Bi-Musicality as Metaphor (1995)

Bi-Musicality as Metaphor Author(s): Jeff Todd Titon Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 108, No. 429 (Summer, 1995), pp. 287-297 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/541882 Accessed: 24/01/2009 16:22 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press and American Folklore Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American Folklore. http://www.jstor.org JEFF TODD TITON Bi-musicality as Metaphor WHEN COLLEGEAND UNIVERSITY music faculty speak of musicianship, we mean a combination of aptitude and acquired skills in musicality-one's ability to hear and sing and play and understand music. The college student in the United States who majors in music undergoes musicianship training, usually in conjuntion with a program in music theory, in order to develop specific Western art-music skills in note and score reading, piano playing (keyboard harmony), elementary conducting, and sight singing (reading and singing back music directly from notation without any instrument). These performance skills, which most college music majors acquire after a couple of years of intensive study, are thought to comprise a basic musical literacy essential to understanding music and to enhancing the musicality of virtually all who would continue in art music, whether as performers, music theorists, or music historians (musicologists).' In this way, knowledge of Western art music, even for the scholar who does not perform particularly well, is rooted in one's own experience of music. How different is the formal training of professional folklorists in North American universities! For although many folklorists are performers, and some are even fairly skillful performers, and "performance" remains the intellectual paradigm for the discipline, performance skills are absent from the folklore curriculum. There are no courses that teach the folklorist how to tell stories, build an I-house, craft a pot, or play the fiddle. Folklorists study the performances of others. One's own performances, while they may be useful at times in eliciting those of other people, are thought to be the mark of the amateur, not the scholar. And of course folklorists are not unique in this. Professors who teach the history of poetry do not have to prove that they can write sonnets, for example. As a member of a rather small folk group-those of us who are professionally active both as folklorists and ethnomusicologists-I have felt this curious contradiction in the assumptions of our disciplines regarding the worth of one's own experientially based knowledge. My purpose in this essay is to explore some of the implications, for folklorists, of the concept of musicianship in the field of field I regard as the study of people making music ethnomusicology-which (Titon 1992:xxi). Because few ethnomusicologists have written about this, I also address my colleagues in that field. My broader thesis is that experientially based musical knowledge, while certainly problematic in some instances, can in other Jeff Todd Titon is a professorof musicat BrownUniversity JournalofAmericanFolklore10)8(429):287-297. Copyright ? 1995, American Folklore Society. 288 Journalof AmericanFolklore108 (1995) instances lead to a more general understanding, not only of music, but of people-of others and of oneself. My more narrow thesis is that bi-musicality,an ethnomusicological term that has come to mean fluency in two or more musics (the term is borrowed from and analogous to bilingual), can induce moments of what I call subjectshift, when one acquires knowledge by figuratively stepping outside oneself to view the world with oneself in it, thereby becoming both subject and object simultaneously. Bi-musicality in this way becomes a figure for a path toward understanding. Mantle Hood was the first ethnomusicologist to write extensively about bi-musicality.2 Early on he considered bi-musicality to be a means of acquiring musicianship in the performance of"cultivated" non-Western music: "Training in basic musicianship of one order or another is characteristic of cultivated music wherever it is found. ... It may be of some comfort to the music student of the West to realize that the Chinese, Javanese, or Indian student also must jump through a series of musical hoops. But if this kind of training is indeed essential, the Western musician who wishes to study Eastern music ... faces the challenge of 'bi-musicality' " (Hood 1960:55). Once basic musicianship is secure, the a particular Oriental musical expression so that his scholar is able to "comprehend observations as a musicologist do not prove to be embarrassing"(Hood 1960:58, emphasis in original). In the 1960s Hood brought musicians from Indonesia, Africa, and China to UCLA, where he directed the Institute for Ethnomusicology. They taught privately and in world-music ensembles (gamelans, for example) that became extracurricular activities (somewhat like chorus and orchestra) for undergraduates and graduate students. Hood's later writings suggest that bi-musicality is best cultivated in lessons with a master musician from another culture and that the end of the resulting communication is a closer approximation of native musical understanding. Significantly, Hood also noted that the process resulted in friendship (1971:222). But acquiring native musical understanding is not easy. Bruno Nettl recounted the following incident: I was about to leave my lesson of Persian music in the spacious old house in south Teheran when my teacher suddenly fixed me with his forefinger: "You will never understand this music. There are things that every Persian on the street understands instinctively which you will never understand, no matter how hard you try." Startled, but still knowing what he meant, I blurted out, "I don't really expect to understand it that way, I am just trying to figure out how it is put together." "Oh, well, that is something you can probably learn, but it's not very important." [Nettl 1983:259] Nettl, or perhaps I should say the character "Nettl" in this vignette, embarrassed, accepts the view that an outsider cannot come to understand music like a native, even though he or she tries to follow the path of bi-musicality; and he goes on to write about the unique advantages of the ethnomusicologist as outsider. Thus bi-musicality has not received universal approbation within ethnomusicology. At the University of Illinois, where Nettl's distinguished career took place, betweenTwoDisciplines Forum, A Conversation 289 world-music ensembles in the curriculum are a very recent innovation. Indeed, while some institutions embraced bi-musicality and ensembles-for example, Michigan, UCLA, Wesleyan, Oberlin, Brown, Kent State, and Washingtonother institutions with ethnomusicology programs either did not or were slow to do so: Indiana, Harvard, Berkeley, Illinois, Texas, Columbia, to name a few. For some, bi-musicality was too subjective, too self-indulgent, too unscholarly, too unscientific, too much fun, too much like the music-ed business (what the late Alan Merriam at Indiana termed "sandbox ethnomusicology"). Of course, in some cultural contexts bi-musicality is not feasible or not even permitted. And if bi-musicality was controversial within the ethnomusicological curriculum, it was quite outside the formal training of folklorists, as Neil Rosenberg has reminded us in this forum. I am an advocate of bi-musicality. Baptists with whom I have done fieldwork sometimes say, "The Lord got ahold of me before the Baptists did," giving greater importance to the experience of being born again than to belonging to a specific denomination. Paraphrasing them, I can say that music got ahold of me before ethnomusicology did; that is, I was a musician before I was an ethnomusicologist. My grandfather was an opera singer, and I learned music at his knee, so to speak. My father was an amateurjazz guitarist. To be sure, I have written my share of scholarly books and articles. But in college and graduate school, while learning to be a scholar, I also played blues guitar and, like Neil Rosenberg, eventually joined a professional group. Today I seldom play blues; I devote myself musically to the fiddle and banjo. I lead a string band at Brown University and am a member of a group outside of Brown. I consciously seek out "sessions" in which to play old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes with others. Like most ethnomusicologists today, I do not find a conflict in my life between bi-musicality and scholarship: quite the opposite-each informs the other. My point is not to lobby for performance practice in the folklore curriculum; it is to show how bi-musicality can operate as a learning strategy, a strategy that not only leads to musical skills but to understanding people making music. Bi-musicality, in my view, when practiced deliberately and reflectively, constantly rubs us up against musical differences that make a cultural difference. Bi-musicality becomes a strategy in which these differences are thrust upon us, not simply because we "notice" them as observers close to the action, but because we live them, we "experience" them in our performance of another music. Bi-musicality becomes a way of life. To make this argument I am going to turn, first, to the question that this forum addresses as a whole: what we learn when we learn from our "informants" (consultants, teachers, friends are better words). Then I will return to bi-musicality as something that throws us into the particular kind of learning that results from what I am terming subjectshift. Obviously, the main thing that an ethnographic fieldworker-whether ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, or folklorist-tries to learn from his or her informants is information, differences that make a difference.3 For years, ethnographers working in the fields offolklife studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology thought of their task as collecting information, first in the form of texts, 290 Journalof AmericanFolklore108 (1995) later in the form of texts and contexts, still later in the form of professional information on performance. We have grown increasingly uneasy with the term collecting,and gradually we have replaced the sense that what we are doing is collecting information with the idea that we are involved with our informants in the intersubjective and dialogical coproduction of texts, contexts, processes, performances, interpretations, and understandings. It is equally true that we are similarly involved with our scholarly audience in intersubjective and dialogical coproductions: this forum is a good example. As we ethnomusicologists become interested in intersubjective and dialogical understanding, the subject of our own experiences becomes a necessary object of inquiry. So we may be led to think that fieldwork isn't really about gathering information, but that it is a quest for wise elders, an initiation rite, or perhaps it is a kind of therapy. If we view ethnography as a made world rather than as a found world, we cannot entirely escape such a reflexive swamp. But do we want to make it into a quicksand that we drown in, paralyzed, unable to work with informants, condemned and banished to a life of theory and contemptuous of all fieldwork as colonialist and exploitive? To do so would make it impossible for us to learn anything from our informants because we would have none. Instead we would, as some of our colleagues in cultural studies do, think the world into being, as text-a position of intellectual arrogance, to say the least. How then does one live without sinking in this swamp of radical subjectivity? One pathway comes through the experience of what I am terming subjectshifts, those moments of transcendental relativity when we become aware of and view ourselves as actors in the world-that is, when we are able, paradoxically, to view the world with ourselves inside it. When we reach this point, we attain a small and momentary degree of objectivity, perhaps the most that, short of revelation, our world permits. In those moments, particularly, we learn something valuable that goes beyond the production of texts and toward understanding. And so I am going to summarize a number of such incidents of subject shift, or what might be termed subjectbreakthrough-those moments when we are wrenched out of our ordinary identity and learn something about our "informants" and ourselves. Then I am going to return to bi-musicality and show how it can function as a deliberate method to create subject shift and offer the kind of understanding that arises from a musical way of being-in-the-world. A recently published and justly famous example of a subject shift resulted from a tragedy: the death of anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo and its effect on her anthropologist husband, Renato. As he recounts it in his famous article, "Death and a Headhunter's Rage," he was unable to understand how grief could lead his Philippine informants to cut off human heads. Their explanation was that "rage, born of grief, impels [them] to kill [their] fellow human beings" (1989:1). Rosaldo had earlier lost a brother and felt only grief. But when his wife accidentally fell to her death, he felt that rage: "Immediately on finding her body I became enraged. How could she abandon me? How could she have been so stupid as to fall? I tried to cry. I sobbed, but rage blocked the tears" (1989:9). In fashioning his article he stepped away from himself and he understood the betweenTwoDisciplines Forum, A Conversation 291 rage, his rage, born of grief, that his informants felt led them to murder. This subject shift permitted Rosaldo to understand his experience cross-culturally and then to understand the other culture based on his own experience in a way that he never was able to do before. An ethnomusicological example of such a subject shift occurred during Steve Feld's stay among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea when he composed a song that brought tears to the eyes of one of his Kaluli friends. As Feld writes in Sound and Sentiment, While there were many things I was able to understand about Kaluli ideals of sound expression as a result of traditional participant-observation, I don't think I really began to feel many of the most important issues ... until the day I composed a song about Buck and Bambi's leaving Bosavi that brought tears to the eyes of Gigio, one of their oldest and closest friends. I wept, too, and in that intense, momentary, witnessing experience, I felt the first emotional sensation of what it might be like to inhabit that aesthetic reality where such feelings are at the very core of being human. [1989:236-237] Feld's subject shift was the result of bi-musicality. I suspect that many of us have had similar subject shifts. About ten years ago I narrated one of my own in an article in the journal AmericanMusic, on role, stance, and identity in fieldwork (Titon 1985:16-24). It happened when, after a series of unlikely events, I found myself singing in the choir of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church-the home church of the Rev. C. L. Franklin and his even more famous daughter Aretha-while the six o'clock television news filmed the occurrence. Not all such moments have been pleasurable, though: in the book PowerhouseforGod I recounted a 1977 incident in which a couple asked whether my cofieldworker and I were "Moonies."4 At that moment I thought the question absurd, but later I realized that from their point of view we strangers must have had some ulterior motive in studying this mountain church other than our announced purpose of documentation-and this was their worst fear. One fairly common subject shift occurs when one becomes complicit with one's "informant" when a third party arrives. In other words, the informant draws you on his or her side and into another point of view. The following incident that occurred while I was playing music with old-time fiddler Clyde Davenport on his front porch a few years ago will serve as an example of such a subject shift and will also reveal an entertaining lie-swapping session. Clyde, a 1992 winner of a National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, certainly helped me become bi-musical in the way of old-time fiddling from his part of Kentucky, and during the spring of 1990, when I was a visiting professor at Berea College, we spent many days together playing tunes. When I visited Clyde again the following spring, it was a warm day and we sat on his porch to play. One of Clyde's neighbors happened by to listen and swap lies. It seems, however, that he half-believed one lie of Clyde's: that Clyde and his wife Lorene were making moonshine. Because my tape recorder was going at the time-I wanted to record the tunes-I have a verbatim record of Clyde's tall 292 Journalof AmericanFolklore108 (1995) tales and the ensuing conversation in which we became complicit. In the transcript that follows, RS is Clyde's neighbor, Robert Southwood; CD is Clyde Davenport, and I am JT. Another neighbor, Fred Sexton, is mentioned in the conversation. It took place at Clyde's home in Monticello, Kentucky (Wayne County), on 25 March 1991; Andy Woolf was also present. RS: [Points toJeffs fiddle.] That your'n over there, too? CD: No, I ain't got but one, and it ain't no 'count. RS: A year or two ago he had four or five here. CD: I did.5 RS: Yeah. You had 'emna-layin' out here on the porch. You'd sand a little on one, and a little on another. [Laughs.] CD: Oh, I was just repairingfor people. [Tearsoffclew of tobacco.] RS: Ain't made nary another one lately, huh? CD: No, no, I ain't going to make no more. RS: [ToJeffand Andy] You don't chew that old tobaccer'n stuff?It's going to kill him, ain't it? CD: Shoot, I'm the gamest man in this country! RS: Y'are. CD: Yeah. [Laughs.] RS: Fellow over there, he lives right over yonder, in Langford,once, said one Christmas,Fred Sexton said that him, they just went and got some of that old kavoda [vodka], he said, and they started in drinking about a week before Christmas,and said they sobered up in about a week after Christmas. They got up and [unintelligible]said they like to have burnt up two or three houses. [Laughs.] CD: Ask Fred why he did it. [Laughs.] RS: And said they wasn't sobered up since. "What day is Christmascoming on?" "Well, Christmashas been over two weeks!" CD: [Laughs.]That was Fred'sway. RS: He said it was bothof you. [Laughs.] CD: I never drunk no vodka. RS: He said you did. That's all I know. He's telling it. CD: No, I'll tell you how it was. I never drunk anything. I went and got a gallon of moonshine. Fred went and did give me a pint of some kind of whiskey and [when] he found out I had that moonshine, he was over there every 15 minutes. He could drink it like drinking water. He'd sit there for a minute, "Well, I've got to go home and catch the couch." Then in about 15 minutes he'd be back drinkingit again, and he dicd't know when Christmascome. I never got to drink none of the whiskey. Think I give 25 dollarsfor a gallon and he got it all. [Laughs.] RS: Did you ever give any of these fellows [eff and Andy] a drink of that you make? CD: No, that's so good they come back. [Laughis.]I make it all the time. Sell it. Don't I? RS: They say you do, that's all I know. CD: [Lauglls.] RS: Fred saysyou do. CD: Did you never buy none off of me? RS: No. CD: [Laughs.]I swore you bought some but maybe you didn't. Fred buys it. RS: Jim says you always bring him down a drink every time you make a run. CD: Yeah, I take him a quart every time I make a run. [Laughs.] RS: [To Jeff and Andy] They've had half the house searched here. The law done searchedhis house. CD: Yeah, they searched it four times, ain't it? I'm too slick for 'em. They can't catch me. betweenTwoDisciplines Forum, A Conversation 293 RS: He said he had it buried so deep they couldn't find it. [Laughs.] CD: They can't catch me, can they? RS: They say they can't. You say they can't. CD: Yeah, boy. [Spitstobaccojuice.] Boy, I make good stuff. Tell 'em about the time the pressurekettle blowed up on me. Blowed up. Lorene [Clyde's wife] had a great big pressurekettle and I was making whiskey in it. RS: Blowed up, Fred said, and it went up on the ceiling. All: [Laughter.] RS: Said they like to never got the house clean, that room cleaned up. All: [Laughter.] RS: I don't know if it blowed up but that's what him and Fred tells. All: [Laughter.] CD: Well, Gib seen the state troopers and policemens up here. He said he seen the lights just going around, said it looked like a little town up here. Did he tell you it? He said he seen it. SaidRS: He said he seen 'em up here but I don't know. All: [Laughter.] RS: But I tell you, their wives, him and Fred Sexton's wife, his wife, Fred's wife, says they've never told the truth since they'd been borned. All: [Laughter.] RS: When your wives tell that on you, that'll be so, ain't it. CD: I don't believe my wife said that. I don't lie. RS: Yes she did, right here, sitting right here. He's telling some big tale. JT: I think she's right. Because Clyde, you remember that a couple, about a year ago or so you had car trouble? CD: Yeah. JT: You remember you had to take it into the shop because it had, you told me it had sand in the gas tank? CD: Yeah, did have, you seen it. JT: Well, I know how that sandgot in. You were carryingyour whiskey in your gas tank. All: [Laughter.] CD: I'll bet that's how it got in. I never thought of that. My goodness, I better not put no more in it. That wasn't sand at all, that was mash, wasn't it? All: [Laughter.] CD: No wonder the law can't find it. Don't you tell 'enmnow. RS: Used to be an old fellow lived out there, had an old T-model and the radiatorleaked and he kept [meal] in it. Boys he passedand it'd just smell like a brewery, that meal had soured. CD: You'll not smell that around here. I've got a way of keeping it from smelling. RS: You have? CD: Yeah. Some of 'em passedhere one time, said they never smelled it that they couldn't stand it, that mash. I stopped that. I fixed it that it won't smell. Makes better whiskey, too. RS: Yeah. You ever give Fred any a drink, now? CD: All the time. I just give him his whiskey. I don't sell it to him. RS: Looks like you're going to have to paint your house again. CD: Yeah, me or somebody. RS: I guess it'll be somebody else. All: [Laughter.] JT: Lorene. RS: Yes, she'll paint it. You won't ever paint it. 294 Folklore108 (1995) Journalof American JT: No, Lorene was painting it last year. She was painting around the back. She was painting it in the back. CD: I can't paint. JT: I think a person has only so much painting in him. CD: [Holdsup fiddle.]You see there, there's the way I paint. See this, now that's the way I paint. See this, now that's the way I paint. Now that ain't no good. RS: All he does is set here and play the fiddle, the banjo or something. CD: Oh, I work. All the time. RS: Well, every time I pass and you're out here, you're out here playing. CD: Oh, I hardly ever play the fiddle. RS: I could tell you some bad ones on him but I'd better not. CD: No, you couldn't do it. You couldn't tell nothing that wasn't so. [Laughs.] RS: You know it's so. [Laughs.] CD: He can't tell nothing that ain't so on me. I'm a pretty good feller, ain't I? RS: When you're asleep. [Laughs.] CD: [Laughs.]Now, I wouldn't have said that about you. I like you, you're a good feller. RS: Ah, you'd have said anything about me. [Laughs.] CD: [Laughs.]You going to mow my yard for me? RS: Fred'll mow it. Said he's going to drive that big mower. CD: I thought you might have driv' it. RS: Yeah, I'd drive for you. Why wouldn't you let Fred?He [Fred]said, he got on and started,boy, he said, here he come, [but Clyde] put him off, [and Clyde] said, "You can't drive that." [Fred]said, "Clyde, I drove these log trucksever since I've been six years old." And he didn't even let him drive the mower. Wouldn't you let him drive it, then? [A pieceof woodfallsout of ajoint in the ivoodenchairClyde is sittingon. Clydepicksit off thefloor.] JT: What's that, Clyde? CD: That's a block out of my fiddle. RS: A piece of rosin? CD: Naw, it come from right here, out of this chair. JT: Ha, your fiddle's falling apart. CD: Made out of maple, wasn't split out, made out of maple saplings.That's the heart there. RS: Well, I better go. You fellers better watch him. CD: Now you stay with us. walksaway.] [Soutthwood CD: Come back! Ain't that something. Believe anything you tell him. He thinks I make whiskey. I told him I did, Fred Sexton told him I did, making it in a pressure kettle and it blowed up, Lord have mercy. You can tell him anything.... At this moment of complicity with Clyde, I experienced a subject shift and became aware of what, in some sense, it means to be a fiddler, as Clyde is. That is to say that he is not someone who is there to cooperate with a fieldworker, or even to play music with an admirer, but to act as a fiddler (as Andy Woolf might say) in all senses of the word-and Clyde surely does: a fiddler is someone who fiddles around rather than someone who works; a fiddler is a tall-tale teller and a trickster and a boon companion. But I have stated that there is a metaphorical quality in bi-musicality that leads us toward understanding and that is that there is something in the nature of the musical experience which serves as a kind of metaphor for social relations. Alan betweenTwoDisciplines Forum, A Conversation 295 Lomax's work in cantometrics was among the first to probe systematically the links between music and social relations, but Lomax's scientific musical categories have to do with structure and leave out personal experience (see, e.g., Lomax 1968, 1976). I want to add the subjective realm of musical experience and exemplify it with a story from my fieldwork with the Old Regular Baptists in eastern Kentucky. Elsewhere I have written about wanting to ground musical knowing in musical being; that is, I want to assert that there is a special kind of consciousness arising from what, using terms from phenomenology, would be called musical-beingin-the-world; and that this kind of consciousness produces a musical way of knowing (Titon 1994). This musical way of knowing is not limited to insights concerning musical structure or performance, but it operates in the world as a whole, and particularly in the social world. Bi-musicality leads to a particularly active form of musical being and knowing. The beauty of singing among Old Regular Baptists is matched perhaps by their reputation as difficult research subjects. Fieldworkers such as William Tallmadge and Terry Miller have expressed their frustration in trying to get cooperation from them.6 For one thing, they do not permit photographs during their worship services. And as a rule, they do not allow strangers to tape-record their singing. They are not, as association leader Elwood Cornett put it to me, "anxious to be studied."7 They are unhappy with outsiders' misunderstandings of their music and culture. One woman voiced her group's complaint: referring to the Appalshop film on the Old Regulars, In the Good Old Fashioned Way, she told me it contained "too much tradition and not enough salvation." When you ask them to sing for you, they may decide instead to engage you in a theological discussion. After singing with the Old Regular Baptists for several months, I learned about sharing authority. Eventually I was able to collaborate on a CD recording with them, one with ample scholarly apparatus, be it said; and to obtain a grant for them for a community self-documentation music project.8 But it was from my experience of singing with them that I learned how to share authority with them. In their lined-out, heterophonic singing, everyone is free to curve the melody a little bit differently. This is, of course, quite different from the precise choral singing that is the standard in European art music and that I had learned as a youngster. The Old Regulars, on the other hand, don't rehearse; they don't have a conductor; they don't have an accompanist: they just sing. As one person put it to me, "The Lord doesn't care whether you have a pretty voice." Another characterized a friend's singing with a certain admiration for his persistence: "He started out of tune and, by gum, he just stayed out of tune." Nevertheless they manage to stay together remarkably well; "tuned up in the Spirit," as they say. At any rate, singing with them while remembering my choral training put me in a bi-musical subject shift. Suffice it to say that the way the Old Regulars sing offers a trope for shared authority. There is no single authoritative melody, no single voice that is correct above all others. Instead, their music is collaborative and cooperative. They told 296 Journalof AmericanFolklore108 (1995) me that they loved to sing this way because they feel both supported by the group and at the same time free to curve the melody to their satisfaction. Some put in more notes, swoops and glides, or oohs and aahs, as one person described it to me-he said someone asked him if he had some extra vocal cords in his throat that enabled him to elaborate the melody so fully.9 Now, of course, Lomax's brilliant work predicts the connection between this heterophonic singing and a loose social organization in which authority is shared, but I maintain that having experienced the singing bi-musically I was better prepared to enter into the kind of collaboration with the Old Regulars myself, a collaboration that has permitted us to work together and learn from each other. Burt Feintuch, in this forum, writes beautifully of his experiences in growing into the community of Northumbrian pipers. The old-fashioned folklorist in him who trafficks in and arbitrates authenticity worries a little about this: How can he enter this community without a birthright? How can he act and "sound like a Northumbrian without being one?" Adoption is the answer: they have adopted him. The adopted child seeks reassurance: "Musical experience resists elaboration in language" and "I have no way of demonstrating that my experience resembles that of the local musicians," he writes (this forum, pp. 304, 305). This is not a problem unique to adopted outsiders in musical communities. Whenever we have transcendent experience-falling in love, for example-we feel compelled to express this experience, however difficult it is, and we do: we embody it and we enact community. Two lovers bridge that language gap, through empathy, and come to understand, and trust, that one's experience resembles the other's-that the inner experience corresponds to and complements the outer. That this is also the case among certain religious groups, such as the Old Regular Baptists, is plain to me. Here the urge is to demonstrate experiences with God, and the church provides forms for this: conversion narratives, for example (see Titon 1988:382-407). But of course, full participation is not possible in every community. I did not become an Old Regular Baptist. Were my musical experiences, then, the same as theirs? Not exactly. The wife of a professor at Berea College once asked me, "How can you sing with them when you don't believe as they do?" "But I think I believe in music as they do," I said. What I meant was that I felt I had shared, with them, in a musical experience that was, indeed, spiritual but that transcended the particularities of any denomination or doctrine. And I think they agreed, but that may be the subject of another essay. For me, bi-musicality has never just meant lessons in acquiring musical technique. Bi-musicality helps me understand musicking in the world, and my being in the world musically, from a particular viewpoint: the musical knowing that follows from musical being. Learning from Clyde Davenport meant learning a way of being in the world: fiddling. It meant being like Clyde: generous with the gift of music, and it meant giving it away. Learning from Old Regular Baptists meant learning to give up my right to be sole author of a text; it meant losing my authority in order to find it. betweenTwovDisciplines Forum, A Conversation 297 Notes fIn Canada, and in Europe, students develop these skills prior to university or conservatory; indeed, they cannot enter music programs without them. 2Of course, bi-musicality was practiced long before Hood wrote about it. The anthropologist David McAllester, for example, learned to sing peyote songs in the 1940s during his fieldwork with the Navajo. But most scholars in ethnomusicology, or in its two predecessors, comparative musicology (in Germany and the United States) and musical folklore (in Britain and eastern Europe) did not practice bi-musicality. 3Gregory Bateson writes about "the difference which becomes information by making a difference" (1979:72). 4'Moonies" are followers of the cult of the Rev. Sun-Yung Moon. See Titon 1988:17-19, where I discuss this incident. 5Clyde used to build fiddles and repair them but recently gave it up and sold, traded, or gave most of his fiddles away. At the moment this conversation took place, he did not own a single one of the fiddles that he had built. 6See, for example, Tallmadge's field notebooks and Miller's correspondence with Tallmadge, in the Tallmadge Collection, Weatherford-Hammond Special Collections, Hutchins Library, Berea College, Berea, Ky. 7Elwood Cornett, interviewed by Jeff Titon and John Wallhausser, Blackey, Ky., 1 April 1990. A copy of this interview is in the Jeff Titon Collection in the Weatherford-Hammond Special Collections. (See note 6.) 8The CD is to be released in 1996 on Smithsonian-Folkways Recordings. 91van Amburgey, interviewed by.Jeff Titon, 1 May 1990, Pine Top, Ky. A copy of this interview is in the Jeff Titon Collection in the Weatherford-Hammond Special Collections. (See note 6.) ReferencesCited Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A NecessaryUnity. New York: Bantam. Feld, Steven. 1989. Sound and Sentiment. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hood, Mantle. 1960. The Challenge of Bi-musicality. Ethnomusicology4:55-59. 1971. The Ethnomusicologist.New York: McGraw-Hill. Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science. 1976. Cantometrics:A Methodin MusicalAnthropology.Berkeley: University of California Extension Media Center. Nettl, Bruno. 1983. The Study of Ethnomusicology.Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Cultureand Truth: The Remakingof Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1985. Role, Stance, and Identity in Fieldwork Among Folk Baptists and Pentecostals in the United States. AmericanMusic 3:16-24. . 1988. Powerlousefor God. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1994. Knowing People Making Music: Toward a New Epistemology for Ethnomusicology. Etnomusikologianvuosikirja[Yearbook of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology], Vol. 6. Helsinki: Suomen etnomusikologinen seura. Titon, Jeff Todd, ed. 1992. Worldsof Music: An Introductionto the Music of the World'sPeoples. 2nd ed. New York: Schirmer Books.