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Topic: Cantometrics

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	Alan Lomax Database
		Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics were designed as lively, democratic methods of teaching world culture through its expressive systems - that is, using universally observable criteria, rather than through the lens of Western music or dance theories.
		Following a brief explanation of the Cantometrics system, evidence for the argument is provided from six stylistic groups: (1) solo and non-specific, (2) choral, acephalous, and non-specific, (3) choral, acephalous, non-specific, and integrated, (4) unison, non-specific, and poorly integrated, (5) antiphonal, integrated, polyphonic, large choral performance, and (6) elaborate, melodically complex, constricted, specific, and exclusive.
		Therefore, the approach of Cantometrics, which studies the social, formal, and presentational aspects of songs in relation to their song-producing cultures, is more informative than traditional studies of songs in terms of pitch and rhythm.
	www.lomaxarchive.com /guide-psc.jsp (4023 words)

	Greg Lindahl‡
		Cantometrics: A Method in Musical Anthropology represents the culmination of the work of Alan Lomax on this topic at its time of publication in 1976.
		Cantometrics is a term created by Lomax to describe the measurement of song, specifically the measurement of song style.
		After describing the method for developing the Cantometric measures and the general cultural correlations, Lomax goes on to list the ten song regions, identify their global locations, cross-cultural influences and list some of the characteristic measures that define the region.
	cfaonline.asu.edu /haefer/classes/568/568.papers/1976.lomax.lindahl.html (1073 words)

	Some Thoughts on Cross Cultural and Comparative Studies in Ethnomusicology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Many of his admirers were astonished that someone who had written with such fervor and eloquence about the human side of the arts, its social history, politics and poetics, could trade his typewriter for a computer and spend so much of his time poring over statistical tables.
		The coding process at the heart of Cantometrics, coupled with the various statistical methods developed for organizing its data, could be understood as distanciation in roughly this sense.
		In such a context, the purpose of Cantometric methodology would not be to determine hard and fast correlations but simply to provide a working, provisional, overview that could function in Ricoeur's terms, as a mediating, distanciating "text."
	www.eunomios.org /contrib/grauer2/grauer2.html (2300 words)

	Cantometrics - A Response
		Cantometrics was designed to be subjective, partly because it was intended for use by non-specialists, partly because we had no need for the precisely defined observations required by specialists, partly because there are hidden pitfalls inherent in almost all attempts to be objective when evaluating style.
		Cantometrics was designed to look past the creativity to the traditions beneath it, as well as the social, historical and psychological forces which lie beneath those traditions.
		Cantometrics is rather better at discovering cultural patterns than it is at explaining them...
	www.mustrad.org.uk /articles/cantome2.htm (6398 words)

	Speech 450 (Propaganda)
		Coding and comparison through cantometric parameters of recorded song performances from all of Amerindia demonstrated broad similarities among New World song styles, with differences which appear at a detailed level of analysis explainable as geographical or migratory phenomena.
		Songs that fit the cantometrics model are present, but so are more that do not fit; and further, other explanations are possible of expressive forms than the economic determinist one--such as the entertainment function of non-repetitive songs and the influence of diffusion in other song features.
		But Henry concludes--much as does Maranda (1970)--that Lomax's "multi-faceted and seminal contribution" to the study of the relationship of music structure and non-musical aspects of culture deserves consideration, despite the flaws in his generalizations and economic theories.
	web.utk.edu /~glenn/Cantometrics.html (3024 words)

	ACE: The Archive (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		This collection, along with Alan’s own recordings and the LP collection (see below) was the source of data for Cantometrics, a wide-ranging, comparative study of the world’s music and its relationship to culture and the distribution of human populations that was spearheaded by Alan Lomax and Victor Grauer in the early 1960s.
		From all the field recordings, as well as the LP collection, the Cantometrics team assembled compilations illustrating the characteristics of singing style for their research, for teaching and presentation purposes, and to develop a teaching system for the Cantometrics approach.
		As a basis for the development of Cantometrics, Alan Lomax and his collaborators amassed an extensive library of LPs and reel-to-reel tapes consisting of the multitude of field recordings they needed to make a comprehensive study of the world’s music.
	www.culturalequity.org /ace/archive.html (1695 words)

	John A. Lomax (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		The study, which Lomax calls "Cantometrics", is a cross-cultural survey using an elaborate system of classification to link cultures to musics.
		Today, Alan Lomax still carries on the family tradition publishing books with subjects ranging from Cantometrics to his field work in the pre-segregation South; directing the prize-winning folklore series, "American Patchwork" for PBS; and, most recently, converting the results of his research into a multimedia database called "The Global Jukebox".
		Across the miles and miles of tape and endless trails of stories, the work of John and Alan Lomax is of immeasurable importance in the realm of American music scholarship.
	users2.ev1.net /~smyth/linernotes/personel/LomaxJohn.htm (1893 words)

	Cantometrics
		Mention of such icons brings me back to The Land Where the Blues Began, and the premise propounded throughout the book that the idiom was born in Mississippi of African parentage around 1900.
		Cantometrics is rather better at discovering cultural patterns than it is at explaining them and it generally supports traditional arguments about the African nature of Black American music.
		Grateful thanks are extended to Meredith Harley, research student at the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh, for checking this article; to journalist Ken Hunt for supplying much valuable material, and to Julie Crawley, Audio Librarian at Exeter University, for allowing me to use the library's facilities.
	www.mustrad.org.uk /articles/cantomet.htm (3674 words)

	Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Comprising 34 essays, book reviews, and lectures that Lomax wrote during his long, fruitful career, this book gathers materials that first saw light in a variety of books, journals, and proceedings of learned meetings.
		Particularly useful are essays on cross-cultural studies; cantometrics (Lomax's complex method of classifying song styles); choreometrics (dance as a measure of culture); the uses of technology, especially ethnological film, to preserve and advance a culture; the loss of cultures; and Lomax's thoughts about the devastating results of some nationalistic music.
		The introductions that precede each of the book's five sections are uniformly excellent, placing the essays in appropriate chronological and cultural contexts.
	www.booksmatter.com /b0415938554.htm (180 words)

	2001 Conference - Abstracts - Kenneth Bilby (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Lomax embarked on his four-month Caribbean expedition with certain purposes and goals clearly in mind.
		He was interested in gathering material that could be used to refine his nascent theory of the relationship between folk song style and culture (which became known as "cantometrics").
		Furthermore, he envisioned a number of practical applications for the planned collection.
	www.cbmr.org /confer/2001ab2A.htm (305 words)

	pw: philadelphia weekly online
		Moby found this music in Sounds of the South, an Atlantic Records box set that was a reissue of the original seven-LP series created by Lomax in 1959.
		He produced a "computerized intelligent museum" called the Global Jukebox that compared the songs and dances of global cultures by employing a unique methodology, creating coding systems called Cantometrics (music), Choreometrics (dance) and Parla-metrics (language).
		Lomax's work can be heard on the Rounder Records releases that document his world travels, and at the Alan Lomax Archive in New York City, where his aging collection of LPs, 78s, books, tape recordings and films are stored.
	www.philadelphiaweekly.com /view.php?id=8230 (738 words)

	Alan Lomax Database (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Alan Lomax, Roswell Rudd, and Forrestine Paulay discuss the Urban Strain project, a study of American popular music in the 20th century.
		Alan Lomax presenting Cantometrics at an unidentified conference.
		There are interviews with Ewan MacColl, Jack Owens, Mabel Hillary, Bessie Jones, John Henry Faulk, Reverend Gary Davis, Lomax family members, and a radio interview with Alan Lomax about the Black Encyclopedia of the Air, a series of educational messages on fl history and oral culture that he produced in 1966.
	www.lomaxarchive.com /guide-audiodli.jsp (135 words)

	Rare Vinyl Records at Craig Moerer ~ Records By Mail \| Used, Collectible, Vintage and Rare Vinyl Records, LPs and 45s
		He also published the groundbreaking collection Folk Songs of North America, which revealed his theoretical interest in music and culture, eventually leading to a program of systematic research in human expressive behavior.
		Along with colleagues at Columbia in the 1960s, Lomax developed Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics, systems designed for a cross-cultural analysis of song, speech, dance and movement styles.
		Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music, first published in 1976, is widely used to help students understand and analyze world musical styles.
	www.recordsbymail.com /alanLomax.php?src=news&kws=031604 (1375 words)

	ISAM Newsletter: Reminiscing on Ruth
		She in turn was deeply affected by my brother’s ever attentive focus on the uncharted and complex relations between aesthetics and life itself, especially the sophistication and depth of the transmitted message.
		To my mind, both Alan’s cantometrics research and Ruth’s three volumes of children’s folk songs stand as later independent creations giving testimony to the impact of those two intellectuals on each other.
		We are all fortunate that Ruth and Alan met at a time in our history when to be called truly “radical” was a glowing compliment and at a time when there was a project worth their combined efforts.
	depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu /isam/2002/hawes1.html (1488 words)

	New Perspectives in American Ethnomusicology
		Finally, while the name "Comparative Musicology" was definitely dropped, the global comparison of musical cultures and the discovery of universal features in music remained ultimate goals for several scholars.
		Most notably, they motivated Alan Lomax's controversial "cantometrics" theory designed to schematize correlations between musical style and cultural characteristics on a cross-cultural basis (see Folk Song Style and Culture, 1968).
		This sketch of the concerns dominating ethnomusicology in its early years may serve to contrast with the orientation of the field since the 1970s.
	www.sibetrans.com /trans/trans1/manuel.htm (3137 words)

	The Association For Cultural Equity: News
		To further develop his research into the music of early humans, Grauer is currently expanding the Cantometrics sample of 5000 songs, initiated by Alan Lomax and himself in the 1960s.
		January 18-20, 2006, Library of Congress, Washington, DC A diverse group of scholars, cultural workers and media producers will gather in the Library of Congress’ Mumford Room to reflect on Alan Lomax’s life and work and share their own research, publications, productions, and advocacy.
		Since then, his colleagues Jonathan Swire and Iain Fairclough have processed the data, run it through new statistical tests, and produced a cluster analysis of geographic regions based on the data.
	www.culturalequity.org /ace/news.html (1710 words)

	blog.myspace.com/samclanton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		1961 Launches, with Victor Grauer, the Cantometrics project, a comparative study of expressive styles and culture which broadened to include movement (Choreometrics) and speaking style (Parlametrics).
		1966 Delivers, with the staff of the Cantometrics project, a day-long report entitled Frontiers of Anthropology: Cantometrics and Culture to the Anthropology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
		1968 Publishes, with Cantometrics staff, Folk Song Style and Culture, a collection and expansion of the papers delivered at the AAAS in 1966.
	blog.myspace.com /samclanton (1962 words)

	Dirty Linen #71: The Alan Lomax Collection
		The diverse styles and forms he personally collected in the field, from ballads to blues, from stornellos to shanties, and from fife bands to fandangos, bear witness to his curiosity and his drive to understand all the musics of the world.
		Although there are large sections of the world that his fieldwork did not cover, he has spent a lot of time analyzing the field recordings of others, a task for which he invented whole new systems of measurement - cantometrics for song, and choreometrics for dance.
		On top of this, he has been one of the most important popularizers of folk music; wherever he has gone, a folk revival has followed shortly after.
	www.dirtynelson.com /linen/feature/71lomax.html (1344 words)

	Alan Lomax - Alan Lomax: Ambassador To The Ages Part II : Feature
		Along his highways and byways Lomax created a series of methods for documenting what he found.
		He called these systems Coreometrics, Cantometrics, and Parlametrics.
		“Cantometrics was a coding system for coding music with all these different parameters,” Fleming explains.
	www.onewaymagazine.com /feature_12-129.html (1410 words)

	Rounder Records proudly presents the Alan Lomax Collection
		He also published the groundbreaking collection Folk Songs of North America (New York: Doubleday, 1960), which revealed his theoretical interest in music and culture and eventually led to a program of systematic research in human expressive behavior.
		Along with colleagues at Columbia in the 1960s, Lomax developed Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics, methodologies designed for analyzing song, speech, dance, and speaking cross-culturally.
		Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music, first published in 1976, was used to help students understand and analyze world musical styles.
	www.rounder.com /series/lomax_alan/bio.htm (1207 words)

	1995 awards
		Lomax continued to record traditional artists in the South, releasing several of his recordings from that period on the Prestige and Atlantic record labels.
		While working at Columbia University during the 1960s, he and his colleagues developed the Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics systems leading to the 1968 collection Folk Song Style and Culture.
		He continued to produce books, recordings, and films, including the PBS series American Patchwork, which aired in 1990.
	www.folk.org /Awards/1995.htm (1950 words)

	* Dusted Reviews - V/A *
		That he sought to explore such sounds was not a revolutionary concept; in fact, these are the exact same types of studies that ethnomusicologists undertook in the name of field work.
		His methodology, however, was drastically different, contrasting with the more anthropological approach that someone like, say, Alan Lomax used in documenting folksong as a means of expanding upon his idea of Cantometrics.
		Alderson simply followed his ears, applying his engineer-honed listening ability to get a feeling of what was going on.
	www.dustedmagazine.com /reviews/1866 (820 words)

	Texas Monthly November 1998: Folk Hero (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Eventually he bound all his recordings and studies together through his own system of cantometrics, which attempts to codify traditional music around the globe.
		He was through with field trips, so he took an apartment with Faulk on West End Avenue in Manhattan and concentrated on his writing.
		Working with professors from Columbia University, he began shaping the discipline he calls cantometrics out of some ideas he’d been entertaining since his career began.
	www.texasmonthly.com /mag/issues/1998-11-01/music.php (2055 words)

	World Music Central - Standing at the crossroads: From historical to technological
		And he wasn't too pleased when American folk singer Bob Dylan switched from acoustic to electric-driven folk rock in the early 1960's.
		And even though Lomax has embraced computer technology, especially as a tool for researching and analyzing musical origins (cantometrics) and his interactive media project, The Global Jukebox, he didn't care much for mechanical beats.
		So the dancer is really in command of the music---the music is background for the dancer.
	www.worldmusiccentral.org /article.php?story=20031201120218687 (1577 words)

	Monktail reviewed by All About Jazz - organissimo jazz forums - This is the place to discuss the band, jazz, and more!
		On the plateau of the scores, the music throbs with the vigour they stoke it with.
		Take “Cantometrics to Cotton.” A deep swirling begotten through keyboards, horns, percussion, and then the saxophones which eddies the body strongly into a whirlwind.
		The flute counterpoints, the trumpet slivers the atmosphere, drums and bass throb at the bottom.
	www.organissimo.org /forum/index.php?showtopic=6735 (506 words)

	The Austin Chronicle Music: Sheet Music: Summer Reading
		Not content to just document the music, Lomax began examining music as a form of behavior and developed theories about its relation to social structure.
		While his flawed Cantometrics system was given a tepid academic reception, his ideas about "cultural equity" remain especially salient amid today's atmosphere of compulsory patriotism.
		In casting a wide net around his many pursuits, Selected Writings is a full-bodied illustration of how Lomax became the pre-eminent scholar in his field.
	www.austinchronicle.com /gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:162561 (445 words)

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