Sunday, September 21, 2014

Ethnochoreology?!

I went on a tangent yesterday.

I was enjoying my ethnomusicology assignment so much that it ended up taking me just about all day because I kept going down internet worm holes. I think this must be how friends like Kim and Luther manage to amass so much interesting knowledge. They both take collection of knowledge very seriously without having to have a class or degree or grade motivate the research. I am in awe of this about them, and hope that I'll allow myself the time and energy to be as devoted as they to things that don't have a prescribed motivation other than just interest alone. Some things I wanted to look into more after chaining onto them while researching musician Hayes Carll:

The Atlantic Slave Trade: It hit the United States in 1609, LONG before we were officially a country. This is something I tend to forget, as most of my knowledge around this surrounds the development of blues, folk and jazz music around the mid 1800s and on.

Ethnochoreology: That's a thing! After finding out about biomusicology last week and starting to study music ethnography deeply, I decided to put 'ethno' in front of 'choreology' rather than 'choreography' to see what I got. It's also called 'Dance Ethnography' and 'Dance Anthropology,' but 'Ethnochoreology' seems to me a more fitting word. It's 'academic thought on why people dance and what it means.

I also discovered that 'Rovi' is a business whose services include a digital music component that hires experts to develop and write content for various clients (including Spotify), that Vevo music video service is jointly run by UMG, Google, Sony and Abu Dhabi media (creepy), that there is an Americana webzine called No Depression (I hope I remember to go back and read it as this is a fascinating subculture), and found a video for Hayes Carll and Corb Lund's "Bible On the Dash" (AWESOME), among other random things.

This Saturday journey was a much more fascinating way to spend time than a movie or TV show often is; I hope I keep doing this!