An Ear for Anthropology

Tozzer Librarian Lutz brings an eclectic mix of musicianship, teaching, and fieldwork to her new job

By Alvin Powell

Contributing Writer

Maija Lutz's road to Harvard was a winding one.

She was born in Latvia, grew up in New Jersey, and taught piano in Philadelphia before a blossoming interest in anthropology led her to study Inuit music in Arctic Canada.

Lutz's path wound back to the United States, to teaching jobs in Colorado, and eventually led to Harvard's Tozzer Library, the premier anthropology library in the country, with 215,000 volumes.

Lutz, who took over as head librarian last semester, said Tozzer is a place that lets her use all the skills accumulated in her years as a musician and an anthropologist.

"I think it's wonderful," Lutz said of her new position. "I'm able to look at it all as a whole, and that's very exciting."

Lynne Schmelz, librarian for the sciences in the Harvard College Library and Lutz's supervisor, described Lutz as intelligent, quick-witted, and level-headed. She said many Tozzer librarians have anthropology degrees, but the way Lutz got hers -- via two music degrees -- is a little unusual.

"I think her background is a bit more diverse," Schmelz said. "But to work with the collection, it is essential to have a broad academic background."

Church Music and Pop

Lutz's interest in anthropology extends back to the late 1960s. A piano teacher married to an anthropologist, she spent two summers at a dig at an Eskimo village in Alaska, south of Nome, on Norton Sound. Even many years later, the village's name still comes easily to her tongue: Unalakleet.

During her time at Unalakleet, not only did her interest in anthropology bloom, but she also noticed music was not a large part of life there. What little music she heard was Western church music or popular music.

"What initially got me interested was the fact that I didn't hear any native music while I was there," Lutz said. "That led me to wonder why not. And that led to an interest in what happens to cultural traditions of native peoples exposed to the outside."

From there, Lutz enrolled in an anthropology program at the University of Wisconsin, eventually receiving her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, the study of music of native peoples.

Lutz gathered some of the information for her dissertation during a winter spent at the village of Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island near the Arctic Circle. Lutz, one of the village's few English-speakers, lived with an Inuit family from September through April, through months of near perpetual darkness.

"It would get semi-light at about 10 a.m., like a cloudy, gray day here, and then dark again at 2 p.m.," Lutz said.

What Lutz found was that traditional Inuit music was rarely played. She never saw a traditional ceremony while she was at Pangnirtung. As she developed relationships with people there, though, some sang songs for her privately that they had learned in their youth.

To her surprise, she found that the music considered local and Inuit were the jigs and reels left by Scottish whalers who frequented the area a hundred years earlier.

She remembers feeling panic when her adviser asked her when the local people were going to bring out the frame drums -- traditional drums of animal skin stretched over a round wood or bone frame -- for a celebration. As far as she knew, there were no frame drums in the village.

The result of the experience was a new appreciation of the difficulty of fieldwork and a new awareness of the fluidity of what a people consider theirs. Religious music was also important, and the people she stayed with were very active in the Anglican Church. They sang Anglican hymns, not traditional Inuit songs.

"I came to realize that music isn't a static thing," Lutz said. "The music of a people is whatever people want it to be at any point in time."

Lutz pointed out that her studies were in the mid-1970s and came prior to the reawakening of many native peoples about their cultures and traditions.

Her office at Tozzer is true to her roots as an anthropologist and a musician. On one shelf is a kokle, a traditional Latvian instrument, boxy and stringed, similar to a zither. On a wall is a Javanese shadow puppet and next to that is a large print depicting a man in traditional Inuit garb playing a round frame drum and singing. The print came from Pangnirtung.

Stone Soup and Folk Music

Lutz said her childhood provided her with an interest in different cultures. She spent her early years in Latvia, until her family left at the end of World War II. She spent some time in a displaced persons camp in Germany before emigrating to the United States and settling in Princeton, N.J., when she was 10 years old.

"When my family and I came to this country, diversity was not the accepted thing it is today. We felt very foreign until we assimilated," Lutz said.

Lutz grew up playing the piano and received a bachelor's degree in music from Douglass College in 1961. Determined to be a performer, she practiced four hours a day and went on to Yale, receiving a master's degree in music in 1963.

After graduating, Lutz quickly realized how difficult it is to make a living as a performer and began to teach at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, a citywide after-school music program. It was while teaching at Settlement that she made her first trip to visit Eskimos in Alaska.

Not all of Lutz's training is in music and anthropology. In 1986, she received a master's degree in library science from Simmons College and last year she received a management certificate from Radcliffe College.

Lutz's duties at Tozzer keep her involved with anthropology. But she still indulges her ethnomusicology interests outside of work. Lutz is a board member of Stone Soup Coffeehouse in Providence, R.I. Stone Soup is part of the Stone Soup Folk Arts Foundation and promotes folk music with a series of concerts through a nine-month season. She and her husband are also avid country-western dancers.

Lutz said different aspects of her background may seem unrelated, but they all fit together well with her current duties.

"They're all related," she said. "I've been able to incorporate all my previous interests and training in what I do now."