Explorations in Urban Ethnomusicology: Hard Lessons from the Spectacularly Ordinary

Author(s): Adelaida Reyes Schramm

Source: Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 14 (1982), pp. 1-14
Published by: International Council for Traditional Music
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EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY:

HARD LESSONS FROM THE SPECTACULARLY
ORDINARY1
by Adelaida Reyes Schramm
In the last decade, the emergence and rapid growth of ethnomusicological interest in urban phenomena has stirred up a fresh sense of
methodological and conceptual inadequacy in the face of current needs.
Confronted repeatedly by the complexities of the urban situation, we are
pressed to reassess the resources with which to meet new problems and
new demands. New questions are being asked; old ones are being
reformulated.
This paper addresses two old questions viewed from a specifically
urban perspective.
The first concerns delineating the object of study in an urban milieu.
The multiplicity of rules which govern a great diversity of musical
behavior within a broad range of events involving actors from a multicultural population, makes boundaries highly fluid. Where boundaries
that define musical repertories, geographic areas, ethnic identities, institutions and other such entities overlap or contradict each other, how and
on what grounds does one carve out what is to be studied? The more
complex the socio-musical domain, the more difficult and, at the same
time, the more necessary it becomes to deal with this issue. For as the
study object becomes more a construct than a given, the justification for
its status and its choice, itself becomes an analytical enterprise upon
which will depend, to a significant degree, the productivity of the study
that is to ensue.
The second question is related to the first and concerns socio-cultural
context. What might its implications be for work in an urban area when
this partakes both of a specific national culture as well as of the
cosmopolitanism that, by definition, makes light of culture-specificity?
These two questions in turn suggest a third: what insights into the
term, urban ethnomusicology, might be gained through an investigation
of the above issues?2
The data which will be used as illustrations in the course of exploring
the above issues were collected in Manhattan, one of New York City's
five boroughs. The study which motivated their collection is an ongoing
one but it focused particularly on free and public musical events during
the year July, 1978 to July, 1979 and again during the period June to
September, 1981.
In an effort to identify ethnomusicological problems that came out of
ethnographic data, I was attempting to construct an overview of New
York City's musical life when I was struck by the proliferation of free and
public musical events. Their sheer volume and the frequency and regu-

2 / 1982 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

larity of their occurrence compel one to assume that they occupy a significant position in and are a major feature of the city's total musical life. It
is virtually impossible to ignore the facts that: 1) they attract huge
numbers of people from all strata of society because they are free of
charge, are widely publicized and take place in highly accessible places;
and 2) they draw support from institutions large and small, from the
private as well as the public sectors. Certainly, no ethnography of New
York could be anywhere near complete without an account of these
phenomena. It was therefore evident that the order underlying this
apparently amorphous mass needed to be discovered. To this end, a
preliminary delimitation was effected.
Free and public events were to include only those events which took
place in Manhattan and which were publicized throughout the city via
the major newspapers, magazines, the radio, and a telephone number
that gives out a daily listing of free and public events. Excluded were
those events brought to public attention through church, school and
community bulletin boards, foreign-language newspapers and other such
restricted means. Using these constraints, I counted a total of 2682 events
in the year 1978-79.
It is not possible to estimate the total number of participants in these
events. For individual occurrences, audiences range from a handful of
people to thousands. A free outdoor concert by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, for example, was estimated to have drawn 150,000
people, reported by one newspaper to be half the population of the state
of Wyoming and more than that of the city of Reno or Tallahassee
(Jenkins 1978:14). Audiences consist of down-and-out park bench
habitues, well-dressed shoppers, blue-collar workers from construction
sites on their periodic breaks, and white collar workers with offices in the
vicinity of the performances. They include the young and the old, preschoolers, students and senior citizens; tourists as well as residents in the
area where performances take place, or admirers who follow their
favored performers as these travel around the city on moveable stages
like the Jazzmobile, the Dancemobile, or the Electronic Musicmobile.
The performers may be young, self-taught amateurs or seasoned, highly
trained professionals. They may be pick-up groups like the CETAfunded3 ensembles or established groups like the New York Philharmonic
and the Metropolitan Opera Company.
The events themselves are of two major types: the yearly festivals, and
the series of events than run either seasonally, like the concerts at Lincoln
Center's Damrosch Park, or year-long, like the programs at the Citicorp
Atrium and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Other bases for grouping the events
together were elusive; the apparent inconsistencies were more striking
than the consonances or similarities.
In the annual Japanese O-bon festival, for example, the public is
invited to participate, and the result is a spectacle where some 100
Japanese dancers and musicians in national costume perform with nonJapanese in I-love-New-York T-shirts,4 shorts, and a variety of other
summer wear. The Korean annual festival of 1978 featured Korean

REYESSCHRAMM

URBAN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY / 3

sopranos in native attire and Korean tenors in tuxedos singing Italian

arias. A Sri-Chinmoy meditation session5 attracted additional attention
through the participation of Carlos Santana, well-known as a "Latinjazz
rock fusion" star, who played Sri-Chinmoy's compositions on an electric
guitar. The Fiestas Patronales, announced as an effort to keep alive the
traditions of Puerto Rico, boasted at the same time of the diversity of its
participants: Argentinians, Cubans, East Indians, Filipinos, Italians, and
others. The spirit of these festivals is probably summarized in a song
sung over and over again during the Little Spain Festival of 1979.
Although the organizers initially signalled a differentiation between
Castilians (as they call themselves) and other Hispanics in the city, this
song had a line of text that repeated "...... se salvara" (...... will be
saved) in every strophe. The blank was filled with the name of a country
introduced by participants from that country. Thus, they sang: "Espana
se salvara", "Puerto Rico se salvara", "Peru, Honduras,
Nicaragua, . .". In the end, everyone sang, "New York se salvara."
The musical repertories and their instrumental treatment are similarly
varied. A group that billed itself as performing Middle Eastern music
included Greek and French songs with Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish texts
sung by a lady who claims to have been born in Transylvania. The
ensemble included an amplified oud, a darabukka, and a clarinet. A
balalaika orchestra playing at Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park
performed transcriptions of Tchaikowsky symphonies and Rossini
overtures along with Russian folk tunes. An ensemble of 150 tubas
played Christmas carols at the Channel Gardens on Fifth Avenue as part
of the Rockefeller Center annual Yuletide celebration.6
For the first two months of summer, 1978, the 464 free and public
musical events that took place in Manhattan appeared to have no clear
patterns. The fact that they had a music component and were free to the
public were not distinctive since there were other such events that
differed only in the means by which and the extent to which information
about them was disseminated. But by the end of the summer, with a
larger data base (approximately 633 events7), regularities began to
emerge. The features, free and public, were augmented by others that
began to bind the events into a unit.
These events owe their existence to sponsorship-by federal, state
and/or city agencies, by business enterprise, by civic and church groups,
and by educational institutions. They, therefore, represent to a considerable degree the sponsoring organizations' views of what the city population is like, what they will respond to, what will gain their favor, and
what will eventually redound to the benefit and serve the purpose of the
sponsoring groups. The relationship between the components-sponsors, performers, and audiences-suggests a dynamic that
accounts for the continued functioning of a system of which they are all a
part.
Systematicity also began to be evident from the patterning in the
occurrence of these events. In June and August, but specially in July, the
largest number of events occurred on Mondays, Tuesdays, and partic-

4 / 1982 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

ularly on Wednesdays when the number peaked to an average of 12 per

Wednesday. By October, the supremacy of Wednesday began to be
challenged by Thursday, Friday, and specially Sunday when the average
number of events rose to a peak of 16.2 per Sunday in December.
These findings suggest that free and public musical events are geared
specifically toward New York audiences since they reflect a population
movement that is characteristic of the city. For while tourists and visitors
pour into the city during the summer, New Yorkers tend to flee the city's
heat at least during the weekends. This finding in turn indicates that the
bulk of the audiences come from the five-day-week, 9:00 a.m.-to-5:00
p.m. work force.
During 1978-79, virtually no events took place before noon. But by
12:00 on weekdays, the lunch break for most workers, activity rose
markedly. On an average daily basis, there were an almost equal number
of noontime events on weekends as on weekdays for five months of the
year (August, September, October, November, and January). But for the
rest of the year, the average rose to as much as 10 times (in May) as many
noontime events on weekdays as on weekends. The relation of temporal
distribution of occurrences to audience population is made more definitive by a look at the 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. time slot. Here, events declined
dramatically on weekdays. On an average daily basis, there were, for
every month of the year during those hours, more events on weekends
than on weekdays-ranging from 6 to 12 times as many.
The importance to free and public musical events of the weekday,
9:00-to-5:00 working population is further reinforced by the spatial
distribution of those events. While the financial district around Wall
Street, and midtown Manhattan (where the densest concentration of
office space and shopping areas is located) are alive with the sounds of
music from noon to dusk, the former falls virtually silent after dark, and
the latter replaces the kind of event under study with a smattering of
random performers trying to catch the theater or restaurant crowd.
The shift in location from business to residential areas during the time
slot, 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. which shows the heaviest clustering of events
throughout the week, thus coincides with the time in New York City's
daily round of activities when the audience of 9:00-to-5:00 workers is
augmented by the general populace.
Exemplifying the above patterns are two of the best-known and most
well-established series of free and public musical events in Manhattan.
With very rare exceptions, the 19-year-old Jazzmobile summer
concerts in Manhattan are scheduled on weekdays at 7:00 p.m. All
performances take place on a mobile stage which is transported from
neighborhood to neighborhood attracting residents who listen from
apartment windows and stoops or who congregate on the streets to
socialize. Jazzmobile makes explicit its resident and neighborhood orientation: it brings jazz "directly to the people where they live" (Anon.
1981:3). Neighborhood associations and community groups respond by
inviting the Jazzmobile to their localities, taking responsibility for local

REYESSCHRAMM

URBAN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY / 5

arrangements, and frequently specifying their choice of performing

groups.
In contrast, none of the musical events at Rockefeller Center (in
existence for almost 50 years) start after 5:00 p.m. Its entire program of
free and public events takes place also on weekdays but it adheres to a
noon schedule or to a 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. time slot. These performances
are given at one of the Center's public spaces in the heart of midtown
Manhattan's business and entertainment district. Rockefeller Center, Inc.
intends these concerts to help create an environment attractive to
desirable tenants which at present includes a list of companies, firms and
institutions that "reads like a 'Who's Who' in advertising,
chemicals, . . . oil, publishing," etc. (Anon. 1979:10-11). The employees
and clients-prospective and actual-of these institutions are therefore
the audiences at which the Center's musical events are aimed.
Figure 1 summarizes the features of time, place, target audience, and
sponsor motivation of the Jazzmobile and Rockefeller Center free and
public musical events. These features particularize the general observations made earlier, and illustrate the patterning that underlies the huge
mass of free and public musical events. Regularities in spatial and
temporal distribution identify the core of the target audience: the
9:00-to-5:00 working population,8 undifferentiated by ability or desire to
pay to hear music. It is an audience core that includes a major portion of
the New York population before special interests, particularized repertories and context preferences segment them and mark the resultant
groups as different types of audiences for different types of musical
events. In other words, the data point to the pool of potential receivers in
the communicative structure that is every musical event.
The mundaneness of the above information, particularly for New
Yorkers, belies its significance as data. From the perspective of many city
dwellers, what it amounts to is no more than a statement of the obvious.9
But when one takes into consideration the data base thus far-a
confluence of the musical and extramusical, and the emergent configuration-the distinctiveness of New York's free and public musical events
(from this point on to be refered to as FPME)begins to become apparent.
There are not many places where the following are such an intrinsic part
of social life: the diversity of cultures represented in the audience population; the corresponding diversity of musics and musical tastes; the great
number of events and sponsoring organizations; the masses of people
and the density of their interactions; and the way these elements combine
and respond to the city's public spaces and to the rhythms of its daily
life. 10
On the basis of the preceding discussion, it can be argued that FPME
constitutes a proper object of ethnomusicological investigation.
Contrasts with other kinds of musical events (e.g., private performances,
paid concerts, random and spontaneous music-making) reinforce its
distinctness. Its context-the sum total of the city's attributes and
properties that impinge upon it-lends it its special character.
It can, however, be just as validly demonstrated that units like the

6 / 1982 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

Jazzmobile and the Rockefeller series are structures in themselves,

entities the internal cohesion of which become more clearly evident when
foregrounded by FPME as their immediate context. Context and unit of
investigation can therefore be the same set of observable phenomena.
Their extrication from each other becomes a function of theoretical
orientation.
The possibility of confusion when the same form can have different
functions underscores the necessity of restating the twin concerns of this
paper: 1) how and on what grounds a unit of investigation is identified;
and 2) the context out of which the unit draws for its definition. It also
underscores the need to start with the assumption that units of investigation have no pre-existent and immutable boundaries. Such boundaries
are to be discovered from ethnographic data that do not separate the
musical from the extramusical. In this sense, the study object is a
construct. The logic that leads to the discovery of the unit inevitably
sheds light on the context: boundaries are a statement of relations
between what they contain and what they exclude.
This old lesson becomes specially potent in urban ethnomusicological
research-the
possibility of confusion increases with social complexity.
But the additional value of this old precept lies in what it can offer
toward a more general ethnomusicological
objective: an integrated
explanation of the musical and the extra-musical. When the features
attributed to a study-object derive not only from the object itself but also
from the larger unit of which it is a part, when the linkage between focus
and context is established as essential from the start, the problems that
one extracts for investigation and the explanation that ensues will more
likely be a unified treatment of the musical and the more broadly social
rather than dichotomized bodies of information that will need at some
later point to be reconciled.
The applicability of the above thoughts on study-object delineation
and on the integration of study-object and context can be apprehended
by taking a closer look at our earlier examples.
The total repertory of the Jazzmobile includes a wide variety not only
of jazz styles but also of Latin American popular and dance music types.
Although the Latin American programs are occasionally billed as Latin
jazz, there are a considerable number of items which, from the standpoint of musical features, are not jazz (e.g., guaguangco, merengue,
salsa). Obviously, the criteria for inclusion into the musical corpus that
will be analyzed and described can derive from a number of factors; but
criteria that emerge from data cannot disregard sponsor motivation,
features of location and audience, and performer input (see figure 1).
The neighborhood orientation of the Jazzmobile and the mobility of its
stage bring the Jazzmobile performances to audiences that differ from
each other primarily in ethnic composition. Specifically, the majority of
these performances are given in communities with large Black American
and/or Hispanic populations. Audience composition and community
initiative impinge upon the choice of performers who are then given a
free hand in selecting the music they perform. These facts, taken in

Figure 1
Day of the
week

Time

Location

Sponsor motivation

Jazzmobile

weekdays

7:00 p.m.

residential area*

the preservation and

conservation of
jazz; to bring jazz
to the people where
they live

Rockefeller
Center series

weekdays

noon;
4:30 or
5:00 p.m.

business
and entertainment
district

the creation of an
environment attractive to the Center's
business tenants

*There may be 1 or 2 exceptions per season.

**Thisrepresentsthe bulk of audiences. The number of non-residents varies according to the proximity of pu
tation and to a lesser degree, to the drawing power of the featured performing group.

***Thislabel is emic, i.e., it originates from Jazzmobile. It includes what the larger society commonly calls L
and dance music.

8 / 1982 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

conjunction with Jazzmobile's dedication to the conservation and propagation of jazz (Anon. 1981:3) suggest that what Jazzmobile chooses to
include under the label, jazz, responds to more than the musical features
generally attributed to jazz. The repertory that Jazzmobile calls jazz,
while coinciding at many points with what the society-at-large understands by it, differs at other points because it responds to a socio-musical
consensus among the Jazzmobile personnel, its artists, its sponsors and
the particular local communities who are its audience.
In the case of the Rockefeller Center series, time, place, and audience
translate to office hours, office environments, office employees and
clientele that are markedly cosmopolitan and culturally diverse. The
concomitant music repertories evade ready identification with specific
groups. But the apparent arbitrariness of a corpus that includes Handel,
Beethoven, Rossini, Brahms; Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington;
Latin jazz, operatic arias, bluegrass, blues and swing becomes apparently
purposive when one notes that no item antedates the Baroque, and
nothing in the art music repertory goes past late Romanticism. Everything stops short of the electronic, avant-garde, or experimental.
Conspicuously absent are non-American ethnic music, and highly
amplified forms such as disco or hard rock.
In contrast to the Jazzmobile repertory, therefore, the total corpus of
the Rockefeller Center events is better delineated by what it excludes
than by what it includes. The catholicity of tastes represented by the
Rockefeller Center audiences is addressed not by matching specific
cultural groups with corresponding musics but by aiming for a common
denominator, a mainstream musical idiom that avoids strong associations with particular time-periods, musical genres, performers and styles.
Since the rationale that governs the selection and ordering of aural
phenomena inevitably pervades their analysis, the value assigned to
extra-musical considerations in the selection process is likely to affect the
outcome of the study. Had the guaguangco, salsa, and merengue items
been excluded from the Jazzmobile corpus on the grounds that as musical
categories they are not jazz, the resulting analysis and explanation of the
Jazzmobile as unit of investigation could easily have sidestepped the issue
of why those items were there to begin with; why they were allowed to
be there by those whose primary objective is the propagation and conservation of jazz.
Similarly, if the selection of musical items from the Rockefeller Center
series were governed by the assumption that order comes from
conformity to a monolithic set of musical rules, the ensuing explanation
could easily be warped by the diminution, misplacement or loss of extramusical data.
To summarize, Manhattan's FPME is an ethnographic fact defined by
musical and extra-musical attributes that are internal to it as well as
imposed upon it from the outside. Jointly, these attributes justify FPME
either as unit of investigation the immediate context of which is
Manhattan, or as itself the immediate context for units like the Jazzmobile and the Rockefeller Center series. Either way, context and study-

REYESSCHRAMM

URBAN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY / 9

object are seen as co-defining, and their study as such safeguards the
ethnomusicological interest in the intrinsic linkage of the musical and the
extra-musical. This interest remains fundamental regardless of whether
the explanation sought is for urban phenomena or for any other
phenomena amenable to ethnomusicological treatment.
Where, then, does the deviation take place that requires the new designation, urban ethnomusicology? What makes this new label necessary or
desirable? Similar questions were asked of anthropology when the term,
urban anthropology, began to be used. Subsequent discussions within
that discipline might prove instructive to ethnomusicology.
Distinctions have been drawn between anthropology in the city and
anthropology of the city (Arensberg 1968:3; Eames and Goode
1977:30-35; Fox 1972; Gulick 1968:46; Leeds 1968:31; Wirth 1938).
Taking a parallel view, it may be said that an ethnomusicology which
concerns itself with phenomena in urban areas takes the urban as
accident, i.e., extrinsic to the study-object and hence to its explanation.
An ethnomusicology that concerns itself with phenomena of urban areas
takes the urban as essential, i.e., intrinsic to the study object and hence
to its explanation. To explore the ramifications of this distinction, let us
return to the data of FPME.
Diversity permeates all the components of this class of events-the
participants, the musical repertories, the behaviors, and the situations in
which such events occur. The co-occurrences and interactions among
these components are highly complex: ethnic music events are not
restricted to members of the corresponding ethnic group; art music
performers may also be performers of other musical types; audience
members who dance, sing or clap rhythms at Latin American popular
music performances in one context may listen quietly to the same music
in another environment. The involvement of all kinds of media and technology, of large masses of people, of a broad range of secular and
religious agencies-all bear the hallmarks of urban life.
To create order on the basis of the assumption that diversity is merely
the sum total of a number of discrete musics or social groups counters the
reality that in the urban area, these diverse units do not merely co-exist
but interact. To assume that there is one over-arching musical system
would be difficult if not impossible to maintain; on the basis of a single
set of standards, irregularities could easily outnumber regularities.
The lack of fit between these assumptions-probably the most
common in the ethnomusicological literature-and the data from FPME
compels entertaining an alternative assumption: the multiplicity of
seemingly discrepant elements submits to an urban socio-musical order
that creates a balance between musical needs and musical resources. This
order governs the interpenetration of musical elements and actors from a
variety of cultures and social groups as these respond to the many
different kinds of contexts that complex societies typically generate.
The validity of this assumption can be fully demonstrated only in a
work much larger than this one. For the moment, it suffices to point out
that, of the three alternative assumptions considered, it is the only one

10 / 1982 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

that does no violence to the data." It is therefore the assumption that

maximizes the data's potential for explaining FPME as urban
phenomenon.
Support for the assumption can also be derived from the analogous
but much wider experience of sociolinguistics in dealing with heterogeneity, diversity and variation in complex societies. Order comes from
what Halliday calls "a grammar of choices" (1978:4), the grammatical
being defined as "what is acceptable". In this view, language is "a
resource for meaning, with meaning defined in terms of function"
(Ibid.:17). Echoing Labov who has persuasively argued that the systematicity of diversity in complex societies is made manifest not so much in
the sound phenomena of speech but in social attitudes toward them
(1972:248), Halliday notes that divergence is replaced by converof dialects since diversity and variation is "intrinsic in the
gence-not
of attitudes toward language. These are as "remarkably
but
system"
consistent" as speech habits are "extremely variable" (Ibid.:155). Thus,
language in an urban setting is best described in terms of the consensus
that binds variation and makes it systemic.
The urban "speech community" is a heterogeneous unit showing
diversity not only between one individual and another but also
within one individual ....
We cannot describe urban speech in
terms of some invariant norm and of deviation from it ....
The
significant fact is that . . . variation is meaningful. The meaning of a
particular choice in a particular instance is a function of the whole
complex of environmental factors which, when taken together,
define any exchange of meanings as being at some level a realization
of the social system. (Ibid.:156)
Hence, in the interpretation of language, the organizing concept that
we need is . . . system. With the notion of system, we can represent
language as a resource, in terms of the choices that are available, the
interconnection of these choices and the conditions affecting their
access. We can relate these choices to recognizable and significant
social contexts (Ibid.:192)
Two points, highly relevant to FPME, are salient in these passages:
1) the inevitability and functionality of diversity in complex societies;
and 2) the importance of choice and consensus in ordering difference.
The first is an empirical reality that method may not excise; it is what
method needs to explain. The second asserts the centrality to explanation
of the human component-in
FPME, all the participants, performers,
sponsors and audiences. These hold the key to the "grammar of choices".
Like the speakers in an urban speech community, they have access to
diverse musical resources and are conversant with multiple sets of sociomusical rules. These resources and the ability to control them are part of
the native paraphernalia that allow participants in FPME to invoke the
particular set that is appropriate to each of the many contexts that are
part of urban existence.

REYESSCHRAMM

URBAN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY / 11

The relevance of the above two points to urban musical phenomena in

general can only be presumed; ethnomusicological work in this area has
barely begun. But if the presumption can be made on the basis of
similarities between language and music in urban environments and on
the basis of what FPME indicates, then the model that ethnomusicology
is challenged to construct for music of complex societies is one in which:
1) diversity is functional; and 2) the consensual is a determinant of the
"grammatical".
Neither diversity nor consensus is new to ethnomusicology. But the
treatment of consensus has been conditioned by the dichotomous view of
the socio-cultural and the musicological components of the discipline,12
and the treatment of diversity has been conditioned by a perception of
what ethnomusicology traditionally studies. Consensus about music,
more often than not in the form of verbal behavior, is assigned to the
socio-cultural and serves primarily as supporting evidence in the
explanation of musical products and behavior. Consensus in music is
considered implicit in the musical product and may or may not be made
explicit in its analysis. Consensus as determinant of the "grammatical",
however, requires the blurring of those distinctions. In the model that
urban phenomena urges us to consider, it is to be sought equally in the
socio-cultural and in the musicological; it is integral to explanation.
Diversity carries the stamp of the paradigm, simple-folk-non-Western
(Kunst 1969:1) which remains influential in ethnomusicological method.
Wittingly or unwittingly, we aim for the ethnomusicological equivalent
of Chomsky's "'ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous
speech community' " as the "object of linguistic description" (Labov
1972:267). But the compatibility of this ideal with an urban object of
ethnomusicological description is open to question. What the ideal
stands for is competence in a monosystem and a high level of abstraction
which becomes virtually unusable "because most of the distinctions that
are important [for performance in the polysystem that is a complex
society] are idealized out of the picture" (Halliday 1978:37-38).
The value of the work that has been conditioned by the above factors
cannot be overestimated, but strict adherence to them can be dysfunctional and severely limiting when dealing with music of urban areas. It
may in fact be useful to speculate that the non-Western part of ethnomusicology's orientation has prejudiced more than the treatment of the
plural and the consensual. The attractiveness of the non-Western and the
distant has too often been translated to indifference toward and even
disdain for the familiar. Cities, particularly Western cities, are thought to
be commonplace; there is hardly an ethnomusicologist who has not had
extensive exposure to them. Hence, the jadedness that has made it easy to
overlook phenomena as ubiquitous and ordinary as FPME.
And yet it is to this very ordinariness, a consequence of widespread
use and broad-based consensus as to value, that such phenomena owe
their existence. It is this ordinariness which, in a sense, justifies their
claim to being not merely in the city but of the city. But it is also what
obliterates the romance that ethnomusicologists frequently seek.

12 / 1982 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

The other side of jadedness, therefore, is the "pursuitof the exotic and
the marginal within urban locales" (Fox 1972:205) and the imposition of
methods that make the urban merely an accident of location.13 For this
course of action, the need for the qualified designation, urban ethnomusicology, finds little justification.
This line of argument directs us to a consideration of alternative
options: 1) the banishment of the qualifier, urban, on the grounds that it
is redundant; or 2) the use of the term, urban ethnomusicology, to refer
specifically to studies pertaining to music of urban areas. The first option
recalls an earlier debate over the subject matter of ethnomusicology:
whether it includes all musics regardless of location, type, or cultural
origin (as in Rhodes 1956), or whether it excludes the art music of the
Western world and the music of complex societies (as in Kunst 1969).
The rationale for this option is embedded in that side of the debate that
argues for all-inclusiveness. This needs no recapitulation here.
The second option warrants a more extensive exploration, far more
than can be accomplished here, but the FPMEdata suggest that there are
empirical and pragmatic grounds for taking the music of urban areas as
the subject matter of urban ethnomusicology:
1. Cross-cultural generalization, important for theory construction, is
better served by a conception of the urban as essential rather than
accidental. The very term urban invites such generalization. All urban
areas, despite their distinctiveness, belong to a worldwide network of
analogous entities bound together by political, economic, and ideological interests. They all possess a measure of ambiguity born of an
inner-directedness toward their national culture, and an outer-directedness toward the rest of the world with which they are in continual
contact. New York exemplifies this urban condition: ". .. is it any
wonder that there is so much ambiguity in the symbolization of this
metropolis, this New York which is 'at once the climactic synthesis of
America and yet the negation of America in that it has so many
characteristics called un-American?' " (Strauss 1976:122). FPME is the
ethnomusicological analog of this urban condition. Despite its identification with New York, it has many things about it that are disturbingly
familiar even to those who do not know New York but who do know
other cities.
2. The music of urban areas provides some of the strongest stimuli for
conceptual and methodological innovation. The duality of the modern
city which is part of a nation-state and at the same time a member of an
international class requires a treatment of its music that is similarly
Janus-like-one that looks simultaneously at the culture-specific as well
as the cosmopolitan. FPME, in its dependence on musical needs and
resources that transcend those of a single culture, not only indicates the
feasibility of such treatment but insists on its implementation.
3. The powerful influence of the paradigm centered on the tribal, the
folk, and the non-Western needs to be counterbalanced by underscoring
the music (unlimited as to type) of complex societies (also unlimited as to
type and geographical location) if ethnomusicology is to broaden its

URBAN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY / 13

REYESSCHRAMM

perspectives. The utility of the term, urban ethnomusicology, is therefore optimal when it applies to music of urban areas. It is in this domain
that the countervailing forces are perhaps strongest. It is therefore this
domain that presents ethnomusicology with a new frontier.

NOTES
1. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper read at the twenty-fifth Conference
of the Society for Ethnomusicology at Indiana University in Bloomington on
November 21, 1980.
2. Although the term, urban ethnomusicology, is now commonly used, there has been
very little discussion of what it represents.
3. CETA is an acronym for Comprehensive Employment Training Act, a government
program that is currently being dismantled. It provided employment for youth.
4. "I love New York" is a promotional slogan that is used on bumper stickers, clothing,
souvenirs, and objects of all kinds. It is conspicuous for the red heart that frequently
replaces the word "love" in the slogan.
5. Sri-Chinmoy is a Bengali "spiritual master" who claims to have established spiritual
centers throughout the world. He or his disciples frequently perform or conduct
meditation sessions in concert settings in New York.
6. In 1981, the Eighth "Tubachristmas"concert at this location featured 500 tubas.
7. The exact number is difficult to ascertain because The New York Times, one of my
sources, went on strike and did not publish for ten days.
8. Performances that take place in the post-dinner evening hours do not nullify this
observation. In cases like the Jazzmobile which has made a commitment to bring jazz
to people where they live, the choice of time slot (7:00 PM) coincides with the core
group's shift from place of work to place of residence.
9. The need to make such a statement nonetheless is suggested by a description of New
York as being "virtually music-less" during the summer. This appeared in an article in
The New York Times (Waleson 1982:1).
10. Worth mentioning is the role of churches as locale for FPME. Contrary to the impression that FPME are primarily summer phenomena, they in fact occur regularly
throughout the year. In 1978, December was the busiest month, with 264 events.
April had the lowest number with 183 events. It is, however, what makes this relatively consistent year-long distribution possible that is a matter of interest, for the
shift of locale from parks and streets in the summer to churches in the winter suggests
some equivalence of function between these kinds of places in the context of New
York.
11. In the Jazzmobile and Rockefeller Center events, for example, this assumption
allowed for inclusion of musical items and participants that the two other assumptions
would either have picked apart or excluded at the risk of losing those very elements
that were crucial in the analysis of these events as urban phenomena.
12. McAllester's review of Music As Culture by M. Herndon and N. McLeod describes
the situation succinctly: "Musicology and anthropology have proven to be uneasy
bedfellows". Thus, he notes, Herndon and McLeod have fallen short of their mark,
probably because "four of five readers of the manuscript objected to the mixing of the
musical and cultural realms" (1980:305-306).
13. The consequence is a perpetuation of the "myth" that urban units are autonomous and
self-contained. Leeds describes a concrete situation in the study of favelas in Rio de
Janeiro. His judgement: ". . . the myth perpetuated the questions asked, which
perpetuated the reception of only certain kinds and interpretations of data which
perpetuated the myth" (1968:40).

14 / 1982 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

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