly used, rated in ve levels, from very high to very low. (33) Vocal Width normally used by the singer, rated in ve degrees, from very narrow and squeezed to very open and relaxed (the yodel). (34) Nasality. The amount of nasalization characteristic of a singer is rated in ve degrees, from very great to none. (35) Raspiness (any type of harsh, throaty voice quality), rated in ve

degrees, from very great to none. (36) Accent. The forcefulness of the singing attack is rated in ve degrees, from very forceful to very relaxed. (37)Consonant Enunciation. The precision of enunciation of sung consonants is rated in ve degrees, from very precise to very slurred.

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MUSICAL ACCULTURATION The usefulness of Cantometrics is, perhaps, most quickly apparent in relation to the troubling problems of musical acculturation. The American folklore school, led by George Pullen Jackson (1943), studied the available musical scores and concluded that most socalled Negro melodies were variants of old European tunes. Africanists, such as Melville Herskovits (1941), pointed to the survival of African musical habits and institutions in the New World. A comparison of the cantometric proles of song performance from Negro Africa and from a wide sampling of Afro-American groups provides the answer to this apparent paradox (see Figure 2) [not included]. In most respects the African and Afro-American performance proles are identical and form a unique pair in our world sample. The social organization of the musical group, the degree of integration of the musical group, the layout of the rhythm, the levels of embellishment, and the voice quality sets conform to the same ratings in both Negro Africa and Negro communities in the New World. These paired proles differ from each other principally at the level where Jackson discovered Western European inuence, i.e., in Lines 16 and 17, which deal with melodic form and phrase length. The African prole codes 10 (simple litany) on Line 16 and 10 (short phrases) on Line 17. The Afro-American prole codes 2 to 12 on Line 16, which means that American Negroes sing every type of strophe as well as every type of litany; it also codes 7 and 10 (phrases of medium length as well as short phrases) on Line 17. The cause for this shift of emphasis in the Afro-American prole seems clear. Perhaps the most prominent and powerful trait of Western European folk song is its attachment to the strophic melodic form, composed of phrases of medium length. It has exploited this trait pair (2 to 6 plus 7) to develop a body of melodies unmatched in the world for number and variety. It appears, then, that Negro singers, coming to the New World, were impressed by the European strophic form and added it to their musical resources, meanwhile keeping their own system more or less intact in other respects. As melody makers, they retained their interest in the litany, short-phrase form but learned how to use and to create melodies in the potent European style. For another example of musical acculturation, we may look at modern Polynesian song. One of the most notable traits of old Polynesian music is the choral performance in perfect tonal and rhythmic unison of long and complex texts, where every syllable is clearly enunciated. In some areas, a rudimentary form of polyphony occurs: one of the voice parts rises in pitch and maintains this level while the chorus continues to sing at the original pitch, thus creating a simple drone harmony. Shortly after contact with European explorers and missionaries, this older style was submerged by an acculturated choral style, which most Polynesians mastered. They astonished, delighted, and sometimes horried European observers by choral performances in perfectly blended and often extremely banal Western European harmony. Indeed, a casually organized group of Polynesians could soon sing in the European harmonized style more skillfully than most Westerners. Recordings of these performances became popular hits in Europe and America, and today this Euro-Polynesian style is spreading into Indonesia, South Asia, and even aboriginal Australia.

The cantometric coding system provides a basis for understanding this historical development. In both Western Europe and Polynesia, text is of paramount importance. European singers, however, perform mostly in solo. Choral singing is rare in this area, and, when it occurs, it is badly integrated unison. In order to organize a polyphonic chorus, Western Europeans must be drilled to pronounce, attack, and accent each syllable together and in one manner. This ability to chant in perfect unison, which is a precondition for effective Western European harmonic singing, is a normal Polynesian culture

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In an earlier paper (Lomax 1960), it was suggested that an older choralizing, wellintegrated singing style has survived in mountain areas, on islands, and, in general, on the fringes of Western Europe, largely sub- merged by the more modern and familiar soloballad style of folk song. Cantometric study has strongly conrmed and sharpened this hypothesis. We have found that, in those areas where people sing naturally in well blended choruses and sometimes in harmony, melodies tend to be in litany form, metrical pattern is more complex, melodic embellishment is less important, and voices are lower pitched, wider, more relaxed, less nasal, and raspy. In other words, the stylistic prole characteristic of this Old European area strongly resembles the model of simpler African song styles. There are also choral-litany song types embedded in the repertoire of modern Western European folk song, notably the sea chanties of Britain, various types of work songs, childrens game songs, and certain survivals of pagan ceremonial such as the Christmas and May carols of England. All of these song types integrate, strengthen, and direct group activity in various ways. With the exception of the childrens games, however, all these functional song types seem to be survivals that are passing out along with the activities and the forms of social organization that supported them. In our society only the children know how to organize and dramatize their feelings in the ancient, collective fashion. That the need for such song types still exists among adult Westerners is evidenced by the recent popularity of highly charged, choral-litany song patterns, rooted in erotic dance forms and created by Afro-Americans. This summary exposition indicates how stylistic models maintain and renew themselves, by working hand-in-hand with history, to weaken or support functionally based song types. Enough has been said to indicate the general nature and usefulness of the cantometric system. It looks at a level of musical activity which is highly patterned, resistant to change, and superordinate over function. The remainder of the paper will relate certain levels of song performance structure to social structure.

! Ver a 259 - referencia sobre Loyola!!!!

The leading singer commands and dominates his listeners during his performance. His association with his audience is, in sociological terms, one of exclusive authority, a principal model for conduct in Western European culture (see Parsons, 1949:43, 140147, 178179, 286295). When a doctor or a lawyer takes over a case, his authority is absolute for the duration of the relationship. The same unspoken pact joins boss and worker, priest and penitent, ofcer and soldier, parent and child. Dominance-subordination, with a deep sense of moral obligation, is the fundamental form of role-taking in the Protestant West. Our cooperative enterprises are organized in terms of an assemblage of experts, each one temporarily subordinating his separate, specialized, and exclusive function to an agreedupon goal. Workers on belt lines cooperate in this way to produce automobiles for Ford or bombers of Lockheed, just as instrumentalists combine to make the big symphonic

sounds. Ultimately, this leader-follower pattern is rooted in the past, e.g., in the European concept of lifelong fealty to the king or the lord. Ignatius Loyola inculcated the same principle in his teaching of the Jesuits: In the hands of my superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing...a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will.

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Choreometrics: A Method for the Study of Cross-cultural Pattern in Film Alan Lomax, Irmgard Bartenieff, Forrestine Paulay Although human beings always have been prime subjects for the cameraman, social scientists have, on the whole, been the last to recognize the research potential of lms. Film can provide the data for a systematic world ethnography and for the systematic study of social interaction, but until recently it has been little used for these purposes. Excellent collections of lms do exist, such as those in the Muse de lHomme and in the Institut fr den Wissenschaftlichen Film at Gttingen, but their function in science has been illustrative and supplementary rather than central and hypothesis- producing. Even the collection of lm has been neglected by those whose studies it might best serve.

P. 277 The Laban Effort/Shape system was the source of some of the measures used in the Choreometric system. Among the fty features observed, two or three have emerged as the most potent classiers and organizers in the Choreometrics rating system: 1) body attitudethe dynamic postural base line for all activity (lines 711, Dynamics Coding Sheet), 2) the parts, or zones, of the body most frequently articulated (lines 1 and 2, Dynamics Coding Sheet), 3) the geometry or dimensionality of the movement that results (lines 2027, Dynamics Coding Sheet). These three easily observed features are sufcient to characterize the regional source of any stretch of lmed movement.

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The mapping of the generative loci of human song is made far more signicant by the discovery that each one has nourished a performance style which matches its social structure. Our survey had drawn on the codied information of ethnography about political and economic systems, social mores, and many other features of culture from a representative sample of our song cultures; thus we could study the ways that society and song varied together cross-culturally. Our nding, backed by strong statistical evidence, is that a framework of performance traits varies directly with a framework of social traits, as follows: 1.The information load of singing increases with socioeconomic complexity. 2. Complexity of ornament and orchestral organization increases with social stratication. 3. Choral vocal blend increases with community solidarity. 4. Vocal tension increases with the severity of the sexual mores. 5. Use of polyphony increases with male/female complementarity.

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Factor analysis of the data had two outcomes. The rst was a set of culture regions that could be arranged in a stair-stepped evolutionary ordersee the bottom row of Figure 1 [not included]. The second result was to group the seventy-one measures into fourteen homogenous structural factors, clustered into two polar sets(1) differentiative and (2) integrative. Figure 1 shows how these two principal centroids in human behavior relate to cultural evolution. The evolutionary arrange ment of the geographic factors along the

horizontal axis provides a time scale from gathering to irrigation agriculture. The vertical axis allows us to measure the rise and fall of the two main socio- communication factors along this evolutionary scale. Differentiation, the factor combining measures of productivity, articulation of information, stratication, embellishment and the like, rises steadily along the evolutionary scale. In fact, this seems to be the evolutionary vector in culture, though it isnt by any means the only component of social change. Fourteen other independent and semi-dependent factors have also been identied. However, the specially close relationship of the elements of social complexity expressed in this diagram testies that economic productivity, administrative systems, and communicative systems have evolved together in increasing differentiation across all human time, with steadily progressive steps from the simple gatherers to our own industrial age. Integration clusters the measures for level of social solidarity, the complexity of integration, the complementary relationship of men and women in social and productive activities and the variables that indicate tension between the sexesalong with performance variables that score level of concert, the degree of vocal tension, and the presence of complementary parts in music. This factor describes the bonds that link team members and the character of the teams and relationships which carry on the adaptive and productive work of society. Its core is male-female complementarity in work and in performance. Where such complementarity is high, as with Pygmies, for instance, polyphonizing is constant. Thus, integration is at its peak right at the beginning of the human series, where the collecting activity of women provided more than 50 percent of the food of the community. This relationship changed in full hunting and shing societies where men took over the main subsistence tasks. Then the feminine contribution to public performances diminished and the integration variable fell to a low level. It rose again to a peak in the gardening societies of the tropics where a complementary work relationship usually was to be discovered alongside chorally-unied polyphony. The level of integration dropped in complex agricultures where, because of the importance of the plough and of large domesticated animals, males tended to dominate food producing, and, by consequence, societal activities. Thus, this indicator of the character and level of integration in work, song, and dance teams varies in an orderly way over against the measure of social progress. Human evolution can thus be viewed in terms of (1) increasing levels of socio-technical complexity and (2) cyclic changes in community plans for integrating its sexual and productive teams. Each stage of human progress produces a fresh and unique relationship between the two central variables, differentiation and integration. Each new combination is a witness to the endless potential of cultural adaptation.

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Each stage of human culture is thus productive of a unique set of social and aesthetic solutions to mans problems of social adjustment. Practical men, especially if they have an engineering degree, often regard these expressive systems as doomed and valueless. Yet, wherever the principle of cultural equity is applied so that these worrisome musical systems are given a chance to grow, they can rise again. I cite a few examples known to me: the renascence of Romanian panpipe music when the new Socialist regime gave the last master of the panpipe a chair in music at the Romanian Academy of Music; the revival of the ve- string banjo in my own country, when I induced a talented young man named Peter Seeger to take up its popularization as his lifes work; the magnicent recrudescence of the many-faceted carnival in Trinidad as a result of the work of a devoted committee of folklorists backed by the Premier. These and many other

instances that might be cited from America and elsewhere show that any of the folk traditions can revive and can nourish important values if given proper administrative care. But, it is argued, as the world is industrialized, folk and tribal culture must go down the drain. This view holds that all cultures must be industrialized and that this means the end of cultural variety. Industry, however, is not an absolute good. Recently we have learned that industry can destroy the natural