INTERPRETING ETHNOGRAPHY 

I've recently been attempting to come to grips / or gaining an understanding of ethnomusicology. I'm hoping that gaining an insight into ethnographic practices will help me establish a suitable and legitimate framework for engaging with, and ultimately understanding how 'Live Streamed Opera' (cinema) audiences, well... work.  

Some quotes of interest: 

‘Because of the potential for truly participatory participant- observation through actively joining in a society’s ‘music culture’ (sounds, concepts, social interactions, materials, a society’s total involvement with music), we believe ethnomusicologists are well positioned to offer unique perspectives on postmodern fieldwork processes for all ethnographic disciplines. By ethnography, we mean the observation and description (or representation) of culture (ethnomusicologists = music culture). Fieldwork is the observational and experiential portion of the ethnographic process during which the ethnomusicologist engages living individuals in order to learn about music-culture. Participation for the musician, however, offers insight and introduces new problems. The researcher may also engage physical documents of a culture in an archive or on site in the spatial location of research interest (secondary technique). (Pg: 4)

(Un)doing fieldwork: ‘In the ethnography of musical performance we are particularly challenged, as writers, to present and represent the experiential since performance is experience… one might argue that all ethnography be considered ethnography of performance , since culture itself is at some level inevitably enacted. But the relative specificity of music, while always embedded in and enabled by other performance modes, can provide a heightened example of performance processes. (Pg: 23) 

‘Ethnography, like any creative enterprise, is a representation, re-formation of experience, and we need to develop tools that help us sense when and what to include when representing a part of life - of our lives. (Pg: 24)

‘An ethnography of performance is in itself a meta-performance, requiring all the care, honesty, and detail that the subject matter - people and their expressive lives -demands. A focus on experience also helps ensure that we as ethnographers explain both the entryways and the barriers to knowing. Being explicit about what one could not come to know, and why, can often be more useful than ostensibly unsullied cultural information. (Pg: 33) 

‘Another argument in favour of experience brought to the forefront by the ethnography of performance is that research is to a great extent particularised by time, place, personality, and social circumstance. One of the most common errors in conventional ethnography is the tendency to generalise into theory based on experiences particular to a certain interpretive situation. The focus on experience helps us to situate readers within the fluctuations and particularities of performative circumstances. This leads us to the task of writing about performance in a way that evokes this immediacy and particularity; that means finding ways to capture what we’ve learned via our senses, our bodies. We must make our writing specific enough to convey in detail the social and technical aesthetics of a group or style, and perhaps most important, to evoke the meaning of a performed moment’. (Pg: 33)

‘Phenomenology emphasises the immediate, concrete, sensory lifeworld and it attempts to ground knowledge in the world of lived experience’. (Pg: 90)

‘Through common intersubjective experience we enter the worlds of interpretation… interpretation turns being into meaning. (Pg: 94)

Barz, Gregory F., and Timothy J. Cooley, eds. Shadows in the field: new perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press, 2008.