Zoom link:
March 13, 2025
Dr. Anthony (Tony) Seeger
Talk Summary:
Music can change people’s lives. In fact, it can change them several times. Music played around the house during childhood may give way to the discovery of something quite different in grade school and college after exposure during a concert, listening to a recording, or a class assignment. Most people I have talked with remember vividly at least one experience with music. Some of them became devoted fans, others learned to perform on musical instruments, some became professional musicians and some became anthropologists or ethnomusicologists who study music.
Only a few anthropologists have focused their research on music and dance. From our publications it would appear that most of us are deaf to melody, unmoved by dance, unaware of aromas, and very dependent on using language for our research. But I know most anthropologists have been deeply moved by their own musical experiences. Many play musical instruments and are good dancers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s my dissertation advisors, Victor Turner and Terence Turner, were notable for their musical and dance contributions to parties as the evenings grew late—Vic with his enthusiastic dancing and Terry with his seemingly endless supply of raunchy rugby songs.
How does an anthropologist change people’s lives through music? I will discuss how I used my training as an anthropologist to run an audiovisual archive, The Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, and a record company, Folkways Records after it was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. I will outline how my training in anthropology shaped my approach to running both of them, and what I tried to do to help people change their lives, and their thinking. Both of these endeavors could be called “applied anthropology (or ethnomusicology)” because they were public facing and policy related. But they influenced my thinking as well—many of my articles and book chapters have been “forged in the crucible of action” where the doing shaped my subsequent thinking.
Presenter Bio:
I was born into a musical family whose lives were profoundly affected by the right wing “red scare” in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. My musicologist grandfather had his passport cancelled and had to retire from his job at the Pan American Union. My uncle Pete was investigated by HUAC and convicted of contempt of Congress (a feeling now shared by many). Several other members of my family were investigated as well and their lives changed. Singing with my parents since I could talk and playing the banjo at age 12, I was deeply aware that music had power to frighten authorities, and that being a musician could be dangerous. It was also personally satisfying—in 8th grade I had a 4th-grade fan club whose members squealed when I performed at school assemblies. I suspect my musical abilities influenced the jobs I have been offered during my career. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I opted to study Social Relations to learn what it was about music that made it so powerful and so dangerous. I also studied folklore under Albert Lord. But for graduate school I thought the questions anthropologists asked were more interesting than those of folklorists. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 1974. My most popular book is Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Cambridge 1987 with audio cassette; U. Illinois Press 2024 revised and expanded, with CD, with translations into Chinese and Portuguese.
I taught at Pomona College (1974-5) and in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro (1975-82). In 1982 I accepted a position in the Anthropology Department Indiana University and was asked by the Dean of the Arts and Sciences to serve as Director of the Archives of Traditional Music. This began my career as an audiovisual archivist. In 1988 I was invited to become the first curator and director of the Folkways Records Collection at what is now called the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. In 2000, thinking it was time for new leadership, I accepted a position as Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. My plans for research at UCLA were sidelined by accepting the position of Secretary General of the International Council for Traditional Music, an NGO affiliated with UNESCO, during the development of a new “instrument” for Intangible Cultural Heritage. I made many more trips to Paris than to the field in Brazil.
As I approach 80, I find I have written three books on the Suyá, now calling themselves Kĩsêdjê, an Indigenous people living in Mato Grosso, Brazil, co-edited three others on audiovisual issues, and published over 140 articles and book chapters on anthropological, ethnomusicological, archival, intellectual property, and Indigenous rights issues. (List of publications: https://www.academia.edu/72475584/List_of_Publications_by_Anthony_Seeger) I am the executive producer of over 250 CDs and producer of radio shows, a 30-video cassette set, and an instructional DVD. My voice and banjo skills are fading, but I continue to perform with my wife, Judy.