Critical Review # 3

Critical Review #3

Chapter 13- Barz and Cooley

 

In Chapter 13, Barz introduces the notion of fieldnotes as an element integral in the relationship between observer and performance. Fieldnotes are the linking factor between an ethnomusicologists’ initial observation of a performance and his/her afterthoughts and reflections on it. In emphasizing the importance of taking fieldnotes, Barz makes clear that it is an ethnomusicologists process in observing a performance that is most crucial to fully experiencing and understanding the music that he/she is studying. Without evidence of an ethnomusicologist’s process, there will exist a gapping hole in the study of a culture and its music. Furthermore, fieldnotes put us in the ethnomusicologists’s mind at the time of the performance; what were his/her instinctive reactions? Were they positive or negative? How did these fieldnotes direct the ethnomusicologist’s reactions and opinions throughout the rest of the performance?

In reading Barz’s commentary on fieldnotes, I could not help but both view the process of taking notes as well as the act of re-reading them as another form of “setting the scene.” Just as a dramatic text sets the tone, scene, and language of a play, fieldnotes put the ethnomusicologist back in a specific musical experience. Every time we re-read a play or a novel, something new comes to surface. Barz states, “Once the fieldnote is written…we enter a new process of interpretation. This process… is one that changes perspectives and relationships to experiences.” (208) Previously hidden elements become more vivid, minor characters step out from the shadows.  The act of taking fieldnotes puts an ethnomusicologist in the mindset of surrounding music, and is able to do so time and time again when they are re-read. It is the act of both taking and re-reading fieldnotes that allows the ethnomusicologist to re-live and trigger the past performance. In re-living a performance an ethnomusicologist can “[refocus]” his/her relationship to any performance, and as a result, test any preconceived notions from that initial experience. Barz states it perfectly: fieldnotes call “into question the very notion of “original” experience.” (208)

Barz’s ideas make me wonder whether or not any experience is a permanent one. Can one initial opinion remain embedded within our minds? Can an experience continue to take form and live on even after it has ended? How does this ever-lasting, continual experience form our own opinion and relationship to it?