Ethnomusicology seems to have survived another quarter-century and appears to be concluding the millennium on an upswing. The word ethnic is no longer rejected by the comparative musicologists and, on the contrary, promises to be one of the burgeoning catch-words for unlocking the spoils of the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities. A cursory drive through the "ghetto" might expose us superficially to ethnic behavior, ethnic food and ethnic culture; but those who have studied the mother culture as ethnomusicologists are given special status. America has ceased to be the "melting pot" and is now heralded as the "suspension" and not the "solution," the "plural" and not the amalgamation. What better nest for ethnomusicology to hatch and mature in than one emphasizing cultural rediscovery? After many years of being regarded as a specialized and esoteric field, ethnomusicology has finally arrived at a situation where its name alone should make it comfortable.
The University system, too, seems to have survived another quarter-century, more or less intact, although its future is clouded and uncertain. To elaborate on this perilous state is, obviously, not my intention here; but regardless of the kind of institution each of us represents, we all face certain necessary re-evaluations of the basic roles we as educators play. By and large, our students are no longer part of a once-isolated caste of social beings who carry with them the roles handed down in one fashion or another from the conservatories of Europe. Their ages are more diverse, their economic and educational backgrounds more varied, their motivations more bizarre, their capabilities and awareness more unique (both positively and negatively) than ever before. What has happened, evidently, is that we have expanded our University system from the position where it once drew from society, through the attitude where it led society by virtue of its prominence, to the point where we now stand, where it is almost synonymous with society. And as the society, it shares in the versatility and spontaneity of the community, it flounders in the doubts, prejudices, unrests, and disasters of the community. Our "community of scholars," now the Community of General Public (or Republic), is forced to operate on very much the same basis as the community at large: namely, on economics. Although it is true that we as educators may hold other values (aesthetics, social moralities, the common "goods" of Locke, and other philosophically conceived social responsibilities), close to the surface is a consciousness dominated by economics alone, just as in the business and industrial spheres. At few other times in history have we been threatened so directly with fiscal responsibility, "accountability" (to the economic returns of our graduates), profit margins, and budgetary efficiency. Mass education has never been necessary for the survival of a nation, inasmuch as the upper class that has guided the body politic has always provided an on-going heritage for its own. Mass education was devised and promoted as a luxury of a developing nation, which was secure in its basic needs, and which looked to its intellectuals for social guidance, not economic stability. Our material posture is now inverted; and either we cope with the problem or see our educational structures rendered helpless and dismantled or, even worse, sentenced to servitude by the industrial-commodity complex.
Neither ethnomusicology nor the University system is sufficiently stable to bring about its own salvation. Ethnomusicologists often feel the academic setting too restrictive for their field, and universities often consider the ethnomusicologist an expensive and unnecessary addition to music programs. But ethnomusicology cannot, in all practicality, exist to any great extent outside the University structure and patronage. The study of cultures and musics other than the Western European art music tradition is not necessary to national survival (according to most people's reasoning); it will not be supported by industry, as it is not readily convertible into quarterly dividends; and its entry onto the lists of philanthropic organizations is late in coming, others having seniority. The University system, on the other hand, is floundering in its new-found position as the mini-community, while its leading administrators grapple with the same problems as do the mayor or city planner: pluralism affects economics, and the financial development or degeneration of the social structure must take new forces into account.
What I would like to propose for discussion here are two points: (1) we should accept, at least for the present time, the fact that the University system in which we find ourselves is no longer capable of generating its own environment, as it once did, but must, if it wishes to survive, accept the pluralism of the community on which it depends for its contemporary existence, and it must deal with that pluralism as a necessary element in the functioning of its educational practices and in the presentation of its academic materials; and (2) ethnomusicology, as a discipline now more or less cohesively established in academic methodology and pedagogical technique, should come to the aid of its sponsors and provide guidance and the means to spread the pluralism of the American community throughout the University structure.
I advance the first point not as an absolute but as one of many possibilities. Such a realization, I am certain, is new to none of us. We have all been aware for some time that involvement is essential, or at least admirable; and the degree to which we as educators have dealt with it has generally been the result of our own institution's role and posture in the local or national community. From the Ivy League through the community colleges, educational institutions contribute to every facet of our national life, from the government in Washington to the corner grocery store. But it is high time we ceased to regard these relationships as intellectually conceived ones, essential to maintaining a facade of idealism but not essential to our basic survival. For at least the next decade, the relationship between the University and the Community will be the most important relationship that will exist and may quite possibly be the only relationship that can save the academic institution from financial disaster.
There are, of course, many ways by which the University relates to its community-at-large, from the financial support formerly given by those institutions commanding large capital reserves, to grants acquired by the institution and applied through it to the general population. In turn, the community often expresses its half of the symbiosis by mercantile catering to the student and faculty needs, and by providing students, faculty, and administrative personnel. The University oftentimes has been the fount for political and cultural leadership, and the community has provided the forum for both. But these are more or less comfortable relationships, not essential to the symbiosis and certainly expendable in times of strained circumstances. It is "nice" for us to provide concerts of chamber music for the community; it is "fitting" that we provide historico-political commentaries on Watergate; it is "proper" for us to return federal monies, collected from the community, to the community in the form of socio-economic surveys and the like. But none of these is essential. What is essential is the one thing the University system can offer that no other institution can offer: that aspect of the society that has always been, and hopefully always will be, the strict domain of the educational system, that central link to which we as educators are all inextricably boundthe curriculum. Indeed, the curriculum is not only the basic way, but it is the best way by which the University can express its commitment to the community.
We in the Arts and Humanities have been the last to recognize this fact. Those in the industrial, business, and engineering fields learned long ago that the University system was the only vehicle for organized instruction in areas that were needed by the community, areas that were supported by a growing economy and an expanding technocracy. Except for the University system itself, no other group ever expressed a constant need for artists and humanists in the country, partially accounting for our present over-saturation of artists and humanists on the collegiate employment market.
The situation is different now. We have all been programmed to believe that the Arts and Humanities survive only in the hands of a full-bellied populace that seeks intellectual stimulation after total satiation of its creature comforts. If the economy is strong, we then believe the Arts will be allowed to flourish; if it is weak, we believe the Arts will be temporarily shelved for better times. "If the Engineering School is losing enrollment, my God, what's going to happen to us!" is the cry. Yet this lament is not necessarily true. From the Cultural Revolution of China and cultural developments in other countries of the Third World to Italy's Radio-Televisione Italiana; we see the Arts and Humanities used as a primary tool in the instigation of economic growth, not as a result of it. The American community, on the verge of celebrating its 200th birthday, finds itself in the midst of economic withdrawal and declining international respect. It looks to the Humanities to provide it with a glory for posterity, not to the corporate structures that have failed it. The community looks to the University for an academically sound curriculum dealing with the American plural society. It is not only our social responsibility to take up that challenge, but it is our obligation as educators and keepers of the knowledge of our Culture to take the lead.
One of the reasons why we have been so reluctant to begin dealing with pluralism in the University curriculum has been that we really don't know how. Our own education has stemmed from manifestations of the trivium and quadrivium made modern. We have learned from books, taught from books; and if we elaborate sufficiently distant from them, we ultimately provide new books for others who learn and subsequently teach from them. We as musicians are in perhaps a bit better position than the sociologists or political scientists in that we are familiar with that difficult area of instruction called "Performance"; and we know constantly the value of the "existential instructional experience," the learning-by-doing and learning-by-osmosis process. But the performers and composers we emulate and absorb are those of a very sophisticated and elite group, who have raised themselves above the masses by procedures we, too, are involved in and urge our students to develop.
In other words, our own academic development has been based upon a written legacy and we strive toward furthering that legacy. We distinguish ourselves from those of prior and subsequent generations by our academic achievements which, if formidable enough, put us at the forefront of contemporary scholarship and set us above and apart from our ordinary, mundane surroundings. Our students come to us for knowledge and guidance, our colleagues for opinion and criticism. If we learn from our students, it is usually not from studying them, but from seeking a further and deeper question out of those simpler ones posed by the neophytes. If we learn from our colleagues, it is at a level shared among members of the academic society already towering above the common man.
A study of Pluralism requires none of these. First, there is very little literature available for even a basic introduction to American pluralism. What is available is primarily a collection of immigration studies, statistically oriented, that serves to describe and not analyze. Although these studies begin in the mid-nineteenth century, many of the early ones are so filled with prejudicial statements about the ethnic groups discussed that they are frighteningly useless in our time.1 There are some modern anthologies of literature beginning to emerge,2 but these, too, are without analysis and merely serve to generate an attitude of acceptance of pluralism rather than defining what it is and how it is. We are therefore faced with an immediate problem as educators which, in our past academic experience, has been the least of our problems in attempting to develop a curriculum—what is the reading list? Usually, we must cut down on our lists, but here we have the reverse.
The second point is the more difficult. Yet it is perhaps the most crucial aspect of developing a study of pluralism within the confines of our University system and perhaps, at the same time, one of the most important underlying reasons why we are at such a loss and have such a reluctance to begin such a program. It deals directly with ourselves, not only as educators but as personalities. Any effective study of pluralism means that we as scholars must abandon our social status and all we have come to hold dear to us as a result of it.
To study pluralism means that we learn from those whom we have previously considered our academic inferiors and to whom we have supposedly dedicated our lives and profession as teachers, not students. We no longer lead the group, nor do we join it; but we trail along behind it, waiting patiently at a distance until, by our meekness and humility and sheer perseverance, we are invited to join (but not become integrated in) the group. We academics by nature are neither meek nor humble, or if we once were, we certainly hid our humility after a few years of teaching in the classroom.
Without belaboring the point, then, or delving more deeply into areas proper to other genres and times, let me summarize that (1) we are accustomed to a curriculum that provides us with a body of guiding literature, (2) we are comfortable in the presentation of that material through our roles as instructors, and (3) a curriculum dealing with pluralism affords us neither of these advantages. Let us now turn to Ethnomusicology.
Although Ethnomusicology has grown tremendously within the last quarter-century, it is still basically devoid of literature necessary for a beginning curriculum. The sum total of introductory material in Malm3 and Nettl,4 with excerpts from McAllester,5 Slobin,6 Hood,7 Merriam8 and others still does not provide the breadth of coverage and depth of material that Grout9 has afforded for more than fifteen years now to the western art music curriculum. Our younger ethnomusicologists are actively involved in filling in the gaps of research throughout the world, and they are therefore unlikely to be interested in producing an introductory textbook at this time. Previous generations of researchers were often preoccupied with those areas they once knew and now fascinate themselves with the acculturation that has developed10 or with the training of younger scholars in proper methodology. When we moved from one side of the lectern to the other, we all realized the dearth of available literature and are all still scrambling for various ways to deal with it. But the fact remains that we ethnomusicologists have already confronted the problem; and despite our inability to solve it satisfactorily, we have devised and are constantly revising the ways and means of dealing with it. The next result is that we have realized the validity of "free form" education that knows little of the boundaries of the traditional classroom. There are those of us, for example, attached to more richly endowed institutions, that enlist the aid of area studies departments outside of music per se. Through interdepartmental cooperation, we can cover Japan, China, India, and Indonesia in conjunction with the Asian studies resources, for example, using budgetary collusion to provide the Visiting Artist concept that has made Wesleyan's program so successful. Although perhaps no one artist can be expected to remain as a permanent faculty member, we are often willing to settle for one artist one year, another from a different area the following year, and so on, so that we can at least use living representatives of the cultures we discuss. Those institutions nearby, not carrying full ethnomusicological programs but offering an introductory survey course, aid in the financial support by supplementing the income of the visiting artists through guest lectures and concerts. This partnership is beginning to develop at Yale University and the University of New Haven. Transcontinental cooperative programs are also currently being developed, the most promising being the World Music Cooperative Council recently formed at the last meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in San Francisco. Here, the resources of Robert Brown's Center for World Music in Berkeley were coordinated with the needs of departments at UCLA, Wisconsin, Michigan, Wesleyan, Brown, and others to provide a traveling group of performers from the Far East at a reasonable cost to all involved.
At the other end of the spectrum, some of us involved with universities offering skeletal budgets must explore more modest means along more personal lines. If artists are not available, graduate students in particular area studies will suffice, for the introductory levels at least. If these are not available, visual aids can then be used effectively. What I and several of my friends attached to Wesleyan through the years have devised is a system of taped lectures on our specialties, which we exchange through the mails.
Regardless of the means, the ethnomusicologist has been forced to function with a curriculum devoid of literature and to formulate a viable academic collection as he goes along.
Ethnomusicology, too, has dealt with another problem, that is, the role of the academic versus the student. Although there are almost as many approaches to field work methodology as there are ethnomusicologists, I think we all agree on one thing—the doing of it is never what we had expected and rarely what we were prepared for. For those more involved in researching folk music than art music (although the phenomenon is found in all areas), what is most striking is the level of our own ignorance. After years of training and successful achievement in our own culture, with all the social accoutrements we enjoy as a result, we stand at the edge of a foreign culture looking in, conscious not only of what we don't know but equally of the limited amount that we do know. It is enough for us to caution ourselves initially that we are foreigners, but we soon realize that the least informed within that foreign society knows more and will always know more about what we seek to learn. We learn from those we have always thought to educate. We are children among those we have been taught to regard as underdeveloped and primitive. We are powerless in the face of those whose superiors are overpowered by the stature and strength of our own nation. Some of us react by telling ourselves over and over that we are capable of seeing things much more sophisticatedly than they, or much more deeply or universally, or whatever.11 Others of us concern ourselves with methodological trappings and questionnaires, thereby providing a rational technology acting as a cultural touchstone for ourselves. Whatever it is, we all have our own personal reactions. But in the long run, all of us must face the fact that without the foreigner we study, we can do nothing significantly ethnomusicological. Without his trust, his faith, his confidence, his willingness to give, we come away with nothing more than a mere snapshot of his culture, a worthless panorama no better than a government travel poster.
There is no difference between the approach to a culture found in northern Azerbaijan and a subculture in northern Philadelphia.
Our University system must therefore consider the needs of the community, and the community needs the humanitarian appreciation of itself as an ethnically pluralistic entity; the University can best provide that through its curricular offerings which are presently bare of traditional materials and personnel. Ethnomusicologists are familiar with both lack of materials and the type of personal qualifications needed to develop such a curriculum through field research. Thus, we must apply the solutions of ethnomusicology to the development of an ethnic-oriented curriculum. I would like to offer some suggestions on how to go about doing precisely that.
THE PROBLEM OF THE LITERATURE
Although immigration studies are purely descriptive, they are a written body of literature and easily accessible. While they may provide little qualitative information, they often serve as a starting point for ethnic interest that leads to more important contributions and involvement by the community at large. The logical sources of these are the University's own departments of Sociology or Political Science, the U.S. Immigration Service in Washington, and the U.S. Department of Labor. Although I know of no one comprehensive volume for all ethnic group immigration in this country, some area studies did develop during the mid-60s for major urban centers.12
Local ethnic churches often support their own meager libraries which sometimes house very rare and interesting volumes and artifacts far better preserved within the confines of an organized library facility. But for lack of interest in the past, of initiative, or of confidence in the University, their owners simply store the treasures in cartons where they remain unused, inaccessible, unknown, and decaying. Ethnic societies are numerous and often difficult to find for the isolated academic, but all areas of our country have them and they lie at the threshold of the entry to ethnic involvement in the University. Although, again, I know of no nationwide directory of ethnic organizations, there are several sources for them. Large ethnic organizations in the major urban centers usually keep rosters of their chapters and are certainly aware of ethnic groups other than their own. Ethnic magazines are beginning to sprout at a rapid rate—for example, Ethnic America of Pittsburgh.13 These are rich sources of ethnic organizations; and they also serve to show the non-involved individual the kind of energy, activity, and attitude the ethnic society displays.
Embassies of mother countries often publish lists of their immigrant organizations in America. Although the Ethnic Heritage Culture Centers established under Title IX through the National Endowment for the Humanities have just recently become active, they ought to become primary centers for such information, as well as an inspiration for further researches. And the National Humanities Institute, with its three-year funding of research into curriculum programs designed primarily for the American pluralism approach, will, I hope, become an important guide as well as a source for material. Msgr. Baroni's National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs in Washington and Michael Novak's TECNA, The Ethnic Coalition for a New America, although strongly political organizations, are major sources for ethnic information and for immigration studies which go far beyond the simple descriptive style.14 But the major search for ethnic information should begin at home—ethnic members of the University itself: students, faculty and administrators who, if themselves not involved with a community ethnic organization, share in the vested interests of both sides and can act as the most appropriate liaison. Somehow, a Pole inquiring about Polish immigration is far less suspect than anyone else.
THE PROBLEMS OF MATERIALS AND PERSONNEL
It is this last aspect that leads us to the second part of our problem: how to develop the materials, personnel and approach so necessary to the success of the University within the patronage of community pluralism. The key, I believe, is attitude. The University may have the proverbial "best intentions in the world," but these will lead nowhere if they are not directed properly—a lesson we should have learned from the disasters of the anti-war years and the years of the radical Black revolutionary movements. We are talking, in effect, about prejudice, both academic and personal, which, as we all know, is easy to discuss but difficult to comprehend. Rather than proselytize for warriors against prejudice, let me simply put forth a series of do's and don'ts that will at least avoid some of the pitfalls usually encountered when an organization branded as the "establishment" turns its interests toward minority groups.
1) We must not attempt to teach the ethnic community until we have learned from it. This means we must receive from it before we can offer it compensation. Money as an incentive will not work, for what the community seeks is respect from the University, not cash. This phenomenon is found all over the world, as ethnomusicologists have quickly, and sometimes sadly, discovered. The University can learn only when it is provided with information, which it stores away and then analyzes, digests and reorganizes to fit within the curriculum structures. The most obvious means is, of course, the Archives: a collection of artifacts, dances, music, poetry and the like, donated by the community to the University, which offers posterity and stature by virtue of its facilities and place in the social hierarchy. The establishment of the Archives is an inexpensive operation for the University—a room. It needs no staff, at the outset, and affords an excellent springboard for funding by state and federal agencies supposedly dedicated to precisely this activity.
It will probably be an Archive of a completely new style and form rather than what we as academics have traditionally called "Archive." It may collect recipes, games, embroidery stitching and loom patterns, cooking utensils and homemade false teeth, but it is an Archive of Latvian-Americans, and Latvian-Americans have now been afforded an identity and posterity by a powerful force in the society—the University. Students should be encouraged to write essays about their ethnic traditions and narrate incidents they recall about their grandparents, if not native born, or tales told on the eve of the New Year (English departments can be of great assistance in this regard),15 and these essays become a permanent part of the Archive.16 Elders who remember the old ways, when questioned by their children for more information,17 often exhibit amazing powers of recollection, albeit sometimes distorted, and dip into traditions hundreds of years old. And most important, it is all done for the University, that grandiose body of distant scholars who are actually interested in the common, uneducated working man.
We should not reject any offering, even though our initial reaction may be "ugh, junk." We don't reject any offering because it is improperly documented. We don't reject any statement or folktale as unauthentic because we are learning, not teaching—the communities are the authorities, we are not. We don't restrict our Archives to just poetry, or just dance, or just music, because it is our job to classify, not theirs. We don't reject their suggestions on how to deal with the information either, since they know more about it than we do. We don't refuse their desires to retain control of the information and the Archives, because it is their material, and without it we have nothing to learn from.
2) We must repay the community immediately. We can do this, amid our own financial crunch, by use of our existing facilities and prestige. It is easier for a University to obtain grants and federal aid funds than it is for a small, local ethnic organization. Apply jointly, or on behalf of non-university organizations, for monies to further the Archives collection, or for proper staffing or equipment. Make the Archives accessible to the community, and use our public relations offices as bearers of gratitude. If we maintain university broadcasting facilities, or exert some influence with local media, set aside some air time, even a half-hour of least prime time, to play the music of the ethnic group, and certainly try to involve community members in the planning and making of the programs. It makes no difference whether there is already another program doing exactly the same thing or not, for what is important is that the University is doing it.18 If we, as music departments, offer concerts throughout the year, let us choose composers of obvious ethnic direction, or at least include a selection or two on the program, and inform appropriate ethnic organizations of our choices. Ukranians have rarely heard the music of Lyssenko and Kossenko, but it is easy to play and fits neatly into most concert programs. If there are local ethnic festivals, the University should be conspicuous, certainly with its audio-visual departments actively engaged.
The ethnic community will respond in kind to our interest. We have the facilities, they the materials to learn from. Whatever we are willing to share with them will certainly be returned in kind, both good and bad, and since we need the community ("now, more than ever" as they say), it is in our best interests to share our experiences. If we have empty classrooms in the evening, offer them as meeting rooms to local organizations. If there are classes in the community on ethnic dances or cooking, offer space within the university walls for them. Extend special invitations to ethnic groups for programs by ethnic artists: an Antonioni film, a Kandinsky exhibit, a Bartok concert, a Tagore reading, etc., and solicit community input into our normal scheduling of University events. The community doesn't wish to be catered to—it wishes to be considered, and if we are honestly concerned with its desires, it will become honestly concerned with our own very real problems.
3) What do we do when we have gathered the material? Let us limit ourselves to the aspect of music, at this point, for we are now prepared to begin turning our attention to the curriculum. Let us say, for example, that we have been given a collection of old 78 r.p.m. recordings of folk dances and tunes that the community has regarded as important. We begin a stylized analysis, we corroborate our ideas with the community that provided us with them. They are the experts, we are the neophytes. Are they singing and dancing these tunes themselves, and if they are, may we record them on tape, in addition to the disc recordings we now hold? When do they sing them? What is beautiful about one singer and terrible about another? How are the pieces put together, etc. In short, all the tools used by ethnomusicologists around the world come into play in our own back yards, and it is for this reason that I believe the ethnomusicologist should be at the forefront of American Ethnic Pluralist studies. He is trained in both the collecting and the analyzing of such material, as well as in the method of creating a curriculum out of his findings. He is conscious of his role as an outsider, and knows how to deal with it effectively.
4) Offer a course in an ethnic music. Since we are the ones who have learned from the community, and yet in the beginning, we embarked on this whole program because we needed the community's support for our own university's flagging economy, how do we make the conversion from community input to community financial assistance? Obviously, through our curriculum, which, if it is interesting and attractive enough to students, will offer what only the university system can offer—academic credit and degree awards. We wish to increase our departmental enrollments which, nowadays, are most directly related to the financial partitioning of the budget. The university can offer the community its own information, now formalized, analyzed, and presented in the desirable academic garb.
The most important element in any particular course about a particular ethnic music, as ethnomusicologists are acutely aware, is the music itself. Those of us teaching survey courses covering the musics of the globe are constantly lamenting the lack of availability of native artists to perform, because one moment of live music can explain instantaneously what hours of discussion and lecture may fail to communicate. The same is true for the music of the ethnic community; but the beauty of this situation is that the performing musicians are almost always available, and more than willing, to play for the university's classes. It is usually we who are the reluctant ones, unwilling to surrender our beloved lecterns, which we have studied years to obtain, to mechanics and doughnut-makers who read little print and no Mozart. Ideally, the role of the academician in the presenting of an ethnic music class should be that of a coordinator only, someone who presents the syllabus at the outset of the semester, prepares the class for whatever guest lecturers or performers he has arranged from out of the community, and concludes their visits with the academic analysis he as an overseer has gleaned. Obviously, the best academician to do this is one of a particular ethnic origin himself, as his connections with the community are more easily, if not already, established; and his observations may be more comprehensive because of his familiarity with the general breadth of the ethnic subculture. He may even be a performer himself, and his role as an analyst and overseer is, once again, much less suspect to the community. If he is an ethnomusicologist himself, he may very likely be asked constantly throughout the semester how the music of the American ethnic subculture relates to the music of the mother country, not only by the students but by the ethnic community itself, which has often forgotten, or never known. The following semester, then, calls for a course in the Music of the Balkans, for example; and this is now the realm of traditional ethnomusicology. And as the Balkan community's courses thrive within the University's curriculum, the Africans will ask when a course dealing with their ethnic subculture will be offered, as will the Latin Americans, the Japanese, the Italians, the Scandinavians, and the Welsh.
There are, of course, other dimensions to the establishment of an ethnic studies program beyond the economic one. There are other ways to go about it and other types of university situations than that described here. Many of our institutions have already begun interesting and new ways of dealing with contemporary issues through the curriculum,19 and many have been doing such for many years. What I have attempted here is to present one approach to the situation which, if not dealt with by more universities across the country, will some day strip us of all relevance to the outside world and leave us as atrophied corpses, the university becoming a curiosity of the past, filled with strange creatures mumbling into their books of undecipherable meanings, occasionally looking up out of the bell-jar to the outside, where a little girl is offering up a peanut from a brown, soiled bag.
1A classic example of this is Robert Foerster's The Italian Immigration of Our Times (Boston: Harvard Press, 1919. Reprinted in 1968 by Russell and Russell, and in 1969 by Arno Press.) Despite extensive modern introductions and relatively sensitive observations on Foerster's part, a classroom presentation of the text would serve to inflame rather than inform.
2Edward Ifkovic, American Letter: Immigrant and Ethnic Writing (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967).
3William P. Malm, Music Cultures of the Pacific, the Near East, and Asia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967).
4Bruno Nettl, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965); Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964).
5David P. McAllester, Readings in Ethnomusicology (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1971).
6Viktor Beliaev, Central Asian Music, trans. M. Slobin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975, in press).
7Mantle Hood, The Ethnomusicologist (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).
8Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
9Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960 and subsequent revisions).
10Alan P. Merriam, "Some Problems in the Study of Musical Change," a paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, San Francisco, October 27, 1974.
11This attitude is usually reinforced by the classic writings of Tocqueville, of course, whose premises have been aptly presented and subsequently rendered transparent by Gianfranco Poggi.
The most unfortunate result of the Tocqueville approach is best illustrated by Edward Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Chicago, 1958) which, although refuted several times since its publication by outstanding scholars, is still accepted by many as a constructive and worthwhile piece of research. The book alone has generated such hard feelings in the communities that it is almost impossible for a scholar to overcome it and gain access to the American immigrants from that region.
12A constant source for new and modern statistics and bibliographic materials on ethnic information is the Center for Migration Studies (209 Flagg Place, Staten Island), whose publications are of excellent quality. For an overall survey of the immigrant experience and dispersion throughout the continent see Salvatore J. LaGumina and Frank J. Cavaioli, The Ethnic Dimension in American Society (Boston: Holbrook Press, 1974).
A new series apparently designed to provide a comprehensive overview of American immigration is the reprint group of the Arno Press, American Immigration Collection, begun in 1969. The same publishing house has produced a large number of area ethnic works in the past five years (see the PTLA for complete listings).
13See also the publication of the Ethnic Assembly of Cleveland, Paul Deac's National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups in Washington, D.C., The Journal of Ethnic Studies of the College of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington State College (Bellingham, Washington), and Greeley's Ethnicity of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism in Chicago.
14See also the publications of the Center for Migration Studies, the bibliography in LaGumina and Cavaioli, and the Arno Press catalogues (all supra, note 12).
15English departments can help, too, in the setting of the proper moods and attitudes for such narratives, not only by including books such as Ifkovic's (supra, note 2) but also by use of particular authors whose approaches highlight the pluralism of America. See, for example, Norman Mailer's Presidential Papers or Advertisements for Myself. An important excerpt from the Presidential Papers dealing specifically with the American pluralistic approach is even included in an existing freshman-level reader; J.G. Hepburn and Robert A. Greenberg, eds., Modern Essays: A Rhetorical Approach (New York: MacMillan, 1968, 2nd Ed.).
16See, for example, entries under "Italian-American Folklore" in the Archives of the Folklore Institute of the University of Indiana at Bloomington. Contents were collected by Indiana University students. See also the Foxfire Book (infra, note 17).
17One of the finest examples of folklore publications is that edited, collected and published by high school students at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Rabun Gap, Georgia, in the southern Appalachians. Their quarterly publication Foxfire (Southern Highlands Literary Fund, Rabun Gap, Georgia) is a model for any serious approach to sub-culture study.
18A thorough attempt to involve the curriculum in the pluralism of the community was made last year by Wayne State through its Ethnic Classroom Committees. I have no current information on the success of the endeavor.
19See in particular the programs and activities of the Study Center for American Musical Pluralism at the University of Pittsburgh, the College of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington State College, and the Center for the Study of American Pluralism at the University of Chicago.
By far, however, the most successful of all programs, and one incorporating most of the points of this paper, is that of DUTIFA: Duquesne University Tamburitzans Institute of Folk Arts. For further information regarding the overwhelming success of their program, write to DUTIFA, 1801 Boulevard of the Allies, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15219.