Work to be Done

I'd like to outline here what needs to be done to complete the work started on this website. Consider this a prospectus to attract interested researchers, interested collaborators, interested organizations or foundations, interested community partners.

First, I want to jump to the widest circle possible: every two weeks a language dies, when its last remaining speaker passes. Of the estimated 7000 languages now spoken on earth, half are projected to disappear by the end of the century. Interested linguists, ecologists, geneticists, anthropologists could be said to be part of a "Biocultural Diversity" movement (a coin termed by the founder of Terralingua), recognizing that human languages and traditions reflect unique, irreplaceable knowledge, in the way distinct biological species and individuals carry unique, irreplacaeble information in their DNA. Many now recognize that the causes threatening both biological and cultural diversity are often the same, destructions of habitats & ways of life.

But I don't feel enough has been done in this field regarding the arts, which to my mind also carry unique, irreplaceable knowledge. The arts carry the heritage of times and places, the lilt of an identity of a people. The arts carry a people's means of coping with reality, of dealing with the tremendous strain produced by the enormous information-processing flow of the brain. The Arts, as recreation, as learning, as hobby, or as passion, are the grease that allow all of the other gears to flow smoothly, processing our dreams, distracting us, keeping us awake, allowing our imagination to run, catharsizing our emotions, allowing us to face the difficult, big things in life, like death, love, heartbreak, parenthood, all the while keeping our daily activities of breadwinning, and the information flow that guides it, intact. Play is what shapes children in their earliest age, play is how they begin to acquire the rudiments of all their later knowledge, play, and the endless repetition of that play, is art, music, dancing, counting, running, speaking, joking, narrating. The arts provide a structure for all the rest of our knowledge.

And the arts engender empathy, says Jeff Leitner, a very interesting guy from Insight Labs. Empathy can bridge hate, misunderstanding, cultural gaps. The world we live in is tremendously diverse--perhaps I feel it particularly living and working at Flushing Town Hall in Queens, NY--and that diversity often first leads to tensions arising from misunderstandings, or competition over the same scarce resources, leading to killings, race riots, or simmering anger or resentment, etc. Bringing people together could be aided by a byproduct of that very diversity: the tremendously diverse artistic and cultural products of peoples from all over the world, any of which have the power to humanize "the other," and bring people together. The mutual admiration of each other's cultures could fuel inter-group harmony and cooperative work toward self-empowerment among minority groups, seemingly powerless individually, who in aggregate could help raise each others' status.

So much for vision, here's the nitty gritty:

• Within Arabic Music:
  • Document all the maqamat with musical examples in the way I've demonstrated here, to get the full picture of the maqam system.
  • Document historic changes in that system, by documenting repertories from specific regions and time periods.
  • Document melodic vocabulary. By "melodic vocabulary," I mean the individual building blocks of larger melody, i.e. the "melody words" that are used to build up into the larger sentences that are whole melodies. This is the work I've begun, which I've displayed in preliminary form at the maqamlessons.com home page. These "melody words" are stored in the memory of practitioners. The first problem is that the existence of such has not been documented in music theory, so the idea encounters much skepticism. That is why the first step is to demonstrate beyond a doubt the existence of this level of melodic content stored in memory, as the second level of a multi-level discrete combinatorial system parallel to (but not identical to) spoken language.
  • Develop a complete lexicon of melodic vocabulary for a specific tradition within a specific region during a specific time period (will take an army of well-trained, i.e. master musician, graduate students, and this doesn't exist anywhere yet).
  • Document historical and geographical changes in that vocabulary, by expanding the time period and/or region.
• Beyond Arabic Music:
  • Document the same basic elements described above (larger maqam structures and lexicons of melodic vocabulary) in related music traditions--Turkish, Greek, Iranian, Central Asian, etc. etc.
  • Track shared vocabulary across these traditions, to track the spread of musical content.
  • Use that tracking to develop hypotheses analogous to Linguistic hypotheses about root/source languages.
  • Perform similar documentation, analysis, and lexicon building for other world music traditions.
  • Develop broader hypotheses, on the basis of these lexicons and analyses, about the big "language families" of world music traditions.
  • Develop pedagogy and curricula, using these lexicons, to help keep alive world music traditions, especially those identified as endangered, by training skilled teachers and accomplished musicians.