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Interviewed by Patrick Carroll I interviewed Dr. Beverley Diamond on December 11, 2002 in her then office in the School of Music Building. On one side of the room was a portable music player and a small stack of music CDs, on the other was a piano. Dr. Diamond was in the process of moving to the new offices of MMAP on the third floor of the Annex, in the Arts and Culture Building. P.C.: What is your position at Memorial? B.D.: I’ve come as a Canada Research Chair in traditional music and ethnomusicology. These are federally funded, research intensive positions that are occurring in universities across the country and in all disciplines. As you might expect, there aren’t too many of them that go to disciplines like folklore or music. Memorial has done a good thing by putting this in place. P.C.: Before you were in this position, were you teaching? B.D.: Yes, forever it seems. I taught for a couple of years at McGill and then for sixteen years at Queen’s University in the music school, then for fourteen years at York University where they have a large graduate program in ethnomusicology. P.C.: Has it always been ethnomusicology? B.D.: It’s always been ethnomusicology, yes. P.C.: Do you have a musical background then? B.D.: Yes, yes. P.C.: Is this your piano? B.D.: This is not my piano. This is the School of Music’s piano, but, indeed I am a keyboard player and trained as a classical piano player. I stay a little bit active. I dabble in all sorts of other things. Sat around a pow-wow drum for a couple of years which is a rare experience for a woman because it’s a male-oriented tradition. P.C.: You were actually playing the drum? B.D.: Yes. One of the relatively rare contexts in which you could do that, at that particular time, was in the prison for women in Kingston. I also took South Indian Vina lessons for a couple of years. And actually, since I’ve come here I took one of the button accordions home from the School of Music and I’ve been practising. So, I like to learn new things. But I can’t say that I’m advanced as a performer at very many of them, except the piano. P.C.: How did you get to ethnomusicology? B.D.: I did a straight Bachelor of Music degree in classical music and then started graduate school thinking I’d be interested in twentieth century classical traditions. I was a bit frightened by ethnomusicology thinking “how could you know about the whole world?” But I had done some undergraduate world music courses and realized that that’s where my real love was. I was also interested in a lot of social issues and how they would relate to music. How do we deal with social diversity? How can we develop ways of looking at the social groundedness and multiple meanings of musical practices and not treat music as an autonomous thing? P.C.: Music is a vehicle for you to look at societies, as cultural expression? B.D.: As expression, but also as a negotiation of identity issues. As a political tool. As a sort of multinuanced statement about cross-cultural encounter and alliances. P.C.: I was reading some of Robert Klymaz’s work on Ukrainian macaronic songs. As a hybrid they present such a nice point of transition between two cultures. B.D.: Yeah, it happens in a lot of different ways in that culture and in others. Sometimes there are different texts combined, as in that particular instance. Sometimes in different languages. Sometimes there are different layers in diverse styles. There are a many instances where there might be really old and rather socially conservative lyrics for songs, the songs that people knew, but they’ll put absolutely new accompaniments or slightly new dance steps to them. That’s happened with the Albanian community, for instance as Jane Sugarman’s studies revealed. There was a study of Armenian choirs in Toronto a few years ago by Margaret Sarkissian. She found one choir had assumed a very different repertoire and way of teaching the music than the other and it depended a little bit on to what extent they wanted to reinforce their roots to the old country and to what extent they wanted to be modern. Small groups of people make these decisions all the time and it’s fascinating what they choose to do and become. My own work, for decades now, has been with Native American artists, largely, so there’s lots of exchanges and cross-cultural issues that come into those repertoires. P.C.: Native American cultures in general? B.D.: I did my doctoral work in the central Arctic on Netsilik Inuit music and there was, still is, a strong drum dance tradition there and the throat singing that you may have heard women do. (Incidentally, we’re going to have throat singers here in February!) That research was exciting, but it was really oriented more to traditional repertoires, although, I recorded some of the pop music that was starting to emerge in Inuit communities. P.C.: Like Susan Aglukark? B.D.: Well, forerunners of Susan Aglukark. People like Charlie Panagoniak, or Charlie Adams. There was a whole host of them back in the ‘70s. Some of them are still going, actually. P.C.: Is this in a country style? B.D.: It’s kind of an interesting blend of styles. It’s got some country elements, but in some songs, there is a lot of influence from Christian hymns. Some of them are more like pop songs or gentle rock songs. Different style choices by different people. My Inuit work was way back in the 70s and early 80s and then I came to Labrador and worked in Davis Inlet with the Innu community there, several trips over a couple of years in the early 80s. That was interesting because there was still the old repertoire of songs with drumming that people got through dreams and people were, for the most part, willing to share that although the contexts in which they can be used are somewhat restricted. There was also a fascinating repertoire of Christian hymns in the Innu language that had been indigenised and adapted for their use. There were a number of people who had lived in convents or residential schools at some point and these repertoires were quite deeply important to them. I never had any thought of going to study Christian music in a native community but I ended up doing quite a bit of work on that because people thought that it needed to be recorded and there were less concerns about an outsider recording that repertoire. There were wonderful narrators of the classic myths of the language [the atnohana]. I started recording the myths because they were performed almost in a musical manner, often with little songs in the middle of them. So I have a collection of legends from that work that’s quite substantial and really interesting. P.C.: You mentioned some of the drum songs and their performance context. Do you mean there are certain times when these should be played? They can’t be played just to be recorded? B.D.: No. They’re generally quite personal songs and the people use them partly in divination. They would dream the song and singing the song sometimes seemed to relate to recalling other kinds of knowledge. Perhaps the location of the next successful hunt. People would tell stories about looking into the skin of the drum and actually seeing images there. It’s hard to fully understand. Also, the drums have snares. One on the top and one on the underside with either little pieces of bone or quill or matchsticks sometimes. One bounces on top of the snare and one bounces at a ninety degree angle on the other side of the snare, on the underside. It’s a lovely sound. Those snares are sometimes described as carrying spirit voices. They listened inside that buzzing sound and it was evocative in a way that was important. These are frame drums rather than the big circular drum that you would have seen at pow-wows. Hand drums but suspended from a rafter or a ridge pole in a tent. And then as I mentioned there was the pow-wow drum in Kingston. Most recently I’ve been interviewing recording artists and have become really interested in how First Nations and Inuit and Metis people are choosing to put certain kinds of music into the public domain. There’s a really careful selection of what they put out there and then all the issues of who controls what in the recording studio. Recording studios don’t know what to do with Native American ensembles. You can’t lay down tracks the way you can with a pop song. P.C.: Why can’t you just lay down tracks? I’m not sure what you mean by that. B.D.: The way in which popular music is generally recorded is that often a group will go in and record what they call the bed tracks first, then overdub the bass guitar and the drums, (there’s the assumption that you’re going to have bass guitar and lat.) Then they’ll do the solos and punch them in over top. But with Native American artists there is so much visual cueing going on in the performance that first of all you have to have all the performers in one space together or it won’t work. And then the idea that you would separate a part out and record it on its own and rerecord it and maybe cut up little pieces of it and all of those things, that just doesn’t make any sense in terms of how their music works. P.C.: So you are viewing the recording process as having it’s own social context? B.D.: Absolutely. So, I like doing ethnography in recording studios these days. For traditional music, even whether or how it gets arranged is an interesting question. Do you take it into the popular world? Do you become some sort of a...do you engage in the discourse of authenticity and say, oh no no no this is pure, this is somehow real traditional or do you modernize it? All those sorts of questions which are always debated. So that all brings me up to the present. I’m still working with indigenous recording artists. I’ve expanded that work to Scandinavia. The reason for that was that so many of my Native American acquaintances were now interested in a pan-Indigenous sound and I thought, wow, nobody’s really looking at these international links among people who self-identify as indigenous people. Even that self-identification is really interesting. So I thought, I really need to understand at least one other indigenous tradition at a level that is more than superficial at any rate and I really like Sami yoiking. A Finish singer named Wimme Sarri was at all the major Canadian folk festivals last year. I heard him in Vancouver and Toronto. He’s one of the most interesting singers out there, I think. So I’ve spent three years now doing some field work in Scandinavia, generally about a month each year, although last year I only managed a little over a week, doing interviews with artists, visiting some of the Sami run recording studios. Just trying to get a sense of what some of the issues are. Going to festivals. There’s a huge festival around Easter. Last summer I went to one the Sami community runs for northern indigenous people all around the world. The Inuit women who are coming here, I met them at that festival. P.C.: You’re looking at more than just the social context of the music now. You’re looking at sound? B.D.: For me you can’t divide them. I think the sound is shaped socially. It’s shaped by the things that will influence people’s aesthetic preferences. It’s sometimes shaped in terms of power. I mean, what kinds of sounds encompass other sounds? What kinds of sounds are layered with other sounds? What kind of sounds allow people to participate? I’m interested in the social practices, but I’m really interested in how those social practices also shape the sound itself. I just can’t disentangle those things. P.C.: Is music the pure universal? People often say that music is the one thing which is universal. B.D.: It’s a question that drives ethnomusicologists mad, I think, because we tend to think of musical practices as quite localized, but of course now embedded in all sorts global and trans-national processes, some of them economic, some of them in terms of media: who’s listening and who has access to what? But universal, no. Almost everybody does some sort of structuring of the sound in their lives. so at that level universal? Yes. P.C.: But sound is universal? B.D.: And some sort of socially shaped ideas mapping onto sound seems widespread. P.C.: Is it a universal behaviour? If you take one sound and everybody can hear that sound, it doesn’t mean that everybody is going to hear that sound the same way. When we talk about telling stories, sound is the major component that we don’t consider. We accept sound as a basis for music because we don’t have a text, a linguistic text, but oral performance is using the voice, manipulating the tone of the voice. This changes my concept of the storytelling performance. It’s sound. Can you recap some of what you were telling me earlier about the project you are currently developing? B.D.: I’ve proposed what I call a research program rather than a specific project. One prong of it is to establish a research centre that we are calling the Music MAP Centre. The anagram is MMAP, so Music, Media and Place. Media being the element that takes sound beyond its local environment and place being the thing that ties it back to community and local circumstances. So there is an interplay between the local and global for a lot of the research. I hope that not only does my work with indigenous musicians fit into that scenario, but that it also enables many other kinds of work by researchers and collectors, some of them trained in the folklore program, some of them professionals, some of them amateurs who just want to get uncle’s fiddle tunes on tape. I hope the centre will serve as a vehicle to enable that kind of work. We’re going to have equipment and technical services available to people. We are going to have the ability to restore some of the archival tapes in the MUNFLA (Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archives) collection. We’re hoping to set up a state-of-the-art audio restoration studio and do some multimedia production of archival material as well. We don’t intend to get into the recording business because there are some fine recording studios in the province that do that, so I don’t think that’s its needed at the University. P.C.: This will all be accessible by people of the Province but also beyond that as well? B.D.: We want to make the vibrant music of the province absolutely central to what that centre is about but not exclusive. We’re certainly starting as a provincial concept and I’ve established an advisory group of people from different parts of the province, from different com-munities and different ethno-cultural backgrounds. But I hope that the work we are doing will eventually interest people from other places, both within Canada and internationally. P.C.: So the collection itself will take a character that is world-oriented? B.D.: I don’t want to set up something that competes with the Folklore and Language Archive. I think that any collections that we do through the projects that are done will become part of MUNFLA. What we are doing is trying to find ways to make that archival material more vital intellectually by doing more extensive contextual research around it and some analysis in some cases. And then more accessible by trying to negotiate permission to do some CD production and maybe internet pedagogical modules down the road. We’ve talked about many different kinds of media. Maybe we’re at a juncture now where you don’t think about just one kind of media but you think about connections between many kinds of media. We’re going to start just with a website. I’ve got a little bit of funding to start developing a website for traditional music after Christmas. P.C.: It’s interesting how this work still relates back to your original interest in the social context of music. B.D.: Practically everything relates to how so-called traditional material, however you define that, is being put into modern circulation. Whether it’s copyright or access issues, whether it’s technological issues, whether it’s questions of different audiences and contexts and social context for performance and all of those things, they’re all questions that are somehow interconnected by this issue of tradition in the modern world. P.C.: You’ve moved well beyond your initial interest in European Classical music to traditional music and now into this work on the social context of music. I find it interesting to see how academics, how their ideas expand and what they grow to encompass. B.D.: It is a fascinating thing. On the other hand I think it is also partly how institutions felt the best preparation would be. Music schools, until relatively recently, figured that you had to train by becoming a good classical musician. I think I already had lots of questions about so-called vernacular practices because I grew up in a rural community myself and I realized the way in which people made music in the community was not the same thing I was studying when I went off to study music at university. So, the questions were already there, but you had to cut it in the classical world in order to get credentialed. And of course, it is good training. There’s no question that it is relevant training. P.C.: Do you have anything that you would like to mention? B.D.: Yeah, I’d like to say that I think this university is at a very special juncture in that they have this world-class folklore program that is turning out really exciting young scholars and that the School of Music, I think, is on a real upward curve in acquiring increasing international respect and, while it’s a little younger than the folklore program, it’s a real golden opportunity for these two departments to work together. I feel really lucky to be here at this particular point in time. Back
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