Experiences As An Ethnomusicologist

1. Experiences As AnEthnomusicologist Interview and Presentation by: Mary Claire Leonard

2. About Katy: • Is now 26 years old and lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her cat, Scooter • Administrator and Event Producer for the International Bluegrass Music Association • Received a (flute) performance degree from Birmingham Southern College • Studied Irish Bluegrass at the University of Limerick • PhD areas of specialization are American Vernacular Music and Music Education and Ethnomusicology “I have studied identity, ideas of home and place, politics, and modernization in relation to bluegrass, both in the US and in Ireland”. -Katy Elizabeth Leonard

3. Why Folklore? • By becoming a performer and active member of the musical community, she has joined a collectivity of people who also express themselves through music. • Learns by ear -Rote: Memorization by repetition • Number Notation • She preserves traditional music techniques from around the world and promotes the value of world music in our society.

4. Interview Excerpt Pt. 1 K: ….I decided that I really enjoyed the classical flute but I wanted to get more into the um, Irish flute tradition and different other cultural traditions. So I ended up going to um, Ireland to get my master’s after I graduated with a flute performance degree; and I originally went there to study the Irish flute, which I did. I was able to study with Desi Wilkinson. Um…and we took group classes, my roommate was a, a harpist from Canada, a folk harpist from Canada. So, there was… the program I was in was called the Irish World Music Center, which is now called the Irish Center for Traditional Music and Dance. MC: Is that when you first got into ethnomusicology? K: It is! And that program actually, I, I went there to study ethnomusicology and at the time it was because that was the program that was available. Um, there was a traditional music program but you already had to be an established traditional musician and I was a classical musician so I wasn’t going to get in that way. Um, so I went to study Irish flute and I actually ended up studying bluegrass. I studied flute on my own time and actually as an elective but for my um, degree and for my main research I ended up studying Irish bluegrass.

5. Interview Excerpt Pt. 2 [Flute Music Playing] K: This is me….trying to copy Desi with the silver flute and the wood… and you can hear, this is Desi and I together with the wooden and the silver flutes. MC: Now you’re playing by ear here, and this isn’t how you were trained… K: No, not at all. Yeah, I found it really useful to record my lessons. MC: Yeah K: And this is Desi… [Sound changes a little] MC: You were able to mimic his sound very well though on the silver flute. K: Well it really helped to play along with him and to like, listen to him play and copy because… Um…yeah, to, to mimic his sound, exactly. Once he um, wanted me to play as high as I could on the silver flute and he was really excited because the wooden flute can’t play that high. [Laughter]

6. Interview Excerpt Pt. 3 MC: Did you take some really interesting classes that gave you experiences you might not, er…knowledge that you might not have been able to gain just from like, sitting in America and taking traditional like, music history classes? Or... K: Oh definitely, I took um, even though my area of expertise is, is, um, American Vernacular Music and Bluegrass specifically, uh..I took Ghanaian drumming with um, Kwave Martin Obeng who is a master African drummer from Ghana. Um…n, that was amazing. Um…I…do not got rhythm, [Laughter] but I tried really hard and I…it was drumming and dancing and singing, and it was the singing part was the hardest for me because yeah, he was pretty much just like, “get over it, we’re all singing”. Um, a lot of complicated clapping. And…I also took um, Javanese gamelan. MC: What’s that? Can you tell a little more?

7. K: I can! It’s um, metallaphones, uh, m-metal instruments. Um…[sigh] They… are uh… I was actually taking a class on Indonesian music uh, and our school had a Javanese gamelan and that was kind of the lab part of the class. Um…it was… a lot of ethnomusicology programs have a gamelan, either Balinese or Javanese. Um…and that was hard for me because bluegrass is… you know, the songs are short, it’s fast, it’s virtuosic. I mean… You know, you play a riff, you can hum it. Javanese gamelan is pretty much the opposite. Um… MC: Is there a lot of improv? Or do they… [speech cut off] K: No…it’s, it’s, it’s pre…pre-composed. Um, and we actually learned it through number notation. Um, and there’s two different schools of thought; you learn it by number notation or by ear. Um, but the pieces are just so long. I mean, so long. N, to teach western students that by ear would’ve taken forever. Um, so we did have notation. But, it was, it was really difficult because it was just a completely different time. I mean, it was a completely different way of thinking about time.

8. MC: Yeah…I know you had to perform on the drums. Did you have to perform on those [metallaphones] as well? K: I did. Um, I, I performed. I did two performances in a, in African drumming and then I did one um, on gamelon. Uh, both of them we had to wear traditional, quote, traditional garb. [Laughing] Um… MC: Well that’s very neat. Did you say there was dancing involved? K: Not in Indonesian. MC: Okay. But in the drumming there was? K: In the drumming. Uh huh. Um…we did uh, the dru…the dancing was pretty fun, I gotta say. Um, about half of us played the drums and half of us danced, and um, and then traded off. Um, but it was… I, I, I like to dance. I mean…

9. MC: You said you took an actual like, dancing class one time and you did breathing…you talked about that with me. You, you went into a trance or something…before…I don’t know if this is the same class… K: Oh I did! Um, when I was at the University of Limerick in Ireland we had a south African dancer and drummer come and hold a, a full day workshop on a Saturday. Um, and we did, uh…some, some, South African dancing and spoke about trance and um, he kind of gave us a very brief idea of a different um [sigh], breathing and in-intense inhaling musical…um, not performances because they’re not performances they’re pretty much a group experience. I guess it was kind of a group experience. Um, and if you do it for long enough you go into a trance and that’s, that’s how it’s, it’s traditionally used as a trance-inducing song. MC: So…it was just something that drew them all together in the moment? K: Mm hmm.