The Experimental College (Ex College)−sponsored "A Taste of Tufts: A Sampling of Faculty Research" lecture series continued last Friday, with Associate Professor of Music David Locke at bat. At the lecture, Locke presented his multimedia research on the drumming of the Dagomba, an ethnic group in Ghana.
Locke discussed his use of the Digital Collections and Archives (DCA), with the help of University Information Technology (UIT), to create an online database of instrumental recordings, staff notation and written history of the Dagomba.
Locke, who sported a traditional black Dagomba hat, is an ethnomusicologist specializing in traditional African music and dance. He began teaching at Tufts part−time as the director of the African Music Ensemble in 1979, eventually earning tenure in the early 1990s.
As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, Locke grew "smitten," he said, with African music and the field of ethnomusicology.
"I liked the way that the study of music … bridges the arts with the humanities and social sciences like cultural anthropology," he said. "It's an engrossing and varied field that's intellectually interesting. It's artistically interesting because you get to be involved with some really cool music, and … it fits very well with a lot of Tufts values. Most of us get involved in active citizenship and the values of giving back between the fortunate scene here and the disadvantaged around the world, so the ethics of ethnomusicology appealed to me a lot."
Locke emphasized his appreciation of music's ability to mitigate the potential pitfalls of cross−cultural studies.
"Music is a fail−safe against first−world arrogance because you have to humble yourself in relation to a music teacher," he said.
"Music tends to inculcate humility … because it represents an ideal of perfection. A life of music is always failing to achieve what you can imagine to be a perfect performance, and much more so if you're a novice in another culture's music and you're working with experts in that tradition … [and] you're dependent on their expertise. It sort of inverts the power relationship."
In 1975, while in Ghana performing his research for his doctoral dissertation, Locke met AlhajiAbubakariLunna, who inaugurated him into the practice of Dagomba drumming.
"He was my mentor and instructor, friend, guide, informant and teacher," Locke said of Lunna, who died in 2009. Between 1980 and 2008, Lunna traveled annually to Tufts to serve as an artist−in−residence.
"Every year he would come, live in my house, teach me, teach groups I had started, work with students," he said. "He was an enormously erudite and learned expert in his musical traditions and the cultural history of his people, and gradually I learned about it … and we collaborated and developed documentary information about it."
To help Locke's students learn various Dagomba songs, Lunna recorded somewhat modified versions of each.
"[The songs weren't] simplified or easier; he essentialized [them], he stripped [them] down to the bare bones," Locke said, adding that Lunna sang in a surrogate language developed by the Dagomba to accompany the instrumental sounds.
Locke then interviewed Lunna about the meaning of each song, with Lunna giving narratives often relating to the history and culture of the Dagomba people.
Additionally, Locke and a graduate student recorded the individual components of each song, many of which have multiple drum parts layered and interspersed in a complex pattern.
"Staff notation [the commonly−used system of musical notation] is an alien visualization system for African music … and the music that I work on has never been written down before," Locke said. "I think audio technology is very important to use to let a reader or a user of publications hear the music."
The eventual collection of over 600 written and recorded files — including prose on Dagomba history and staff notation as visual representation — posed a publication challenge, given its size and the variety of documentation mediums. So Locke turned to the Internet, creating an online database through which the fruits of his research could be displayed.
"The university was interested in promoting faculty doing innovative types of publication, and the web suggested itself … and University Information Technology was also eager to find professors who wanted their materials put out using dissemination technology."
To help organize and safeguard the data, Locke worked with Director of the DCA and University Archivist Anne Sauer, who also spoke at the event.
"We're documenting the documentarian here," Sauer told the audience. "As [Locke has] been learning and observing this material, I've been learning and observing [Locke's] work with it."
Sauer's objective, she said, was to isolate the essential components of Locke's research — namely, the hundreds of files of audio and written documentation — and begin the process of preservation.
"These files, individually and taken together, and woven together in different contexts, begin to represent Professor Locke's research," she said. "There will be new ways to share and access this information in the future, but the data will be preserved in our repository … where we can make sure that, long after we're all gone, this research data will continue to be accessible."
Sauer's job — to protect the files from corruption and document them for posterity — allowed Locke to "focus on presentation and teaching without having to worry about anything else," she said.
Given the often taxing nature of the project, Locke welcomed the partnership.
"I think of collaboration as a very African approach to things, so I feel comfortable working in teams," he said. "It's nice to share the work and make it an interactive group project. It very much comes out of the nature of the music I've studied."
The prospect of mixing centuries−old music with modern technology also excited Locke.
"It's neat that I'm working on stuff that's from an era of oral tradition … and we're bridging the most contemporary technology with those age−old traditions," he said. "There's a kind of sex appeal to having a combination of the contemporary and the old blended, the First World and the Third World meeting on the Web."
During the lecture, Locke encouraged participation — what he called "a huge value in African music" — by involving the audience in a performance of "Damba Sochendi." As Locke played his instrument, the audience substituted clapping for drumming.
Locke and Sauer are currently collaborating once again. Based on the research of a Ghanaian professor at the University of North Texas, they are documenting the Agbadza music of the Ewe tribe. The Tufts Chorale is slated to perform Agbadza songs in conjunction with a video documentary by Associate Director of the ExCollege Howard Woolf.
