Music Autoethnographies edited by Bydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis


Introduction - Making Autoethnography sing / making music personal

[intro]
‘Personal writing saved me from being less than passionately involved in my career and from being so mired in grief that I couldn’t breathe. Doing autoethnography madre me feel that my work was worthwhile, that I could contribute to making the world a better place, show my students alternative ways to survive grief and reframe their lives, and equip myself to make sense of the life I was living.’P.2

[What’s going on? What comes before autoethnography?]
‘Before I began doing autoethnography, I was a young conductor tearing on the edge of career suicide. I’d been conducting for just over ten years and clocked up a string of performances with ensembles from Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and Australia. My career was soaring, but a deep dissonance and restlessness was building inside me as I struggled to come to terms with issues about my musical identity, ability and the role of ‘conductor’ and guiding my musicians from one work to the next, the more I felt like a fraud, a fake, a failure. My feelings of charlatanism were exacerbated by the fact that I do no longer had time to play my trumpet. Conducting had become the dominant melody in my life, and my trumpet-playing had slipped quietly into a deafening silence. I dashed from one rehearsal and performance to the next, improvising my way through a massive amount of music, and dancing to a tune that left me exhausted. I couldn’t see a way out of this situation< this phase felt like I was somehow in control of this unruly improvisation. I hoped my musicians wouldn’t see the struggle going on inside me, although I suspect the did. I’m sure my revealing face, yearning gestures, and vulnerable performances gave away what I was feeling. I had to do something. I knew I couldn’t keep playing this worm out tune much longer (...) [why doing autoethnography?] So, I decided to start an autoethnography to try to come to terms with why I was feeling so distressed on the podium. I knew a little about the method, having encountered it while doing ethnographic research for my doctorate. As I read more, I began to realise that this approach could offer me a way to pause, listen and come to appreciate this difficult musical phase in my life.’ P. 2, 3

[some books]
‘The Arts and Narrative Research: Art as Inquiry’
‘Our Writing Lives: An Introduction to Writing and Research — Personal Views (2004)’ P. 6

[Who’s doing autoethnography?]
In practice-led research, composers and performers are uncovering the ways in which their personal lives and cultural experiences intertwine in the creation and interpretation of musical works (see for example, Mio, 2005; Bartleet, in press). In musicology and ethnomicology, researchers are sensitively exploring the interconnectedness between their lives and their areas of study, and the relationships they share with those in their fields of inquiry (see example, Cottrell, 2004; Field, 1990; Mackinlay, 2008; Wong, 2004). (...) Likewise, musicians are reflexively exploring the ways in which they learn and acquire musical skills (see for example, Sudnow, 2001; Bartleet & Hultgren, 2008). P. 7

[What it is?]
Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre that connects the personal to the cultural, social and political. Projects in this genre are distinctly characterised by a focus on “intimate involvement, engagement, and embodied participation” in the subject matter one is exploring (Ellis and Bochner, 2006, p. 434; see also Ellis and Bochner, 2000). Usually written in the first-person voice, autoethnographic work appears in a variety of creative formats; for example, short stories, music compositions, poetry, photographic essays, and reflective journals. P. 7

[quote #1]
Ellis and Bochner write, autoethnographers ‘ look through an ethnographic wide angles lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experiences; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. As they zoom backward and forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural become blurred, sometimes beyon distinct recognition. (2004, p. 38)’ P. 8

[what performers / musicians are able to do with autoethnography?]
Autoethnography frees musicians from writing dry descriptions or reports of musical experiences. Rather, this approach encourages them to convey the meanings of vibrant musical experiences evocatively. The focus becomes telling a tale that readers can enter and feel a part of (see Ellis, 2004, p. 116). The aim becomes to inspire others to critically reflect upon their own music experiences in relation to the autoethnographic tale being told (see Spry, 2001, p. 710). The product of the process thus become ‘something to be used; not a conclusion but a turn in a conversation; not a clones statement but an open question; not a way of declaring ‘this is how it is’ but a meanbs of inviting others to consider what I (or they) could become’ (Bochner & Ellis, 2003, p. 507)
(...)
This leads them to ask: ‘To what uses could art [or music] be put? What new conversartions would open for the viewer [or hearer]? What hidden possibilities would be unveiled? What dormant desires would be awakened?’ As Bochner and Ellis (2003) suggest, [quote #2] These sorts of questions do not fit snugly within the scope of traditional canons of research that emphasise the delivery of a research product that is passively received by a reader, viewer, or hearer. To use art [or music] as a mode of narrative [and autoethnographic] inquiry [is] to move toward a new research paradigm in which ideas become as the artist’s intentions, the language and emotions of art [or music] as important as its aesthetic qualities. (P. 507)’ P. 9 & 10

[Creators and autoethnography - intro]
In the first section, ‘Composing and Improvising’, the authors explore how the creative processes of songwriting and improvisation can be used as powerful autoethnographic tools to tell stories and reflect on significant life experiences.
(...)
Using narrative theory and comparing their stories to those of other songwriters, they reflect on how song-writing contributes to knowledge. Karen Scott-Hoy’s chapter continues the songwriting theme, and tells the story behind an original song, ‘Beautifull Here’, composed by the teenage son, his hand, and her in an effort to understand death and to celebrate life.’ P. 14

Section 1 - Composing and Improvising
    Chapter 1 - Songwriting and the Creation of Knowledge

To understand the analysis made by the writers, I need to write a brief resume about the story. 

So, Kitrina lost her uncle and he was a big support in her life. He was her mentor and almost like a father because Kitrina’s parents died when she was young. David is a professional song writer and Kitrina’s friend. He don’t know how to handle with the situation. He is very good with words but in this moment he couldn’t help Kitrina because he was speechless. However, suddenly, David describes, the words started to appear in his mind, the melody and the chords started to happening and he made the song dedicated to Kitrina and her uncle called ‘A Little Rain’

The writer of the book took this example and appointed some very interesting subjetcs:

Discovering Alternatives Stories
The writing of McLeod (1997) — as well as aspects of our own story — suggest that despite a desire of connection, silence (i.e., an abcense of story) is a likely outcome when available narrative scripts fail to align with personal experience. In exploring this issue we have asked ourselves: What is it about the processes of songwriting that allows this silence to be broken and for us to — though the sonf — found a means of communication? How might the process of writing a song provide access to the June’s of understanding of knowledge that can act as a template for a ‘new’ story that better fits personal experience, one that feels authentic to the writers and hearer of the song? One answer, we think, centres on the ways in which the songwriting process entails some kind of movement away from concious, controlled thought processes towards a more open sense of discovering alternative stories.” P. 31

 In the story, David described the process of writing A Little Rain: ‘At some point during this process...words began to come, I was aware of thinking the words... I didn’t even recognise the words as being my own, as being depictions or representations of my own thoughts’. For us, this suggest that for a songwriter to write, it is necessary, in Neil Young’s terms, to avoid “consciously trying to think” or, at the least, to stop oneself from thinking in certain kind of ways. Doing so allows what Paul Simon describes as a process of ‘discovering’ through which stories, knowledge and understanding are realised.” P. 32

“In this remark, Cohen suggests something is required for him to be able to step outside this ‘immediate realm of thought’. In our story this thing is music itself. Implicit in and essential to this act are the symbiotic relationship between a musician’s body, the body of the instrument and the music that comes out of an through both.
A sense of the act of playing music becoming a trigger for a new story is present in songwriter John Hiatt’s description of writing:

    Interviewer: Does the guitar you use affect the song?
    John Hiatt: Absolutely. There are songs inside guitars. For sure. The question is, how you get them out of there.
    Interviewer: And what’s the answer?
    John Hiatt: For me, it’s to sit down and start playing, because its fun to play. If I’m lucky, something will hit me. If not, I keep playing. (As cited in Zollo, 2003, p.647)

The physical-ness of playing music is also highlighted as important at several points in our story; for example, when David recounts: ‘Somehow, it felt food at this time to just hold the guitar. From thousands of hours playing, the feel of an acoustic guitar against my body has become a familiar and comforting one’. Later, ‘I picked at some chords, feeling the wood reverberate against my body, the ebony fingerboard and silvered frets beneath my fingers, the clean bronze strings against my fingertips’. Finally, ‘...despite not knowing what to say, here were words ... Words were coming from my mouth along with a melody, a rhythm, and a sequence of chords a ans notes from the guitar’. At the core of these descriptions is a sense of embodiment which shows songwriting as ignited and sustained throough physical bodily processes that are realised through connection with a musical instrument.

What we are trying to suggest here is that the physicality of playing music — as an embodied practice — can be the ‘source’ or stimulus of a new song and thereby new understanding. According to Liora Bresler (2008):

   Embodied is at the core of music. Music is produced by physical movement — the voice or an instrument that functions as the extension of the body, where the performer unites with the instrument to produce sound. Embodiment is manifested differently in sigh ands sound. Whereas we see things ‘out there,’ the experience of sound, like touch and taste, is internal, ‘in here;... Sound penetrates us, engaging us on a bodily level in ways fundamentally different than the visual. (P. 231)” P. 34

“For us, some kind of embodied action — as opposed to disembodied cognitive thought — is part and parcel of the ways by which knowledge and understanding is created through songwriting. The physical ‘doing-ness’ of playing music is tied to these insights. In this regard, Ronald Pelias (2008) observes that, ‘Unlike traditional scholarship where the body seems to slip away, performers generate and present their insight through the body, a knowing body, dependent on its participatory and emphatic capacities’ (p. 188). While Pelias is referring specifically to performative works here, we are also aware that humans are always, in some sense, performing — in our story A Little Rain was performed even as it was being written. Thus the process of coming to know evident in performance week in general resonates with the song-writer who, as Pelias observes:

    ... learns to trust what the body teaches... The performer listens to what the body is saying and, based on what the body has come to know, makes judgements about performances choices... At each step in the process, the performer relies upon the body as a location of knowledge. (P. 186)

From this perspective, we see interconnecting elements of music, the instrument and the musician’s body, as supporting the incorporation of knowledge (Douglas & Carless, 2008c), which entails, literally, noth bringing knowledge into the body and bringing the body to knowledge. Knowledge and its acquisition or creation trhough these forms cannot be seen as an entirely cognitive process. Instead, through song-writing we know in our bodies and we come to know through our bodies. In the context of a wholly embodied creative process, a host of significante. In the story, for instance,. David ascribes meaning to this particular guitar, the person who made it, their relationship, and so on. We suggested these biographical and material factors can be significant in the context of a songwriting process that necessarily involves the creation of meaning. Through a desire of connection combined with the opportunity to discover through writing,m we see songwriting as a meaning-making process in which new knowledge and understanding can be accessed or created. A personally meaningful ‘prop’ — in this instance, a guitar — can therefore be more than an essential tool; it can also be an efective way to help bring embodied meaning to the creative enterprise.” P. 35

Closing Thoughts
In attempting to write about the relationship between art and research, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones (2002) describes his work as ‘an essay about the impossibility of speaking about the impossibility of art which makes the everything possible but of which we cannot speak’ (p. 90). With this chapter, we have traveled the same impossible territory. We accept that a degree of ambiguity and paradox (both inherent in the creative process itself and generated through telling a story of the creative process) implies that precise conclusions concerning songwriting are neither possible nor desirable. We do not wish to suggest that the themes in our story are universally representative of every songwriting process. Bom Dylan has said about songwriting: ‘There’s no rhyme or reason to do it. There’s no rule. That’s what makes it so attractive’ (as cited in Zollo, 2003, p. 72). Indeed, no sooner is a ‘rule’ of process suggested them someone goes and breaks it — sometimes with magnificent results. By trying  to ‘explain’ or ‘make sense’ of songwriting we risk imposing reason on a process with caution because we want to avoid doing ‘symbolic violence’ to a creative process that arguably has a degree of disorder and chaos at its core.
For us, however, these risks are worth taking because songs and songwriting are part of an artistic canon that enables us, as researchers, ‘to know something about feeling that cannot be revealed in literal swcientific statements’ (Eisner, 2008, p.8). In this regard, Eisner suggests that science states meaning, art also constitutes to its creation. Just as poetry ‘creates of makes the world in words’ (Leggo, 2008, p. 166), songwriting helps create or make the world in music,. It is on this basis, we believe, that songwriting merits inclusion within the work of autoethnographic, performative, narratiove, and arts-informed researchers.” P. 36

Chapter 4 - Creativity and Improvisation, A Journey into Music

This is a statement about a 43 years old men that learned to play the trumpet when he was young. However, his parents said to him that he must see music as a hobby and actually study mathematics or science.
Peter, did his normal school and then he realised that music was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Actually because, he didn’t quite the trumpet during his math and science courses.
Peter, had a normal classical music education in trumpet, but the first time he heard about improvisation he decided to change and became a jazz mucisian.
He started to improvise with some friends and suddenly he was learning solos and the jazz language. Without realising, Peter was on a tour in Sydney. 

“The comparison between jazz improvisation and autoethnography is too obvious not to be touched upon here, though I am not the first to draw such a parallel. Stacy Holman Jones (2002) describes torch singing as a form of autoethnography, and Deborah Reed-Danahay writes that autoethnography and torch singing both enact a life story within larger cultural and social contexts and histories, or should if we follow Lewis’s thinking. I am also reminded of my own development as an improviser and my experience of cultural dislocation when Reed-Danahay notes:
    The most cogent aspect to the sturdy of autoethnography is that of the cultural displacement or situation of exile characteristic of the themes expressed by autoethnographers ... whether the autoethnographers is the anthropologist studyin his or her own kind, the native telling his or her like story, or the native anthropologist, this figure is not completely ‘at home’. (1997, p.4)” P. 81

“To paraphrase Whiteoak (1999), I began to wonder what I was doing playing music that developed in a completely different physical, spiritual and social environment to that in which we live.” P. 81

“On of my primary motivations as a musician today is to find ways of making my music relevant to the time and place in which I live. Creating music that draws on my background in jazz wihtout being bound by the idiom, music that embodies the ‘personal’. But here it is that words fail us — when we try to use them to describe what we are driven to express in music it’s almost impossible to do without chasing yourself around in circles — suffice to say that what I am attempting to achieve is that difficult to define quality of ‘authencity’. And I use the term ‘authentic’ knowing that in some sense it doesn’t mean very much or that irs meaning is not, as Schippers point out, ‘as clear, stable and value free’ (2006, p. 333) as it may appear. What is authencity? Authencity whom? And so on. But it is a useful word in describing my practice in the context of this chapter because it points to the fact that I am more concern3ed with creating music that ‘feels’ right to me and that communicates something of my truth (whatever that is). Schippers reminds us of Mautners’s Dictionary of Phylosofy definition of authenticity: ‘the quality of being genuine, being true to oneself’ (Mautner 1995, p. 39).

David Borgo offers an interesting perspective in a fascinating paper about free improvisation and music pedagogy (2007) in which he refers to Eric Clarke’s (2005) notion of an ‘ecological’ approach to music performance. It seems particularly relevant here especially given the context of my musical development, in which improvisation has been key. The ‘ecological’ approach to which Borgo refers resonates with what I am trying to achieve in my music practice: the creation of music that is personal and that embodies spontaneity, music in which the composed elements and the idiosyncratic improvisatory languages of the performance and which privileges process over outcomes. Borgo writes, ‘Ultimately, learning is not a matter of what one knows, but who one becomes’ (2007, p.62).” P. 83


ISBN: 9781 9215 1340 4