Living Ethnomusicology: Paths and Practices by Margaret Sarkissian & Ted Solis

Author:Margaret Sarkissian & Ted Solis [Sarkissian, Margaret & Solis, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, General, Ethnomusicology, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780252051180
Google: fNSXDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07SRGBSDP
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

Judith (Judy) McCulloh (March 24, 2009)

PhD, Indiana University (Folklore)

Editor Emerita, University of Illinois Press

Graduate Studies

JMcC: After I got my bachelor's in English I went down the road to Ohio State and started a PhD in English.

MS: Did your interest in folk songs continue?

JMcC: Oh yes. I got a big old clunky box of a phonograph—I'm sure the needle wore out very quickly—and started buying recordings. I had a lot of the Folkways stuff, including some of the overseas stuff, and things that Kenny Goldstein was issuing. I got a bunch of revival stuff—The New Lost City Ramblers when they came around. I heard a pretty good variety of music at Ohio Wesleyan, and by the time I went to Ohio State, I was more seriously interested in folk music. Even at Wesleyan, I knew enough to give a talk about British and Anglo-American folk song. I knew about Child Ballads and stuff like that and could play examples and so forth. When I got to Ohio State, I did some work with Fran Utley, who was the main folklorist there. I had one quarter with him and became his assistant for a while. I took a class with Claude Simpson on the broadside ballad, so I got some of the written older British tradition that way. But mainly I was working in medieval studies, Old English and Middle English, that kind of thing with Morton Bloomfield.

MS: So you were finding your way into folk-song studies through English departments rather than music departments at that time.

JMcC: Yes, Morton Bloomfield decided that if I was going to work in that area, I needed to know Sanskrit. Where should I go study Sanskrit? There was a wonderful professor at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, so I applied for a Fulbright and got it. I went off to Belgium in ’58, but the professor died while I was on the boat going over there. Eventually, they found a native speaker of Flemish to teach the course in French. I knew a little French, and somehow I got through the year. I sat in on some other courses and went folk dancing with some Flemish people from the countryside. You could make out basic stuff in Flemish if you knew German, so that was no big deal. We spent weekends learning traditional dances from the countryside.

The spring before I went to Belgium Fran Utley was involved in hosting a meeting of the Ohio Folklore Society at Ohio State. Richard Dorson came over from Indiana to give a talk, and he brought with him a trio of students who sang and played instruments. At the end, Dorson issued an open invitation to the every-four-years Folklore Institute at Indiana University, which would run for six or eight weeks that summer. I expressed some interest, and he said, “Well, come on over.” I went to Indiana for the summer and took a couple of courses from Archer Taylor, the great Germanic riddle and proverbs scholar. There

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.