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March 9, 2003

Closing Address  |  Jeff Todd Titon

A sense of history pervades this conference in more ways than one. For one thing, this is the first conference of its kind, the first devoted to applied ethnomusicology, a historical first. But while we have been hearing and speaking at this conference about music solving conflict among peoples, we are as a nation about to cause conflict. We are about to invade Iraq.

It's not enough to point out the irony. Scholars in my generation are good at irony. The problem with irony is that it however much intellectual satisfaction irony gives, it doesn't stop tanks. It's not the same as action. Advocacy requires action, it requires public witnessing.

I will come back to Iraq at the end of this little talk. First, applied ethnomusicology — what is it? A lot of people have said, at this conference, what it means to them. To me it involves much of what everyone has said about the application of what we as ethnomusicologists know, to the world outside of the university, something to which academics like me are unaccustomed, as we spend much of our time reading and writing and teaching students in the academic world. We enter the world outside of the university through fieldwork and insofar as it is a transforming experience for us, we return to the university changed, "in a relationship," as the phrase goes, with the people and their music in their community that we have visited and with whom we may have befriended. For me, applied ethnomusicology isn't noblesse oblige, the academy dispensing its wisdom about plain living and high thinking to the world outside. No, as many have observed, we learn as much or more than we teach; our informants are not informants but consultants and teachers, community scholars like Wayne Newell and Blanche Sockabasin. We learn from each other, when it goes well, and we collaborate; we are partners in a common cause. That is what applied ethnomusicology means to me. There are some things we can contribute by virtue of our training, by virtue of our positions, by virtue of our connections to institutions.

Tony Seeger spoke of the difficulties in joining the applied to the academic side of ethnomusicology. These are not merely institutional difficulties; they permeate thought. If in Europe the academic is weary, in the United States and Canada the academic is wary of the outside world. The ivory tower is seen as a sanctuary or prison, depending on perspective. One of my great teachers, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, told a story he credited to Dr. Benjamin Mays, head of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, that bears on this idea. An alligator was captured and put in a zoo inside a big cage where he was given a nice place to live, companions, and food was brought to him every day. After a while the zoo fell on hard times and the animals were let loose. But when the cage was torn down, the alligator did not leave. He waited there for food until he died.

Nick Spitzer prefers the term "public" to "applied." For Nick, terminology is important. Fifteen years ago he critiqued the then (and still) current phrase, "cultural conservation," suggesting we would be better off thinking instead about "cultural conversation." And I think that in universities we can find good use for the term public, as when we speak of a general public, or of a public intellectual. I agree that public ethnomusicology gets us going in good directions. I also think that applied ethnomusicology encompasses it; public is one aspect of applied. Nick's radio show, American Routes, shows how so many regional American cultures have contributed to our vernacular musical culture. Nick likes the multiple connotations of routes, but I am wary of one of them, roots, which strikes me as chiefly a marketing term for musical tourism, whereas the center of vernacular musical experience is not in connoisseurship.

Martha Davis and Paul Austerlitz spoke of their applied ethnomusicology activities in two worlds: that of the Dominican Republic and that of the United States. Each an academic, Davis and Austerlitz both do applied work, Davis quite consciously and for a long time feeling her allegiance to the Dominican worlds of scholarship and Austerlitz recently having discovered that what he had been doing instinctively in the Dominican, as a human being entering relationships with scholars and musicians there, can be regarded as applied work.

Judith Gray, Jon Kertzer, Tom Van Buren and Dan Sheehy all spoke to the place of recorded music in the world of listening, now accessible more than ever over the internet. Gray works in a repository, the Archive of Folk Culture, where awareness of the relationship between the recordings and the communities that donated them is increasing, to the point of repatriation and an internet presence for the collections. Kertzer and Sheehy are also dealing with collections, but these have been released commercially on Folkways, a company that must answer to the demands of the marketplace, where intellectual property rights law has become a major issue in applied ethnomusicology. Van Buren speaks of his institution, one of the largest that is dedicated to the support of the ethnic folk arts, and its projects in cooperation with ethnic communities in the New York area.

Blanche Sockabasin and Wayne Newell spoke with me about collaboration and partnership between applied ethnomusicologists and community members such as themselves. Sockabasin and Newell are singers, musicians, and respected elders within their Passamaquoddy community in Maine. They have circulated repatriated field recordings, originally made among the Passamaquoddy in the 1880s for the Smithsonian Institution. These are having a positive impact, helping those who would preserve and sustain their traditions to realize something of their depth, as well as to connect with the past.

Svanibor Pettan and Kjell Skyllstad presented their work in using music to help bring peoples together in the war-torn Balkans. This requires the application of ethnomusicological knowledge, for some of the traditional music is nationalistic and would increase conflict rather than resolve it. And so music and conflict brings me back to Iraq.

A few weeks ago I stood on the steps of a great building, a monumental work of architecture, at my renowned university, and addressed hundreds of students, faculty, administrators, and onlookers who had gathered to protest the still imminent invasion. It reminded me of the anti-Vietnam War teach-ins nearly forty years ago, but then I'd been in the crowd, cheering the speakers on. Now in a privileged position as a faculty member, in a privileged institution, I could speak to the group instead of merely being in it. My words would be heard. I had a platform, albeit inside the ivory tower.

In those forty years I thought I had learned something about conflict, and something about music. Iraq, I said, had a magnificent musical heritage. Iraq was a cradle of civilization. War in Iraq, unprovoked war in Iraq, I said, would damage that heritage, irrevocably. We are told, I said, that if we invade Iraq we will depose a bad dictator. If that is our destiny, we have a lot of work to do all over the world. Why Iraq? It wouldn't have anything to do with the strategic importance of oil to our energy future, would it? Oh no, they say we must destroy the weapons of mass destruction. But the inspectors haven't found any, I said. Oh, they say, but they are there. But surely, I said, the inspections and the sanctions are crippling their weapons program beyond use; and are they really a threat to the United States? Oh yes, we are told, they are a threat; Saddam Hussein is linked to Al-Queda. But is he? What is the evidence? Oh, there is evidence; it is all part of the axis of evil. It just kind of spreads like a virus. If Al-Queda is our enemy and Saddam is our enemy they must be friends, they must be together in this. But, I say, surely Saddam's regime is secular and therefore opposed to Al-Queda's Islamic fundamentalism? Yet I am told it isn't true or doesn't matter, and that we must fight terrorism in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and wherever else it is, in order to secure our homeland. And so I said to the group that rather than making the world a safer place, rather than eliminating terrorists, by invading Iraq we will make the world more dangerous, and we will create far more terrorists than we destroy.

I claim no special wisdom here. Many people feel as I do, but we feel powerless to do more than witness. We vigil by the side of the road. We light candles in the darkness. Most of us know what it is to celebrate life. Some of us celebrate life through music. That is what unites us at this conference. Whether it is Nick Spitzer calling for a public ethnomuscology, bringing music with a sense of history, or roots, into public consciousness through his show American Routes; whether it is Tony Seeger, working tirelessly on behalf of indigenous groups in the world arena to secure their rights to their music and to their culture in the face of global exploitation, potential or actual; whether it is Jon Kertzer, realizing Alan Lomax's dream of a global jukebox with Smithsonian Global Sound; whether it is Svanibor Pettan or Kjell Skyllstad using music to bring peoples together and quell conflict — something we could only hope for in the Middle East now; whether it is Wayne Newell and Blanche Sockabasin singing and working to bring Passamaquoddy traditional culture into the future, not merely to preserve the traditional music and language but to bring it alive among the young who embody that future; whether it is university scholars working in partnership with community scholars and activists like Wayne and Blanche — all of us know and understand the quickening power of music, because we feel it. We feel its renewing and revitalizing power; we understand its wisdom; we embody what it teaches; we are in the world musically and we also have some kind of itch that tells us it's not enough merely to feel it — we must act on it.

And so music, which may seem powerless against the imminent invasion of Iraq, which will surely be harmed in any war, will last because it is a life-affirming power, an alternative to conflict, an alternative to war. Our efforts to sustain music, on behalf of the shaping power of art that each human being possesses, and that all of us use in our lives every day, as we shape those lives, create our environments, celebrate spontaneity and creativity, these efforts will outlive and outlast the negating powers of control and destruction, of slavery and empire building, of greed and the desire for material wealth. We are on the right side of this and if at times like this it sometimes feels as if we don't make a difference, know that in the long run we do, and we will. I wish you all well.