Difficulties with the Ethnography

In analyzing the local jazz music culture for my musical ethnography, it was difficult to find material concerning this music culture that treated the local music culture as a separate entity from the larger jazz music culture, and even the history that led up to this current music culture. Therefore, what I had to do was to look through published material that gave me a general idea of the music culture as a whole, and then use the information I obtained from my interview and performance to assess how close my research was to the actual music culture.

When I finally got to the interview, the most difficult part about it was to get the person I was interviewing to really understand that I was seeking information about the music culture and not just the music itself. Even though I tried to guide the questions in such a way as to obtain information concerning the music-culture, I found the concept of a music culture is foreign to many people.

Overall, the most difficult part was not so much in the research phase of this project, but rather in the stage in which I had to put all of the information together in my report. In my report I had two aspects that were particularly difficult. First, it was difficult condense all of the information to only a 1,200 word report. After all of my research, I had so much information I wanted to talk about, that I felt like I wasn’t doing the music culture justice through my short paper. Second, I had difficulty in refraining from treating the paper as a history of the music culture, because the history of jazz influenced the current music culture so much. However, overall, I was able to work through all of these difficulties and will have my ethnography published soon for all of my followers to see :)