Singing Community

Singing Community is an on-going project studying the community and music of the exuberant Yale a cappella world.

The project is run by Sarah Weiss of the Department of Music at Yale s.weiss@yale.edu and involves graduate and undergraduate students in the practice of ethnomusicological approaches to the study of performance culture. While ‘the field’ in ethnomusicological and anthropological research often suggests a location in a distant culture and a grappling with issues of otherness (one’s own and those with whom one is studying), in this project the being in ‘the field’ involves working within a community of peers. The general equality of social and economic standing and a shared university culture disrupts the usual criticism of ethnomusicological work – that the research and publication process is a replication of the colonial endeavor and results in an unequal relationship between the researcher and the researched, with the advantage going to the researcher. While there are always differences between the observer/researcher and the performer, engaging in research among one’s peers means access to the results is equal for both researcher and performer (in terms of language capability and technological access); there is the likelihood that performers are able to decline to participate more easily than if the socio-economic relationship between researcher and researched were less equal or skewed toward the researcher; and the identity of the individuals in the research group is deeply connected to the same community as the performers – some of whom may be roommates, friends, competitors, or also researchers involved in the project.

This project has two overarching goals.  The first is to explore the formation of affinity groups, in particular their meanings to their members and those who observe them.  This kind of situated case study produces data that can be used for understanding the relationship between identity and community in the contemporary world where many of the usual anthropological and social structures (nuclear families, kinship, religious communities, geographic boundaries) for interpreting culture and individual roles in it are stretched and decentered or no longer relevant. Affinity groups challenge the pessimistic assumption of an inevitable atomization of society as family and religious structures recede in significance. Comparison with other situated case studies examining similar kinds of group formation will generate the possibility of theorizing more broadly about community-formation in the twenty-first century. It turns out that the affinity groups are simultaneously intensely local and capable of global connectedness. The second goal of this project is to involve students in every aspect of the ethnomusicological research process. To date, student researchers have pursued vastly different ideas and approaches to their fieldwork and their analysis. The original fieldwork for this project was performed in an ethnography course offered in the Fall semester 2007 by: Cristina Cruz-Uribe; Lauren Frankel (then Holmes); Esther Morgan-Ellis; Valerie Rogotzke; Sofy Solomon; Danielle Ward-Griffin; and Sarah Weiss. Several of the researchers have continued to work on the project until the present. The four essays by Sarah Weiss, Valerie Rogotzke, Esther Morgan-Ellis, and Danielle Ward-Griffin represent some of the ideas and work that have been generated by the project thus far.