Fragile Culture

             

            I once thought I’d like to become a musicologist. It’s a fascinating field that studies music, how music came to be, and how it interacts within culture over time. I think you have to be part musician, part historian and part anthropologist to be a good musicologist.

I remember reading an account of the adventures of a 20^th century musicologist that astounded me. Before World War I, this musicologist (I want to say his name was Green, but I’m really not sure) traveled to America’s Appalachian region to write down the songs that had been passed down among the Scotch Irish that had lived for  generations secluded in the region’s mountains and hollers. The music was not written down. People learned by listening and repeating - pretty much how freshmen learn their college songs and can still belt them out 50 years later at reunions.

Much of the music particular to Appalachia is based on the Dorian mode, an antique “scale” known to the early settlers hundreds of years ago. (Our major and minor scales are two of those antique modes.)  Because those tunes, sung for years in the Appalachian Mountains, have a sad or minor key sound, the Dorian mode is often called “mountain minor.”

            Enter the war and the young men of Appalachia exited their hills to become soldiers. When they returned home, they shared what they had seen, heard and experienced from the rest of America and the world.  After several years, “Mr. Green” returned and discovered people had forgotten those hand- me- down songs in that quaint mountain minor. He had to re-teach them their own songs.

            How fragile traditions are within a culture! Our Native American code talkers in World War II couldn’t have contributed as significantly as they did unless the generations preceding them had not valued and passed on their tribal languages. It’s a mistake to think that songs, dances, philosophies, customs, and language of the past are less valuable then what is currently popular in our melting pot American culture. I think it behooves all of us to value and pass on what went before us, even as we recreate culture for our own times.