Approaches to Craft: Perspectives on Music, Sound and the Visual

My excitement here is twofold: taking part in a crucial eco system of information, and the opportunity to ruminate with my passion.
Let me be transparent: I am a musician, and ethnomusicologist filmmaker. This combination means that I work across the spectrum of sound and music. The methods I use reflect the medium of my choice – music, songs, soundscapes, fine art, musings, and film comprise the products. I live and inhabit the world in sound. Whilst lately forging a triptych of sound, music and the visual, aspects of craft rather than process becomes more evident to me, quantifiably so.
Anecdote: A panel interview for a senior academic position, a University in England, quite picturesque and quaint, with the usual suspects, air infused with Conrad. Whilst my shadow bounced off oak filled panels, wooden floors, and strategized with William Blake and James Baldwin, I was asked:
‘How are your skills as an ethnomusicologist pertinent to everyday life?’
[This question proceeded:
“Are you on Facebook?”
‘’Life is too short”, I replied. I was obviously on a roll.]
“Well, I could do an ethnography of that Styrofoam cup you are holding, with the tea, in three different languages - quite handy if in Japan, and you fancy a cuppa”.
The looks of amazement/incredulity (ok, transparency: I’m a woman of colour with an MMus in Japanese Music - the mergence of traditional and Western symphonic music in 20th century Japanese film; the PhD fieldwork focused on Korean Women composers. You could say the looks were not entirely disingenuous. Question: would I have been invited having not fulfilled the requirements?? Just saying….)
Point being: a cup, tea, Styrofoam - products inhabiting the same space – a triptych amalgamation existing simultaneously in a variety of cultures as part of an eco system; each vying with time lines and ley lines of historiography - a way of seeing and engaging, and each with it’s own perspective: the tea in ‘ High Tea’ may be markedly quintessentially British, it is, de facto, Asian – East, West, North and South.
Culture and context matter, these are the bedrocks of knowledge – fact; they turn opinion into grounded perspective, a measured evaluation. Therefore a ‘product’ of culture is only as good as the research, with the process dictated by the level of craft.

Let’s do some groundwork. Of necessity, I begin from an appreciation of certain fundamentals of the relationship – music, sound and the visual – the three aspects pertinent to a film have that also exist as products ‘of culture,’ (the making of things that humans do in order to chart and engage with time) and, are situated ‘within culture.’ They are everyday life - happily coexisting whilst you people watch outside a small café: you secure the perfect table, hear the conversation two tables away, listen to the programmed music you can never escape whilst ‘dream timing’ with one foot in this world, the other in a next - a never ending film unfolding in front of you as each character passes by.
Anthropologists state, (broadly speaking), all cultures engage with sound; most have an engagement with, and concept of, melody. To varying degrees this constitutes, respectfully, a consideration of musicality in simplistic terms, and therefore denotes a use of, and for, music.
The ‘ethno’/musicologist in me (yes - problematic title) uses this western term as a construct if only to alert people that my perspective, for the sake of argument, is equipped with an inbuilt level playing field, and a hazard sign towards western hegemony.
Music and sound are highly politicized cultural products. They curate debates around foreign imperialism, capitalism, morality, appropriation; freedoms of expressions, gendered space, the individual, nationalism and identity. All speak towards the formation of indigenous identity independent of cultural hegemonies, whether used as a tool for cultural capitalism, or a simple mode of expression such as ‘I hear you’.
How music and sound are used as constructs, and function in a culture - by extension to determine a filmic space – is an inherent important component of the consumerist nature of borrowing sounds (a nicer term than thieving), creating soundscapes, the highly skilled task of through composed, and strophic form music – all present in film - that constitute signifiers of sound in all its glorious forms.

During this series I will seek to explore the above within the category of film music: how it is constructed, enculturated, and continues to maintain a social relevance. We will skinny dip into the practical, technical, philosophical, cultural and musicological considerations, with added geek moments. So, bring a curious mind, and lots of snacks – enough for everyone please (and not the cheap ones; yes, you know who you are…)

Walk Tall,

The Anomaly – ahwnotes.