Q&A with professor of ethnomusicology Robin Moore

University of Texas professor Robin Moore teaches ethnomusicology, the study of the intersections of music and culture. He will be speaking at Person Hall today about his work. Staff writer Hanzhang Jin spoke with Moore on his upcoming talk at UNC, his background and with whom he’d most like to grab lunch. 

The Daily Tar Heel: How did you become interested in ethnomusicology?

Robin Moore: The short answer is I did an exchange program as an undergraduate. I went to Vienna for the year, and it was really my first experience with living languages and being out of the country for an extended period. I realized that I was really interested in language and culture, and I was already a music major and was looking for some way to hook all that up. So eventually I found out about the field of ethnomusicology, which seemed to combine it all, and I thought I’d give it a try. Also when I came back to California, I kind of clued-in for the first time on the large numbers of Spanish speakers there and I realized that I would prefer to do something relevant to the region I was living in.

DTH: You said that was the short version. Is there a longer version?

RM: When I first started getting interested, Mexican music was everything that was around, so I first started learning Mexican songs and eventually went down and did some intensive language around Mexico City. It was at that point that I came back and decided to join the ethnomusicology program. I was still kind of casting about, wondering what exactly I wanted to do. I liked the sound of Afro-Latin music because it seemed a little more similar to music in the U.S. in particular ways. And from the little bit of reading I’d done, I could tell that Cuba had been really important historically in terms of its influence throughout the hemisphere. 

Given that I was quite politically naive and didn’t really realize how hard it might be to get to Cuba or to get permission to get access to what I wanted or get funding from the United States to do what I wanted there, I started getting pretty interested, reading what was available and learning. So, I guess that’s a little bit of a longer story about how I ended up writing mostly about Cuba in particular.

When it was time to do fieldwork, I kind of lucked out because it was the Clinton era, and there was a little bit of a detente in political relations, and there was a little more opportunity to get access to things than had been the case previously. So I was one of a handful of people going down to Cuba starting about 1990s and doing fieldwork and ethnographic work and interviews and stuff for the first time in maybe 30 years. At least from the U.S., since things had been so tense and there hadn’t been much contact.

DTH: Can you give me a more definite timeline for all of this?

RM: Yeah, I was an undergraduate from ’82 to ’88 and I did that exchange year in ’85 to ’86. Then I went to Mexico in the summer of ’87 and then I was working for a bit and started grad school. I did a masters in ethnomusicology in Santa Barbara from ’88 to ’90 and then I transferred to the University of Texas starting from 1990, did some fieldwork in Cuba in ’93 and ’94, and graduated in 1995. So there are some dates for you.

DTH: What is ethnomusicology and what does it mean to you? Could you define it in your own terms?

RM: I guess the “ethno-" sounds a bit like “ethnic,” so a lot of people think it has to do with ethnic music, and it does have to do with some ethnic music. But the “ethno-" actually comes from the idea of ethnography. The field, at least in the United States, developed in the 1950s. There was a group of folks that broke off from the mainstream musicology association at the time because they were interested in music as a universal phenomenon and they were interested in studying how people actually made music and had circulation in society, and its meanings and uses for people. It is true that the majority of things that were studied originally were things like Native American music or West African music or Indonesian music. But at least since the 1980s, there’s been a lot of movement back towards musical scenes closer to home and popular culture and things that don’t always necessarily involve the same degree of travel or contact with entirely unknown sorts of people and places.

DTH: And to go back to the second part of that question, what does ethnomusicology mean to you, specifically? What has been your relationship with it?

RM: Well, I don’t have a lot of formal classical background. My parents didn’t really listen to a lot of canonical classical repertoire, so when I got interested in studying music I ran up against a lot of barriers. I couldn’t really study voice because I didn’t sound classically trained, I couldn’t really take guitar lessons because I didn’t play classical guitar, my trumpet playing didn’t wow anybody because the tone wasn’t what was expected, et cetera. So, I think I found a space in ethnomusicology that I found much more welcoming and open to discussion of and performance of a lot of different kinds of music that weren’t always embraced by typical music programs. So to me, it’s about inclusivity and ability to play and study a lot of different things that aren’t just Mozart and Beethoven.

DTH: What does it mean to be an ethnomusicologist?

RM: Well, the majority of people are teaching in schools and departments of music and most of them are the only person on their faculty that has training outside the mainstream and most of them are offering survey courses on different kinds of world music or particular kinds of popular U.S. music. Some of them lead ensembles as kind of an alternative to the typical symphony, wind band, choir kind of thing that happens. So I guess in terms of day-to-day practice, that’s kind of what it means.

DTH: What are you going to be talking about in your talk here?

RM: Well, I’ve been asked to get involved in two different contexts. I have a formal talk on Friday afternoon, and I’m going to be talking about some research I did on a musical style from the Caribbean called danzón that is not really well-known in the U.S., but it’s quite a big deal in Mexico these days and somewhat in Cuba. So I’m going to be talking a little bit about that project and about what danzón is. 

The talk is actually about the similarities in style and performance between early danzón bands and early jazz bands and the fact that they both improvise and that they used similar instruments and had multiple simultaneous melodies going on — like with Dixieland-era stuff. Then, I’m going to talk a little about the implications of that for jazz studies and how it tends to imply that what we think of as exclusively a U.S. phenomenon, a U.S. cultural form, seems to have developed in dialogue with some other regional musical trends.

DTH: Why do you think ethnomusicology is important and that it should be taught at universities?

RM: I think the standard view of music is that it is something separate from human life and it’s just jotted down there on paper or recorded on CD, and that it’s kind of a dead object. I think the real value of ethnomusicology, aside from the promotion of and greater awareness of diversity and all that, is to really drive home the fact that music and the arts are really a fundamental part of people’s lives in a dynamic way. That it helps shape their views about things, contribute to broader social initiatives and processes and give a window into all kinds of different peoples’ lives. So it brings a real different perspective to what music study is, could be and the possibilities of aligning it with more typical concerns within universities like global awareness and social justice and minority concerns.

DTH: Do you think the talk holds appeal for UNC students who are music majors, aren’t music majors, or interested in a variety of things? What appeal do you think this holds for UNC students?

RM: I’d be interested in having anyone that would be interested in coming. I’d like to think that the talk would be of interest to folks interested in jazz, folks interested in Latin American or Caribbean studies, folks that are interested in thinking about the connections between the United States and the Gulf of Mexico region, and in thinking about culture beyond the confines of national boundaries.

DTH: Where do you think the culture or curricula of music will go in the future?

RM: I think it’s going to diversify more. I think it’s going to have to include more popular music, more regional music, more international music. I think the days in which you could just study European classical repertoire and end up with a living wage at the end of the day are over for most people. So, the question is, "What do music programs need to do in recognition of that, to diversity peoples’ career options and prepare them for a different kind of market and consumer expectations?"

DTH: What’s caught your attention lately in music?

RM: I’m afraid I’m not the perfect person to comment on the trends in latest U.S. culture. But I’m real interested in — well, you know I’m a Latin Americanist by specialization — so right now I’m teaching a course on music historiography, like how music has been written about and thought about through the years. How it’s been discussed, what would have been of interest to researchers, what was going on in the 1930s and the '60s and the '90s and kind of how interests have changed in response to political changes, social changes, et cetera. So I’m working a bit with those issues right now, both in classes and outside them. 

One of my next publications is going to be a book on one of the first people who wrote about black heritage in the Caribbean. So a kind of counterpart to a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois or Melville Herskovits in the United States, but kind of a Latin American perspective on black heritage and its relationship to national culture and stuff in the Caribbean and elsewhere. So not so much about contemporary events, but hopefully contributing something to peoples’ understanding about our country and other countries, similarities and differences and overall processes of change. 

DTH: If you could grab lunch with any musician, alive or dead, who would it be?

RM: It would probably be one of these early danzón artists that I’m going to be talking about, just because the recordings are fascinating and sound a lot like early jazz but there isn’t a lot of biographical information about them, and there’s not a lot of information about how their performances varied in live contexts. One of the most prominent guys, the director of this group at the turn of the century that I talk a lot about, died even before his group was able to make the first recordings. So chatting with him would answer a lot of questions for me. His name is Raimundo Valenzuela. 

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