Audio file
Title: "From Lead Belly to Computerized Analysis of Folk Song": Lomax lecture on his life's work given at the Celeste Bartos Auditorium in New York City (part 2)
Date recorded: 1979
Contributor(s): Contributor: Lomax, Alan
Genre: lecture
Setting: Celeste Bartos Auditorium, New York CityOriginal format: Cassette Tape
Tape number: T4100
Track: 2
Part of: Lomax, 1979
Rights: The rights to the audio, photographic, and video materials contained within the Lomax Digital Archive are administered by various publishers, record labels, collectors, estates, and other rights holders. Any uses, commercial or not, must be cleared by the specific rights holders. For questions regarding the use of any material on the LDA, please contact Permissions.
Date recorded: 1979
Contributor(s): Contributor: Lomax, Alan
Genre: lecture
Subject(s): Cantometrics; Folklore; Ethnomusicology; The American School of the Air (radio show); Folk Songs of North America (book); Jackson, Aunt Molly; Morton, Ferdinand (Jelly Roll); Ledbetter, Huddie (Lead Belly); MacColl, Ewan
Note: Real country blues was not two lines and a rhyming punch line, but looser - musician held an open conversation with self. Open spaces left for other voices to come in, this is basic African style. How listening to Irish singer made Alan want to go to Ireland and led to Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series. Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records said, "If you pay for it, I will publish it." Seamus Ennis and the Irish origins of "Get Along, Little Doggies" in song about old man, "Rocking the Cradle and the Child's Not His Own." Woman singing the song in Gaelic said "It's the song Joseph sang to the baby Jesus." Tweed waulking songs and milking songs of the Hebrides. The lack of Puritanism about sex a surprise to Lomax. How the skiffle phenomenon made "John Henry" a hit in Britain. Ewan MacColl's decision to become a cultural worker and his role in the pub revival of the solo unaccompanied ballad (basic song-style of the British Isles). Lomax's adventures recording in Spain and how he noticed contrast in strangulated Andalusian singing style, even in lullabies, contrasted with more open sound across the Pyrenees and speculated on its origin in the locking up of women. His seven month tour of the Italian peninsula and his mapping American song styles while writing the Folk Songs of North America. The beginnings of Cantometrics. Lomax and Victor Grauer's 39 measures for categorizing songs and their relation to 400 culture variables. The geographic and historical areas that emerge from Cantometric analysis. Basic song type: the gathering people of the backwoods of South America and Australia. Siberia and Paleolithic Asia. The circum-Pacific. Asia and North America formerly attached. Oceania and Australia. High cultures of the Andes. The plow culture of old Europe and the irrigation cultures of Asia. Things that link the old high culture from Spain to Japan, narrow voice, embellishment, complex poetry. African gardening patterns, complementarity. 700 dance style variables and their connection to culture. Most interesting are social implications of musical styles: class stratification, child-rearing styles, position of women. Song and dance call up the whole social order. Lomax ends his talk with an attempt to answer his critics? accusation of reductionism. When an art form evokes something as complex as a whole culture, can it be called reductive? Cantometrics is more satisfying than fascistic, black and white, either/or explanations (Levi-Strauss). Our cultures link us to each other| our brains are also formed of networks. Cantometrics is not exact. It provides 80 percent frequency correlations, leaving 20 percent of latitude. We like to have stretch. Our aesthetic, not our economic systems, tell us who we are.Setting: Celeste Bartos Auditorium, New York City
Location:
Archive ID: T4100b
Tape number: T4100
Track: 2
About the session: "From Lead Belly to Computerized Analysis of Folk Song": Lomax lecture on his life's work given at the Celeste Bartos Auditorium in New York City
Do you have something to add, or do you see an error in this record? We'd love to
hear from you.