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Book Review Article

■ David W. Samuels
Department of Music
New York University
dws2004@nyu.edu

Music’s Role in Language

Revitalization—Some Questions from
Recent Literature
Faudree, Paja. 2013. Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Grant, Catherine. 2014. Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Minks, Amanda. 2013. Voices of Play: Miskitu Children’s Speech and Song on the Atlantic
Coast of Nicaragua. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Relationships between music and language—or, for purposes here, between song
and speech—have attracted the attention of a small but influential number of inter-
disciplinary scholars who, at least in some incarnations, consider themselves, and are
considered by others, to be linguistic anthropologists. Earlier work in this area traces
back to Roman Jakobson’s brief 1932 essay “Musicology and Linguistics,” and is
exemplified, perhaps, by Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) generative grammar for
music in the mainstream Western classical tradition. Work in this vein considered
music and language to be systemically analogous. It argued that they were similarly
constructed of functional and meaningful units, rightly considered phonemic and
morphemic, and that these in turn were used to produce utterances by rules of
sequencing and (re)combination. In contrast, more recent ethnographic work in this
area has emphasized the shared discursive resources of musical and linguistic
expression, treating the two as interwoven, overlapping modes of expression. These
expressive modes circulate as both art and as means to the achievement of tangible
and intangible ends, salient to ethnographic understanding of the production of both
material and intellectual culture. The foundations for this work were laid by the
sustained engagement of Steven Feld (1974, 1981, 1984, 1988; Feld and Fox 1994; Feld,
et al. 2004). This scholarship has layered the post-Peircean with the post-
phenomenological, taking micro-elements of style as the empirically analyzable
meeting place of social and individual forms of creative engagement with the
world—and with various creative forms of en-, con-, decon-, and recontextuality.1 In
this rendering, language and music cease being analogous systems for expressing
“meaning” and become instead overlapping forms of discourse resources.
The shift in focus from elements of grammar to elements of performance resonates
with a key issue facing cultural revitalization movements: is it practices or lexico-
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 25, Issue 3, pp. 346–355, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2015
by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12099.

346
Music’s Role in Language Revitalization—Some Questions from Recent Literature 347

syntactic systems that are at stake in the effort to stem the tide of shift and loss? One
rejoinder to this question, of course, is that these are mutually dependent and not
separate aspects of a more general challenge. Questions of structure and practice in
revitalization, however, are further complicated by the perceived differences in the
instrumentalities of language and of music, namely the “pragmatic” aspects of lan-
guage versus the “expressive” aspects of music, a distinction seated deep in the
rhetoric of colonial regimes. A semiotic-ideological distinction between supposed
“types” of signs continues to separate speech and song in both discourse and in the
marketplace. A politics of monetization condemns minority languages to a rhetoric of
market efficiency in the face of monolingualism. This politics simultaneously cel-
ebrates the profitability of a diversity of “global” musical expressions, leaving unre-
solved the contradiction that those musical expressions are created by the very same
people who are desperate to maintain their allegiances to the linguistic and poetic
resources underlying them.
The three books discussed in this review offer differing vantage points for a
discussion of the ways in which language practices are linked—socially, ideologically,
and empirically—to musical forms of discourse, expression, and communication in the
context of loss, shift, and revitalization efforts. They differ in emphasis and geographi-
cal focus. Faudree and Minks work in a Latin American context (Mexico and Nicara-
gua, respectively), whereas Grant’s most sustained examples are geographically
located in southeast Asia (Vietnam). The first two, as well, are ethnographies, whereas
Grant offers a guide to music revitalization that would also fit comfortably with any
number of works offering instruction in the revitalization of languages or other
instances of intangible cultural heritage. Between the two ethnographies there are
distinctions to be drawn as well—between the heterogeneous postcolonial context of
the Corn Island Miskitu children Minks writes about, and the context of Nda Xo (Santa
Maria Magdalena Chilcotla), which—either despite or because of its relationship to
Timothy Leary–inspired mycotourism—is considered among the most conservative
and “traditional” of communities in the Sierra Mazateca.
Moreover, of the three, Grant’s is the only book that explicitly treats the problem of
music revitalization. The ethnographies, in contrast, offer explorations of changing
vocal economies and communities’ commitments to maintaining them, negotiating
the role of speech and song in that maintenence. Faudree acknowledges an overt
relationship between language and music in the classic ethnographic and linguistic
work on Mazateco “whistle speech” (Cowan 1948), a register in which intonation
patterns are performed without articulation. Minks’s commitments are more covert,
engaging in the range of vocal practices that constitute children’s socialization to
multilingualism in the Corn Island community. Grant’s work, being invested in the
maintenance of music in itself, sees in language an analogy for the revitalization work
that needs to be done in the face of threat and loss.2 Taken together, these authors’
works offer a means to a sustained conversation about the roles of embodiment,
socialization, shift, and narratives of shift in the revitalization of linguistic and other
semiotic and expressive resources in contemporary small-language communities.
The authors’ works trace the simultaneous moves to both connect and separate
vocal expressive domains. Music has long been somewhat vaguely considered a
“kind of language,” but the precise entailments of this claimed similarity often
remain unstated. The movement for language and cultural revitalization has not
necessarily proposed solutions to the inconsistencies in these analogies. On the one
hand, for example, we may detect a politics of identity in the discourse features
of various musical genres. Language, on the other, seems to possess a perceived
instrumentality that maintains it in a “privileged” position in distinction to music. Yet
the practical instrumentality of language—over music’s imagined emotional
expressivity—mirrors, in a sense, arguments about the practical instrumentality of
majority languages over the imagined cultural identitarian nature of threatened
minority languages, thus more tightly stitching together the relationships between
language, music, and revitalization.
348 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Emerging from semiotic and phenomenological approaches to the social life of the
auditory spectrum, music and language, speech and song, are each and together
complexly and problematically embedded and implicated in the revitalization of
cultural and expressive practices threatened by the enduring apparatus of colonial-
ism. As languages are pushed to extinction by administrative, media, technological,
and educational forces, so too musics suffer the onslaught of the global marketplace
and the draconian sorting it imposes, the efficacy of a poetic or artistic expression
being reframed to reflect its potential capitalization by international media corpora-
tions. These, along with the vagaries of media storage capacities and the demands
of commerce, conspire to make the “song” the basic unit of circulation within this
universe of expression.3
As local vernacular languages become objects of celebration in movements to
revitalize and preserve the diversity of human solutions to common problems, so too
musics falling outside the bell curve of mainstream traditions or commercial viability
are increasingly conceptualized with analogies to ecosystems and biodiversity. These
are neither the only reasons why music and song can be deeply implicated in the
ethical discourse of language revitalization, nor vice versa. In addition, music’s place
in ideas of sociability contributes to a metadiscourse about “identity” and about the
relationship between language revitalization and broader issues of cultural revital-
ization. To the extent, for example, that language revitalization is seen as a necessary
aspect of broader cultural revitalization, we gain clarity on the place of songs and
song texts. Moreover, as vocal practices, speech and song make shared use of pro-
sodic, phonological, and suprasegmental features of sound production, not to
mention common anatomical means of production.
The use of song in learning and revitalizing language is a double-edged sword of
sorts. On the one hand, the total physical response involved in singing engages the
language learner in both cognitive and embodied planes of practice (I have forgotten
most of the Italian I learned in a brief immersion class the summer after I graduated
from college. But I can still sing “Santa Lucia”). On the other hand, as others have
observed (Crum and Crum 2002, Hinton 1984, Pietikäinen 2010), relying on song as
a means of language revitalization poses challenges to revitalization movements that
carry ideals of restoring everyday modes and genres of conversational speech.4 Song
texts often play with the plasticity of phonology, morphology, and syntax, and the
vocal production of song often uses the vocal anatomy in ways that are distinct from
the production of everyday speech. Imagine revitalizing German from an archival
collection of recordings of Wagner opera performances.

Embodiment
One perspective that joins together efforts in both language revitalization and music
revitalization involves the move toward a recognition that, as Barry Truax (2001:34)
has written, “the significance of the voice is that . . . its production is a reflection of the
whole person.”5 It is a move toward phenomenology. As Csordas (1999:143) suc-
cinctly put it, embodiment is “about culture and experience insofar as these can be
understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world.”6 Truax’s whole
person, of course, exists in time and space. The shared somatic means of producing
both linguistic and musical communication thus presents important issues for speech
and song in the contexts of neocolonialism and globalization. By considering lan-
guage and music as similarly embodied forms of expression we open ourselves to
also consider what exists within that shared space, and how thinking about revital-
ization of the one might contribute to how we consider revitalizing the other. At the
same time, however, to the extent that these embodied expressions emerge from
something akin either to Gramsci’s inventoriless historical “sedimentation of
‘common sense,’” as the gestural expressions of Foucault’s capillary power, or as
Bourdieu’s “political mythology realized,” we are left to ponder what are the cultural
and historical stakes involved in framing that which is to be revitalized?
Music’s Role in Language Revitalization—Some Questions from Recent Literature 349

Taken in the context of shift and loss, speakers’ and singers’ questions about what
has changed can bring ideas of embodiment to the foreground in particularly forceful
ways. In her work on changing senses of voice in Nagaland, Sententia Toy presents a
revealing excerpt that blends concerns about bodies, languages, musics, and histories.
In one interview Vengota Nakro, a government official, told Toy (2010:33), “I feel like
my throat has changed. I can’t even say ‘hoi’ the way I hear older people and experts
of my traditional music say it. It’s not just the ‘hoi’ but the sound in general that we
produce singing traditional songs today is just not getting there, some . . . thing
unreachable, don’t know quite what it is . . . have our bodies changed?” That ques-
tion, “have our bodies changed?” expresses a core concern of the music-language link
in revitalization contexts.
The three books here make different productive links between the mutually
embodied enactments of linguistic and musical practice in the context of revitaliza-
tion concerns. Minks’s focus on children’s games puts on display the kinds of issues
of sequencing, timing, metrical repetition, dance movement, and vocal timbre that
create the multisensory environment for language-learning favored by advocates of
Total Physical Response techniques. Minks’s discussion (p. 66ff) of Mitchel and
Kris’s speech and song play while climbing in a mango tree near their school shows
the boys mixing Spanish and Kriol, playing with vocal qualities and timbres as they
sing, moving between lexical texts and vocables, and using various forms of
“translinguistic poetic parallelism” (p. 67). By a similar token, embodied voices
“materialize gendered subjectivities” (p. 102), that is, children’s games and their
vocal performances within those games are incorporated into a metadiscourse that
genders these diverse vocal practices.7 “Gender interpellation” (p. 102), then, occurs
within the frame of children’s games in a way that anticipates the frame of the
production of subjectivity outside the game. The game/life relationship is thus akin
to a performance/performativity relationship, or a metadiscourse/discourse rela-
tionship more broadly. This recognition leads Minks to a productive discussion
of Austin’s ideas about the arts being “parasitic” on “the conventions of
performativity” (Austin 1962:22, Minks p. 103). If Minks’s interpretation of Austin is
correct, however—and I believe it is—we then inevitably circle back to an interpre-
tation of “music” that is forced to see it as parasitic on “language.” That imagined
relationship “between” music and language depends on a crabbed notion of a
language-music divide along lines of syntacticity, rationality, and performativity.
Dolar (2006), for example, tells an old story about language, casting sound and
performance as an “excess” of language that must be accounted for. The performing
voice is “an excess, a surplus” (Dolar 2006:81), a factor that transgresses the bound-
aries of language.8 Dolar here seems to welcome an insufficient definition of lan-
guage simply in order to claim to have discovered a new and heretofore invisible
element. The three works here, however, point to ways of expressing language-
music relationships in ways that replace false dichotomies with more unified means
of representing the mutual dependences of linguistic and other forms of cultural
revitalization.
Questions of play, performance, and embodiment are of course notably conspicu-
ous in Grant’s treatment of music endangerment. She observes with care the ways in
which new forms of mediation—and the market forces associated with them—have
changed not only how people listen to music and what kinds of music they listen to,
but also affect the number of young people who put energy into the active pursuit of
expertise in the performance of threatened musical traditions. Grant arrives at an
analogous perspective on art and life to Minks, albeit without Minks’s deeper con-
sideration of Austin’s position. “Music serves functions beyond language,” Grant
writes, “holding the potential to express aspects of culture and cultural identity that
are incommunicable through words” (pp. 7–8). One might certainly question the
neo-Langeresque romanticism of such a position, but in the end, it acts as an obverse
point to Austin’s about the parasitic nature of art’s performativity and Dolar’s about
the excess value of “musical” material over “linguistic.”
350 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Ideas of embodiment are also on prominent display in the ways that dis-embodied
voices haunt these works. Faudree’s ethnography expertly explores the ways in which
Maria Sabina’s recorded voice pervades the National Museum of Anthropology in
Mexico City. Faudree also presents important work on the politics of orthographic
representation among Mazatec writers through, “the alphabet . . . whose capricious
relationship to the human voice plagues writers and readers alike” (p. 224). Faudree
likewise traces the importance of orthography in her discussion of how Heriberto
Prado Pereda’s Mazatec songs for the Catholic Mass not only led to an awareness of
the loss of language and culture that was occurring in the community, but also—
because they were written in Heriberto’s idiosyncratic orthography—promoted a
particular Mazatec literacy that proved equally important as the songs themselves.
Questions of literacy, or an aural-to-literate continuum, pervade Grant’s discussions
of documentation and transcription, to the point where Grant states that “linguists
generally agree that literacy is vital for successful language revitalization” (p. 49), a
claim that has met with some skepticism among a number of indigenous communi-
ties and scholars alike. The disembodied practices of literacy arise on Corn Island, as
well, where Miskitu and Spanish Bibles circulate and mark a generational shift:
“Teenagers and young adults said they used Spanish Bibles as a means of acquiring
fluent literacy in Spanish” (p. 155).

Socialization
Socialization to language and socialization to music face similar though not identical
challenges. Both imagine some form of encounter by which novice practitioners learn
from more expert practitioners. Both face massive colonial and postcolonial upheaval
to the sociocultural contexts in which these encounters might occur. And both face
excruciating choices about how to respond to this upheaval. At the same time, as
Grant rightly cautions, “Care is needed when drawing analogies between music
transmission models and those for language transmission, especially in contexts of
endangerment” (p. 48). Grant does not cite the language socialization literature, nor,
as an ethnomusicologist, should she be expected to be conversant with it. But her
point is well taken: models of transmission and models of socialization are not
equivalent. Grant singles out the “master-apprentice” model of language mainte-
nance for special consideration. In the context of language revitalization it constitutes
a special circumstance for languages in the face of dire circumstances. In musical
contexts, however, a master-apprentice model “for certain music genres . . . is the
primary method of intergenerational transmission” (p. 48). For Grant this points to a
distinction between linguistic and musical efforts at revitalization. “[I]n a character-
istic vital and vibrant linguistic environment, in contrast with some musical ones,”
she writes, “language transmission never takes place principally between two people
alone” (p. 48).
What are the possible forms of immersion, what new forms of immersion might
substitute for those no longer possible, and what forms of immersion are appropriate
for the revitalization of distinct traditions? Who is socialized, and who does the
socializing? The works at hand present an array of possible answers. Minks, influ-
enced by Nestor Garcia Canclini and perspectives on interculturalidad, offers the
reader access to a peer-directed socialization process in which children grow up in a
context of Miskitu, Spanish, and Kriol English “linguistic heterogeneity” (p. 8). Chil-
dren’s song games create an important context for working out the complicated social
indexicalities of their interlanguage. The context of play and performance in Minks’s
case is distinct from the Mazatec Day of the Dead song contest described by Faudree.
In that instance, Faudree shows how the ten-day fiesta of dance and song contributes
to “resurgent expressions of ethnic pride” (p. 114). The founder of the song contest,
Heriberto Prado Pereda, has written, “He who fails to do [observe Muertos] ceases to
be indigenous” (p. 120). This is in distinction to linguistic sociality on Corn Island,
where the children come to learn over time the ways in which their polyglot linguistic
Music’s Role in Language Revitalization—Some Questions from Recent Literature 351

practice is in fact divisible into separate codes that can be used—or must be used—in
different discourse contexts. Also distinct is that the Muertos song contest as
originally devised was for adults, a children’s division having been added in 2002
(p. 126). Grant, in her Chapter 4, presents readers with the heart of her presentation,
a 12-factor Music Vitality and Endangerment Framework (MVEF) that attempts to
calibrate for the different ways that forms of musical socialization might change. For
example, she accounts for the influence of media and the global music industry on
musical genres, both traditional and emerging. Certainly these factors have telling
results on minority languages, but the fact that there is a “music industry” in a sense
that there is not a “language industry” is an important and recurring figure in Grant’s
discussion. Grant’s positions raise important questions for Faudree that could be
addressed by more detailed musical analysis. The Day of the Dead Song Contest is in
Grant’s sense a robust emerging musical genre that lends strength to the potential
safety of Mazatec language, but it is unclear whether the genre is simultaneously
strengthening or replacing an older musical tradition. Faudree discusses the difficul-
ties in arriving at a history of the songs composed for the contest (p. 120ff). It would
certainly be fruitful to learn more of the political aesthetics that have brought lan-
guage and music so forcefully together in this revitalization practice.

Shift
The overlaps and distinctions between musical and linguistic forms in the context of
revitalization leads us to a point where we might ask, just what is it that shifts? What
is it that is revitalized? On Corn Island there was a repertoire of Moravian Church
songs, sung in Miskitu, that were important markers of group belonging and identity.
But a preference for Spanish literacy among younger community members “was
noted by the parson one day when he lamented the loss of Moravian culture in the
form of traditional Miskitu Moravian songs” (p. 155). The juxtaposition of those
adjectives should give pause to the sense of what might be meant by “loss,” “culture,”
“traditional,” or “revitalization.” At risk, as well, was a traditional Moravian singing
timbre: “the Miskitu songs tend to privilege tight, high-pitched voices in contrast to
the full-throated, broad range of Spanish songs in ballad style” (p. 155).
Moreover, despite Bourdieu’s resonant metaphor of the linguistic marketplace,
music’s circulation as an artifact in a commodity economy is fairly firmly established,
whereas language’s relation to the market remains something of an open question
(McGill 2013). Grant discusses the “revival industry” that selects some forms of
musical expression for promotion in the marketplace for global sounds, and notes
this “contrasting potential as a commodity” as “perhaps the most significant disjunc-
tion between language and music in relation to issues of vitality and viability” (p. 65).
Extending her metaphor of ecological stewardship, Grant observes, “The cuter the
animal, it seems, the more likely it is to be earmarked for ‘rescuing,’” asserting that
music appears to be “cuter” than language in that sense, “arguably giving it a sig-
nificant advantage in the endangerment stakes” (p. 65).9
Grant’s distinction, and the underlying question of whether it is system or practice
that is revitalized, is challenged somewhat by her comparing languages to musical
genres. It’s a necessary and understandable move. Given her main concern “with the
parallels between language and music in relation to their vitality and viability . . . to
examine first and foremost the conceptual, and not actual, links between the
sustainability of languages and music genres” (p. 5), Grant must identify a unit of
analysis analogous to the unitary language. Grant explains that “I use the term music
genre to refer to a discrete musical tradition, a defined or in some way unified set or
subset of repertory (notwithstanding the fact that boundaries between one genre and
another can be difficult to define)” (p. xiii). Her implication is that languages may be
somewhat more stably bounded than music genres.10 But Minks’s ethnography dem-
onstrates all the ways in which the idea that there is a “language” emerges out of a
352 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

confluence of discursive and metadiscursive socialization practices and contexts

within a heteroglossic community.
By the same token, the musical forms discussed in the two ethnographies do not
really fit comfortably within Grant’s model of threatened genre. The Mazatec hymns,
Day of the Dead contest songs, and Moravian hymns do not appear to be the kinds of
musical genres that Grant has in mind. In her introduction, Faudree compares the
sung programs of Nda Xo with the musical revitalization taking place in the neigh-
boring municipality of Yalálag, which “is directed at instrumental music played by
the town’s wind bands” (p. 4) and to literacy in Western musical notation, and thus
not tied to language revitalization. With the emerging creative genres, we reach a bit
of an impasse between language revitalization and music revitalization. To the extent
that new forms of popular song are amenable to learning, circulating, and maintain-
ing fluency in minority languages, it’s unclear whether those musical forms of lan-
guage circulation will lend any weight to the preservation and revitalization of the
musical genres within which these languages were formerly found. In a nutshell, the
question of the relationships between revitalizing languages and revitalizing musics
leads us to the question of whether it isn’t the case—and the enormous presence of
the Catholic and Moravian churches in the ethnographic works here points to a
number of telling moments—that the thing we imagine we are preserving has already
been irrevocably changed by history and colony? Indeed, as Minks pointedly puts it,
“Miskitu children’s voices disrupt the most prominent global discourse on indig-
enous language . . . the discourse of language endangerment” (p. 175).

Stories
In Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, the librarian, Oshima, tells the title charac-
ter, Kafka Kamura, of Miss Saeki and the love song she wrote as a youth, a layering
of text and tune, “a poem, set to music . . . It was a melancholy melody, innocent and
lovely. The lyrics, on the other hand, were symbolic, contemplative, hard to figure out.
The contrast gave the song a kind of spirit and immediacy” (Murakami 2005:144).
When we consider the subject of cultural revitalization, we are almost by definition
considering the kinds of stories we want to tell. Oshima, afraid that Kafka is becom-
ing bored, is reassured by his listener that he is sure the story is coming to a turning
point. “‘You’re right,’ Oshima says. ‘That’s how stories happen—with a turning point,
an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in
all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a
story’” (Murakami 2005:144; emphasis in original).
The allegories and stories of cultural revitalization are ethical narratives, tales of
striving for continued human relations outside the instrumentalist dictates of market
productivity and one-language-fits-all analogies to economic exchange—pace
Saussurean metaphors of valeur. The heroes do not have a thousand faces. If they did,
people around the world might not be facing the mounting crisis felt so deeply by so
many who would not have their communicative ecologies crushed under the differ-
ential pressure of the vacuum forming machinery of postcolonial modernities. What
kinds of stories will we tell about people’s ardent striving to overcome “the extraor-
dinary inertia which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies”
(Bourdieu 1997:172)? The three books here offer a range of possible answers to that
question. Minks tells the story of children enmeshed in the creativity of building a
world under “the tragic consequences of colonization” (p. 175). Within this exists a
space for a Miskitu language reified from other influences, but looking at the song
play of children Minks tells a story in which revalorization is at least as important as
revitalization. Minks pointedly asks, in her conclusion, “In our efforts to validate
subaltern communicative practices, have we privileged views of order over disor-
der?” (p. 173). Grant, on the other hand, approaches the subject from the other end, so
to speak, exploring the ways in which concerned adults and their institutional allies
can effect change in the loss of musical genres and their proficient practitioners and
Music’s Role in Language Revitalization—Some Questions from Recent Literature 353

realize their legitimate desires to maintain order and stability in threatened minority
musical practices. Policy and institutional support are necessary parts of her compre-
hensive plan, but in the end Grant’s primary concern is with intergenerational
transmission of musical forms, “safety” being conferred upon situations in which
“the music genre is performed by all appropriate ages and is transmitted
intergenerationally” (p. 112). Faudree’s story is one of fraternal rivalry and the rela-
tionship between half-brothers Heriberto Prado Pereda and Alberto Prado Pineda.
The brothers, separately or together, are responsible for the creation of Mazatec
Catholic church songs, the Day of the Dead Song Contest that grew out of them, the
Mazatec Indigenous Church, and “thus . . . a vast social project in which the church
helps people valorize customs they have been taught to disparage while welcoming
their expressions of cultural difference as a catalyst to the church’s own fundamental
transformation” (p. 126). Faudree brings her readers deep inside the anatomy and
social drama of two emerging musical genres that contribute more widely to lan-
guage revitalization and cultural revitalization. That they are popular genres is crucial
to this wider import. In adapting and modifying language vitality factors to music,
Grant points out that the benchmark measure of “absolute number of speakers” must
by necessity be changed, because for some musical practices “it may be typical for
there to be only a handful of hereditary master musicians within the community”
(p. 113). Thus the popularity of and the popular access to a musical genre have telling
effects on its role in language revitalization movements.
Indeed Grant’s careful adaptation of the technical register of language revitalization
to music is an important part of the story. Writing on the notion of poetic truth almost
a century ago, Louis Harap (1933:477) observed, “If the frequency with which a
concept is named were indicative of its clarity and explicitness, the notion of truth as
employed in literary criticism would be one of the clearest.” An analogous observation,
or poetic truth, might be made of the concepts named in recent work on language,
music, and revitalization. In passing, Grant expresses reservations about the fuzziness
of a number of contentious terms. “Heritage,” “sustainability,” “endangerment,” and
more are all prone to “fluctuate according to researcher, country, and context” (p. 11).
In adapting the UNESCO methodology for assessing language vitality and mainte-
nance, Grant is forced to ask, “What is a speaker?” “What is fluency?” “What is a speech
community?” She does this in the context of asking what it means to replace those
words with more music-specific terminology, but the question is productive in more
general terms when considering these three works and their shared contemplation of
cultural survival. These categorical questions have occupied a great deal of recent
research in language revitalization as well (see Kroskrity and Avineri 2014; Doerr and
Lee 2013). In the context of music revitalization, Grant observes that her own attempt
to define “music genre” contrast with the UNESCO document, which “does not offer
a definition of language at all” (p. 107, emphasis in the original). Read as a set, the works
of Minks, Faudree, and Grant set out an intersecting and overlapping array of possible
conversations about language, music, tradition, revitalization, modernity, and subjec-
tivity. These conversations cause us to consider more productively the potentials for
thinking about language and music through the ear or the voice of the other in the
context of loss, shift, and the desire for renewal.

Notes
1. An additional branch of scholarship, not treated in this essay but worthy of engagement
and critical discussion, is the somewhat neo-Rousseauian approach to the co-evolution of
music and language—or more accurately, linguistic and musical capacities.
2. Grant’s book is also the only one of the three with a material commitment to sound, in the
inclusion of a companion website of audio, video, and textual resources. These include perfor-
mances, documents, and interviews with researchers speaking on their involvement with
various revitalization projects.
3. See Meyer 2015. By various logics, a single sound (multiphonics), instrument (the mbira),
or subgenre (yeibichei songs) may be made to stand as a synechdoche for an entire range of
354 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

culturally embedded musical expressions. When these are further organized by continental or
national geographies for the purposes of genre identification, the sweep of colonial and neo-
colonial practice is regenerated. There are, of course, numerous local and independent media
companies that fill niches not serviced by international conglomerates.
4. Hinton, Crum and Crum, and Pietikäinen discuss Havasupai, Shoshone, and Sámi con-
texts, respectively.
5. Sidtis and Kreiman (2012) explore evolutionary and biological support for the phenom-
enological experience of the “familiar voice pattern.”
6. Csordas’s terminology is Heideggerian, and we need to acknowledge recent disclosures of
Heidegger’s anti-Semitism as contained in the recently released Black Notebooks.
7. Subjectivities are also age graded. Older children will exclude younger children from
playing more complex games, although the youngsters observe and “continue learning even if
they are excluded” (p. 93).
8. In my view Dolar’s misrecognition stems as well, in part, from a rather flamboyant
misreading of Jakobson’s argument about the poetic function.
9. Grant also notes that not all musical genres are equally cute, contrasting “The fate of
unaccompanied Australian Aboriginal ceremonial songs performed by untrained voices and
lasting half a minute” with “the energy and rhythmic impulse of Cuban son,” which “holds
high entertainment value by most standards” (p. 65).
10. Grant raises the problems of such an assumption, but appears to limit this to the idea of
“where to draw a line between a language and its dialects” (p. 74) rather than the idea of a
language itself as a socially constituted artifact.

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