Cultural Engagement: The Case of the Oakland Symphony Orchestra

The term "cultural performance" was coined by Milton Singer, an anthropologist dealing with South Asian groups. For him, a cultural performance includes not only "what we in the West call by that namefor example, plays, music concerts and lectures, but . . . all those things which we usually classify under religion and ritual rather than with the 'cultural' or 'artistic' " (Singer 1955:23). It requires a limited time span, organized activity, set of performers, audience, place, and occasion of performance, and is a separable portion of human activity thought by members of the social group to be encapsulations of their culture "which they could exhibit to visitors and to themselves" (ibid.). Folklorists, sociolinguists, and ethnomusicologists have amended and refined the original concept, recognizing that highly formalized human behavior is a cultural focus that is meaningful on multiple levels. Folklorist Richard Bauman, for example, discusses the patterning of performance in terms of genres, roles, acts and events, developing the notion of performance as "constitutive" of an artistic domain (1975:293). In ethnomusicology, there have been both in-depth studies of specific music cultures, such as those of Steven Feld (1982), Regula Qureshi (1987), and Ruth Stone (1982), and collections, such as those of Gerard Behague (1984) and Norma McLeod and myself (1980). Multiple efforts have contributed to the development of an ethnography of musical performance in ethnomusicology, which advocates not only a strong etic component but also great attention to emic elements. Scholarly attention has been focused upon the event or the occasion of musical performance, accompanied by thick, deep synchronic description and analysis. This approach has been quite useful in expanding knowledge about musical performance in particular contexts. In contrast, the focus on cultural performance has impeded the evolution of an exploratory and dynamic model for musical change, particularly that type of change which might best be characterized as catastrophic. The exegesis of cultural performances has been mainly synchronic; since musical change tends to take place both synchronically and diachronically,