Into the woods...

Like Heffley, I am trained and degreed, and have made much of my living, as a professional ethnomusicologist, publishing work in academic journals and for academic presses (in another part of the world; again, here is his account of our meeting there; here is his subsequent account of its aftermath in his own life) on much of the same kind of material (jazz, improvised and experimental music, modern art music). Unlike him, I have not also trained and worked as a musician myself—but of all the music that has caught my obsessive interest as a scholar (in the way, say, Anthony Braxton’s has caught Heffley’s), Heffley’s has come to top the list.

Like many such studies in our discipline, this one comes with some challenging complications revolving around the scholar’s relationship to his material, particularly to the artist who generated it. Most traditionally, such challenges have come with the baggage of colonialism and elitist Western academicians framing, even exploiting, music organically “owned” by people who created it in their own personal and cultural contexts far removed from such careerist concerns. More recently, they have been risen to and overcome in many liberating ways, giving way to more mutual collaboration, trust, egalitarian understanding. Many, including Heffley and I both when wearing our ethnomusicologist hats, have come to move more comfortably and intimately between the worlds of those who make and those who write about music.

Like Heffley too, I am also a longtime thinker-cum-writer about new music as the offspringing torchbearer (more than invading iconoclast) of old traditions, so our meeting of minds triggered a chemistry that would inevitably combust. Finally, like him, my compulsion and talent has often been to promote by explaining the music that I most admire and feel deserves more attention. Unlike him, at this point in his life, I feel that way about the music offered here.

The complexities of our different roles in this project, while similarly awkward and even tension-fraught, as with any such clashing agendas and temperaments, are unique in the ethnomusicological literature, to my knowledge. Let me try to spell them out as plainly as I can.

Yul Agee Manu’s Gloss on Mike Heffley’s Music