American Music Documentary. Benjamin J. Harbert
and then shows the musicians looking at a photographic book about New Orleans jazz funerals. The film reveals not only the similarity of styles but also the diasporic meaning of the pan-African practices for the Por Por musicians. Hugo Zemp (1979; 1986; 1990c) and John Baily (2007; 2011) have also produced ethnomusicological films, identifying questions about musical change, diaspora, and musical meaning.
But most films by ethnomusicologists rely heavily on textual arguments constructed by voice-over narration and interview testimony from musicians. Tim Rice’s May It Fill Your Soul (2011), Zoe Sherinian’s This Is a Music: Reclaiming an Untouchable Drum (2011), and Lee Bidgood’s Banjo Romantika (2015) offer expert description of musical traditions, accounting for change and reflexively including the filmmaker-ethnomusicologist in the films. All provide excellent visual and aural examples of musical traditions, taking advantage of film’s ability to offer text, sound, and image. That said, they all operate mostly in the perspicuous mode, favoring clarity over experience. Sensations are often explained rather than felt. Despite some efforts, ethnomusicology’s major use for film is the instructional film or video lecture—perhaps from the JVC Anthology of World Music and Dance collection, aimed at an undergraduate classroom.
As I built a filmography, I began to include films slightly outside the disciplinary circle. A few nonethnomusicologist filmmakers have produced important documents on disappearing traditions. Alan Lomax’s The Land Where the Blues Began (1979) and the majority of Les Blank’s and John Cohen’s films use the camera to contextualize music. Using varying degrees of narration, these films present less argument than documentation, preserving dying musical practices and showing how music is part of the daily lives of (mostly rural) people. Films made by ethnomusicologists and those just outside the discipline offer examples of translating concerns and methods from text to film—presenting the voices of voiceless musicians, giving visibility and audibility to underrepresented musical practices, and brokering meaning across cultural distances.
Looking over the body of scholarly and folkloric films, I began to wonder why ethnomusicology has never taken on a cinematic way of theorizing about music. Cinematography and musical placement offer such rich ways of experiencing music. One answer might be in the early definition of what ethnomusicology was. In his seminal book The Anthropology of Music, Alan Merriam hoped to bring disciplinary focus to a study of music that rigorously accounted for culture. His precursors were an eclectic bunch—explorers, composers, folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and song hunters. As a call to order, Merriam proposed that ethnomusicology should be a discipline of “sciencing about music” (1964: 19–25). He clearly advocated for an empirical method (social science) of studying the humanities (performing arts). In so doing, he cut out the option of ethnomusicology using critical art in understanding music. Reconsidering Merriam’s disciplinary approach, what might one branch of the humanities (film) be able to reveal about another branch of the humanities (music)?
Two influential musical ethnographies contain pathways for answering this question. In his book on music in a Papua New Guinea rain forest, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Steven Feld concludes with two photos of Kaluli men in full ritual dress. The content of the photos is the same. A man is dressed in a costume of feathers used for a ceremony in which the man becomes a bird. The first photo freezes the man and his outfit, the medium depth of field blurring the forest behind him. The details of the outfit are easy to see—the symmetrical arrangement of feathers, the painted designs on his body, the drum he holds in his hands. The second photo is of the same outfit, yet it suffers from extreme motion blur, perhaps because the lack of light required a long exposure. The details are lost in the blur but the photograph captures the motion and, in fact, the figure resembles a bird as much as it does a man. Of this photograph, Feld states, “In a sense, then, the imaging code typically considered to be the least documentary and the most ‘artistic’ structures what is the most ethnographic of my photographs” (2012: 236). The image conveys the experience of the ceremony. Feld continues to suggest that images can bring analysis back to a meaningful whole—the multilayered and multimodal meaningful event that ethnomusicologists interrogate. Like the photograph, cinema can present a synthesis. But it can also provide analysis. For example, a close-up of an instrument encourages listening for that instrument. Including two people in a frame encourages a consideration of their relationship.
Feld’s blurred man-bird image has another significant contribution for thinking of how film can engage music. He suggests that the image is an expression of “co-aesthetic witnessing” (2012: 233–38). Choosing the blurred shot renders the Kaluli ritual in photography. In other words, the photo does what the ritual does: it softens the distinction between man and bird. To varying degrees, the filmmakers that I engage in this book approach music through coaesthetics—using the image to represent the elements of music. Shirley Clarke attempts to make a film based on Ornette Coleman’s musical theory of harmolodics. Chris Hegedus instinctively pairs circular camera motion with circular harmonic sequences in the music of Depeche Mode. Jem Cohen uses visual and narrative disruption to mirror the dub techniques that Fugazi uses. Co aesthetic witnessing has the potential to show musical elements from a cinematic perspective—an act that is theoretical (from the Greek theoros, meaning “spectator”)1 and ethnographic when anchored to the understandings of the people being filmed. A film can reveal aspects of music shown through musical and cinematic practices.
The second musical ethnography that helps frame how filmmaking might be used to study music is Tim Rice’s May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music. Rice came to Bulgarian music as an amateur dancer. As part of his phenomenological approach to understanding the music, he suggests that his understanding of the music expanded from the horizon of dancing. Rice suggests that dance is one of many “nodes of musical cognition and understanding,” that the body offers a meaningful experience of music in the same way that playing an instrument or speaking with musical terminology engages musical understanding (1994: 98–103). In this sense, understanding can take many forms—from moving the body without regard to tempo (an expressive understanding of the fact that music is playing) to playing virtuosic melodic ornaments on a Bulgarian bagpipe (an expressive understanding of melodic details particular to Bulgarian music). Rice’s contribution is that he describes these activities as types of nonverbal understanding. Extending Rice’s theory to cinema, I argue that filmmakers engage cinema as a way of understanding music. The process of shooting and editing can be expressive nodes of understanding. Shown to an audience, a film can present an understanding of music and of musical issues. Bringing back Feld, my central claim here is that the filmmakers I present in this book develop and express coaesthetic understandings of music through shooting, editing, and constructing a narrative—they engage filmmaking about music.
I wrote this book to analyze cinematic techniques and offer perspectives brought through interviews with filmmakers who use their practice to understand music. In Merriam’s terms, perhaps this is a work of sciencing about filmmaking about music. My goal, however, is not to establish a science about music films but to articulate how making films about musicians can contribute an ethnomusicological understanding about music. Interview, music analysis, and the stories of production build an investigation into how each film operates as a set of practices that understand music and its relation to social issues.
The filmmakers I interviewed for this book are not ethnomusicologists, so much so that they often felt unqualified to speak authoritatively about music. That, to me, is the great opportunity that these films offer. Films by people who are primarily filmmakers make more cinematic presentations of music—through narrative, montage, realism, symbolic representation, and temporality, for instance. While they may have felt unqualified to “speak” authoritatively, each is entirely qualified to create films about music. These films operate more in the experiential mode using techniques that differ from ethnomusicological texts. Their commonality, however, is in the acknowledgment that musical and social worlds are inseparable and that problems and questions should drive inquiry into music. Having chosen the types of films to address, I needed to sort out how to write about these films.
Existing Scholarship on Music Documentaries
Scholars have written about film in many different ways.