Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Mark Wood. Patty Vest: In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast, we're talking to promote a faculty and alumni about the personal, professional, and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today, we're talking with Assistant Professor of Music, Gibb Schreffler, an ethnomusicologist whose areas of research include music and dance of South Asia's Punjab region, historical work-songs of American maritime culture, and aesthetics of Jamaican popular music. Mark Wood: Welcome, Gibb. Gibb Schreffler: Thank you. Mark Wood: Thanks for joining us here in cyberspace. Gibb Schreffler: Thank you so much. Mark Wood: So, how are you adjusting to life in this public health crisis? Gibb Schreffler: I feel lucky. I feel fortunate to have a job and some job security, and to be in a rather safe area. So, my main things that are on my mind now are mostly others, I think, at this time. And really, I've been trying to think about the students, their mental state and their capacity for learning during this time. Mark Wood: What are you teaching? Gibb Schreffler: I'm teaching two courses. One is Intro to World Music and the other one is called Music and Punjabi Culture, and they function okay on Zoom. Because although I prefer to have class discussions, we did a lot of the discussion work earlier in the semester and we're writing up the semester a bit more with some lectures. And lectures, they work more or less on Zoom. Gibb Schreffler: So, in this kind of situation where I feel like I'm writing out the semester, I think it's been okay to use that format. But where are we to continue with this remote learning situation in the fall, I think the courses would really have to be rethought. Patty Vest: Gibb, tell us a little bit about your early years. Did you always gravitate towards music, or how did you find your way to music? Gibb Schreffler: So, my family background, I wouldn't consider it to be particularly musical at all. I didn't have anyone in my family that I significantly was engaged in performing music. I had my grandmother from Sicily play the organ but that wasn't an enormous influence. Aside from that, there wasn't much of anything. Gibb Schreffler: So, I remember my first interest in music probably exploded in around like 1983, '84 when hip hop and rap and breakdancing started to come in. I grew up in Connecticut, which is within the greater sphere of the New York area where that type of music, hip hop, was developing. And by about '83, that expanded enough out of the Bronx to the nearby tri-state area. So, that was our big thing. Gibb Schreffler: I remember the first music I was into was hearing like these, what they call, electro music at the time. This Newcleus' Jam on It was this big hit song, and we played in our boomboxes and we wanted to learn to breakdance and that sort of thing. So, that was the first thing that got me enthusiastic about music until my middle school years where I was going into punk music. Gibb Schreffler: That was exciting to me because it was kind of a rebellious thing and kind of an outcast musical scene. And that's really what drew me into performing music for the first time because I wanted to have a punk band or various bands. I formed a band called the George Bushwhackers in the spirit of these political protest things. Dead Kennedys was a hero of mine, so I was like, "Well, George Bush was the president, George Bush the First, so we're the George Bushwhackers." Gibb Schreffler: So, these are garage bands. We're drawn towards it to for the scene, find a place for yourself if you feel like an outsider or an outcast. All the outcasts come together and form their own scene in the punk rock scene. It could be different and be with other people who felt different, but also wanted to, in the lyrics, expressed these protests. But in order to do that, I had to form a band. Gibb Schreffler: And so, that's the first thing that drew me into actually wanting to perform music because as I said, my family didn't have any history of that. There were no instruments around, it wasn't like the parents make you do piano lessons or violin lessons, I didn't have any of that. Gibb Schreffler: I didn't even have a guitar. I had to do the proverbial cardboard box with rubber bands on it to try to imagine what a guitar was like until I got one. So, that was the first thing I was able to do, was to get some guitar lessons at my high school. And soon after, I decided I didn't like guitar because it was a, I'm a big guy, it was little small in my hands. I wanted something heavier, so I started to play the bass. And basically, that's how I started getting into the performance of music and music theory. Gibb Schreffler: In a formal way was first wanting to play punk rock music, but then after starting to learn to perform music, it opened my mind and my interest to all kinds of other music. And actually, jazz was one of the first I got into after that because it was like a tricky music. It felt like advanced. It was a bit nerdy. Jazz really actually calls on musicians to be really into music theory. So, I started pursuing the jazz thing at the same time. Mark Wood: So, the George Bushwhackers, did you write songs for your group? Did you have original music? Gibb Schreffler: I wrote a few songs. A lot of them are the cover songs. It was still, I mean, in the beginning in middle school so we weren't old enough to play out at gigs. So, it was a garage band. Mark Wood: So then, the move into an academic career in music, when did you know that that was going to happen and how did you get interested in ethnomusicology? Gibb Schreffler: Yeah, that took a while. I was not interested in ethnomusicology stuff in the early years at all. Somehow, I developed this passion for performing music and it becomes a discipline. I think musicians will tell you, it's just a way of being of your body to practice your music into your daily routine. And once you start doing it, it's hard to think of how can I live without this routine. It's like anyone who does an exercise regime or anything like that, or a meditation routine, you do that. Gibb Schreffler: So, I had gotten so into that, that by the time became time for college, I was the first... More or less, my stepfather went to a four-year college, but my siblings and my mother and my biological father hadn't gone to college. So, in a way, basically, no one in the family had gone to college. But the expectation was there that I go to college. What am I going to do in college? It was just like, "I guess I'm going to do music." Gibb Schreffler: Very lucky that my parents didn't take an attitude like, "What are you going to do with music and how can that get you a career?" I mean, for us, it was just like the idea of going to a college in itself was exciting. And I think we were all a little maybe, I don't know if it's naive or just open-minded, we thought, "Well, if you go to college, then that'll be a great thing and you'll get a degree and it will open up opportunities for you. And when you go to college, you just do what you like to do." Gibb Schreffler: So, I was very lucky that I was encouraged to go ahead and follow my passion, which was a music major, that developed into wanting to be a composition major. So, I learned to play the bass in a formal professional way, but my major was actually composing music. Gibb Schreffler: And the issue then became what to do after college. As the senior year was wrapping up, I'm thinking, "Gosh. Now, how do I deal with my situation?" I've taken out lots of loans, came from a low-income background, so it's mostly loans that I went to college, happily took those loans so I could go to college. Gibb Schreffler: Now, I'm getting ready to be spit out on the other side, not really with a plan of how to turn these musical endeavors into a career. And the music you're writing in academic situation tends to be fine art music, and moreover, it's like a music that's avant-garde. It's on the cutting edge but that also means it's not accessible to a large audience of people. It's not music to be marketed. And you're adhering to your art rather than thinking about marketing. Gibb Schreffler: But of course, that becomes the thing on graduation. Now, what do I do as a composer? I guess, I was in my final year of college when I really started exploring all these other kinds of musical traditions that I was interested in beyond, what you might call, the Western Concert Music and trying to envision how to be active in music that was perhaps more broadly accessible. Gibb Schreffler: It didn't really work out still. It didn't work out still. Once I graduated, I thought, "Hey, I've got to see what I can do with these skills. Should I be a professional musician? Should I do some other work but still practice music as my discipline in my way of life on the side?" I did so many things. I mean, it was real. I love to talk about students about this because you really don't even know, I think most people even when they graduate from college, where they're going to end up. Gibb Schreffler: So, I immediately... Since due to my family backgrounds, a working-class background, we have the attitudes like, "You just get a job immediately." There wasn't a tradition in my family of like you... We didn't have any professionals in my family. Nobody aspired to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, those sorts of things. Everyone in my family just worked for somebody else. Getting a job was the immediate thing. Gibb Schreffler: So, I remember graduating from college, I didn't attend my commencement. For some reason, I just felt alienated or something. I didn't even do that. I remember those days, I was just playing bagpipes in the woods or something, still pursuing this passion in denial of what I was going to do. But I just immediately took minimum wage jobs, labor jobs one after another, factory, construction-like thing, restaurant, dishwasher, temp jobs, all those sorts of things until a few years went by, about two years went by. Gibb Schreffler: And oh, I did try for the musician path by going on a cruise ship, playing on a cruise ship. And that was my turning point when I realized that after playing on the cruise ship that I didn't want to be a professional musician, that I didn't want to go through the grind of playing gig-to-gig type of situation. I wanted a nine-to-five or something more steady. I remember I was on the ship at sea, just at that point of wanting to get back to the land and just having a normal routine. I decided then that music was going to be part of my life, but being a professional musician was not going to be it. Gibb Schreffler: But I'm still in debt. What do I do? I have to say it was hard to decide what to do because I was drawn to what felt like the simple life of doing a humble labor. Again, that was the cultural environment I was raised in, just go to work, do your job, get a very modest pay, you'll be fine. But I had taken out so many student loans. I just couldn't pay back the loan, so I had to find out a way to escape that. Mark Wood: Those loans shake your life, right? Gibb Schreffler: I had to escape the student loans, and the path to escape from the student loans, I hate to say this, was to go to graduate school- Mark Wood: Graduate school. Gibb Schreffler: ... and they would defer the loan payment. I'm still completely naïve, still thinking, "Okay now, if I go to graduate school, I'll come out the other side of the degree and that'll just entitle me to work, and then I'll be fine. I'll be able to pay off student loans easily once I cannot put aside of graduate school." This is a long way of saying that's when I turned to the ethnomusicology because I had to think... Gibb Schreffler: And in those intervening years, I'd explored so many different types of music around the world. I had gotten into, by chance, Indian film music, and in order to understand Indian film music, I was learning the Hindi language of the Indian films, just teaching it to myself and broadening my musical horizons. Gibb Schreffler: But now, I'm thinking, "How can I translate all these very eclectic skills that I have from..." I had gone to a liberal arts college and musical skills and now I had some linguistic skills, and I had some life experience of dealing with difficult situations. I love to study things still. How can I turn that into something? Gibb Schreffler: I'm not sure how I became aware of ethnomusicology, but ethnomusicology grad school in the 1990s seemed like a pretty cool way to escape the last two or three years of debt and minimum wage for a time with the hopes that I would again come out the other side with something. Patty Vest: Very pragmatic and hopeful musician. Gibb, let's get into a little bit of your areas of research. You focus lot of your academic work into work songs. How did you find your way into this area of research? Gibb Schreffler: So, work songs comes another... I had several periods during my academic career where I had to retreat back into my minimum wage labor sector. And during one of those was the financial downturn around 2008 where I had to essentially leave my grad school studies for two, three years again, and I was back into that attitude again. Gibb Schreffler: Now, I had to leave grad school because, for one reason or another, my funding dried up for going to school, and it was so sudden that there was no planning of what job I could go into in the meantime while out of grad school. So again, it was just like, "Just get any kind of work you can immediately." Gibb Schreffler: I had to move back home with my parents, my sister, her husband, my nephew, and my brother. We were all affected by the economic downturn, and we all crammed into my parents' small house. We're all sleeping on air mattresses or whatever it was, we all had our work routines, had to stagger. One person wakes up at 5:00 AM, one person wakes about 5:30 to get in the shower and do that sort of thing. Gibb Schreffler: So, I'm doing this back in this work labor environment which I had experienced right after undergrad too. And I had remembered right after undergrad the way I got through those jobs was to get through the eight-hour a day by learning music in my head while I was working. And so, I went back to that skill. Gibb Schreffler: And I had started drawing on these shanty songs, these mostly maritime work songs, which I had some exposure to from growing up in Connecticut because Connecticut has this living history museum called the Mystic Seaport, which is the premier maritime museum, I think, in the world, we can say. They have a program where, they're not reenactors, but the facilitators of a circle learning sing these songs as part of the educational program. So, growing up in that state, we were actually exposed from elementary school years to this genre, so I had some background in that. Gibb Schreffler: And then in grad school, I met a friend. His name is Revell Carr. He's a colleague and scholar and after musicology as well. His father was the president of that museum, so he grew up with that thing. So, this was something in my past that I brought back at this particular time and use it to keep me going. And I sit on this project, I don't know why. It's like a pet project of... Gibb Schreffler: Every few years, I have different musical interest comes up. So, at that time, this music launches came up, the shanty songs, and I said, "I really want to learn them well this time. Here's a project to learn them well. I'm going to try to learn every known shanty song, every item of repertoire." I've got a lot of time on my hands. I'm back into working in the factories doing this repetitive work or a construction job or those sorts of things. Mark Wood: Well, that's what those songs were made for, right? Gibb Schreffler: In many ways, yes. I was never able to really affect it in the way that songs were done historically because we don't have that culture of singing at work anymore and how to [crosstalk 00:18:59] into that, right? So, it became more of my own personal project to do it in my head and learn all the songs. Gibb Schreffler: And as I took in this enormous bite of all the repertoire of those songs, I started to see all these connections between other diverse music of the world that I explored in the past, including my real passion for pleasure of music listening, which was to make a music, so music of the Afro-Caribbean area of the world. Gibb Schreffler: This is like I can hear through the shanty songs because I have some musical training, hear past the visual images or the narrative of the songs that you see in the media as to what I'm supposed to think they're about, listened to them according to their musical form and lyrics and structure and sensibility, and hearing through that and see this connection to these songs of the African diaspora and the Americas. And that's when that project started going when I start to... Gibb Schreffler: So, my project about these shanty work songs is largely about revealing, trying to revise the history of these songs to reveal how this genre of song, sailors singing a very particular genre of work songs on ships, how that genre emerged out of what I argued to be pre-existing genres of work song that come from African-American culture. Gibb Schreffler: And that goes back even further to a sensibility in certain West African cultural groups of embedding work in song as a matter of course, not as an add-on, not as an incidental, not to generalize and say, "Well, there are people all around the world who happened to sing when they work because it alleviates depression," not just that, but a very specific, developed interaction between a method. Like whenever people work in groups, by default, they sing these songs because it's just what's done. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So now, somewhere along the line, you developed an alter ego, a shantyman named Ranzo. Can you tell us a little bit about that and about Ranzo's performances? Gibb Schreffler: Sure. So, that came out, first, out of my project to learn all the shanties, and YouTube was beginning in those years. Those were the nostalgic early days, I feel, of YouTube. YouTube starts to really emerge in 2006, and it felt really like a community then and really like any person, it was you. You did your thing. And it wasn't about advertising as much as it is now and promotion and those sorts of things. Gibb Schreffler: I felt like, "How am I going to learn these songs to some sort of standard?" Well, I keep myself honest by recording myself as I learned and then I can go back and create an archive of what I've learned from the songs. I'm posting the songs in YouTube. So, that one particular musical alter ego, I've had many of them, that was one particular one that developed out of that YouTube project, which goal was to record as many songs from this repertoire as possible. It ended up being, I think, over 500 different songs. Gibb Schreffler: And really, not purport to be giving a performance to entertain people, but really, it was largely a personal growth project, but secondarily posted for others to see because a lot of this repertoire is only in text form in books. It hasn't been performed in a recording. So, you actually hear what the text sounds like. Gibb Schreffler: So, I'm sitting there, applying my research skills while I'm in a situation where I'm not an active academic doing research, but bringing that to this project to bring these songs to people who might want to figure out what this... For example, on the books where the songs are listed, but not have any idea what they sound like. And then from there, I go on to be somewhat active and different like performing communities that cater to this genre. Patty Vest: Gibb, as part of one of your classes, American Maritime Musical Worlds class, you take your students out to sea. Can you tell us a little bit about this voyage, and what do you hope for your students to learn from this experience? Gibb Schreffler: So, my learning of these songs or learning of any music in my field of ethnomusicology is largely a tool of research. So, there's the activity of performing music, which people do as an art and a personal expression. And then, there's performing or learning to play or perform whatever music as a potential auxiliary tool for research, and that's something that ethnomusicologist do. Part of doing that is to experientially learn about your subject matter, right? Gibb Schreffler: Could I just go back for a second? When I was learning all these shanty songs, I was always doing it while my body was physically engaged in something. So, either I was at my job, my body was moving a certain way, or it might have been just walking somewhere, walking to a bus stop or waiting for a bus or at the gym working out or something. I always had body movement with that because my understanding of what these songs were is, it's sound that is always connected with body movement. And it's really hard to envision these songs without body movement. Gibb Schreffler: It's almost like once you know this music and I think you understand it, it hurts to experience it completely outside of its context. You don't get satisfaction of it outside of its context. Every music has its context. That's what ethnomusicologists are interested and music in its context, because music gets its meaning from its context. So, when you rip music out of the context that suits that particular type of music, you lose the meaning. And then you maybe lose a sense of like, "Why are you even doing it at all?" Gibb Schreffler: So, the tricky thing about these songs is that since they're always in this movement context and ideally, in this particular work context, when you do it outside of that, you feel like you're, A, not really understanding what it's all about and, B, maybe even aesthetically, you don't get center satisfaction out of it. Gibb Schreffler: So, I'm trying to, of course, help the students get some experience of the feeling of learning these songs in the context. And it's so rare that you can nowadays to actually experience those songs, and even a close facsimile of the context in which they're performed. Because the sailing ships today do not, even when people operate the old-style sailing ships, they don't do the work to any kind of singing. It's a lost tradition. Gibb Schreffler: And I think the people of today, the demographic that's involved in those ships, on one hand, they just don't know how to do it because it's lost, but in another sense, they're just not inclined. They're not culturally inclined because they think this embedding song and music was a particular cultural inclination. So, we wanted to get as close as we could to recreating that experience. And the only way to do that was really to merge the expertise of the people who sail the ships with someone like myself who also knows the songs. Gibb Schreffler: Because the communities of people who sing these songs generally sing them as a sing around where they're just sitting there and they're not coordinating with the work either. And to be honest, I don't get a lot out of those experiences, again, because I feel like it's an aesthetic violence to the experience to... This sounds really harsh because who would criticize people who just like to get together and sing? I mean, honestly, I don't have criticism of those people. Gibb Schreffler: It's a very personal thing that I'm saying here is that I was not getting the aesthetic satisfaction out of going to a group of people and singing these songs. They say the sailors on the ships that sang these songs never sang these songs outside of a working context. They didn't abstract the song from the context ever. So, to get any kind of understanding, you have to try to do it. Gibb Schreffler: So, that project, Patty, you were talking about, was to go to sea... And actually, there's a lot of historical knowledge that's lost. And because the people who were singing these songs historically took for granted what they were doing, so they didn't feel they needed to write down and explain what they're doing. So, we can actually develop hypotheses of things that were happening that weren't actually noted by engaging in the work, too. Gibb Schreffler: We did that with the students like, how many pauses does it actually take? How many verses does it take to accomplish this job? Nobody notes that in the literature. They say, "We did it," but we don't actually know how fast they did it, how hard for the speed of the work, how long they had to do it for, what the actual feeling was. Mark Wood: I understand that, Gibb, you've given us some recordings of some of your performances. We're going to include some of that at the end of the podcast for those of our listeners who stick around with us. Can you tell us a little bit about one or two of your favorites, especially maybe one that you've included for us to play later? Gibb Schreffler: Sure. One of them, which you might play is a song called Sally Brown. It interests me because, according to my research, it's more or less the first song in this genre. The genre develops, so what I mean to say is like if we call rock and roll a genre, there are precursors to rock and roll that sounds a certain way and you realize they're related but then there's like rock and roll, the standard rock and roll. Gibb Schreffler: So, if we talked about the standard shanty genre, one of the very earliest examples was this song, Sally Brown, and it appears in an account on a ship, I believe, if I remember correctly, in 1837. So, it's a real good marker for when this genre really did start to appear. And especially because in this account, there's an observer of the singers of these sailors who was a captain who happened to be a passenger on this voyage, and he's awoken to hearing the sailors sing this song. He'd been a captain for decades, and he's saying, "What is this new kind of song?" like there had been some kind of vocalization singing in the past, but this was the new thing. So, it's really marking with a new genre comes, and it's that particular song. Gibb Schreffler: And they're doing the work on what was the new invention of the time. So, technology, the invention of new technology on ships plays a lot in some of my research. There was an invention called a lever windlass. It's used for hauling up anchors and other heavy jobs. It was invented in the 1830s and slowly becomes adapted onto the ships. It entails that particular method of working. It's almost like you're pumping down on what used to be the way they pumped old fire engines or why you pump water out of something, or looks like a railroad handcart, those ways people could move along the railroad by a seesaw action of pumping up and down. Gibb Schreffler: This was an absolutely new device, absolutely new in the late 1830s on sailing ships and highly conducive to singing songs with it as opposed to an earlier device, which you have to stop and start and readjust and always interrupt what you were doing and wasn't conducive to singing songs. Gibb Schreffler: So, we have this moment in the 1830s where this song Sally Brown is being heard. And it's also the moment when Sally Brown is a representative of a new genre of song is linked with a new piece of technology that would then continue on for the next several decades, and I believe allow this genre of song to flourish. So, I'm singing that in this example. Gibb Schreffler: And on the ship, the Charles W. Morgan, which is a whaling ship, it's a historical landmark at Mystic Seaport, and it's, I believe, I would say, it's the only vessel in the world with some small caveat or maybe one other, but basically the only vessel in the world that still has that particular device on which that song was sung. Gibb Schreffler: There are people that are recreating the action of that working on that device while I'm singing this song, so I was able to bring that research together, sing that particular song on the last remaining ship that actually has that device. Mark Wood: That's cool. Patty Vest: Gibb, let's shift to another area of your research, which is South Asia's Punjab region. What drew you to Punjabi music, dance, and culture? Gibb Schreffler: When I went to grad school, I knew I wanted to do something about India because I had this bizarre five-year plan that was part of those fantasies after graduation that I wanted to be a musician in the Indian film industry. And that was what got me into learning about Indian culture, learning Indian languages. So, I knew I wanted to do something in India. I entered grad school and then you're feeling around for a topic. I happened to begin grad school in the very year where they started... Gibb Schreffler: At the time, it was pretty rare which was to be able to learn Punjabi language and to take courses studying about the Punjab area of the world. So, I was lucky to get in on the ground floor of the beginning of one of these rare programs. This was at University of California, Santa Barbara. They had endowed a chair and studies related to the Punjab region. So, I was able to jump right into Punjabi language classes, I was able to, immediately after my first year of grad school, go to the Punjab area of India and immerse myself, and then I was able to take more Punjabi language classes, and then go to India again. Gibb Schreffler: So, my project started to open up because I thought, "Hey, now I can..." This is an area as I discovered that hadn't been addressed by scholars very much. The local Punjabi scholars had address Punjabi music, but they're almost entirely in the form of the texts of the songs. You hear a song, what are the words in that and what's that about. Gibb Schreffler: But in terms of studying other nonverbal aspects to Punjabi music, there had been very little research on that, and there hadn't been research in English. So, as a grad student, you're looking for an area to go into. Gibb Schreffler: And my first time I went to Punjab, India, I noticed this drum called dhol, this large barrel drum. Seeing it everywhere. It emerged as what I think is now this icon of Punjabi culture. It's an emblem that can represent the Punjabi identity globally that was starting to emerge at that time and I thought, "Hey, this is maybe like a key symbol that I can interpret in my academic language as the keystone for all kinds of activity related to Punjabi musical culture," but even more specifically, Punjabi musical culture that local musicians or scholars, for one reason or another, didn't think was worthy of being discussed because the drumming is not classified in the local conception as music. It is a drum, it's classified as drumming. Gibb Schreffler: But ontologically, there's a different distinction between "music" per se and drumming. And the other twist to this is that the drummers are all hereditary professional musicians. They're born into their profession and they're born into it from the position of the absolutely most marginalized ethnic communities in the Punjabi society. So, there's very little dialogue between the people who are creating those sounds doing the drumming from those very marginalized ethnic communities and the people who might deign to discuss that in scholarly work, which come from a different social class. Gibb Schreffler: I had the dubious advantage of being more kind of extreme outsider who didn't fit into the web of class and cast in society there. So, didn't have the inhibitions to, let's say, rub elbows with these folks for hundreds of years and still putting a marginalized position. We could have a bit more of a dialogue than others had. Gibb Schreffler: That was that opportunity when I started talking to those people, and saw that they were interested in having their stories told by someone who was interested to do it, which was myself, that I was able to just run wild and ended up going back to India several times. Eventually, on a Fulbright-Hays grant staying there for a full year one time and just traveling every single area of that region and meeting these musicians to try to gather their stories and also paint a picture of also the diversity of that particular tradition. Mark Wood: So, since this is a podcast, I have to ask, did you learn to play any of those instruments yourself? And do you have any of them around that you can let us know how they sound? Gibb Schreffler: Yeah, I'll give you the sound of one instrument, which I don't consider myself as a performer on, but I'll say something about it that I think could be of interest to the audience. But before that, I did learn to play that large drum, dhol. And it's an interesting journey because, as I said, the players of that are hereditary professionals. They're born into it. So, the question is what business do I have playing, right? Mark Wood: Right. Gibb Schreffler: And where do I fit in anybody who plays that? And in fact, a book manuscript which I've completed, seeking a publisher right now, is about the story of recent years of Punjabi people who don't belong to those specific hereditary communities that are taking up this instrument, and what kind of issues that is raising for the future of those who have been born into it. Specifically, the fact that they're born into it with this one privilege in life. They're disadvantaged in every other way, but their one privilege is to have the monopoly on playing that instrument. Nobody else can play because only those who were born into. Gibb Schreffler: So, with all the other adversity they face in life, they have this one thing. So now others want to play that and like it calls forth the topic of cultural appropriation. What's going to happen to them? And it really brings home that discussion of cultural appropriation where sometimes when we have that discussion, it's like, "Yeah, I can see how somebody could feel slighted that someone's doing your tradition, but isn't that the way culture is and music is? It flows and people borrow, and that works." Okay. So, that works in a lot of situations. Gibb Schreffler: In this particular unique situation, it's like literally stealing the one job from these people that they had. So, I have to really reflect on my role in doing that. But again, the performance for an ethnomusicologist is part of the research tool. And I was absolutely welcome to learn it as part of my process of understanding, also the understanding that I'm not going to go on to become a professional performer. Gibb Schreffler: The instrument that I did bring for you today is a totally different instrument. It's called tumbi. Tumbi, T-U-M-B-I. It's a small lute. Lute is the ethnomusicologist term for any kind of string instrument where the string runs parallel to the body of the instrument and there's a fingerboard on it. Gibb Schreffler: A specific type of lute is a banjo, and I use the word "banjo" in this broad sense that means a lute where the body of the instrument is covered with skin, and that would give a particular sound. A guitar isn't covered with skin, it's covered with wood on top. Whereas a banjo, like the American banjo has skin on top so it has a particular twangy sound. So, this instrument has a skin on top and this is the twangy sound of it. Gibb Schreffler: This instrument was used in the genre of Punjabi music, which before recordings were invented, was as close as you came to a purely entertainment genre of music. Now, the reason why I emphasize that is because I'm thinking of ethnomusicologist want to look at society's total involvement of music and why you do certain things, and music is not just an entertainment genre. You use it in devotion and in rituals and all sorts of other things. Gibb Schreffler: The pure entertainment genre was singing of ballad-like songs, narrative songs with a simple accompaniment. Those musicians use this type of instrument to accompany their singing. I want to give you an example now of what that could sound like with singing. I'm going to make an attempt. I don't claim to be a professional performer of this, but here's the instrument, here's a Punjabi lyric. Gibb Schreffler: (singing) Gibb Schreffler: Very strident vocal tone and narrow melodic range, just a few notes that go up and down. It's very declamatory tone, lack of metre in the singing, but the instrument keeps your metre. The interesting thing I wanted to say about this instrument, which is why I brought it today, is that type of music was, a few decades into the recording industry, was old-fashioned. It didn't suit the recorded music genre. So, of course, people are finding ways to adapt their prior musical traditions to a recorded music format, something you could buy, like a three-minute song type format or something with some tambour, some tones that were more, I would say, genteel, more suited to the record-buying public. Gibb Schreffler: There was one musician who gained a lot of notoriety in the 1950s who played this instrument a lot with his singing. He played in a softer vocal tone. He sang songs that were more concise, could be expressed in an idea, maybe a love song or something within a three-minute span. This individual's name was Lal Chand Yamla Jatt and he adapted this instrument from what was a much bigger form to the form that I have here. And as he did that, this instrument became just ubiquitous in the entertainment music on recordings. Gibb Schreffler: Now, as Punjabi music starts to be known all over the world more now, this very instrument is the, what I'll call, the indexical sound of Punjabi music. I say index in being a little fancy here. Index is like a sign that points to something. So, this is an index that points to... It references something. What does it reference? Punjabi culture in a nutshell. You hear this sound and it tells you this is something of Punjabi culture. Gibb Schreffler: So, when Punjabi music is dispersed in the global musical marketplace, musicians are being eclectic and mixing different sounds from different music traditions, a lot of dance music traditions from the West, for example, but they'll add this particular instrument because, in a nutshell, hearing this twangy banjo sound of this instrument, the tumbi, immediately, without question tells you that's a Punjabi thing that you're referencing. Gibb Schreffler: So, be on the lookout or ear out, listen out for the sound of this particular instrument. If you're hearing this in any globally circulated popular music, you can be sure that that's a Punjabi origin. Patty Vest: When you started playing, I could identify it already. It's really remarkable. Gibb Schreffler: Can I ask you a question? Patty Vest: Yeah. Gibb Schreffler: Do you remember where you might have heard it before? Patty Vest: Yes, I have Indian friends. So, when I would visit their home, they were watching, obviously, Indian TV shows so there's always delicious food in the kitchen and that music in the background. So, when you started playing, I was like, "Oh." It took me back there. Gibb Schreffler: Yeah, the milestone was around 2002, 2003, a Punjabi producer based in England who was mixing Western dance beats with this iconic Punjabi sound. His mix was taken up by the hip hop artist, Jay Z, who did a remix of the song called Mundian To Bach Ke was the original Punjabi song. Jay Z turned it into Beware of the Boys, and it was a hit song on 2003 internationally. Patty Vest: That's right. When you started saying it, I was like, "That's right. That Jay Z song." Gibb Schreffler: And then, Punjabi is everywhere. It could feel like in America, for instance, they could see somebody who wasn't Punjabi cruising down the street, bumping their speaker in their car to this new Jay Z track and hear that Punjabi sound will feel like. We're being seen now. Mark Wood: So, on that note, literally, we're going to wrap this up. We've been talking with Gibb Schreffler, ethnomusicologist and assistant professor of music. Thanks, Gibb. This was fun. Gibb Schreffler: For me too. Thanks very much. Patty Vest: And to all who have stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast. Stay with us to listen to some work songs from Gibb Schreffler. Stay safe. Until next time. Patty Vest: (singing)