Baba Yaga Music

Well, that would be me,Maura Enright, a music and dance enthusiast who performs 'ethnic' music, sews costumes, and who organizes the occasional small dance event.

The website came to being as a teaching tool for myself. I gave myself five years to get it (and myself) organized, grounded and informed. I am almost to the end of the fourth year. In that time, I have developed an approach to collecting and organizing information which is very similar to Timothy Rice's description (in Music in Bulgaria) of how ethnomusiciologists try to explain music.

1. Capture individual events. These descriptions depend on what the observer thinks is important. Therefore, they will vary by person, sometimes a lot.
2. Make generalizations based on observations of many similar events (normative descriptions).
3. Combine the particular and the normative (interpretive descriptions) and "move beyond them to interpret some of the cultural meanings enacted in the particular event... Interpreting meaning ... is one of the most important goals of ethnomusicological research."

You will encounter pages that are not complete. They hold one or more of the above: the stand-alone description, the normative description, the interpretive description. I add to the page as I encounter information. At some point, I begin to interpret. I publish the incomplete pages because the description(s) on them interested me and they might interest you as well.

The Internet has changed a great deal in the past few years. More and more websites are little more than advertisement traps; one sentence of info per page of ads. However, the Internet started out as a way for scientists to exchange information, and I prefer to continue that tradition. In addition, mobile devices, with their small screen capacity, are increasingly the device of choice. However, much of what I find interesting cannot fit on a small screen. I make some accomodation for small devices, but information comes first.

• "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs." - E.B. White
• "Distrust adjectives." - Ernest Hemingway
• "The road to hell is paved with adjectives." - Stephen King
• "When you catch an adjective, kill it." - Mark Twain