Ethnomusicology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My undergraduate degree in Music trained me to listen closely, but it was a stack of cassettes in my mother's spare room that taught me to ask better questions. She has taught fiddle privately for over twenty years and recorded sessions on a portable tape machine since the 1990s. Helping her label and digitise the tapes, I noticed that the same tune could appear in three different versions within a decade, changing tempo and ornamentation depending on who was leading and how full the room was. Nobody had decided this; it simply happened, and the players themselves described it as playing the tune "properly". That gap between what people do and how they account for it is what I want to study formally.

My dissertation grew directly out of that interest. I spent two terms attending a monthly session in the town where I studied, taking field notes, recording with permission, and interviewing six regular players about how tunes entered and left the repertoire. The most useful finding was the least glamorous: repertoire was governed less by taste than by who could be relied upon to turn up. When a whistle player moved away, a cluster of tunes she had introduced quietly dropped out within months, even though others knew them. Writing this up taught me the practical discipline of the work — negotiating consent with people I saw socially, deciding what not to publish, transcribing with the understanding that notation flattens much of what matters. I also learned how much my own playing shaped access. Being able to join in got me invited back; it also made me slower to notice things I had stopped finding strange.

Reading has pushed me beyond that single setting. Bruno Nettl's writing on how ethnomusicologists define their object of study helped me see that my instinct to treat the session as a bounded community was a choice with consequences. Thomas Turino's discussion of participatory and presentational performance gave me clearer language for the difference between the session and the ticketed concerts some of the same musicians played, where the tunes were tidier and the tempos fixed. I have also been reading on archives and repatriation, partly because the cassette project raised questions I could not answer: who now has a claim on recordings made informally, and what does it mean to deposit them somewhere. I would like to work on those questions with proper methodological grounding rather than improvising.

Alongside this I work as a music technician and teaching assistant in a secondary school, maintaining equipment, supporting lessons and running a lunchtime ensemble. It is ordinary work, but it has sharpened skills I expect to need: recording in acoustically poor rooms, keeping consistent file naming and metadata across hundreds of student recordings, and explaining to eleven-year-olds why the version of a song they know from an app is one version among many. Organising the monthly session with my mother — booking the room, chasing the rota, making sure newer players get a tune — has taught me the unromantic logistics that sustain musical life, and that participants are colleagues rather than data.

For the master's I hope to develop a project on how amateur teachers transmit repertoire outside institutions, combining interviews with analysis of personal recordings of the kind I have been cataloguing. I want training in fieldwork ethics, transcription and analysis, and exposure to musical traditions well outside my own, which is narrow. Longer term I am considering doctoral research, but I would also be content working in a sound archive or in community music, where the questions I find most interesting are asked in practical form every day.

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