Robert Garfias papers and sound recordings, 1964-1979, 2007

Scope and Content: Malm, McAllester, Seeger, Powers, Garfias, England, Kishibe, Hood …

Scope and Content: Relating to resignations of Chicano faculty from UW

Scope and Content: Content of papers related to music of Poland, Finland, Central Asia, and Slavic countries

Scope and Content: The Garfias family name in Spain and Mexico – His father, from Tehuantepec, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco – Enjoyed calligraphy and furniture making – Growing up in, first, a white, and then a Mexican neighborhood of San Francisco – Befriending and playing jazz with Vince Delgado and Kaye Dunham, nephew of Katherine Dunham, in North Beach – Playing with Naji, an Iraqi drummer, and meeting Mimi Spencer, wife of Vince Delgado – Death of father, Adolfo, in 1953, just after RG finished college.

Scope and Content: Death of his mother – Father’s personality – RG shares father’s openness and willingness to talk to strangers – Grandfather on his mother’s side was a wealthy rancher from Guadalajara, Jalisco, who became a school contractor in Mexico City, eventually immigrating to the U.S. – Mother’s family included many priests and nuns – RG’s mother was born in Mexico City but her father died soon after they immigrated – She was placed in a convent because her mother had to work to support the family – Mother fluent in English and didn’t speak Spanish until she returned to her mother at age eighteen – Married RG’s father at age nineteen and RG was born soon after – Raised to speak Spanish by his story-telling grandmother and English by his mother – Growing up Mexican in the U.S. – The mix of his father’s southern Mexican culture, including marimba music, tamales steamed in banana leaves, and corn tortillas with his mother’s central valley of Mexico culture of tamales steamed in corn husks – Traveling with is mother and grandmother to Mexico in 1943 – They succeeded in bringing their brother and son (RG’s uncle), raised in the U.S., back to the U.S. after he was denied entry – Hearing a concert by Duke Ellington’s Orchestra – Mother, whose maiden name was Alicia Gonzalez Muñoz, died in 1999 at around eighty years of age.

Scope and Content: Discovering Duke Ellington – Discovering Mexican music on trip to Mexico – Enjoying art as a child – Placed in advanced reading group in school – Mother works in a coffee shop – Mother arranges for classical guitar lessons – Plays with friends in junior high school – Father played light classical music on saxophone – RG played saxophone in the junior high band – His teacher encouraged jazz, composition, and writing for big bands – Wrote music for shows and plays in high school and college – Played in the San Francisco jazz scene with Vince Guaraldi, among others – Knew Paul Desmond and Bill Smith, and the Dave Brubeck group – After high school, having learned piano and bass, gets job as musician on a ship to Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong.

Scope and Content: Joins Marine Cooks and Stewards, a seaman’s union, and works in ships’ kitchens and as a cleaner on liners and Victory Ships – Visited Hong Kong in 1951 – Astounded by the beauty of Japanese culture – UPI photographer teaches him photography on trip to Japan in 1953 – Goes to college, San Francisco State, to major in music education but hates it – Majors in anthropology and music– Studies with Wendell Otey, eclectic composer and fan of jazz, classical, and “exotic” music – Reviews some of the books and 78 records available in the mid-1950s – Composes for San Francisco’s Actor’s Workshop – Graduates in 1956 after three years of study – Invited to lecture on music in his anthropology classes - Read the ten to fifteen books available then by Jaap Kunst, Curt Sachs, Colin McPhee, and other pioneers of ethnomusicology – Tells of meeting prominent musicians and scholars of Indian music: Alain Danielou, Ali Akbar Khan, Balasaraswati, and Nazir Jairazbhoy in the 1960s after fieldwork in Japan – Writes to Richard Waterman about studying ethnomusicology at Northwestern – Meets Jaap Kunst, who encourages him to study with his student, Mantle Hood, at UCLA – Applies and is accepted – Troubled relationship with Mantle Hood over various issues – Hood sends Garfias to take a new position in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington – Teaching Assistant for Charles Seeger – On Mantle Hood leaving UCLA.

Scope and Content: Reflections on radio in the 1950s – Listening to a Chinese ethnic radio station – Meeting Alan Watts and Daisetsu Suzuki at the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco – Created radio programs on Japanese music and Latin American music on KPFA radio (San Francisco) – While at UCLA did radio programs for KPFK – For ten years was program director for public radio station KRAB in Seattle – Joined Harry Partch’s group, the Gate 5 Ensemble, while a student at SFSU – Meets Darius Milhaud at Mills College – The San Francisco beatnik scene with Allen Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Pauline Kael -- Studies Japanese Yamada school koto in San Francisco and Okinawan koto in Los Angeles – Studies Korean kayageum with Hwang Byong-gi in Korea in 1960.

Scope and Content: Met Japanese painter Hasagawa Saburo at the Academy of Asian Studies.

Scope and Content: He and friends study Japanese koto in San Francisco with Haru Suwada, who owns old 78 recordings of Japanese music – Correspondence with Curt Sachs, Colin McPhee, and Jaap Kunst – His search for 78 recordings of the world’s music – Changes in music style after WW II due to conservatory training around the world – Correspondence with a conservatory in China – Arrival at UCLA in 1956 – seminar with Mantle Hood and students Sam Chianis and David Morton – Ethnomusicology as the measurement of pitches and intervals – Fellow students at UCLA in the late 1950s – Hood’s insistence on modal analysis in Ph.D. dissertations – The problem of modality in Burmese music – First conference paper at AMS with C. Seeger, Alan Merriam, and David McAllester – Conflict between Merriam and Hood over disciplinary focus – Bringing Shigeo Kishibe to UCLA – Colin McPhee at UCLA with two Balinese musicians – Charles Seeger and the melograph at UCLA.

Scope and Content: Shigeo Kishibe teaching at UCLA – meeting important Asian music scholars Lee Hye-gu from Korea and Hisao Tanabe from Japan – The feeling of estrangement from an academic discipline as one ages – Fieldwork begins with Ono Gagaku Kai, whose members played in Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples – Supported by a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship, as did Mantle Hood and many of his students – Later acted as screener for Ford Foundation program aimed at underrepresented U.S. minorities – Introduction to the imperial court musicians of gagaku and lessons with them – Traveling around Japan with the court musicians – Meeting Donald Ritchie and Lincoln Kirstein – Helped the court musicians with their first (six-week) tour of the U.S. – Meetings with Gil Evans, Hammarskjöld, Leonard Bernstein, Lotte Lenya, Edwin Reischauer – Return to graduate seminars at UCLA with Hood, C. Seeger, McPhee, plus professors from other deparments (William Bright, Leon Knopoff, and others), trying to invent a systematic way to do musical analysis – Relations between RG, Hood, and Boris Kremenliev.

Scope and Content: The ensemble performance tradition at UCLA begins with Javanese gamelan – Hardja Susilo and Hood teach it – Balinese musicians come to UCLA – Gertrude Robinson and Colin McPhee and Balinese gamelan at UCLA – Listening to Hugh Tracey’s recordings of African music – Learning South Indian flute from Viswanathan, who taught for a while at UCLA – Hood suggested he study Japanese music, and he started from gagaku musicians at the Tenri Kyo in Los Angeles – Architect Frank Gehry joins the the UCLA gagaku ensemble – Arranging for a gagaku ensemble to come from Japan to play at Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles – Mariachi and Thai ensembles at UCLA – Stories of David Morton and Donn Borchardt – Encountering marimba music on a trip through Central America – Qualifying exams with Robert Stevenson and Walter Rubsamen – Stories of Robert Stevenson’s classes and oral exams – Classes and examinations in European music history and bibliographic methods – Flunked first dissertation defense because of Kremenliev’s objections – Stories of Bob Brown and Harry Powers.

Scope and Content: Learning Japanese and fieldwork in the Japanese language – Field work in Korea in 1960 with court musicians, who spoke Japanese – Listening to Richard Waterman on Pacifica radio – Choosing UCLA over Northwestern – Mantle Hood’s teaching of “Music Cultures of the World” and graduate seminars – Reflects on the general environment of ethnomusicology at UCLA in those days and the people who were teaching and studying there – the change at UCLA from performance “study groups” to “performance groups” – His attitude to the educational function of performance in the arts at the University of Washington (UW) and at UC Irvine – Requirement at UW for the study of anthropology and linguistics, which Hood had opposed at UCLA – Mantle Hood faces trouble from faculty at UCLA.

Scope and Content: On Bartok and Stravinsky in the United States – On ethnomusicology at Columbia, Indiana, and Wesleyan at the time – Attending his first SEM meeting in the early 1960s – Victor Grauer at UCLA and RG’s work on cantometrics – Jose Maceda teaching kulintang at UCLA – On Barbara Smith’s M.A. program at the University of Hawaii – J. H. Kwabena Nketia at UCLA and the UCLA-Ghana connection – Studying for comprehensives after returning from Japan – Relations with Colin McPhee and possible Arab or Jewish origins of the Garfias name – On loving always to learn new things (languages, musical cultures) – On meeting Igor Stravinsky in Los Angeles and Japan – An encounter with Aaron Copland.

Scope and Content: Composer Alan Hovhaness’ interest in gagaku –Ernst Heins’ stories of Jaap Kunst – The origins of the UW ethnomusicology program in a Ford Foundation grant for arts, which needed to include an ethnomusicologist – Kishibe hired first and may have influenced RG’s hiring in 1962 – Early emphasis on gagaku and koto -- Creating the UW ethnomusicology program with a global perspective – Other visiting artists (Dumisani Maraire, Angel Aparicio, Nyama Suso, Necdet Yasar) and early students (Lorraine Sakata, Steve Otto, David Waterhouse) – Music department chair William Bergsma’s support of the ethnomusicology program – Bringing Robert Kaufman (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe specialist) to UW – Bringing Maraire from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, who taught a kind of neotraditional music – Music and race relations at UW during this period – Fieldwork in Zimbabwe with Dumisani Maraire and Robert Kaufman.

Scope and Content: At UW, eliminating the UCLA-type requirements for training and examinations in European classical music – Reflection on early students – Encouraging Karl Signell to study Turkish music – Signell’s help bringing Necdet Yasar and Niyazi Sayin to UW – Bringing Usopay Cadar and Kalanduyan to UW to teach Philippine kulintang – Reflects on the early split in ethnomusicology between anthropology (represented by Merriam) and musicology (represented by Hood).

Scope and Content: Ethnomusicology’s beginning in “measuring what was measurable,” namely scales – ethnomusicology as “the analysis of music of that culture” – The failure of undergrad music majors to take “music cultures of the world” – Other professors come to UW (Robert Kaufman, Rod Knight, Frederic Lieberman) – Fieldwork in Burma and meeting U Thant, UN Secretary General – Hiring Lorraine Sakata, Daniel Neuman, and Ter Ellingson at UW.

Scope and Content: On Nazir Jairazbhoy, who taught during the summer at UW – Moving to the UW Provost’s office to handle the growing tensions among minority students – Student protests and the student strike of 1975 – RG and seven Chicano faculty threaten to resign over lack of progress in Chicano studies and to show solidarity with student protests – Hired as Vice Provost as a result of his actions during these troubled times – Work as Vice Provost for faculty affairs at UW, including sexual harassment cases, international exchanges, and improving teaching quality – Exchange visits with Anna Czekanowska and Poland – Applying for positions in Texas and California as a university vice-president and the role of affirmative action.

Scope and Content: His interest in photography for field work documentation – Fieldwork in the 1960s in Central America – Funding from the JDR 3rd Fund to film in Korea and the Philippines and deposit the results in university archives there – His philosophy of music documentation on film – Two three-month recording trips in 1966, first in the Philippines and then in Korea – Fieldwork adventures in the Philippines.

Scope and Content: Fieldwork in Korea – Trouble finding a publisher for his Philippine and Korean recordings – Current interest in Korea in his old recordings – Recordings of Indian and Afghan music at UW - - Advice from Alan Lomax on how to record and archive recordings – Traveled for the first time to Romania to see their archive on advice from Lomax – On the problem of access to archived recordings – On the many unreleased “treasures” (recordings) he has produced and collected over the years.

Scope and Content: Spending time with his family in Mexico City in 1943 and being allowed, as a young boy, to wander and explore the city on his own – He does same in San Francisco on their return – Remembers tough times during the Depression – Worked as an elevator boy at the St. Francis Hotel -- Being introduced to Greek food and starting a stamp collection as a boy – Began learning words in other languages via his stamp collection – Friendship with Vince Delgado and other local boys – Interested in art and in science – Elected president of the Junior California Academy of Sciences and spent many days at the museum of the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco with his father, who worked there – Interest in birdwatching – Abandoned these interests when he turned his attention to musical performance and composition – Meets Donald Philippi, translator of ancient Japanese and Ainu literature, who introduces him to an Okinawan koto player in Los Angeles – Fieldwork on Japanese court music involving learning to play hichiriki, fue, and sho from court musicians and comparing current practice to descriptions in old manuscripts – Resistance to, and then acquiescence to, his learning sacred mi-kagura – Organizing at UW soon after he arrived a small conference of the major ethnomusicologists of the day (Merriam, Hood, McAllester, and so on) – His concern with the artistry of particular musicians from the cultures he has studied – His joint appointments in anthropology at UW and UC Irvine.

Scope and Content: On the musical origins of language – hearing Guatemalan marimbas (the Hurtado Brothers) at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco – Recording marimbas in Tehuantepec in 1968 -- Research on Central American marimba traditions in the 1970s.

Scope and Content: Learning qin with Mr. Lui Tsun-Yuen at UCLA – Differences in fieldwork between the Philippines and Korea – Fieldwork in Ghana, Uganda, and Zimbabwe during summer, 1971 – Meeting and learning from mbira player Hakurotwi Mude in Zimbabwe – Writing about Shona music – Recording the family of Ephat Mujuru – Studying Chopi xylophone in Mozambique – Field research in Burma in 1973 and 1974 – Learning Laotian khen.

Scope and Content: Another memory of studying anthropology at SFSU – Mode and melody in Burmese music – The folklore archive in Romania – Filming visiting musicians at the University of Washington, including the Romanian nai player Simion Stanciu – In Burma RG meets Stanciu, who invites him to Romania to study muzica tiganeste – RG invites three Romanian musicians to UW – Marries Marcy in 1977 and they go to Romania for three months of fieldwork.

Scope and Content: Romanian fieldwork anecdotes – Meeting Mihai Pop – Working on Romanian Gypsy music.

Scope and Content: Doing fieldwork in a Communist country – Recording harp music in Venezuela and bringing the Aparicio brothers to UW – On his interest in language learning, on language as a means of communication, and on the many languages he has studied.

Scope and Content: Attending, as UW Vice Provost, a six-week class a Harvard on university management – On the problems of university administrators – Service as president of the Orange County Arts Alliance and nomination to the National Council for the Arts – Service as Dean of the School of the Arts at UC Irvine – The problem of the arts at universities – On the problems of minorities in university administration – Service on the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation board.

Scope and Content: Participating in the Symposium on Transcription and Analysis in Ethnomusicology 8(3), 1964 – Ethnomusicologists early interactions with music historians – Using personal computers in the early 1980s to create databases of his recordings and his textile collection for use in teaching and to create animated classroom presentations – On early ethnomusicology and RG’s desire to make sure that waning traditions were being adequately studied and documented – On the failure of ethnomusicology to enter fully into university curricula in music.

Scope and Content: Directing Chicano Studies at UC Irvine – Directing the UC Education Abroad Program in Costa Rica – Getting to know “corn fed” but culturally deprived UC undergraduates and deciding to devote the remainder of his career to undergraduate teaching about “the essential meaning of life” in courses titled “Music as Expressive Culture” and “Global Popular Music” – Teaching courses on African American and African music and other world regions (Indonesia and the Philippines, Turkey, Japan, East Asia, Mexico and Latin America) – Disciplining student classroom behavior – Connecting with students.

Scope and Content: Reflections on leaving the UW ethnomusicology program for new administrative horizons at UC Irvine – Teaching as vice-provost at UW and returning to teaching – Serving on the NEA Folk Arts panel with Bess Lomax Hawes for five years – Nomination and FBI background check for service (10 years) on the National Council on the Arts – Memories of famous people on the Arts Council – Council discussions of the superiority of Western art.

Scope and Content: On NEA funding in the wake of the Robert Mapplethrope and Andres Serrano scandals – Writing the essay “Diversity and the Arts in America” – On issues around NEA funding for folk arts – On national arts-funding policy – Meeting presidents in the White House as a National Arts Council member – Supporting the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Folkways Records and serving on the Smithsonian Council for six years.

Scope and Content: On the disconnect between ethnic minorities and immigrants, on one hand, and U.S. artistic institutions – On negotiating his identity as a Mexican American during his career – Acting as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) – Changing the approach to the Seeger Lecture at SEM annual meetings – Arguing with Alan Lomax – Appointment as, and working as, a researcher (visiting professor) at the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan.

Scope and Content: Nominating Lalo Guerrerro and Celia Cruz for the National Medal of the Arts – Publishing Music in Cultural Context with the museum in Japan – Receiving the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese emperor – Researching the music of Okinawa.

Scope and Content: Serving on the board and as president of the organization (Chado Urasenke Tankokai) that teaches the Japanese tea ceremony in California – Researching music in Turkey in the 1990s – On the problem of interpreting historical performance practice in Turkish music, gagaku, and Vivaldi and RG’s differences with the Laurence Picken tradition of scholarship – On the problem of conservatory training replacing traditional individual teacher-student transmission in many cultures.

Scope and Content: On the loss of improvisation in many of the world’s musical traditions through conservatory training – On the relationship between cultural and biological diversity – On the current position of ethnomusicology and ethnomusicologists in American universities – On the current state of ethnomusicological research and writing.