“Like a Cry from the Heart”: An Insider’s View of the Genesis of Alan Lomax’s Ideas and the Legacy of His Research: Part I

Abstract

Abstract. This article takes us on a journey into the origins of Cantometrics and other interdisciplinary studies of expressive style undertaken by Alan Lomax (1915–2002) in collaboration with Conrad Arensberg (1910–97), Victor Grauer, Forrestine Paulay, Edith Trager, Norman Markel, and others. Using archival sources, it traces their theoretical development, influences, methodologies, and outcomes as accretions of knowledge, observation, and converging streams of thought. It documents the trail of Lomax’s discourse with a wide range of authorities and collaborators. I render a candidly critical portrait of Lomax (my father) in relation to his work, collaborations, and rhetorical style.

The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture

“…Many limitations of Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and related schemes have been previously critiqued (cf. [ 14 , 17 , 18 ] for review and discussion). For example, some argue they are too subjective, and thus have low reliability [ 32 ], while others argue they are not subjective enough in that they do not account for the ways in which similar sound structures can have different meanings in different cultures [ 33 ].…”

“…This accounts for societies that were sampled in the primary studies listed in Table 1 , with the exception of Instruments and Ensembles. Where possible, Cantometrics was sampled from the more than 1,200 societies for which cultural data had already been coded in Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas to facilitate comparison of song style and social structure [ 14 , 17 , 18 ]. Of the total number of Global Jukebox societies, 1,234 are linked with coded data (including Choreometrics data coding dance style, which will be published in the future), and of that number, 1,026 are included in the Cantometrics set.…”

“…Lomax and colleagues published numerous analyses of Cantometrics and other Global Jukebox data. These results were reviewed by Wood [ 17 , 18 ] and Savage [ 14 ], and are summarized in S1.2 in S1 File . Unfortunately, the original analyses cannot be precisely reproduced, as it is not possible to reconstruct the specific datasets and procedures that were used for previous analyses performed during the mid-20th century before data/code-sharing capabilities were widely available.…”

“…Alan Lomax and Conrad Arensberg's Expressive Style Research Project at Columbia University, which also began in the mid-20th century, complemented resources like the Ethnographic Atlas for the domain of the performing arts by integrating its cross-cultural classification design into the research design of "Cantometrics" ("canto" = song, "metrics" = measure). In the 1980s their studies of song, dance, instrumentation, conversation, popular music, vowel and consonant placement, breath management, social factors, and societies were brought together in an interactive multimedia platform, the "Global Jukebox" [13][14][15][16][17][18]. While several subsequent studies have used methods and samples modeled after Cantometrics to analyze hundreds of traditional music recordings from around the world [19][20][21][22][23], the full Global Jukebox sample of over 5,000 coded performances was never made publicly available, until now.…”

Comparative musicology: The science of the world’s music

“…A. Grauer, , 2011Lomax, 1968Lomax, , 1976Lomax, , 1980Lomax, , 1989Lomax & Arensberg, 1977;Lomax & Berkowitz, 1972). Lomax's daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, myself, and many collaborators have also published posthumous meta-reviews attempting to address and synthesize many of the shorter critiques and controversies surrounding Cantometrics (Savage, 2018;Wood, 2018bWood, , 2018a, republished Lomax's detailed classification schemes and training tapes for coding songs (Cantometrics), dance (Choreometrics), speech (Parlametrics), and more (Wood, 2020), and digitized and published the full Cantometrics coded data and audio recordings in the form of the "Global Jukebox", containing over 5,000 songs from almost 1,000 societies (Wood et al, 2021) (Fig. To summarize, Lomax led a large team of collaborators to collect and curate this large sample of traditional songs from throughout the world and analyze them according to the standardized "Cantometric" classification scheme based on 37 variables of musical style.…”