Music Endangerment & Disappearing Cultural Traditions

The Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith has just published Todd Saurman's book review of Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help by Catherine Grant. Todd is an ethnomusicologist who has worked in Asia for more than two decades, laboring beside musicians and artists of minority culture groups that fear the loss of their languages and artistic forms. Preservation of dying traditions has been a concern of ethnomusicologists from the beginning, but our discipline trains ethnographers to go into the world to analyze and describe musical performances -- we are not by nature community organizers or policy makers. Linguists and educators tend to be a little bit ahead when it comes to devising strategies for maintaining and revitalizing the world's dying languages. That's why we welcome Catherine Grant's attempt to bridge the worlds of language planning and music research, giving ethnomusicologists some tools for moving from analysis to advocacy.

Make sure to read Saurman's review for yourself, if not the entire book. But here are a couple of important points that I noted :

• Frameworks are great, even necessary, for making plans with a local community. Indeed, Grant offers a twelve-step Music Vitality and Endangerment Framework, which prompts planners to investigate factors such as the degree of intergenerational transmission of music practices. Saurman notes that even with a comprehensive framework, an ethnomusicologist's tendency to view music holistically -- that is, touching on all aspects of people's lives -- helps prevent organizers and planners from taking a perspective that is too narrow. In traditional societies, music and dance often create the very cultural structures that allow for food production, trade, and warfare. Music is not just an "extra" component of culture.

• Music, like language, is a form of communication. Of course a song doesn't communicate in the same way as a written essay, but ignoring the communicative function of indigenous music may cause a policy planner to miss an important aspect of music in the lives of the people. In many societies, music communicates important information -- some people even sing, rather than say, their most important messages. If a policy-maker wants to revitalize a traditional music system, then it would be a mistake to assume that music just traffics in non-essential, even elitist, meanings like it often does in Western societies.