Like a drop of colored water on to white porous paper, ethnomusicology starts in a place you’d think it’d start. With music, of corse, but as soon as that drop absorbes in to the page, the music you focus on soon too bleeds out and stretches beyond what you thought, like a blind star of fortune with individual reaching rays. And as you dwell deeper and become more submerged you find there’s far more going on then just music.
To the people of Accura in Ghana their music and dance are a sacred force that move and breathe with each other. To them the drums sing and have a language they know and understand. Its more then just communicating to the dancer where they are on the beat but the actual pitches have words and phrases associated with the phrases from the drums. In the PDF “Soundscapes” from Kay Kaufman Shelemay, its talked about a certain drum, the Atumpan. This drum is in a goblet form (as Shelemay puts it) and it is built in pairs of two, one male and one female to reflect the strength of the relationship between men and women in the Akan culture. In this way the music is heard and felt on multiple levels of emotion and knowledge.
“If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of the quest-in all its ardour and paradoxes-than our travels.” Allan de Bottom “The Art of Travel”. If our lives are dominated by this search and if the means of this happiness we seek is through travel, I wonder how and if the people Accura found their happiness… There land was found in the fifteenth century and since has been visited, colonized, and liberated. But it has been impacted significantly since the Ga people first found it. And it continues to change and become more and more and one day soon it will be like an American city like Boston.
In reading “the Art of Travel” I have been putting my forehead to the grinding stone to try and make connections and find glimpses into what I should (or shouldn’t) be doing on my travels to New Orleans. Page sixty seven in the book starts the chapter of the Exoitc, and in it de Bottom talks about the Strange vs. the Familiar, his example is of a directions sign in an Amsterdam airport and how the sign was a strange color yellow, and how if the sign had been made in his home land or some other different place it would be yet a different sign, but only so slightly as to keep it similar but slightly dissimilar as well. This made me think of the drum maker in Ghana, and how he uses local materials; local seashells, metals, leathers, and most importantly the woods used and how if this same drum was made here in the pacific north west or back east in Boston, down south in Florida or New Orleans across the pacific in Hawaii, would it be the same drum, granted no two drums are the same but could it behave, talk, look, feel, Sound like the same drum he made in Ghana, or even would a Ghanaian drum maker even recognize it as the same membranophone?
I say through travel you can find happiness, wether it’s a travel on the physical plane or a travel back through time in a traditional folk song battered on the old drums from a time before your grand parents roamed the earth you can find something somewhere what ever it is, and find happiness in it. In ethnomusicology you take a broad look at what makes things happen with in the music and if you keep focused on the big picture and don’t let your self get diluted in the bullshit happiness will run in a circular motion.