Tara Browner on Ethnomusicology and Native American Music

Tara Browner
Professor, Ethnomusicology
Interview Conducted by Ryan Guffey
I spoke briefly with Professor Browner about her views regarding Ethnomusicology and her interest in Native American Music. What she had to say was honest and reflective of her independent spirit. Something she might say is inherited from her Native North American Ancestors.
What is an ethnomusicologist and what is their role in academia and society in general?
An ethnomusicologist is an individual who studies music in the context of the music’s culture, as opposed to studying, for example, music analysis or musical texts. Historical musicologists might do something like study manuscripts at monasteries, whereas ethnomusicologists will go out and do field work, and actually observe people creating music and performing music. I think that one of the things that I’m supposed to be doing in academia in terms of teaching is getting it across to students that there are lots of other peoples and cultures out in the world--beyond the one they live in here in LA. To me part of being an ethnomusicologist is teaching people how to be citizens of the world. And it would work the same way in the larger society, as I have been interviewed for some fairly major publications. For example, I did a big interview about ten years ago in US News and World Report. This was just after my book on pow-wows had come out, and they talked to me about Native American music and what was going on in Indian Country right now. To a certain extent I’m a kind of a public advocate for educating people about Native cultures.
How did you become interested in becoming an ethnomusicologist and specifically where does your interest in Native American music come from ?
The interest in the music comes from that my paternal grandfather was Choctaw Indian. And I also have Indian ancestry on the other side of my family--my mother’s side of my family is part Mohawk--but my Grandpa is the one who got me interested in the culture by doing things like taking me to pow-wows when I was a little kid. He’s originally from Oklahoma but he lived out in Riverside, and he would do things like he taking me to a pow-wow at Sherman Indian school. And he would talk to me about Native history, that so what ended up happening is as I went through school--and especially through graduate school--I would hang out with Native students and go to pow-wows. They just became a big part of my social life . . . It’s wrong, though, for people to think that I’m just interested in Native music, because I do like a lot of other things. I really love the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and will be going to Leipzig (in Germany) in a month to hear live performances in Bach’s church. Native American music just happened to be what I was working when I got hired here in Ethnomusicology, but I could just as well teach in a music department (and did before I came here).
If you had to choose one of the Native American groups’ music as your favorite which group would it be and why?
My favorite music just in terms of listening is actually from my mother’s side—it is Iroquoian music. The Iroquois people are up in New York state and Canada (my family is from the Niagara Falls area). And so that music [Iroquois}-is what I listen to. There is the music I listen to and the music I teach, and some of what I teach I don’t listen to outside of the classroom. But Iroquoian music is something I like the sound of, and it’s part of who I am.
What is the greatest challenge ethnomusicologists face in regards to conducting meaningful research?

That’s an interesting question . . . Now I’m going to say something to you that probably not many other people would say. To me the greatest challenge is not letting the garbage that academia demands of you in order to be published get in the way of research that you can do that helps the community you’re working with document their own music. I try to make sure when I write about people that I’m writing using vocabulary that they can read and can enjoy. And if I write something about someone, I want them to be able to show it to their kids. In academic settings there is a lot of disciplinary jargon expected in your research. It’s a real conflict when you’re doing Native American music between writing stuff that you know is kind of a gift to the community--saying thank you to these people that are making your career possible--and writing something that you know can be published in journals and means nothing to the people you’re working with. So to me that is a big challenge. You’re always walking this fine line.
What advice do you have for aspiring ethnomusicologists?
It’s really hard right now because Ethnomusicology is something where most of the jobs--not all of them, but most of them--seem to be at academic institutions like UCLA, and the job market is horrible. It’s just horrible because we are in a recession. So what I would advise people is to be really flexible in terms of all the different kinds of things that they are able to do. Some people work in libraries or archives, and other people go out and do fieldwork, and some people do what Anthony Seeger did and work at the Smithsonian for a few years. So what I would say to people is that you need to be very knowledgeable in your specific area, but at the same time, be very flexible, because being a full time ethnomusicologist in an academic setting is not something as a career choice that is very viable over the next few years. My first academic job—in the early 90s when the economy was also bad--was teaching band, applied percussion, Western music appreciation, and World Music.

Some Additional Info about Tara Browner from the UCLA Ethnomusicology Faculty Website
Classes:Native North American music and dance; Native North American contemporary music; musical imagery of Indians in popular culture; indigenous concepts of music theory; American music.

Academics:Ph.D. Music History: Musicology, The University of Michigan; M.M. Percussion Performance, The University of Colorado, Boulder; B.A. California State University, Sacramento
Tara Browner is the author of Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance 
of the Northern Pow-Wow (University of Illinois Press, 2002), editor of 
Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North 
American Music (University of Illinois Press, 2009), and editor of 
Songs from "A New Circle of Voices:" The 16th Annual Pow-wow at UCLA
(Music of the United States of America [MUSA], A-R Editions, Madison, 
Wisconsin, 2008). She has published in several major journals including 
Ethnomusicology, The Journal of Musicological Research, and 
American Music, and also regularly presents papers at national and 
international conferences. In addition to her scholarly activities, she is
on the Native American Music screening committee for the Grammy Awards, 
is a pow-wow dancer in the Women's Southern Cloth tradition, and a 
professional percussionist and timpanist. Her current research focus is 
on manifestations of pow-wow culture in Northern Europe.

The Story of TORA!TORA!TORA! (gadgets assignment)

Tora!Tora!Tora! Has been together for a little over a year and originally consisted of Matt Nolan, Ryan Squirrel, Mike Berezny and Myself. We play music that is largely influenced by the first and second waves of early Punk Rock and really all types of Rock and Roll. I joined in about January of 2009 after about a year of searching for a new project since I had decided to throw the towel in on my previous effort Ryan Mudd and The Stuff. I had only been playing guitar for about a year and a half at this point so initially I was going to sing. When it became apparent that we could use some more guitar I decided to learn how to sing while playing and we started writing our first songs as well as performing a couple I had written previously. In 2009 we played about 25 shows and recorded an as of yet unreleased six song E.P. 2009 was an exciting year for all of us as a band because we got to play alot of fun shows with bands like The Stitches, Angry Samoans,and Funeral Dress and we even managed to get our selves kicked out of the Knitting Factory after a fight with another band.
2009 though was a very tough year on us personally. Our drummer Ryan Squirrell had a tragic and unexpected death in the family, me and Matt both started at different Universities, I totaled my car the week before I started UCLA and in November I was diagnosed and hospitalized for a life threatening bone marrow disease that gone untreated would have killed me. After all this we had to regroup because Mike Berezny quit the band and as if nature itself was against us our studio lockout flooded.
2010 is a new year though. We are stronger and tighter than ever and are continuing as a three piece. The hardships of last year have fueled the creative process and the trimming of an extra member has allowed us to become a more focused cohesive unit. We look forward to releasing our already recorded E.P. and writing new material as well as getting back to a regular schedule of shows every weekend.
I have added a gadget that displays our site's rss feed on the side of the page as well as a music player with our songs and a slideshow of pics from 2009 is in the post.

Casting of Pods

The casting of pods was easier than I thought it would be. All I did was take a track I had already recorded when I first bought Garageband and add a voice over. I do have some limited understanding of recording programs though, going back a few years so I realize how this could be difficult for folks who haven't recorded themselves via computer before. I can think of a range of things the podcast could be useful for in my life, but not sure exactly how I would use it yet. I was thinking it might be cool to do a weekly song or something. I'm writing songs almost every other day so It would give me motivation to actually hone and finish them as opposed to losing them to my famously inadequate memory. It might also be something fun for the band to do. We could do interviews with ourselves and even other bands we play with and play tracks from each others music. Maybe even collaborate on some in studio acoustic jams. If I can ever get motivated to start my own blog I'm sure podcasts will make an appearance, but as I said before I haven't figured out the exact details yet. So enjoy my one minute podcast. The song I wrote kind of sounds like elevator music haha but I still may have plans for beefing it up. Alot of the stuff I record on garageband is just pre production so I don’t forget a riff or a chord progression I want to use. This one I actually recorde pretty much to test garageband out when I first bought my mac. I was surprised with the quality of the internal microphone, but not very surprised with the amount of static in the tracks that I can’t seem to get rid of.

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Flickin The Flickr

I am extremely tired of these pictures. Most of them have been up on my facebook and myspace profiles for years now. I don't know why but at some point the joy of uploading tons of pictures of myself and others escaped me. This little project was kind of fun though so maybe I'll start taking photos again and updating my stuff more often. The only downside to Flickr is that I need yet another e-mail adress and password to remember as I had to create a yahoo Id. Thanks brand Identification, Your so convenient for massive internet corporations yet such a pain in the ass for me. Oh well I guess this will finally motivate me to start writing this stuff down or even use the little adress book program that came with my mac.

All of these photos are either of me or by me. The way to tell for those who aren't too quick witted is that the ones without me in them were shot by me. Some are of performances with my band TORA TORA TORA. Theres a bunch of photos of just running around Long Beach, and Santa Monica- two of the places I've lived in the past few years. And theres two of me singing with the Misfits. It was pretty funny. They let me sing a song with them and I blew the lyrics because I was so pumped to be singing on stage with a band I grew up listening too. Later on backstage Jerry Only was like "Who do you think you are? Fu**ing Mick Jagger or something?" It was rad. Another photo is of me with my old truck which had recently run over a fire hydrant. Lets just say that I don’t have very good luck with vehicles. Time to run this through word count HUZZAH!!

Fun with RSS feeds

So I set up a Google Reader account. This was a fairly easy task as I already have a gmail account. I used to kill alot of time going to news sites like punknews.org. I would read and sometimes comment on stories to pass the hours between classes when I didn't feel like doing anything productive. Well now I can read all my sites at once with googles rss feed reader. Its cool and it lets me kill time more efficiently by allowing me to read the news from countless sites at once. This article from punknews.org caught my eye: F*cked Up, Xiu Xiu suit against Camel, Rolling Stone dismissed I've read different articles about this for awhile now and had wondered how the lawsuit would end up. To summarize a bunch of bands were featured in a Rolling Stone article which was wrapped in about four pages of Camel cigarette ads giving an impression, according to the bands, that Camel was in some way sponsoring or endorsing their music. This is actually a complex legal issue and, if the lawsuit had been successful, would have set a precedent for free speech pertaining to commercial speech placement. In layman's terms magazines would have to be very careful about the placement of their ads and their proximity to other content. I am ambivalent about this. On one hand It was an obvious attempt at Rolling Stone to sell ad space by capitalizing on the credibility of these bands and threatening that very credibility at the same time. On the other hand, where would the line be drawn? Who would be responsible for deciding what commercial content was acceptable for a magazine and where they could put it? Any body have any thoughts on this?

Tweetdeck

My first blog post of all time. And its about a software program. Can you tell that Its an assignment for school haha? Anyways, I am here to tell you about how I am using tweetdeck to further my insidious goals and conquer the world of rock n roll. First I signed up and made some columns just for the sake of completing my class assignment. I chose to have a search column for hasom to see my classmate's tweets and any one else who may be tweeting #hasom. I also included one on The Replacements a band I've liked for years, but have gotten into heavily after reading "All Over but the Shouting: An Oral History of the Replacements". Basically a blueprint on how to prevent yourself from having a successful music career, but their antics are the stuff of legend. I also created a search column for 70's Punk. This time period and genre seem to be the style I've gravitated towards in both my listening and playing since I was 12 or so. Having a search column in reference to it just helps me see what other bands people are tweeting about and info about shows/clubs to related to the scene are tweeted about regularly as well.

After I set up my school twitter account for tweetdeck, I decided to use it with my band's twitter account. I searched my band name TORA TORA TORA and came up with mostly Japanese people talking about tigers and such. I also set up some search columns for related bands/music types so I could steal some of their followers and potentially funnel some of them to our music page. Just for fun here's a video of the Replacements performing the song "Bastards of Young" on SNL in 1985 I believe. They are one of the few bands/performers with the distinction of being banned from Saturday Night Live.

Replacements

GOD | MySpace Video