American Fiddle Tunes and the Historic-Geographic Method

Goertzen, Chris

doi:10.2307/851799

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…in Europe) with small old-time communities, and I have heard his tunes played by outsiders, but never insiders, at many different conventions. Isles ancestors (e.g., Burman, 1968;Burman-Hall, 1975;Frisch, 1987;Goertzen, 1985;Guntharp, 1980;Titon, 2001). There also exists a massive volume of fiddle tune transcriptions, The Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011), which contains 1404 transcriptions -more than enough for a systematic musicologist to use as a data set for preliminary analyses.…”

Section: Hypothesis Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Mixed-Methods Study of Affective Difference in the Old-Time Music Revival in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina

Wood¹

2017

Preprint

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This dissertation examines differences in affective response to music among players of Appalachian old-time music, primarily in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina. While a small number of musicians with family or community links to previous generations of old-time musicians in this area still play the music today, the majority of contemporary old-time musicians come to old-time as cultural outsiders. Cultural, socio-economic, and political differences are easily observed when these two types of musicians come in contact with one another, but significant differences also exist in the domains of musical behavior and experience between insiders and outsiders. These differences likely serve as a catalyst for the animosity that some insider musicians have towards certain outsider musicians, yet they have been mostly unaddressed in the extant research on the old-time revival. Under ideal conditions, and usually in jam sessions, some old-time musicians (usually outsiders) claim to experience altered states of consciousness that can be variously understood as “flow,” “trance,” or “strong experiences with music.” Other musicians (usually insiders) deny ever having such experiences, yet they are heavily invested in this music and derive great pleasure from their involvement with it. The sound and structure of the music in these jam sessions seems to be more important to outsiders in facilitating these altered states than are extra-musical factors (e.g., the historical significance of a tune), which tend to be more important to insiders’ experiences. To investigate these observations in a more systematic way participant-observation and semi-structured interviews were combined with empirical survey data on personality and demographic factors, musical preferences, and affective response to music in order to examine relationships between these factors. These data together suggest that there are significant and widespread differences in the way that certain subgroups experience old-time music and that, for my participants, Openness to Experience and related constructs correlate strongly with differences in musical behavior and experience. The dissertation concludes with suggestions for how this mixed method approach could be used to investigate other phenomena of interest to both ethnomusicologists and music psychologists, such as the parallel revival tradition of Sacred Harp singing.

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Section: Hypothesis Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Mixed-Methods Study of Affective Difference in the Old-Time Music Revival in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina

Wood¹

2017

Preprint

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“…Problematizing the comparison of tunes to an imaginary archetype, Cowdery (1984) proposed a system for understanding how tunes within a given repertoire relate to each other. Goertzen (1985) applied the Finnish historic-geographic method to the popular American fiddle tune "Billy in the Low Ground, " arguing persuasively for the relative age of variants while remarking on the limitations of such an analysis. (See Pekkilä 2006 for a brief history of the historic-geographic method and its influence on European folklorists.…”

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The Chop: The Diffusion of an Instrumental Technique across North Atlantic Fiddling Traditions

Risk¹

2013

Ethnomusicology

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The "chop" is a percussive string instrument technique pioneered by bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene in the 1960s and adopted into contemporary string styles by Darol Anger in the 1980s. This article traces the diffusion of the chop through a number of North Atlantic fiddling traditions in the 1990s and 2000s. It also considers the circumstances and implications of musicians' decisions to adopt, adapt, or reject the chop. Drawing on both sociological research on the diffusion of innovations and genre theory, this article demonstrates that the diffusion trajectory of a musical innovation depends on the innovation itself, on the sites of transmission, and on the interplay of the lived and imagined musical worlds within which musicians play, work, and study. It concludes by suggesting that, when studying North Atlantic fiddling, both regional divisions and generational trends should be taken into consideration. The violin is so old and the techniques are so well established. .. . And now all of a sudden there's a new thing, after how many years?-Casey Driessen (telephone interview, 1 February 2011) I n 1966, bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene invented a percussive string instrument technique that he dubbed "the chunky chop" (telephone interview, 1 February 2011). Now known simply as "the chop" or, in its verbal form, "chopping, " this technique is currently used by violinists, violists, and cellists in nu-Note: this article refers to figures and video clips that can be found on the Society for Ethnomusicology's website, following the pathway Publications > Journal > Multimedia Appendices. As of 2013, the URLs for the SEM website and the multimedia appendices are www.ethnomusicology.org and http://www .ethnomusicology.org/?Pub_JournalMA, respectively. merous musical genres, including traditional fiddling styles of the British Isles, Canada, Scandinavia, Spain, and the United States; jazz; progressive bluegrass, or newgrass; popular styles; and classical string pedagogy. In this paper, I trace the diffusion of the chop through a number of North Atlantic fiddling traditions. 1 I also consider the circumstances and implications of musicians' decisions to adopt, adapt, or reject the chop. Drawing on both sociological research on the diffusion of innovations and genre theory, I demonstrate that the diffusion trajectory of a musical innovation depends on the innovation itself, on the sites of transmission, and on the interplay of the lived and imagined musical worlds within which musicians play, work, and study. I conclude by suggesting that, when studying North Atlantic fiddling, we ought to consider not only standard geographic or regional divisions, but also generational trends. Like col legno (striking the strings with the wood of the bow) or sautillé (a rapid bouncing that uses the natural springiness of the bow), the chop is a technique specific to bowed string instruments. It consists of dropping the bow vertically onto the strings to make a crunchy, percussive noise, then picking it up off the strings with a slight h...

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Organonscape, geography, and aural spaces of kemençe in and around Trabzon

Aslan

Karahasanoğlu

2022

Ethnomusicology Forum

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American Fiddle Tunes and the Historic-Geographic Method

Cited by 5 publications

References 3 publications

A Mixed-Methods Study of Affective Difference in the Old-Time Music Revival in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina

A Mixed-Methods Study of Affective Difference in the Old-Time Music Revival in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina

The Chop: The Diffusion of an Instrumental Technique across North Atlantic Fiddling Traditions

Organonscape, geography, and aural spaces of kemençe in and around Trabzon

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